the most important election of your lifetime - identify it please (US postwar edition)

humphrey's vietnam position might be described as "frustrated." my understanding is that he was one of those in the admin who'd started to think the war was indeed "quicksand" and that the rosy pictures they were getting from the brass were B.S. but it was pretty hard for him to stake out a different position while running as LBJ's veep. meanwhile the national mood was souring on the war at sort of the worst time for the admin trying to pass the torch; he probably would have won if the calendar were all shifted around and the election happened in '67.

he didn't run in the primaries (focused on caucus states IIRC) and of course he entered late because of LBJ's sudden decision to drop out, but all through this period and into the summer he was still stick carrying water for the admin's line on the war, months after Tet and with the momentum clearly shifting to mccarthy and RFK as outright anti-war candidates. a month before the election he finally said publicly that he'd end the bombing and seek a cease-fire as a gamble for the sake of peace talks (which he'd been pushing to LBJ privately for a while, per wiki). it went over well with the public, but it was sort of too-little-too-late. or maybe it would have been just enough had nixon not fiddled with the peace talks. it was a close race (despite the blowout electoral vote). nixon carried several EV-rich states by around 3% or less (CA, IL, NJ, OH) and the Wallace ticket was in striking distance of a couple more than it won (the Carolinas, Tennessee). it really could have gone differently.

this gets much more into his vietnam chronology and his frustrations: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/vietnam-hubert-humphrey.html

this is an auspiciously timed first post :/

yeah. :-/ it was a different time, for sure.

thinking about the supreme court really boosts 1968 a bit i think. a lot of things might have played out very differently had humphrey, not nixon, filled four vacancies in that first term. blackmun turned out a surprise liberal but rehnquist, powell and burger shifted the court decidedly rightward off of where it was going under Warren - really where it had been going since FDR's raft of appointments - and they stuck around forever. even reagan's picks, much as i still loathe scalia, seem to have been less obstructive to the progress of justice and equality.

― This is a total Jeff Porcaro. (Doctor Casino),

Wait till you read John Dean's The Rehnquist Vote, in which the tapes clarify how stupid and troll-y Nixon intended to be with his real picks for the Court. To be honest we're lucky that Powell and Blackmun turned out to be moderates fairly quickly (compared to Scalia, Thomas, and even early O'Connor), despite Powell's writing one of the most influential of modern conservative memos.