1968: in a year of turmoil, a nation goes to the polls: the Vietnam War and violent social unrest at home set the stage for Richard Nixon's victory in one of the most dramatic presidential races in U.S. history.

• Author: Roberts, Sam
• Position: Times Past

A distant war that came home to haunt us. A stunning surprise in the first presidential primary. Two horrific assassinations. Urban riots, social unrest, and a convention that tore apart the Democratic Party. That was 1968--the year, Frank Rich of The New York Times wrote, that "the 1960s became The Sixties."

For all the muscular personalities in the news that year, 1968 was defined by events, beginning with the war in Vietnam. In January, on Tet, the Vietnamese lunar new year, the Communists launched a bold offensive against U.S. backed South Vietnam. While the offensive was short-lived, it signaled to the American public that an unpopular war wasn't winding down, as President Lyndon B. Johnson maintained, but escalating, with nearly 300,000 American troops in Vietnam--and 17,000 dead--by the end of the year.

DEFEATED BY WAR

Johnson, a Texas Democrat who had been John F. Kennedy's Vice President, was elected President on his own in 1964 in a landslide. But while South Vietnam's government survived the Tet offensive, LBJ was defeated by another army: young anti-war protesters who mobilized behind Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota in the New Hampshire primary in March.

McCarthy's surprisingly strong showing--he won 42 percent of the vote--amounted to a repudiation of a sitting President by his own party. Three weeks later, Johnson stunned the nation by announcing: "I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party as your President."

Johnson's withdrawal left the Democratic field to Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, also of Minnesota, McCarthy, and Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York, brother of the slain President.

Challenging McCarthy for the mantle of which man was most antiwar and most electable, Kennedy generated an intense, almost rock-star-like excitement among his followers. Kennedy won the important California primary on June 5, but was assassinated that same night in Los Angeles by a Jordanian immigrant who despised Kennedy for his support of Israel.

POLICE AND RIOTERS

With Kennedy dead, Democrats nominated Humphrey. But what happened at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago helped doom his candidacy in November. In what the authorities later dubbed a "police riot," anti-war demonstrators, many of whom mercilessly taunted the cops, were brutally beaten by officers.

"The whole world is watching," the protesters chanted, and indeed it was. But among Americans, reactions varied. To some it drove home the...