1968
Victory for Law and Order
Convention Contentions When the Republican Convention met in Miami in early August 1968, Richard Nixon was the clear winner. Nixon handily won the nomination on the first ballot and chose Spiro Agnew as his running mate. Robert Kennedy's assassination threw Democratics into a tailspin, and at their convention in Chicago, the Hubert Humphrey / Edwin Muskie ticket triumphed. But chaos reigned in The Windy City as 10,000 anti-war protestors faced 12,000 club-wielding Chicago police. Americans watched their TVs in horror as demonstrators were beaten bloody and unconscious by police. |
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Nixon Wins Presidency by Slim Margin
Richard Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey by an uncomfortably thin margin of 800,000 votes, just 43 percent of the popular vote. The substantial impact of George Wallace' independent campaign had shifted electoral votes in the Deep South away from the Democrats. The Nixon era began with a promise of honesty. He proclaimed, “There will be no whitewash in the White House.
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