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Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics
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Overview
The 1968 U.S. Presidential election was the young Lawrence O’Donnell’s political awakening, and in the decades since it has remained one of his abiding fascinations. For years he has deployed one of America’s shrewdest political minds to understanding its dynamics, not just because it is fascinating in itself, but because in it is contained the essence of what makes America different, and how we got to where we are now. Playing With Fire represents O’Donnell’s master class in American electioneering, embedded in the epic human drama of a system, and a country, coming apart at the seams in real time.
Nothing went according to the script. LBJ was confident he'd dispatch with Nixon, the GOP frontrunner; Johnson's greatest fear and real nemesis was RFK. But Kennedy and his team, despite their loathing of the president, weren't prepared to challenge their own party’s incumbent. Then, out of nowhere, Eugene McCarthy shocked everyone with his disloyalty and threw his hat in the ring to run against the president and the Vietnam War. A revolution seemed to be taking place, and LBJ, humiliated and bitter, began to look mortal. Then RFK leapt in, LBJ dropped out, and all hell broke loose. Two assassinations and a week of bloody riots in Chicago around the Democratic Convention later, and the old Democratic Party was a smoldering ruin, and, in the last triumph of old machine politics, Hubert Humphrey stood alone in the wreckage.
Suddenly Nixon was the frontrunner, having masterfully maintained a smooth façade behind which he feverishly held his party’s right and left wings in the fold, through a succession of ruthless maneuvers to see off George Romney, Nelson Rockefeller, Ronald Reagan, and the great outside threat to his new Southern Strategy, the arch-segregationist George Wallace. But then, amazingly, Humphrey began to close, and so, in late October, Nixon pulled off one of the greatest dirty tricks in American political history, an act that may well meet the statutory definition of treason. The tone was set for Watergate and all else that was to follow, all the way through to today.
Playing With Fire is the perfect holiday gift!
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780399563140 |
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Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
Publication date: | 11/07/2017 |
Pages: | 496 |
Sales rank: | 117,335 |
Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.70(d) |
About the Author

Table of Contents
Seizing the Moment 1
1 Declaring War 13
2 "Why Isn't He a Priest?" 23
3 Sleepy Hollow 31
4 "A Hard and Harsh Moral Judgment" 42
5 Dump Johnson 49
6 The General 55
7 "We Will Never Be Young Again" 68
8 Old Politics 79
9 "A Decent Interval" 91
10 Peace with Honor 103
11 Peter the Hermit 110
12 "Clean for Gene" 120
13 The New Nixon 133
14 "Nixon's the One" 154
15 "Abigail Said No" 166
16 The Poor People's Campaign 185
17 "Something Bad Is Going to Come of This" 196
18 "Stand Up and Be Counted" 210
19 "It's Not Important What Happens to Me" 218
20 "I've Seen the Promised Land" 231
21 The Happy Warrior 241
22 Don't Lose 250
23 "Everything's Going to Be Okay" 262
24 Stop Nixon 273
25 "Great Television" 285
26 The Last Liberal Standing 305
27 The Peace Plank 316
28 "The Whole World's Watching" 345
29 "The Government of the People in Exile" 360
30 The Perfect Crime 376
Epilogue 410
Acknowledgments 429
Notes 431
Bibliography 461
Index 471