ABSTRACT
Thirty years ago, covering the tumultuous events of 1968 day by day as a political reporter left little time for reflection on the long-term meaning of it all. Those events came so unexpectedly one upon another that recording them and trying to make sense of their immediate impact was task enough. First there was the Tet offensive that awakened America to the unwinnability of the Vietnam War. Then came Eugene McCarthy's unmasking of President Lyndon Johnson's vulnerability in the New Hampshire primary, followed by Robert Kennedy's joining the challenge and Johnson's shocking withdrawal. Kevin Phillips, the author and political analyst who himself worked in the Nixon campaign that year, has suggested that 1968 was 'really a kind of political and cultural Civil War'. In 1968 as well, the important story that eluded much of the national press corps was the election-eve maneuvering by Johnson and Nixon regarding peace talks between the North and South Vietnamese, aimed at ending the war.
