A president who looked secure
At the start of 1967 Lyndon Johnson appeared to be in a strong position for the 1968 election. He had won the 1964 landslide, the Great Society had produced a long list of laws, and sitting presidents who wanted a second full term were rarely denied their party’s nomination. Nothing in the early months suggested that he would not run, and there was no serious Democratic challenger.
By the end of the year the picture had changed. The presidential election of 1968 had not yet happened, and Johnson was still the Democratic incumbent, but opposition was now organised, a senator had announced he would run against him, and the president’s approval ratings were weak. The shift came from three directions at once: a Republican recovery, a revolt among liberal Democrats, and a war that was not producing the progress officials kept promising.
The Republican recovery
The groundwork had been laid in November 1966. In the midterm elections that year, Republicans gained 47 seats in the House of Representatives, three in the Senate and eight governorships, recovering much of what they had lost in the 1964 landslide. The new governors included Ronald Reagan in California, and some Republicans were already being discussed as presidential candidates, among them George Romney of Michigan and Richard Nixon, who had campaigned widely for the party in 1966.
The same mood showed in some state contests in 1967, though local issues played a large part. In Kentucky, for example, a Republican was elected governor in November, a result that party leaders were glad to cite. At the same time, voters were electing Black mayors in Cleveland and Gary, which showed that the picture was not simple. Republicans also had their own divisions between moderates and conservatives, and the contest for their nomination was still open at the end of the year.
Doubts among Democrats
The central political problem was Vietnam. By the end of 1967 there were roughly half a million American troops in South Vietnam, a figure that had risen sharply since 1965, and casualties were increasing. At home, large demonstrations such as the March on the Pentagon in October showed the strength of the antiwar coalition, and public opinion polls were beginning to show that more Americans doubted the war than had a year earlier. Opinion was divided rather than uniformly hostile, and many who disliked the war also disliked the protesters.
Inside the Democratic Party the doubts were sharper. Some liberals believed that Johnson’s policy was a moral and strategic error. Others worried that the war was consuming resources that should have gone to the Great Society and to the cities, where there had been serious riots that summer. Black leaders and civil rights organisations were also under strain in their relations with the administration. Meanwhile Robert McNamara, one of the architects of the war, had begun to express private doubts and left the Pentagon at the end of the year. In November, General Westmoreland told audiences in Washington that progress was being made, a message that the administration hoped would reassure the public.
Allard Lowenstein and the Dump Johnson movement
The organiser at the centre of the revolt was Allard Lowenstein, a lawyer and activist who had worked on civil rights in Mississippi and had many contacts among liberals and students. In 1967 he set out to find a Democrat who would challenge the president in the primaries. The campaign became known as the Dump Johnson movement.
Lowenstein approached prominent figures, and most turned him down. Senator Robert Kennedy, who had criticised the war, was reluctant to challenge the president and risk a split in the party. Others he sounded out, including Senator George McGovern and retired general James Gavin, also declined. Through the year Lowenstein and his allies travelled to party meetings and college campuses, and they helped organise a group of liberal Democrats known as the Conference of Concerned Democrats. A national gathering of the group took place in Chicago in early December 1967.
The effort was not an uprising of the whole party. Many Democratic officials, labour leaders and the party machine remained loyal to Johnson, and some saw the project as hopeless or dangerous. But the organisation gave antiwar Democrats a place to work and a message that the war could be fought in electoral politics rather than only in the streets.
McCarthy enters
Lowenstein finally found a candidate in Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, a critic of the war who agreed to run. McCarthy announced his candidacy at the end of November 1967. He was not a famous national figure, and few observers gave him much chance of beating a president. His entry mattered because it turned a protest into a campaign, and because it gave students and other volunteers a target for their energy.
The weeks before New Hampshire
In the first weeks of 1968 the political situation was still uncertain. The Tet Offensive began at the end of January and cast doubt on official claims of progress, which pushed the debate further. Kennedy still held back at that point, McCarthy campaigned in New Hampshire with the help of young volunteers who became known for cleaning up their appearance to win over local voters, and Johnson’s supporters ran a write-in campaign on the president’s behalf rather than a conventional one.
The New Hampshire primary took place on 12 March 1968. Johnson won the most votes, but McCarthy did far better than expected and came close, which was widely read as a rebuke to the president. Kennedy entered the race days later, and Johnson announced on 31 March that he would not seek re-election. Those events belong to 1968 and are covered elsewhere on this site. The point for 1967 is that the groundwork was laid in the year before: an organised Democratic opposition, a revived Republican Party and a war that had divided the country.
What the shifts meant
Seen from late 1967, the changes were incomplete. Johnson remained the heavy favourite for renomination, and few predicted that he would give up. Yet the underlying shifts were real. Republicans had recovered, antiwar Democrats had organised, and the president was no longer the commanding figure he had been after 1964. Those facts help explain why 1968 became a year of upset, and why the politics of 1967 are better read as preparation than as a conclusion.