Lawrence O’Donnell’s entertaining romp through the pivotal 1968 presidential race has a distinctly post-November 2016 sensibility. O’Donnell is keenly aware that we look to the past not only for wisdom but also for solace – to explain how we got into the mess we are in, and to be reassured that there have always been messes. The book lacks new research and interpretative innovations, and O’Donnell, the host of a political news and opinion show on MSNBC, sometimes slips into soundbite-style hyperbole. Yet the book succeeds in bringing to life a momentous election in all its tumult and frenzy.

Like the best storytellers, O’Donnell conjures suspense, even though we know what will happen. Senator Eugene McCarthy will take on a sitting president to run for the Democratic nomination as an anti-war candidate. Then Robert Kennedy will, too. Lyndon Johnson, shaken by how unpopular his war has become, will stun the country with a decision not to run. Martin Luther King Jr and Bobby Kennedy will be shot. Riots will erupt and cities will burn. Chicago police at the Democratic National Convention will beat and tear-gas protesters, and the world will recoil at televised images of the brutality. Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s vice president, will become the major party candidates. The unabashed segregationist George Wallace will mount a third-party challenge. At the end of it all, Nixon will win by a surprisingly small margin.

The outcome shifted American politics in fateful ways, leading to the continuation of the war in Vietnam for four more years, Watergate, and Nixon’s resignation in disgrace – but also ushering in deeper shifts, with lasting consequences. Democratic frustration with the establishment’s grip on the nominating process led to reforms that refashioned the way both parties select presidential candidates. Harnessing Southern discontent with LBJ’s civil rights reforms, Nixon turned ‘law and order’ into a racially coded dog whistle, achieving a party realignment that recast a once solidly blue South into a swathe of solid red. The death knell of the liberal ascendancy that had ushered in the Great Society was sounded.

Hubert Humphrey gives a speech during his 1968 presidential campaign (Kheel Center, Wikimedia Commons)

As a former congressional aide and later a scriptwriter for the acclaimed television drama The West Wing, O’Donnell brings journalistic flair and political savvy to his account – as well as a sense of personal investment in the events. Aged seventeen during the events of 1968, O’Donnell was drafted at the end of 1972 and spared from fighting only by the US withdrawal soon after. His narrative sparkles when he writes about the politicians who engage his sympathies: the Irish Catholic Democrats on the left who opposed the war. Robert Kennedy, in first place, and Eugene McCarthy, in second, are the heroes of the story, and the tragedy is that these two honourable men, both of whom opposed the war on principled grounds, could not rise above their jealousies.

In 1968, the conventions that selected the major party presidential candidates were rigged in favour of the establishment candidates. There were few primaries, and even those delegates chosen by voters rather than party bosses could change candidates. The task of the presidential hopeful was to become the establishment’s choice and then to seal off the backdoor routes challengers might take when votes were counted (and changed) at the conventions. Most of the action took place in smoke-filled back rooms. O’Donnell’s attention is fixed on the people in these back rooms – their deals, their backstabbing, their egos. His book is more about politicians than about politics, and actual policies, along with the fabric of American life in the 1960s, remain hazy.

The core of the book is the opening of the rift in the Democratic Party. O’Donnell offers masterful sketches of a long list of major characters, from Black Panther Bobby Seale to Yippies Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. He builds to the climactic scenes at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago with a scriptwriter’s sense of drama. By the time readers get to the final day, when Humphrey was nominated and the anti-war factions decisively defeated, we almost feel that we have spent a week at the Chicago Hilton ourselves, with its malfunctioning elevators, impassable stairs, broken phones, ventilation shafts reeking of tear gas, and views of the chaos on the streets below. The internecine fighting that O’Donnell renders with palpable regret brings to mind Will Rogers’ famous quip: ‘I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.’

The Republican side of the story, though also populated with fascinating characters, pales in comparison, and O’Donnell clearly struggles to be interested in it. Nelson Rockefeller, the immensely wealthy liberal Republican governor of New York, longed for the presidency but not for the electioneering needed to get there. Ronald Reagan, the actor-turned-television-host-turned-governor, was beginning to map a path to the presidency. Richard Nixon had seemed consigned to the political wilderness after his famously sweaty defeat in 1960 by John F. Kennedy, but he dragged himself back into the national arena in one of the all-time great political comebacks. But the only time O’Donnell musters passion about Republicans is when he excoriates Nixon for sabotaging Johnson’s peace talks in the final months of his presidency.

Richard Nixon being inaugurated as the 37th President of the United States on 20 January 1968 (photograph by Oliver F. Atkins, Wikimedia Commons)

Philip Roth would write of the president who was elected that year: ‘Of course there have been others as venal and lawless in American politics, but ... the wonder of Nixon (and contemporary America) is that a man so transparently fraudulent, if not on the edge of mental disorder, could ever have won ...’ The Nixon administration, Roth anguished, made him feel like he was ‘living in a country with a government out of control and wholly in business for itself’. Half a century later, his sentiments, like O’Donnell’s book, are all too relevant.