“Whatever became of Hubert?” sang the musical comedian Tom Lehrer in 1965.

The late 1960s were tough years for Hubert H. Humphrey. In the immediate postwar years, he, as much as any other individual politician, had defined what it meant to be a liberal in America. As a reforming mayor of Minneapolis, a founder of Minnesota's Democratic–Farmer–Labor (DFL) Party, a leading light in the organization Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), and a Senator, he had been a pacemaker for American liberalism. The liberalism Humphrey defined was anticommunist, pro-civil rights, and centred on a raft of reforms that would form the bedrock of the New Frontier and Great Society: the Peace Corps, Medicare, federal aid to education, and the nuclear test ban.

But by the time of Lehrer's musical satire, Humphrey's liberal bona fides had begun a decline from which they would never fully recover. As Lyndon B. Johnson's vice president, he became an object of pity or derision to many, apparently a hostage within the administration. (“Does Lyndon, recalling when he was VP,” mused Lehrer, “Say I'll do unto you like they did unto me?”) Despite his initial misgivings, and to the dismay of many old friends, Humphrey vociferously defended Johnson's Vietnam policy. Though he lost credibility, this made him Johnson's heir apparent and the presumptive Democratic nominee after the President decided to withdraw his own putative candidacy in March 1968.

In Michael Schumacher's readable new account of the 1968 election, Humphrey “more than any other candidate” becomes “a symbol of the country itself, a casualty in the war for America's soul” (xiv). Decent, honourable and unable to confront the challenges of the election, in Schumacher's telling Humphrey is torn apart by a war between “the old and the new politics,” an ideological and generational skirmish for the future of the country (xiii). (Humphrey is perhaps the closest thing Schumacher has to a protagonist. Each of the major candidates is introduced with biographical chapters that occupy the first 150 pages of the book. Humphrey receives fifty-two pages, a third of the space. Even Richard Nixon, the eventual winner of the election, receives only twenty-two.)

Schumacher joins Theodore H. White; Lawrence O'Donnell; Lewis L. Gould; Michael A. Cohen; and the journalist triumvirate Lewis Chester, Godfrey Hodgson, and Bruce Page as a chronicler of the presidential election of 1968.Footnote ² To this collection, Schumacher is not offering a particularly groundbreaking new interpretation. An election that has previously been a “melodrama” and a “maelstrom” is, for Schumacher, “the culmination of a mighty struggle” for “America's soul” (xi) and “a marker, a turning point in American electoral history” (xix). In some nebulous way, he argues, it was the catalyst for the emergence of modern American politics, an arena defined by partisanship, polarization, negative campaigning, soundbites, the dominance of a handful of swing states, and the loss of a general “sense of politesse” (xix).

The story that Schumacher tells is a familiar one, and the characters are rendered in familiar ways. Robert F. Kennedy was “a man of powerfully conflicting characteristics … kind, mean, competitive, temperamental, gentle, hostile, ruthless, sensitive, ambitious, opportunistic, judgmental, driven, tender, and empathetic’ (152). Gene McCarthy was “detached, unwilling to lead and happy to delegate” and gave the impression “that he was running on cool intelligence at the cost of political savvy and elbow grease” (178) There was “something Shakespearean” about Richard Nixon, “an almost sinister aura that could make one believe that, in the end, he would impale himself on his own foibles” (99).

Nor does Schumacher claim to have made any significant new archival discoveries. His source base rests largely on the secondary literature, supported by newspaper accounts and the oral-history collections curated by various presidential libraries. Nonetheless, Schumacher has done an extraordinary job of synthesizing those materials into a lucid, dynamic, and accessible account of one of the most gruelling American elections in the postwar era. He has a sure grasp of his narrative and steers the reader through a sprawling, cacophonous tale with brio and confidence. (Schumacher has previously authored well-regarded biographies of figures of the 1960s counterculture like Allen Ginsberg and Phil Ochs and his immersion in the culture and politics of the decade shows through on these pages.) As a new history of the 1968 election, Schumacher's is a lively and fluent work that I would recommend enthusiastically to an unfamiliar reader.

The sitting President, Lyndon B. Johnson, is largely a background presence in Schumacher's book: his decision to withdraw from the presidential election in March 1968, and the reactions to this decision of the other key players, occupy much of the introduction, but then he fades from the action. Whereas LBJ is a spectral presence who only occasionally intrudes on Schumacher's narrative, he is the central character in Kyle Longley's new account of the final year of Johnson's presidency. Longley – professor of history and political science at Arizona State University who was, until March 2019, the director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library before he was dismissed under mysterious circumstances – has provided here “a microbiography of Lyndon Johnson, focussing on one critical year as opposed to a lifetime” (6).

That was a year when Johnson was, in his own words, “living in a continuous nightmare” (5). Longley's LBJ is a lion in winter, long past a political prime when he cajoled Congress into passing the most sweeping civil rights legislation in a century, launched a War on Poverty, and won an election in a historic landslide. Instead, this is a Johnson forced to withdraw prematurely from the presidential election, disdained by much of the country, failing to persuade legislators to take up his bills or approve his nominees, and stubbornly refusing to extricate the nation from the bloody quagmire of Vietnam.

This book is shaped around a series of crises that confronted LBJ that year: the Tet offensive, the seizing of the USS Pueblo by North Korean forces, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and RFK, the wave of uprisings that swept the nation's cities after the former, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, among others. In most of these, Longley portrays an LBJ who is wiser and more cautious than he might have been earlier in his term. In the case of the Pueblo, for instance, Longley suggests that LBJ demonstrated a “maturity” that had eluded him in Vietnam and in the Dominican Republic, showing “patience and restraint, resisting the calls to employ military force” (34). Longley does acknowledge that such moderation was partly due to the US's existing commitment in Vietnam and the limits on any President's freedom of action. The overriding impression Longley wants to leave his reader with is that of LBJ as effective crisis manager. As Johnson's wife, Lady Bird (whose diary Longley draws on throughout to great effect) put it, “Lyndon's a good man to have in an emergency” (7).

In those cases when LBJ tried to take the initiative in that last year, it usually ended in failure. He complained to his aide Horace Busby that the legislative proposals he receives are “all vanilla” (129). Those proactive successes he did enjoy – like the 1968 Fair Housing Act – were exceptions. The gun-control bill he sought in the aftermath of King's assassination was diluted in Congress and ultimately LBJ paired its signing with a statement about the new law's disappointments and limitations (157). The most humiliating political disaster – and one that revealed the extent of Johnson's diminution – was the failed nomination of his ally, Abe Fortas, to the position of chief justice of the Supreme Court (the “Big Stumble,” as Longley dubs it). This fight revealed the burgeoning conservative resistance to Johnson, the (accurate) expectation that a President Nixon would appoint a more ideologically congenial judge, and LBJ's waning influence with southern Senators, once a natural constituency. It also represented a disastrous political miscalculation, with LBJ underestimating the growing unpopularity of the Warren Court's liberal jurisprudence and the damaging accusations of “cronyism” that arose from his close personal relationship with Fortas. Though LBJ embarked on an enthusiastic lobbying campaign on Fortas's behalf – wooing and chivvying potential allies – he failed to corral the votes to break a filibuster. It is at these moments in Longley's narrative that Johnson looks most like “a lame duck president mired in a host of quagmires with few novel ideas to offer” (178).

Though Longley's is a broadly sympathetic account, he never overlooks Johnson's flaws. The crises often bring out, and are sometimes exacerbated by, Johnson's more objectionable personal characteristics: his stubbornness, his pettiness, his hubris, and his cruelty. Some of these have an unnerving contemporary resonance. The Fortas nomination fight underlined the fact that he “showed little regard for normalized standards of behavior and faced accusations of crossing ethical lines for political or personal gain” (168). His muted initial reaction to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia revealed his “tendency … to disconnect from reality to create an alternative one that he desired” (188). In the midst of the primary campaign, he told one reporter scornfully that the beleaguered Hubert Humphrey “crie[d] too much” (215).

The particular strength of Longley's book is in his meticulous reconstruction of that year's crises and LBJ's reactions. He draws on the extensive collections of the LBJ presidential library to take the reader into the White House to follow a fading political giant who becomes increasingly desperate to secure his legacy as the world outside prepares to move on. This book vividly renders Lyndon B. Johnson as both the President and human being in all of his grandeur and monstrosity. It is a rich and engaging addition to the literature on one of the most complex US Presidents of the modern era.

These books by Michael Schumacher and Kyle Longley offer two new, and neatly complementary, views of America's 1968, one from the campaign trail and the other from LBJ's “vantage point” in the White House. Both see it, as many others have, as an inflection point between eras. Through their own distinct prisms, they try to understand the legacy of one of the most compulsively fascinating and documented years in recent US history.