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richard nixon
JD Vance's Drunk History
On June 25, Vice President JD Vance told his audience at the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library and Museum that Nixon got a bum rap. The uncontested historical record proves otherwise.
Jun 30, 2026
The Watergate scandal revealed President Richard Nixon’s contempt for the Constitution and his systematic abuse of power. At the time, it was one of the darkest chapters in US history, resulting in the first-ever resignation of an American president.
But on June 25, Vice President JD Vance told his audience at the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library and Museum that Nixon got a bum rap. The uncontested historical record proves otherwise. Vance’s contrary view demonstrates the depths to which he and President Donald Trump have taken the country.
“Facts Are Stubborn Things”
- In May 1972, a group of men connected with the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) burglarized and wiretapped the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex. One of the wiretaps didn’t work, so on June 17, 1972, they broke in again with a new microphone. A security guard saw door locks that had been taped open and called the DC police, which caught them red-handed. Among the burglars’ possessions was a White House phone number.
- After declaring falsely that no one on the White House staff was involved in the crime, Nixon acquiesced as his aides provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in “hush money” to the burglars. Then Nixon and his top advisers developed a plan to get the CIA to obstruct the FBI’s investigation into the matter.
- As Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein pursued the story, a DC grand jury summoned witnesses who cracked. Nixon aides—including White House counsel John Dean—testified in nationally televised hearings where Sen. Howard Baker (R-Tenn.) asked, “What did the President know and when did he know it?” The answer was “a lot.”
- With the revelation that Nixon had taped his conversations about the cover-up in the Oval Office, the president sought valiantly to block their production.
- When special prosecutor Archibald Cox sued to obtain the tapes, Nixon instructed Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire him. In what became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre,” Richardson refused and resigned. Nixon then told Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox, but he resigned too. Finally, Nixon turned to the third highest official in the Justice Department, Solicitor General Robert Bork, who carried out the order.
- Firing Cox was the futile act of a desperate man. Bork appointed Leon Jaworski as Cox’s successor, and Jaworski continued to press his case to the US Supreme Court. In a unanimous decision, the court ordered Nixon to release the tapes, and the public could hear Nixon’s own voice incriminate him.
- On July 27, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee recommended articles of impeachment. On August 7, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.), Sen. Hugh Scott (R-Pa.), and Rep. John Rhodes (R-Ariz.) visited the White House to give Nixon the bad news: The full House was going to impeach him, and the Senate would convict him. The next day, Nixon resigned.
Vance’s “Deep State” Fantasies
Vance claimed that Nixon was the victim of a “deep state” conspiracy.
“If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon,” Vance continued, “it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration.”
But the supposed “deep state” actors to which Vance referred consisted of Nixon’s top advisers who turned on him, the most conservative Republicans in Congress, a unanimous US Supreme Court, and two intrepid reporters at The Washington Post.
Timothy Naftali, a historian at Columbia University’s School of International Public Affairs and the former director of the Nixon library, told The New York Times: “We have more than enough information from the Nixon era to know that there was no intelligence conspiracy against Richard Nixon. He brought his house of cards down upon himself.”
“You can hear him suborn perjury on the tapes,” Naftali told The Washington Post. “He’s telling an intermediary, what to tell someone who’s about to be interviewed by the FBI, what to say and what not to say. You can hear Nixon being told that money had been found to hire teamsters to go and break the bones of demonstrators. That’s all illegal.”
Lies Reveal Character
Prof. Naftali observed that, curiously, Vance had likened Trump to a president who had directed the CIA to subvert the Constitution.
“It’s not as if [Watergate] is a matter of partisan interpretation,” Naftali said. “The evidence is overwhelming. If [Vance] does know all of this, he’s telegraphing the kind of president he hopes to be.”
Vance also claimed that Watergate would have been a 12-hour news story today. He may be correct, but that does not diminish the seriousness of Nixon’s crimes.
As prof. Naftali observed, “It’s not that Nixon looks better in retrospect, it’s that we look worse.”
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Defense of Nixon's Watergate Crimes Is JD Vance 'Telling on Himself,' Say Critics
"He’s insinuating that his own regime has so normalized corruption and lawlessness that past corruption and lawbreaking schemes now seem minor."
Jun 26, 2026
At an event for the Richard Nixon Foundation on Thursday, Vice President JD Vance suggested that if the 37th president's Watergate scandal had happened today, it would barely make the news, let alone destroy a presidency.
But his critics say that's only because President Donald Trump has totally "normalized" corruption.
During a speech at the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California, Vance celebrated that the "historical legacy" of Tricky Dick, whose name has functioned as a shorthand for presidential lawlessness since his resignation in 1974, "is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, and, I think, deservedly so."
"If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story," Vance said. "The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy."
He said the way the "deep state took down Richard Nixon" was "not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration."
Vance also said he personally identified with Nixon: "Young senator, vice president, writes a bestselling book, is hated by the media. It kinda sounds like JD Vance," he said. "I've always liked Richard Nixon."
The vice president was correct that, as Trump adopts a similar philosophy of boundless executive authority, there is a concerted effort among Republicans to rehabilitate the image of Nixon—who infamously declared in a 1977 interview with David Frost that "if the president does it, that means it's not illegal."
Christopher Rufo, an intellectual architect of crusades by the so-called "New Right" against liberal cultural institutions, in 2023 cast Nixon's presidency as "a blueprint for counterrevolution—the last hope for restoring the American republic,” praising his efforts to use lawfare to destroy left-wing groups.
Vivek Ramaswamy, a 2024 Republican presidential candidate who is now running for governor of Ohio, has called for a "revival of Nixonian realism" in foreign policy, citing his "unapologetic American nationalism" and hyperfocus on US interests at the expense of moral concerns.
During a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in 2021, Vance himself cited Nixon's declaration that "the professors are the enemy" to say that the next Republican president would need to “honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country."
Some critics described Vance's downplaying of Watergate's severity on Thursday as a sign of historical ignorance or willful deception.
"Let’s remember what Nixon actually did," said Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.). "Operatives tied to his reelection campaign broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters to plant listening devices. Then Nixon personally orchestrated the cover-up. The 'smoking gun' tape caught him ordering the CIA to shut down the FBI’s investigation."
"Nixon weaponized the IRS and FBI against his political enemies, authorized burglaries of private citizens, and fired the special prosecutor investigating him in what is called the Saturday Night Massacre," continued Levin. "When the Supreme Court ordered him to release the tapes, the vote was unanimous. Even his most loyal defenders walked away once they heard his own words."
"JD Vance works for the most corrupt president in American history," Levin said. "So of course he wants you to believe Watergate was nothing."
Political scientist and author Michael McFaul suggested that Vance was not aware of how bad he sounded.
The fact that Watergate would probably be a mere blip, McFaul said, "is a tragic indictment of [Vance's] administration," and it's "amazing to me that’s not obvious to him."
Others saw it not as a feint from Vance, but as a boast about everything the Trump administration has gotten away with.
"'We do a Watergate twice a day' is a crazy way to confess your own corruption," said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) in response to Vance's comments.
Amid a litany of other scandals during his second term, Trump has openly used the presidency to make nearly $4 billion since returning to office, accepted lavish gifts from foreign countries while rewarding them politically, and attempted to appropriate taxpayer money to reward his allies. He's pardoned donors and supporters who committed crimes while pushing the Justice Department to target enemies. His administration has brazenly defied the law and the courts to carry out mass deportations of immigrants without due process. And he has carried out hundreds of extrajudicial assassinations and launched multiple illegal wars of aggression without congressional approval.
"Vance is telling on himself," said The Lever editor-in-chief, David Sirota. "He’s insinuating that his own regime has so normalized corruption and lawlessness that past corruption and lawbreaking schemes now seem minor."
John Culver, a retired CIA analyst, said that Vance is "right" that Watergate would no longer register with the public today, "but not for the reasons he thinks."
He blamed modern corporate-controlled media for numbing the public to outrageous political scandals that would have once enveloped a presidency.
Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos "would have fired" Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the journalists who broke the Watergate scandal, "a year earlier," Culver said. "The [New York Times] journos would save it for their book."
He said, "Trump has a Watergate-scale scandal every month, and media billionaires distract, distract, distract.”
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Beware the Trump-Musk Regime Weaponizing Social Security!
There is no Democratic Social Security and Republican Social Security. There is only one Social Security system that we all pay into and we all benefit from.
May 02, 2025
For nearly 90 years, the Social Security Administration has stood above the fray of partisan politics. The agency focused on its mission to deliver hard-earned benefits to every American, regardless of whom they voted for. Official communications channels, such as press releases, never endorsed or criticized a politician.
Indeed, the one time a president tried to politicize Social Security, he was forced to back down. Before benefits were automatically indexed to offset the rise in inflation, Congress would vote for increases that the president signed into law. Those benefits were accompanied by simple straightforward notices, stating that Congress had passed, and the president had signed into law, the enclosed increase.
Just prior to the 1972 election, President Richard Nixon explored the idea of substituting an insert with his signature and photo, hoping to imply that he alone was responsible for the increase (that, ironically, he in fact had opposed). The Social Security Commissioner threatened to publicly resign, and Nixon backed down.
Not only is the Trump-Musk regime lying to you, they are using your money to do it.
President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are throwing that long-standing tradition of neutrality in the trash. The Social Security Administration (SSA) announced that it would be posting its official announcements on Elon Musk’s for-profit social media platform, alongside the platform’s paid advertisements. Consistent with that declaration, SSA’s official account posted a thread to Musk’s platform, X, that began “Former President Joe Biden is lying to Americans.”
This thread was filled with misleading information and used offensive, politically charged language, including “illegal aliens.” Contrary to the thread’s implications, undocumented immigrants do not and cannot receive Social Security. In fact, SSA has determined that undocumented workers have been subsidizing the rest of us to the tune of $25 billion a year, since many of them contribute (under fake Social Security numbers) but never receive a penny of their earned benefits.
This is a wildly inappropriate use of SSA’s resources. Like the rest of SSA, the agency’s official communications are paid for by the American people’s Social Security contributions. Normally, SSA is very efficient, spending less than a penny of every dollar contributed on administrative expenses. But now, some of that money is being wasted and misused on politics. Not only is the Trump-Musk regime lying to you, they are using your money to do it.
Unfortunately, this is just one of many ways the Trump-Musk regime is weaponizing Social Security. After the governor of Maine publicly challenged Trump, Social Security canceled two contracts with her state.
The contracts, which the federal government has with every state, are extremely efficient and important. One of them allows parents to register their newborns for Social Security cards at the hospital, instead of dragging their babies to overcrowded field offices. The other quickly transmits when anyone in the state has died, so benefits can be immediately terminated.
To punish the governor of Maine, the Trump administration decided to punish the parents of newborns. After massive public outrage, the Trump administration was forced to reinstate the contracts.
Trump and Musk could declare people dead because they are political enemies, or members of a disfavored group. They could extort people by threatening to declare them dead.
Leaked emails leave no doubt that the Trump-handpicked acting head of SSA, Leland Dudek, terminated the contracts as political revenge. An SSA employee told Dudek that terminating the contracts “would result in improper payments and potential for identity theft.” Dudek replied, “Please cancel the contracts. While our improper payments will go up, and fraudsters may compromise identities, no money will go from the public trust to a petulant child,” by whom he meant Maine Gov. Janet Mills.
Most chillingly of all, the Trump-Musk regime is illegally falsifying government data by adding people to Social Security’s death master file—despite knowing that they are still alive. Their initial targets are thousands of legal migrants, who have Social Security numbers so that they can work in the U.S.
When Social Security wrongly declares a living person dead, it ruins their life. Financial institutions, health insurance companies, and many other entities rely on Social Security’s data, and they react quickly when someone is declared dead. Imagine, in one keystroke from “Big Balls” or another Musk henchman, losing your income, your health insurance, access to your bank account, your credit cards, your home, and more. This is financial murder.
Legal migrants are the first victims, but if the Trump-Musk regime gets away with this, they will not be the last. Trump and Musk could declare people dead because they are political enemies, or members of a disfavored group. They could extort people by threatening to declare them dead.
All of this is particularly outrageous because Social Security is a nonpartisan program. Democrats, Republicans, and independents alike all value their Social Security benefits and want to see them expanded, not cut. There is no Democratic Social Security and Republican Social Security.
The American people’s message for Trump and Musk is simple: There is only one Social Security system that we all pay into and we all benefit from. Hands off.
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How the Vietnam and Gaza Wars Shattered Young Illusions About US Leaders
Emerging generations learned that moral concerns about their country’s engagement in faraway wars meant little to policymakers in Washington.
Apr 30, 2025
Eight years before the U.S.-backed regime in South Vietnam collapsed, I stood with high school friends at Manhattan’s Penn Station on the night of April 15, 1967, waiting for a train back to Washington after attending the era’s largest anti-war protest so far. An early edition of the next day’s New York Times arrived on newsstands with a big headline at the top of the front page that said “100,000 Rally at U.N. Against Vietnam War.” I heard someone say, “Johnson will have to listen to us now.”
But President Lyndon Johnson dashed the hopes of those who marched from Central Park to the United Nations that day (with an actual turnout later estimated at 400,000). He kept escalating the war in Vietnam, while secretly also bombing Laos and Cambodia.
During the years that followed, anti-war demonstrations grew in thousands of communities across the United States. The decentralized Moratorium Day events on October 15, 1969 drew upward of 2 million people. But all forms of protest fell on deaf official ears. A song by the folksinger Donovan, recorded midway through the decade, became more accurate and powerful with each passing year: “The War Drags On.”
By remaining faithful to the war policies of the president they served, while discounting the opinions of young voters, two Democratic vice presidents—Hubert Humphrey and Kamala Harris—damaged their efforts to win the White House.
As the war continued, so did the fading of trust in the wisdom and morality of Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon. Gallup polls gauged the steep credibility drop. In 1965, just 24% of Americans said involvement in the Vietnam War had been a mistake. By the spring of 1971, the figure was 61%.
The number of U.S. troops in Vietnam gradually diminished from the peak of 536,100 in 1968, but ground operations and massive U.S. bombing persisted until the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in late January 1973. American forces withdrew from Vietnam, but the war went on with U.S. support for 27 more months, until—on April 30, 1975—the final helicopter liftoff from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon signaled that the Vietnam War was indeed over.
By then, most Americans were majorly disillusioned. Optimism that public opinion would sway their government’s leaders on matters of war and peace had been steadily crushed while carnage in Southeast Asia continued. To many citizens, democracy had failed—and the failure seemed especially acute to students, whose views on the war had evolved way ahead of overall opinion.
At the end of the 1960s, Gallup found “significantly more opposition to President Richard Nixon’s Vietnam policies” among students at public and private colleges than in “a parallel survey of the U.S. general public: 44% vs. 25%, respectively.” The same poll “showed 69% of students in favor of slowing down or halting the fighting in Vietnam, while only 20% favored escalation. This was a sharp change from 1967, when more students favored escalation (49%) than deescalation (35%).”
Six decades later, it took much less time for young Americans to turn decisively against their government’s key role of arming Israel’s war on Gaza. By a wide margin, continuous huge shipments of weapons to the Israeli military swiftly convinced most young adults that the U.S. government was complicit in a relentless siege taking the lives of Palestinian civilians on a large scale.
A CBS News/YouGov poll in June 2024 found that Americans opposed sending “weapons and supplies to Israel” by 61-39%. Opposition to the arms shipments was even higher among young people. For adults under age 30, the ratio was 77-23.
Emerging generations learned that moral concerns about their country’s engagement in faraway wars meant little to policymakers in Washington. No civics textbook could prepare students for the realities of power that kept the nation’s war machine on a rampage, taking several million lives in Southeast Asia or supplying weapons making possible genocide in Gaza.
For vast numbers of Americans, disproportionately young, the monstrous warfare overseen by Presidents Johnson and Nixon caused the scales to fall from their eyes about the character of U.S. leadership. And like President Donald Trump now, President Joe Biden showed that nice-sounding rhetoric could serve as a tidy cover story for choosing to enable nonstop horrors without letup.
No campaign-trail platitudes about caring and joy could make up for a lack of decency. By remaining faithful to the war policies of the president they served, while discounting the opinions of young voters, two Democratic vice presidents—Hubert Humphrey and Kamala Harris—damaged their efforts to win the White House.
A pair of exchanges on network television, 56 years apart, are eerily similar.
In August 1968, appearing on the NBC program “Meet the Press,” Humphrey was asked, “On what points, if any, do you disagree with the Vietnam policies of President Johnson?”
“I think that the policies that the president has pursued are basically sound,” Humphrey replied.
In October 2024, appearing on the ABC program “The View,” Harris was asked: “Would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?”
“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris replied.
Young people’s votes for Harris last fall were just 54%, compared with 60% that they provided to Biden four years earlier.
Many young eyes recognized the war policy positions of Hubert Humphrey and Kamala Harris as immoral. Their decisions to stay on a war train clashed with youthful idealism. And while hardboiled political strategists opted to discount such idealism as beside the electoral point, the consequences have been truly tragic—and largely foreseeable.
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The Vietnam War Ended 50 Years Ago. People Still Get It Wrong.
Based on subsequent events, sadly it appears that America did not learn much from the Vietnam experience.
Apr 30, 2025
April 30th marks the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War's end when Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon, soon to be renamed Ho Chi Minh City. The war was a terrible experience for the United States, but even more so for the people of Vietnam and much of the rest of Southeast Asia. Estimates are that up to 3 million Vietnamese perished, as well many many thousands of Cambodians and Laotians. Fifty-eight thousand American died, and a trillion American tax dollars were wasted.
Many of us who were there are still trying to understand and come to grips with it. Based on years of study, here is what I think people still get wrong about the war. What I write will be controversial, but it is based on what I saw and learned. If I seem angry, it is because I still am.
In nearly all wars, the other side is demonized and made into evil caricatures of human beings; doing so makes it easier to kill them. From the U.S. perspective, the Vietnam War was no exception. Even the Vietnamese who were supposedly on our side were commonly referred to as gooks, zips (Zero Intelligence Personnel), slants, slopes and more, often to their faces. In my experience, the U.S. military chain of command made no effort to correct this. Given the pervasive racism among American troops, it should come as no surprise that violence against Vietnamese civilians was common. It is hard to understand how anyone thought the Vietnamese people would rally to the U.S. side while being badly treated.
The lesson to be learned is that U.S. military leaders, if they care about the troops at all, should do all they can to prevent war crimes through training, clear orders, and prosecutions.
In Vietnam many of us learned to be quite skeptical of the media and the U.S. government. To cite just one example out of hundreds, as the advancing NVA/VC forces began to overrun the South (mid-1970's), U.S. officials and media warned of a bloodbath to come. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger warned that 200,000 would be killed if the communists won. The American armed forces newspaper Stars and Stripes, in one of the last issues to arrive in Saigon, carried a headline: "At Least a Million Vietnamese Will Be Slaughtered." But that never happened. When it came to allegations of massacres, whether by the enemy in Hue during Tet, or the Americans at My Lai, the truth was regularly mangled by the U.S. government and media.
The leak of the Pentagon Papers, which so infuriated then-President Richard Nixon, revealed many other falsehoods, even as to when the war started. The Papers show that it was in 1945 that the French government decided to reclaim its Vietnam colony from the Japanese occupiers. Then the U.S. got involved under President Harry Truman. From that time the U.S. provided air transport, weapons, advisers, and funding without which the French reoccupation would not have been possible. So the Vietnamese are correct in calling it the Ten Thousand Day War—the 30 years from 1945 to 1975.
The Pentagon Papers also reveal that U.S. leaders all the way from Truman to Nixon and Gerald Ford were advised that the U.S. could not win the war. They all knew that defeat was on the horizon, or perhaps just over the horizon. But except for Ford, all the presidents decided that, while the war was a lost cause, it would not be lost on their watch—so they kept it going by kicking the can down the road to the next president. So the death and destruction continued.
In 1968, Richard Nixon ran for president declaring that he had a "secret plan" to end the war. In actuality, his secret was to covertly sabotage ongoing peace talks to prolong the war. It went on for four more years, and another 25,000 U.S. soldiers died in a war Nixon knew could not be won.
During and after the war we learned a good deal about war-related post traumatic stress. Tens of thousands of returning Vietnam veterans began showing alarming signs of acute mental distress, often leading to harming others or themselves. Thanks to cutting edge research by Veterans Affairs, we learned that troops serving in support roles (which is most of them) had rates of PTSD about the same as the general population, around 6%. On the other hand, troops who were involved in abusing civilians or prisoners had rates of PTSD of over 50%. There are treatments available, but none seem to be especially effective. The lesson to be learned is that U.S. military leaders, if they care about the troops at all, should do all they can to prevent war crimes through training, clear orders, and prosecutions.
Today, most Americans think of the anti-war movement as mostly long-haired, pot-smoking hippies—with a Doctor Spock or a Jane Fonda occasionally thrown in. But that was not the reality. Instead, by 1967 thousands of veterans who had served in Vietnam returned home and eagerly joined the anti-war movement, especially on college campuses, quickly taking leadership positions. Tom Grace, in his book on the Kent State shootings, carefully documents that the leadership of the campus protesters there was almost entirely made up of returned working class veterans. This was typical. The largest of the veteran anti-war groups was the Vietnam Veterans Against the War with 20,000 to 50,000 members at its height. They were active in colleges and universities across the country.
There were also protests and some sabotage from within the active duty forces. In the face of widespread refusals to obey, ships could not put to sea, and aircraft could not fly. Racial tensions ran high.
Even with a half million troops in Vietnam, the U.S. could not prevail against a rising tide of nationalism in Vietnam, or even control most of the country. As the Pentagon Papers explained, the U.S. never had a chance.
Based on subsequent events, sadly it appears that America did not learn much from the Vietnam experience.
Anger alone solves little. If you want peace, you will have to organize to get it.
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Jimmy Carter: The First Neoliberal Democrat and the Last Boy Scout
The most meaningful measure we can make of Jimmy Carter is whether we would prefer an imperfect, yet noble man like him at the helm of the country, today. I would.
Jan 08, 2025
Virtually everybody with an opinion judges Jimmy Carter to have been a decent man. He was certainly as good an ex-president as we’ve ever had. But what about his legacy as a then-president? That assessment is murkier.
A common refrain holds that Carter was a good man but a weak president, that he was not wise to the ways of Washington, that he was naïve in his belief that pure motives could win over champions of impure schemes.
It is impossible to fairly weigh Carter’s success or failure without understanding the context in which he served. That context was some of the greatest institutional tumult the U.S. has ever seen.
First, was Vietnam. The U.S. had just limped, still bleeding, out of the Vietnam War. It was the first war America had ever lost. The trauma of that loss (to say nothing of the trauma of having tried to prevent it) cannot be overstated.
Carter was the first elected president to have to deal with the shock, the disbelief, the grief, the shame, and the anger from the loss. There wasn’t a person in America who knew how to deal with that rat’s nest of conflicting, disorienting emotions and make the country whole again.
After Vietnam (and, especially, immediately after) the U.S. was not the swaggering hegemon it had been for the 30 years since 1945. But what could it be? That Delphic divination was only the first of Carter’s monumental challenges. There was equal upheaval, economically.
In 1971, Richard Nixon had removed the dollar’s coupling to gold. That left Arab oil sheikdoms receiving paper for their once-ever patrimony. They responded by tripling the price of oil, sending both inflationary and recessionary shocks through the world’s economy.
Theory held that stagnation and inflation couldn’t exist at the same time. But there it was: stagflation. The remedy for stagnation was to lower interest rates and increase the money supply. The remedy for inflation was to raise interest rates and reduce the money supply.
Clearly, you couldn’t do both at the same time. The Keynesian framework for managing the economy, operative since the Great Depression, no longer worked. So, in 1979, Carter hired Paul Volcker to try to fix it.
Volcker jacked up interest rates to record levels, inducing an immediate recession. It was the right thing to do, but it killed Carter’s chances in the 1980 election, as he knew it would. It gave Ronald Reagan his now-famous question: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”
Finally, on top of the ferocious ferment roiling international and economic affairs, there was Watergate. Richard Nixon was caught trying to break into the offices of whistleblower Daniel Elsberg’s psychiatrist and also the Democratic National Committee headquarters. The crime seems petty today, especially compared to launching a mob on the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power, but it was monumental, then.
Probably no event in modern history had so shattered the public’s faith in the integrity of its national institutions and actors. Nixon resigned in disgrace. All political acts—and all political actors—were suddenly suspected of being nefarious and self-dealing.
Carter was both, but he was also neither. That is, yes, he was a politician, carrying out political acts. But he was neither nefarious nor self-dealing. He was as honest and selfless a politician as we’ve ever known. But, that was the tar with which all politics, and politicians, were smeared by Nixon’s sordid bequest.
Simply put, the intellectual and institutional moorings that had anchored the country for the prior 40 years—from the New Deal consensus to the post-World War II international order—were coming unglued. That was the tectonically-shifting world that Carter inherited. Nobody had ever dealt with anything like it.
So, how did he do? In truth, he did pretty well. First, the negatives.
In 1979, Iranian revolutionaries overthrew their government and took 66 Americans hostage. They held them for 444 days, dealing a severe humiliation to the U.S. That was probably Carter’s greatest public defeat.
But the underlying grievance had started in 1953, when the U.S. overthrew the democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, and installed the brutal Shah Reza Pahlavi, a reliable U.S. sycophant but a ruthless enemy of his own people. The boil of that festering resentment popped in 1979, on Carter’s watch.
Also, the Reagan campaign had cut a back-door deal with the revolutionaries to not release the hostages until after the election, thereby depriving Carter of a win in the matter. It was one of the most perfidious deeds ever to degrade American politics. Most people didn’t know that then, and don’t know it, still, today, so mistakenly blame Carter for the entire ordeal.
Later in 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Carter had provoked the invasion. Six months before, he had begun supplying arms to the opponents of the Soviet-leaning Afghan government. The Soviets invaded to prop up their ally which was under attack by U.S.-supported terrorists, including the later-to-become-infamous Osama bin Laden.
Ironically, Afghanistan proved to be the Soviet Union’s Vietnam, draining it of treasure, manpower, and willpower. It is widely regarded to have been the single greatest cause of the Soviet collapse, in 1991. Carter’s critics who condemn his actions at the time always seem to forget that they eventuated in the defeat of the U.S.’ greatest adversary of the twentieth century.
Carter’s solutions to economic woes leaned conservative, or even further. It was he who began the Neoliberal regime we often associate with Ronald Reagan.
He deregulated the airline, trucking, and railroad industries. He reduced spending on welfare much more than either Nixon or Reagan ever did. Fearing inflation, he fought the United Mine Workers in their 1978 national coal strike, alienating one of his—and the Democratic party’s—most important bases.
But what of the good things that Carter delivered?
For all of the upheaval, he actually delivered better economic performance than did Ronald Reagan. That meant faster GDP growth and higher levels of business investment. He delivered the last balance of payments surplus the country has ever known. And he did this without the budget busting deficits that followed him.
When Carter left office, in January, 1981, the national debt—the cumulation of all federal borrowing over 204 years—stood at just under $1 trillion. Reagan tripled that debt in only eight years, an ominous portent of things to come. It is $36 trillion, today.
Carter placed more women and minorities in the federal judiciary—40 and 87, respectively—than all of his predecessors, combined. Ruth Bader Ginsburg attributed her decision to become a judge to Carter’s initiative. He literally actualized the centuries-long-delayed intent embodied in the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s.
Carter established the Department of Energy, an essential move, given the way the country and the world were being whipsawed by Arab oil producers. It has been a huge contributor to the U.S.’ being one of the world’s top energy producers still, today.
He started the Department of Education. An educated work force is probably the most valuable social asset a society can produce. But before Carter, it was left to the scattered machinations of 50 different state bureaucracies, a guarantee for national failure.
Carter engineered the Camp David Accords, bringing Israel and Egypt together to bury at least part of the hostility that has afflicted the Middle East since Israel’s founding in 1948. He proved prescient on the Israelis, predicting that they would not honor their promises to cede greater autonomy to the Palestinians.
Finally, Carter introduced Human Rights into U.S. foreign policy considerations. Even if done badly, it signaled an aspiration for what the U.S. stood for in its desire to be “the leader of the free world.”
The sum of this amounts to as adroit (though not flawless) an adaptation to the challenges of the time as could be conceived.
Besides considering the context and weighing the balance on Carter, there is one more lens through which we can, and should, judge him. That is, “Who would you rather have at the helm, today, steering the country through waters that are at least as perilous as those Carter faced?”
The U.S. is going through similar—or even greater—dislocations, today, as it was in Carter’s time. Its status in the world is plummeting as it has done everything it possibly could to bolster Israel’s heinous genocide of the Palestinians, and as China has blown by it in manufacturing, commerce, and in many areas of technology.
It has suffered withering military defeats, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and, now, Ukraine. The majority of the world’s nations—led by Russia and China—are aligning against it as a Global South. Its economy, too, is much worse today than it was in Carter’s time.
In 1980, the U.S. had not begun hollowing out its economy with 40 years of de-industrialization. It had not begun the psychotic debt binge it has taken, borrowing $35 trillion dollars to try to mask the rot and keep the lights on. It was not hazarding the onset of actuarial bankruptcy, as it is, today.
These are not the signifiers of a healthy global leader. They are the signs of a wounded, faltering behemoth struggling to find a way to regain its once-heralded, even respected, primacy.
So, where does all of this leave us with Jimmy Carter?
Everybody agrees that Carter was an honest, decent, dignified, intelligent, hard-working, selfless public servant who never used his office for personal gain. It’s the things he wasn’t, though, that makes the things he was stand out in such dazzling, admirable, relief.
He wasn’t a pathological liar. He wasn’t a serial sexual abuser. He didn’t consort with porn stars and Playboy bunnies. In fact, he was married to the same woman for 77 years. His daddy didn’t leave him $413 million, so he wasn’t a phony put-up as a self-made man. He wasn’t a five-time draft dodger. He was a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis and served seven honorable years in active duty.
He wasn’t a tax cheat or a convicted felon—probably didn’t even have traffic tickets, he was such a Boy Scout. He didn’t use his office to boost his own personal wealth. He didn’t sell access to billionaires. He didn’t foment racial hatred for electoral gain. He wasn’t a bully. He didn’t threaten to send journalists and political foes to jail, in order to silence them. He didn’t steal state secrets on his way out of the presidency. And he certainly never tried to overthrow the government to keep himself in power.
It’s amazing how far our putative standards have fallen, and how we can so readily, fatuously, condemn a good man who, facing the greatest task of many decades, gave our country his very best, and, in fact, healed so many of the wounds of distrust and division that he and we had inherited.
Smug, supercilious condescension about Jimmy Carter is precisely the sign of our own inadequacy to judge him. We insist of him, even in his death, that he be some kind of incongruous super-human avatar: both chaste and worldly-wise; honest and wily; simple, but savvy; idealistic, yet pragmatic; compassionate, yet ruthless.
Would that we could apply such standards in our own time, to wildly, egregiously inferior human beings, repulsive, amoral self-dealers, setting out to loot the country for their own vanity and personal gain, again.
The most meaningful measure we can make of Jimmy Carter is whether we would prefer an imperfect, yet noble man like him at the helm of the country, today. I would. You? There you go.
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Hey Senate, a Vote Against Nonprofit Killer Bill HR 9495 Is a Vote for Democracy
HR 9495 seems designed for political purposes, to limit debate about the most pressing issues—war, climate, economic access—our country faces today.
Dec 12, 2024
On November 21, 2024, the House of Representatives passed bill H.R. 9495, the “Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act” and passed it to the Senate for consideration.
The bill contains two separate elements, one of which is not controversial and another which is highly controversial.
The first part of the legislation proposes to postpone the tax obligations of Americans being held hostage overseas. It seems fair and right and has almost universal bipartisan support.
It’s already illegal for NGOs in this country to support terrorism, so one intent of HR 9495 must be to limit democratic participation that makes legislators uncomfortable.
The second piece of the bill would allow the Secretary of the Treasury to, unilaterally and with no concrete justification, designate nonprofits as “terrorist supporting organizations.” These organizations would then lose their nonprofit status. As the ACLU has pointed out, any community news outfit, university, or civil association targeted by this law would be required to prove Treasury’s error in order to reclaim their tax-exempt status. By then, of course, the damage would have been done. The scarlet letter “T” would likely haunt the organization for as long as it attempted to act in the world. The potential effects of HR 9495, however, extend far beyond the fates of a handful of nonprofits.
This bill echoes one passed near the end of President Richard Nixon’s first year as president. President Nixon and his surrogates pitched their Tax Reform Act of 1969 in populist terms. It would, they said, prevent millionaires from squirreling away money in foundations and nonprofits in order to dodge paying their fair share to the common good. What really drove the passage of the bill, however, was another concern. Major foundations, including the Ford Foundation, had been contributing to President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” and his mission to bring the nation’s poor in from the “outskirts of hope.” President Johnson had called for the “maximum feasible participation” of poor people in the democratic politics of their localities, states, and the nation. With funding from the Office of Economic Opportunity and Ford, the voices of the poor and marginalized were being heard. Cleveland elected its first Black mayor. Parents in Bedford Stuyvesant took control of the public schools. And in Durham and Greensboro, as well as in rural North Carolina counties, foundation-funded organizers were helping poor and working people, Black and white, to make coherent demands that would improve their lives and the lives of their children.
Threatened political and business bosses saw in Nixon an ally who could help them maintain their grip on power, as they reinforced the president’s grievance-driven “silent majority” with race-baiting and red-baiting tactics. Meanwhile, Roy Wilkins, the director of the NAACP, saw the Tax Reform Act of 1969 for what it was. “Negro citizens,” he wrote in a New York Times op-ed, “are not deceived by the ‘tax reform’ label. They view the move (and rightly so) as an attempt to halt the increase of Negro voting strength.”
After the passage of the Tax Reform Act, over 200,000 people lost nonprofit jobs funded by the OEO and private foundations. Beyond the economic impact of the law, powerful government and private institutions cut ties with committed activists, causing many of these activists to lose faith in the country’s commitment to broadening our democracy. This pushed some of them to imagine ever-more radical solutions beyond the voting booth, even stirring in a few dreams of overthrowing the American government.
When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in 1831 and 1832, he saw American associations as “fundamental” to our democracy. They give voice to our citizens’ myriad thoughts, concerns, and creative ideas for improving lives and the laws that govern them; nonprofits inspire and improve democratic debate.
As the Tax Reform Act of 1969 siphoned the political power from associations, HR 9495 seems designed for political purposes, to limit debate about the most pressing issues—war, climate, economic access—our country faces today. It’s already illegal for NGOs in this country to support terrorism, so one intent of HR 9495 must be to limit democratic participation that makes legislators uncomfortable.
Before they vote, we should make sure our Senators realize that by shutting people up, they will damage our democracy. They may even push some to more desperate, provocative, and unruly attempts to be heard. Instead of reducing social conflict, passing HR 9495 could well increase it.
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Why I Regret My Antiwar Protest Vote in 1968
While I see many parallels with the choice we faced back then, I now think differently about how to register my opposition to war.
Nov 02, 2024
In 1968, I was a full-time anti-Vietnam War organizer and voted for a third-party candidate. I now regret that protest vote, which has led me to think differently this time around.
I certainly sympathize with many progressives who intend to either sit out this election or vote for the Green Party’s Jill Stein or Cornel West. Kamala Harris’s continuing support for Israel’s war on Gaza and now Lebanon is abhorrent to anyone opposing war. For the past year the Biden-Harris administration has functioned as a willing ally and enabler of Israel’s genocide. Though not a self-proclaimed Zionist like the president, Harris parrots Israel’s talking points and lies about the war on Gaza. At the Democratic convention, she didn’t even permit a Palestinian representative to speak for five minutes from the platform.
But come election day, I won’t be casting a protest vote as I did in 1968 — even though I see so many parallels with the choice we faced then.
Like Harris, that year’s Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, served as vice president, standing loyally by as Lyndon Johnson sent more than a half-million U.S. troops to Vietnam, hundreds of whom were dying every week in 1968. Far from distinguishing himself from the war hawks, Humphrey made speeches supporting the U.S. and its South Vietnamese allies as thousands of American soldiers were killed and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were slaughtered.
When it comes to radically transforming the two major political parties it’s going to take a lot more than one election cycle.
Adding to this outrage, Humphrey was nominated at the infamous Democratic convention in Chicago where the local cops brutally assaulted antiwar demonstrators in what was later described as a “police riot.” I was one of those protesters and was jailed for my efforts. Many antiwarriors demonstrated against Humphrey during the subsequent campaign, often chanting “Dump the Hump.” So, when election day came, I just couldn’t bring myself to vote for someone I considered a war criminal and cast my ballot for comedian Dick Gregory, who was running on a third-party ticket.
What I did not consider, however, was Humphrey’s opponent — Richard Nixon. At the time, I considered the parties as Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Both seemed indistinguishable on Vietnam. And both reflected the same Cold War anticommunist mentality that underlay the American imperialist project and the growing military-industrial state.
I ignored, however, the profound differences between the two candidates on a host of other issues. For example, Nixon’s campaign revolved around what he called a Southern strategy. By using thinly disguised racist “law-and-order” rhetoric, he hoped to peel away white Southern and Northern white working-class voters from the Democrats. Ronald Reagan and later Republican administrations have solidified their appeal to white voters to effectively roll back the hard-won gains of the civil rights movement, especially on voting rights.
Today, the differences between the two parties are even more stark on a wide variety of issues – from women’s and LGBTQ+ rights to the climate and consumer protections to electoral integrity. The evidence can be found in Project 2025, the Republican blueprint for a new Trump presidency. Or in what Trump proclaims at his rallies. Earlier this month, he declared that he intends to use the military against protesters whom he considers “the enemy within.”
This kind of authoritarian rule is happening around the world, including Erdogan’s Turkey, Orban’s Hungary and Putin’s Russia. There is very little to protect it from happening here. We certainly can’t rely on the current Supreme Court.
In the face of such a prospect, shouldn’t we do whatever is possible to forestall an autocratic regime? I no longer see casting a symbolic protest ballot — or sitting on the sidelines — as an act of conscience. Real acts of conscience imply taking a risk and being willing to accept the consequences.
Still, some might argue that it’s worth voting for the Green Party’s Jill Stein to send a message to the Democrats that they can’t literally get away with murder in Gaza. But would it convey that message?
In 2016, when Stein last ran for president, she received more votes than Trump’s margin of victory in three key states: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. In this election, that could be enough to help him retake the White House. Trump’s solution to the Gaza war: Netanyahu should “finish the job.” Is that something that would help the Palestinians?
More than anything, they need us to continue challenging the U.S.-Israeli genocide by street actions, by supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS, and by educating our fellow citizens about the reality of the Zionist settler-colonial project. When it comes to radically transforming the two major political parties it’s going to take a lot more than one election cycle. It will require building powerful movements that address systemic issues like racism, poverty, ecological devastation, and war and militarism.
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Just in Time for Independence Day, Supreme Court Grants President Powers of a King
The court has issued an instruction manual for future lawbreaking presidents: Make sure you conspire only with other government employees. You’ll never be held to account.
Jul 02, 2024
It long had seemed that the “stall” would be the worst thing the Supreme Court could do when it came to Donald Trump’s claim of immunity from prosecution. How naive.
Delay there will be. The six justices in the Republican-appointed supermajority held, “A former president is entitled to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his ‘conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority.’” They added, “There is no immunity for unofficial acts.” Rather than make clear that trying to overthrow the Constitution’s peaceful transfer of power is not an official act, the justices send the whole matter back to trial judge Tanya Chutkan. Expect more consideration, more parsing, more rulings, more appeals. It will all likely end up at the Supreme Court again in a year, if the whole prosecution isn’t shut down entirely.
But damage to our system goes well beyond delay. Trump v. U.S. astounds in its implications. It grants the president the power of a monarch. Richard Nixon defended his conduct in Watergate, telling interviewer David Frost, “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” Effectively, the Supreme Court’s supermajority has now enshrined that brazen claim.
The presidential immunity concocted today would have blessed most of Nixon’s crimes.
To be clear, there are reasons to be nervous about prosecuting former chief executives, so some standards make sense. In this case, though, the court has issued an instruction manual for future lawbreaking presidents: Make sure you conspire only with other government employees. You’ll never be held to account.
What makes something an official act? “In dividing official from unofficial conduct, courts may not inquire into the president’s motives,” the justices ruled. And a jury cannot learn about the other parts of a criminal conspiracy that may involve official acts.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett did not agree with this last critical point. She said that of course juries can consider the context of a criminal act. Neither Justice Samuel Alito (who flew insurrectionist flags outside his two homes) nor Justice Clarence Thomas (whose wife was on the Ellipse on January 6) recused themselves. They cast the deciding votes to keep from jurors the full story of the attempted overthrow of the Constitution.
The founders said repeatedly that presidents have no special immunity, as a brief filed by the Brennan Center on behalf of top historians made plain. After all, that was one of the very things about the British monarchy that they hated and against which they rebelled.
Even more directly, this ruling undoes the restrictions on presidential abuse of power put in place by officials and jurists of both parties since the 1970s.
The imperial presidency described an age of growing executive authority and abuse of power. It came crashing to an end during Watergate and after revelations about the misuse of intelligence and law enforcement by Nixon’s predecessors.
The presidential immunity concocted today would have blessed most of Nixon’s crimes. Nixon ordered his White House counsel to pay hush money to burglars in an Oval Office meeting on March 21, 1973. Presumptively an official act? He dangled clemency before E. Howard Hunt, one of the conspirators. Use of the pardon power—entirely immune? He resigned when a tape revealed he had ordered the CIA to go to the FBI to end the investigation of the burglars sent by his campaign committee. “Play it tough,” he told his White House chief of staff. On its face, official.
What about other criminal cases involving high officials? In the Iran-Contra scandal of the late 1980s, numerous officials were charged (including the national security adviser and the defense secretary). Ronald Reagan faced no charges, but not because he was presumed immune. What if he did break the law—would he have escaped accountability? In 2001, federal prosecutors probed whether Bill Clinton sold pardons. They cleared him—but issuing a pardon is surely an official act.
In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said it plainly: “Under [the majority’s] rule, any use of official power for any purpose, even the most corrupt purpose indicated by objective evidence of the most corrupt motives and intent, remains official and immune. Under the majority’s test, if it can be called a test, the category of presidential action that can be deemed ‘unofficial’ is destined to be vanishingly small.”
So, yes, all this will delay Trump’s trial. In that sense, he gets what he craved. But the implications are far worse for the structure of American self-government.
It is a massive failure for Chief Justice John Roberts. The other major rulings on presidential accountability for legal wrongdoing have been unanimous. U.S. v. Nixon (limiting executive privilege) was written by the Republican chief justice Nixon appointed, and it was unanimous. Clinton v. Jones (opening the president to civil suit even while in office) was unanimous. Let’s grant that Roberts is an institutionalist. He is presiding over the collapse of public trust in the very institution he purports to revere.
And Trump v. U.S. has enormous implications for the future of the presidency. Remember that utterly bonkers hypothetical from the appeals court argument—that a president could order SEAL Team Six to assassinate an opponent? Sotomayor again: “A hypothetical president who admits to having ordered the assassinations of his political rivals or critics... has a fair shot at getting immunity under the majority’s new presidential accountability model.”
We read sonorous language in the majority opinion that “the president is not above the law.” But just in time for Independence Day, the Supreme Court brings us closer to having a king again.
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Thank You, President Biden. Now Do the Right Thing.
Don't let history fool you. Trump can be destroyed, but only if those in a position of power show the courage that's needed. It’s now up to Biden's inner circle and the leaders of the Democratic Party to make the correct decision.
Jun 30, 2024
By showing his age and fragility in the debate, President Joe Biden did us all a big favor. There now is a possibility, still slight but higher than before, that he will bow out of the race and not run again.
On November 20, 2023, I wrote a column—titled "Who Has the Courage to Tell Joe Biden Not to Run?"—that asked Biden to drop out. I took heat for that, even from my friends and colleagues. I heard all kinds of arguments, ranging from “He’s a great president and deserves another term,” to “It’s too late to do anything about it.” I was also accused of being a defeatist and some said that my attitude would weaken Biden and help Trump win.
After Biden gave his energetic State of the Union address, the finger wagging accelerated: “See, Biden clearly has the wherewithal to crush Trump,” friends said. I was not convinced. But, after Biden’s Thursday night debate performance, a lot more people became unconvinced. He looked old and spoke even older, that was undeniable.
It’s now up to Biden and the leaders of the Democratic Party. Do they have the guts to tell Biden not to run? Do any of the younger presidential hopefuls have the nerve to speak out? Does Biden have the guts to withdraw?
It is past time to listen to what the Democratic rank and file have been saying all along. They want someone younger to do combat with Trump. While I’m usually a poll skeptic, Biden’s approval numbers are pathetic. The president stood at just 37 percent as of June 24, and that number hardly budged even after the surprisingly strong SOTU address. That polling weakness, I believe, reflects less on the president’s job performance than on how he looks and acts on the job.
Unfortunately, the primaries have been completed and no significant Democrat has showed the nerve to oppose him. That leaves it up to Biden to decide, and in the aftermath of the debate debacle, he and his team say they’re running harder than ever... right over the cliff!
But that could change if his poll numbers further deteriorate and if enough Democratic leaders feel they might lose as well in the fall if Biden heads the ticket.
Misreading History
Pundits have encouraged the Democrat’s cowardice by claiming that defeat always follows when a sitting president is challenged by one of his own party. The poster child for this story is 1968, when Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota took on President Lyndon Johnson in the primaries. McCarthy’s strength led Johnson to withdraw, and for party regulars to engineer the nomination of Vice President Hubert Humphrey. This ended with the victory of Richard Nixon in the general election.
That’s not the way I see it. I challenge all comers to a historical duel about 1968 politics. I think that election was entirely winnable by Humphrey had he taken a mild anti-Vietnam War position a bit sooner during his fall campaign.
That pivotal year is worth reviewing. In 1968, there were 536,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam killing and being killed in large numbers. The Tet Offensive showed the American public that the Johnson administration had been lying when describing our success conducting the war. It was clear that America was not winning. McCarthy challenged the sitting president with a strong anti-war message, appealing to the support of young people in the growing anti-war movement. (About one million men were drafted into the armed forces from 1965 to 1968.) Thousands flocked to his campaign, going door-to-door in New Hampshire where McCarthy gained 42 percent of the Democratic primary vote. The next primary was to take place in Wisconsin and following his New Hampshire scare Johnson knew he was sure to lose. On March 30, LBJ dropped out of the race, and on April 2 McCarthy won Wisconsin by 57 to 35 percent.
With Johnson out, Humphrey became the Democratic Party establishment candidate, but then Robert Kennedy jumped in, making it a three-man race. On April 4, Dr. Martin King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis and riots broke out in 100 cities across the country, leading to 43 deaths and the mobilization of National Guard units and the military occupation of several U.S. cities. Disruption and chaos had the upper hand, and by the time of the California primary, on June 4, it was clear that Kennedy, would defeat McCarthy and become the leader of the anti-war Democrats. Sadly, he was assassinated that night in Los Angeles, greatly weakening the anti-war electoral efforts.
The August 26-29 Democratic convention, held in Chicago, turned into a riot, a police riot, as the Chicago police—under the control of Mayor Richard Daley—viciously attacked the generally peaceful anti-war demonstrators. Anti-war convention delegates, and even CBS’s Dan Rather, were beaten as Daley turned his political machine into a ramrod for the Humphrey campaign. The carnage was broadcast live on TV.
After Kennedy’s murder it was a forgone conclusion that Humphrey would become the Democratic nominee. But the key political event at the tumultuous convention turned out to be the vote on a rather mild peace plank for the Democratic Party platform, something that the Kennedy and McCarthy delegates hoped to salvage for their efforts. But LBJ, pulling the strings, refused to compromise and the plank was narrowly defeated.
I try to avoid the prediction game, but I am willing to go out on a limb on this one: If Biden stays in, we get Trump. If a younger Democrat becomes the nominee, Trump will get crushed.
That fall, Vice President Humphrey ran against the former Vice President Nixon, who based his campaign on law and order, scaring the newly concocted “Silent Majority,” and criticizing the riots and anti-war demonstrations that were ripping through the country. Nixon also claimed to have a plan to end the war in Vietnam that he would reveal at his inauguration, which turned out to be an appealing lie. Humphrey, an organization man nearly to the end, stayed loyal to the unpopular LBJ positions and fell behind by 44 to 27 percent in a September 27 Gallop poll.
On September 30, 1968, Humphrey finally broke ranks with LBJ in a nationwide speech. He announced that he would put an end to the bombing in Vietnam and would call for a ceasefire. This brought McCarthy and many of his supporters, as well as Kennedy supporters, into the Humphrey campaign, quickly narrowing the gap. But with only a month to go Humphrey didn’t quite get there: Nixon won 43.4 percent to Humphrey’s 42.7 percent, with segregationist George Wallace netting 15.5 percent.
I believe any objective analyst would conclude that had Democrats supported the peace plank at the convention or had Humphrey offered his peace plan sooner, he would have won. So please don’t use 1968 to tell us that if Biden withdraws, the Democrats are sure to lose, (which is what Kaitlin Collins said on CNN the night after the debate.)
I try to avoid the prediction game, but I am willing to go out on a limb on this one: If Biden stays in, we get Trump. If a younger Democrat becomes the nominee, Trump will get crushed.
It’s now up to Biden and the leaders of the Democratic Party. Do they have the guts to tell Biden not to run? Do any of the younger presidential hopefuls have the nerve to speak out? Does Biden have the guts to withdraw?
President Biden, we thank you for your service. Now give us the chance to thank you again for protecting democracy by stepping aside.
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