How Vietnam Broke the Democratic Party

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/28/opinion/vietnam-broke-democratic-party.html

Version 0 of 1.

Fifty years later, the 1968 presidential election and the Vietnam War still shadow American politics. But the war actually had little effect on the vote that November — even though surveys showed that Vietnam was by far the most important issue on voters’ minds, they saw little difference between the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon, and his Democratic opponent, Hubert H. Humphrey, both of whom they scored “slightly conservative” on the University of Michigan’s seven-point “Vietnam scale.”

The real consequences of the election and the war were on the Democratic Party, with collateral effects on the Republicans. The Democrats’ united, confident and longstanding commitment to the spread of liberal values throughout the world eroded in the aftermath. Fragmented by internal divisions over the war, the party also overhauled its process for choosing presidential candidates in ways that upended its previous domination by Southerners, unions and big-city bosses.

The decade had begun with the election of John F. Kennedy, whose main issue in the 1960 presidential campaign was the Cold War, which he believed America was losing to the Soviet Union. Kennedy pledged in his Inaugural Address to do whatever was necessary “to assure the survival and success of liberty,” a declaration that placed him squarely in the tradition of his party.

Ever since Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt led the United States onto the world stage as a promoter of liberal values during the first half of the 20th century, most Democrats had been comfortable with this role. Indeed, an animating premise of Democratic liberalism was that the federal government has the ability to solve virtually any problem it chooses to take on, domestic or foreign.

Soon after taking office, Kennedy began escalating American military involvement in Vietnam. In June 1961, following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, he told James Reston of The New York Times that “we have a problem in making our power credible” and “Vietnam is the place.” By November 1963, Kennedy had dispatched 16,300 military advisers to South Vietnam. As late as the morning of Nov. 22, he said, “Without the United States, South Vietnam would collapse overnight.”

Assuming the presidency when Kennedy was assassinated a few hours later, Lyndon B. Johnson felt bound to continue his predecessor’s course. Less confident about Vietnam than he was about domestic matters, Johnson regularly asked the foreign policy advisers he inherited from Kennedy — chiefly Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, and his national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy — what Kennedy would have done, and then he did it. Their confident recommendation was that the American commitment to victory in Vietnam must be maintained.

After Johnson was elected in 1964 to a term in his own right, hawkish pressures from the administration’s Kennedy alumni intensified. In February 1965 Bundy returned from South Vietnam and said that the war was lost unless the United States launched a sustained bombing campaign against the North. Johnson quickly approved Operation Rolling Thunder, which lasted, with brief pauses, for three years, the largest sustained air campaign in the history of warfare. With repeated reassurance from his advisers that eventually a “crossover point” would be reached at which the Communists decided they couldn’t win, Johnson steadily increased the American troop presence in Vietnam, which rose above a half-million.

To raise the manpower needed, Johnson saw conscription as a less politically risky approach than calling up the reserves or National Guard, which would have forced many married, middle-class men to leave their jobs and families. College students, whose numbers had swelled to 7.5 million from 2.1 million in 1952, became increasingly alarmed that the draft soon would extend to them. “The draft was the best organizing tool we had,” said the antiwar activist Sam Brown. Not just male students but also their sisters and girlfriends joined protests against the war on campuses and in Washington.

Demonstrations were not the only manifestation of the growing opposition to the war. Senator Eugene McCarthy and — after seeing how vulnerable Johnson was to an intraparty challenge when McCarthy nearly won the March 12 New Hampshire primary — Senator Robert F. Kennedy entered the race for the Democratic nomination. Days afterward, Johnson’s “wise men,” 14 high-ranking foreign policy officials from recent administrations who previously had endorsed his conduct of the war, told the president that “we must take steps to disengage.” Johnson withdrew from the election at the end of the month.

As the spring primary season unfolded, McCarthy vied with Kennedy to be the main antiwar alternative to Vice President Humphrey, who delayed announcing his candidacy until April 27, too late to compete in the primaries. Kennedy won all but one head-to-head primary contest with McCarthy before being assassinated on June 4. But even if Kennedy had lived, Humphrey’s nomination was essentially sealed by support from the Democratic Party’s Southern, labor and organizational wings, which dominated delegate selection and, ultimately, controlled the nomination.

Humphrey wanted to move his party’s platform in a slightly dovish direction to placate Kennedy and McCarthy supporters, but he backed off when Johnson told him that doing so would “endanger American troops,” that he “would have their blood on my hands.” The consequence was that the Democratic platform ended up more hawkish on Vietnam than the Republican one, which at least called for a “de-Americanization” of the war.

Plagued by war protesters and trailing Nixon badly in the polls, Humphrey pledged at the end of September to stop the bombing of North Vietnam. His campaign steadily gained strength from that day on, rising from a low of 29 percent in a Gallup poll early that fall to near parity with Nixon by Election Day.

Nixon’s victory, however narrow, broke the Democratic Party’s record of seven victories in the previous nine elections, most of them by a landslide. Once united in support of an assertive foreign policy, Democrats now were fiercely divided entering the 1972 presidential nominating contest. One leading contender, the strongly anti-Communist Senator Henry Jackson, was squarely in the old Democratic tradition. With support from party heavyweights such as the A.F.L.-C.I.O. president George Meany and Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, he may well have been nominated under the rules that prevailed in 1968.

But in a concession to antiwar delegates at the 1968 convention, Humphrey had not opposed a resolution requiring that in the future “all feasible efforts” would be “made to assure that delegates are selected through primary, convention or committee procedures open to public participation.” A postelection commission headed by Senator George McGovern and Representative Donald Fraser fleshed out this resolution with rules requiring that every delegate in 1972 and after be chosen in a primary or caucus open to every Democratic voter.

With grass-roots party activists now driving delegate selection, McGovern won 15 primaries and Jackson none. Humphrey had not won any primaries either in 1968, but under the pre-McGovern-Fraser rules that did not prevent the party’s leaders from making him the nominee. In 1972 these leaders were outshouted by war opponents who had carried McGovern to victory in the primaries.

McGovern lost the election to Nixon, but the new activist-centered party he midwifed remained. The party lost interest in using American power, and spent the next generation trying to constrain it. Democratic Congresses voted to hem in Nixon’s war-making power by enacting the War Powers Resolution and forbade President Gerald Ford to continue to supply arms to the government of South Vietnam, which quickly fell to the Communists.

They hamstrung President Ronald Reagan’s efforts to roll back Communist advances in Central America and did their best to impose a “nuclear freeze” on America’s arsenal. They opposed President George H. W. Bush’s Gulf war.

Only with victory in the Cold War in the early 1990s did Democrats begin regain a trace of their old confidence that American involvement in the world, especially for humanitarian reasons, should sometimes be embraced. Bill Clinton, the party’s victorious nominee in 1992 and 1996, made clear that he was not a “McGovern Democrat.”

The Republican Party was a bystander to the changes in the presidential nominating process, but was still affected by them. The Democrats’ move toward a primaries-based system required alterations to state election laws that opened Republican nominations to grass-roots capture as well, albeit grudgingly and with party leaders better able to hold the reins of power for a longer time.

But just as the Democratic nomination after 1968 was won by political outsiders such as McGovern in 1972 and, four years later, Jimmy Carter, so eventually was the Republican. How else to explain the ability of history’s ultimate outsider, Donald Trump, to become the 2016 Republican nominee despite the near unanimous opposition of established party leaders?

And is it mere coincidence that what had happened among Democrats starting with McGovern finally happened among Republicans? Voters in both parties have always been more reluctant than public officials to embrace foreign aid, military deployments and multinational agreements. In 2016, Republican primary voters seized the opportunity to choose a candidate who disdained his party’s previous support of these pillars of an assertive foreign policy. History doesn’t repeat itself, but sometimes it does rhyme.