The Year that Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968By Luke A.Nichter, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023. 396 pp. $24.00. ISBN: 978‐0300280135.

Like numerous historians before him, Luke A. Nichter views 1968 as a watershed moment in American history. The opening pages of The Year that Broke Politics tick off a list of transformative events—the Tet Offensive, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson's withdrawal from the presidential race, to name just a few—that have drawn the attention of scholars, journalists, and memoirists for decades. Yet Nichter contends we still have much to learn about 1968. “It has taken more than half a century to see 1968 with the distance needed for a more dispassionate assessment,” he writes (xi). Drawing on new sources and questioning old verities, Nichter promises to tell the story of the year's presidential contest in myth-puncturing depth and detail. If the book does not quite live up to the bold claim embedded in its title, it unquestionably delivers a series of provocative insights meriting the attention of scholars and other connoisseurs of political history. Perhaps most arresting is Nichter's contention that Lyndon Johnson, after dropping out of the race on March 31, thereafter supported the Republican, Richard Nixon, over the Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Earlier scholarship sometimes suggested as much, often by observing how little LBJ did to support Humphrey's campaign. But Nichter, exploiting newly accessible papers of Rev. Billy Graham, goes further in demonstrating mutual respect between Johnson and Nixon and highlighting their tacit agreement to avoid speaking ill of one another during the 1968 race. Especially important to this “collusion” was Johnson's belief—accurate, in Nichter's account—that he could count on Nixon, rather than the dovish Humphrey, to stick with his plan for ending the Vietnam War on American terms. Also striking is Nichter's refutation of scholarship accusing Nixon of conspiring with the South Vietnamese government to scuttle a peace agreement that might have bolstered Humphrey's chances if it had been signed in the days leading up to the election. With meticulous care, Nichter reassesses the sketchy evidence on which historians have built a case against Nixon for illegally tampering with the Johnson administration's diplomacy. Far from engaging in a treasonous plot, Nichter contends, Nixon worked behind the scenes to ensure that US negotiators stuck with President Johnson's relatively draconian conditions for a peace agreement. Nixon was thus bolstering the sitting administration rather than subverting it. Nichter similarly challenges conventional wisdom about the “Southern Strategy,” the scheme allegedly crafted by Nixon and his aides to lure the South from the Democrats through appeals to racial bigotry. In fact, writes Nichter, Nixon was a genuine supporter of civil rights who hewed to the center of the political spectrum in hopes of steering a middle course between Humphrey on the left and third-party candidate George Wallace on the right. If Nixon made gains in the South, it was due, in Nichter's view, not to race-baiting but to the Democrats' declining appeal in the region. Nowhere is that dwindling appeal more evident than in Nichter's analysis of Wallace, who won 46 electoral votes in five Southern states while also performing well among working-class voters in other parts of the country. Nichter's revisionist claims will not convince everyone, but he deserves enormous credit for rooting his contentions in deep research and lucid prose. Taken together, his arguments amount to a sweeping reconsideration that future scholars of 1968—not to mention biographers of Johnson, Nixon, Humphrey, and Wallace—will be unable to ignore. Nichter's contentions do not, though, sustain the argument that 1968 somehow “broke American politics.” Curiously, Nichter never explains what he means by this assertion, which implies not a mere change in the nation's political direction but the breakdown of its political system. In fact, the book describes an election in which the political system arguably worked well, delivering a result that reasonably reflected shifts in the nation's political climate. To be sure, as Nichter shows, the result amounted to a sweeping rejection of the ambitious liberalism that had propelled Lyndon Johnson to a landslide victory in 1964 and underpinned the Great Society laws that followed. Although Nixon beat Humphrey by a narrow margin, Nichter rightly emphasizes the impressive 57% of the vote won by Nixon and Wallace combined and the fact that Humphrey garnered 12 million fewer votes than LBJ had won just 4 years earlier. Yet underlying this decisive result lay not a systemic crackup but a variety of divisive issues—the grueling war in Vietnam, pervasive disorder in US cities, and anxieties about big government, among others—that led large numbers of Americans to rethink their support for the Democratic Party. The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the Perry-Castaneda Library at https://www.lib.utexas.edu/visit-us/locations/pcl.