Ezra's Bookshelf

An American Melodrama

by Lewis Chester, Godfrey Hodgson, Bruce Page · 814 pages · ~15 hrs

Politics & GovernmentHistory

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Three British journalists provide an outsider's account of the tumultuous 1968 American presidential campaign, bringing perspectives unavailable to domestic reporters. Chester, Hodgson, and Page covered the entire campaign from the New Hampshire primary through Richard Nixon's victory, observing the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the chaos of the Chicago convention, the implosion of Hubert Humphrey's campaign, and George Wallace's third-party insurgency. Their status as foreign correspondents gave them access to all sides while freeing them from the access relationships that constrained American journalists. The book is exhaustive, running to nearly 800 pages, but the length reflects the complexity of a year in which everything seemed to be happening at once: Vietnam, urban rebellions, generational conflict, political realignment. The authors were particularly interested in how American politics actually worked beneath the rhetoric, and they bring an anthropologist's eye to rituals that American observers took for granted. Their conclusion that American democracy was experiencing a fundamental crisis proved prophetic, as the forces they identified continued to reshape politics for decades. For anyone seeking to understand the political ruptures of the 1960s from a perspective neither nostalgic nor dismissive, this work provides detailed reconstruction of a pivotal campaign.

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