A reflection on the last 60 years of American politics.
Introduction to a Tumultuous Era
In the summer of 1968, I was only seven years old. But, though young, I vividly remember the political turmoil surrounding the Presidential Election and the civil unrest dividing our nation. Five years earlier, on November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Vice President Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as President aboard Air Force One, with Jackie Kennedy by his side. Just two days later, JFK’s alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was shot by Jack Ruby in the Dallas Police Headquarters.
Clarifying Presidential Succession: The Twenty-Fifth Amendment
The Constitution’s Article II, Section 1, describes how the President is chosen, the
qualifications for office, and what happens when a President resigns or is disabled. However, it is vague about presidential succession when a President is alive but incapacitated, and unclear about whether the Vice President acts as President or assumes the role outright in such circumstances. This ambiguity became critical after JFK’s death and led to significant changes in our nation’s approach to presidential succession.
Throughout history, eight Vice Presidents have ascended to the presidency after a sitting President’s death. Prompted by Kennedy’s assassination, Congress passed the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, ratified in 1967, which provided clearer guidelines for presidential succession and the transfer of power when the President is disabled.
Voting Rights and the Impact of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment
The presidency has also seen instances where both the President and Vice President resigned. Following Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson secured his own term in 1964, defeating Republican candidate Barry Goldwater. Though Goldwater lost, his campaign helped ignite the Conservative Movement. It was during this time that Ronald Reagan delivered his famous speech, A Time for Choosing, marking the rise of the Conservative Right within the Republican Party.
Meanwhile, the Vietnam War intensified under President Johnson, becoming the central issue of his presidency. In June 1967, while the Vietnam conflict dominated American politics, Israel was embroiled in the Six-Day War with its neighbors, including Syria. The war in Vietnam, combined with racial tensions and civil unrest, led to deep divisions within the Democratic Party. The draft, which compelled young men over eighteen to serve in Vietnam, was wildly unpopular. Protesters chanted, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” throughout the nation.
On an opposing political platform, In 1968, the third-party campaign of segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace carried five southern states in the Presidential election—marking the last time a third-party candidate won electoral votes in a general election.
Similarly, Robert F. Kennedy, JFK’s brother and former Attorney General, opposed Johnson in the Democratic primary. Although Johnson narrowly won the early contests, his approval rating was a dismal thirty-six percent. On March 31, 1968, Johnson stunned the nation by announcing he would not seek re-election. Five days later, civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by James Earl Ray, sparking race riots across the country.
Two months before the Democratic Convention in Chicago, Robert F. Kennedy won the California primary and seemed poised to secure the party’s presidential nomination. However, he was tragically assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian who claimed he acted due to JFK’s support for Israel following the 1967 war. By the time the convention met in August, the Democratic Party, like the nation, was deeply divided over the Vietnam War and segregation, leading to riots in Chicago. The Democratic nomination went to Johnson’s Vice President, Hubert Humphrey but Despite a bitterly divided party, Humphrey lost the general election to Richard Nixon, who ran on a platform of restoring law and order.
In response to the draft of eighteen-year-old men to fight and die in Vietnam, the Nation adopted the Twenty-Sixth Amendment providing the right to vote to citizens age eighteen and older. The chant was “old enough to fight, old enough to vote.” The Twenty-Sixth Amendment was the fastest Constitutional Amendment to ever be adopted and was ratified on March 10, 1971.
Shifts in Presidential Power and Governance Challenges
In 1972, George Wallace rejoined the Democrat Party and ran for election as President. In May 1972, Governor Wallace was shot at an outdoor rally in Maryland. Wallace was paralyzed from the waist down and three others were wounded. Wallace went on to win the Democrat primary in Michigan and Maryland but lost the Democrat nomination.
Nixon and Agnew won the 1972 election in a landslide winning more popular votes than any prior President and Vice President in American History. One of the dominant issues, in addition to the Vietnam War and racial discrimination, was crime and law and order. Bumper stickers declaring “Support Your Local Police” were common. The Right was saying “Impeach Earl Warren”, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, for presiding over a series of liberal Supreme Court decisions. The conservative Right was also campaigning to “Get the U.S. out of the U.N.”
However, the triumph of Nixon and Agnew was short-lived. Agnew resigned the Vice Presidency in 1973 following a bribery scandal when he had been governor of Maryand, and Gerald Ford, the Republican minority leader in the House of Representatives was selected to be Vice President. Nixon himself resigned in 1974 amid the Watergate scandal on August 8, 1974.
Amazingly, two years after winning a landslide election, the President and Vice President had both resigned and Gerald Ford, who had never been elected to any office other than a congressional seat in East Grand Rapids, Michigan, was now President of the United States. The Republican establishment rallied around President Ford and encouraged him to run for election as President in his own right.
In 1976, as America celebrated its Bicentennial, Ronald Reagan challenged President Ford for the Republican Presidential nomination. This was the last presidential election where a major party’s nominee for President was decided at a contested convention. Ronald Reagan carried Missouri and other states but lost to Ford in the Republican National Convention in Kansas City. Gerald Ford won the Republican nomination but went on to lose the general election to Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer and former governor of Georgia.
President Carter presided over a failed presidency with a massive increase in inflation and interest rates, an energy crisis resulting in gas lines where drivers could only obtain gasoline on alternate days of the week, and a series of unpopular government regulations to supposedly “save energy” like the fifty-five mile per hour speed limit and ban on outdoor gas lights. America also declined in its international reputation and influence, while the Nation’s military was underfunded and in disarray. The iconic event was when Iranian radicals overthrew the Shah of Iran and captured more than sixty American hostages at the United States embassy in Tehran.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan, at age seventy, defeated President Carter, winning forty-four states and 51% of the popular vote. Just as Reagan took office, Iranian revolutionaries released the American hostages, fearing military retaliation. Two months later, John Hinckley attempted to assassinate Reagan outside the Washington Hilton. Reagan narrowly survived, losing nearly half his body weight of blood.
Following this assassination attempt, President Reagan declared, “Whatever happens now, I owe my life to God and will try to serve Him in every way I can.” Reagan later said, “perhaps having come so close to death made me feel I should do whatever I could in the years God had given me to reduce the threat of nuclear war. Perhaps that is the reason I was spared.”
Ronald Reagan was reelected in a 1984 landslide, winning every state but Minnesota, with George H.W. Bush as Vice President. His "Morning in America" campaign marked his second term, during which Reagan's policies led to the defeat of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The Berlin Wall was torn down, capturing the iconic moment when Reagan declared, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" at the Brandenburg Gate.
Relevance to Our Time
These events are eerily familiar to events of today. Our Nation has been through similar times, and our constitutional republic has survived. In uncertain and tumultuous times, the question is how did our Nation survive prior challenges to our political and civil order? The answer is our Constitution and the Rule of Law. No human endeavor or Nation is perfect. Humans are fallen and imperfect. As James Madison observed in Federalist Fifty-One, explaining,
"If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty les in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed and in the next place oblige it to control itself."
Madison explained why the Founders divided the federal government into the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches:
“…to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights.”
The constitutional republic our Nation’s Founders crafted almost two hundred and fifty years ago is, as President Lincoln said, the “last great hope of mankind”. This constitutional order is under siege. The task falls to us and our generation to defend the Constitution and Rule of Law so this Nation is preserved for future generations.
-Written by Thor Hearne
Comments