1968: POLITICAL TURMOIL IN TURBULENT TIMES

	VS
R. Nixon		H. Humprey

The escalating Vietnam War and riots in American cities divided the nation and tore at the fabric of the Democratic party. With Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy taking up the antiwar banner and setting his sights on the presidency, Lyndon B. Johnson called a partial halt to bombings over North Vietnam -- then announced he would not seek re-election after all.

New York senator Robert F. Kennedy began campaigning against the war and seemed to be overtaking McCarthy for the lead when he was assassinated after a primary victory in California.

Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey, never entered the primaries, but he won the Democratic Party nomination anyway, at a convention wracked by protest inside and outside the Chicago. The Republican party's nomination process moved along more smoothly. Republicans lined up behind Richard M. Nixon while the nation's leading spokesman against civil rights, Alabama Governor George C. Wallace, formed a third party that managed to dent into the voting tallies of the other two candidates. Nixon, the politician who served as vice president under President Dwight Eisenhower and who just barely lost the presidency to John F. Kennedy eight years earlier, finally and just barely managed to win the nation's highest office.

1960 - 1964 - 1968 - 1972 - 1976 - 1980 - 1984 - 1988 - 1992

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