cover image Year the Dream Died

Year the Dream Died

Jules Witcover, Witcover. Grand Central Publishing, $45 (564pp) ISBN 978-0-446-51849-9

In a deft recycling of his earlier works (among them 85 Days: The Last Campaign of Robert Kennedy), Baltimore Sun political columnist Witcover has us relive the tumultuous year in which the nation came ""unglued."" Nixon and Agnew vie for the villain's role, although neither would have been significant, contends the author, had LBJ not eroded his Kennedy legacy by escalating American involvement in Vietnam. As faith and trust in government die, so do Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the latter memorably Witcover's hero. In what is viewed as a might-have-been turning point offering the politics of hope, the crowd magic of RFK grows so uncanny that he must touch thousands of outstretched hands from an open car in motorcade marathons. But he is shot on the night of the California primary, Johnson drops from contention and Vice-President Humphrey is nominated during the bloody rioting at the Chicago convention. Witcover claims that three factors kept Nixon ahead on election day--resentment against ""everything people were seeing on television,"" the failure of Humphrey's ad agency to spend all its TV money and the success of China lobbyist Anna Chennault, Nixon's agent, in stalling LBJ's peace talks with the North Vietnamese in Paris. This backward look is enriched by the 20/20 hindsight of surviving participants, some still prominent in public life. (June)