PHOTO BY JESSE DAVIS / THE VILLAGE REPORTER
TALKING POLITICS … Lauded presidential historian and Toledo native Luke Nichter speaks to Swanton High School students on subjects from his 2023 book “The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968.”
By: Jesse Davis
THE VILLAGE REPORTER
jesse@thevillagereporter.com
One of the linchpins of the 1968 U.S. presidential election victory of Richard Nixon was actually the behind-the-scenes activity of the Rev. Billy Graham, noted presidential scholar and Toledo native Luke Nichter told Swanton High School students during a guest lecture last week.
Nichter’s lecture, based on content from his 2023 book “The Year That Broke Politics: Chaos and Collusion in the Presidential Election of 1968,” came after former Swanton Village Council member David Pilliod struck up an email conversation with him regarding his YouTube content.
During their conversations, Pilliod discovered Nichter graduated from Otsego and had a sister in Delta, and would be visiting the Swanton area soon, leading to the lecture being scheduled.
Nichter has long been interested in the history of the Nixon era, and said an eye-opening conversation with Walter Mondale several years ago led to his pursuit of the information which ended up in the book.
According to Mondale, he said, outgoing Democrat President Lyndon Baines Johnson did not want Herbert Humphrey – his vice president – to be win the election. He wanted his Republican rival, Nixon, to win.
During his research, Nichter gained access through Graham’s family to his diaries, which led him to the position he lays out in his book.
“I argue in the book that Graham was more involved in the 1968 presidential election than anyone who wasn’t on the ballot or outgoing president Lyndon Johnson,” he said.
“Graham operated as a kind of back-channel messenger between Johnson and Humphrey and Nixon and Wallace, passing messages that would never be leaked, would have never ended in the public.
Graham assured them that he wasn’t making a record of anything, but obviously, in some cases, he was making a record of things.”
According to diary entries, Nichter said, Graham had a three-part plan for the election – to unite the conservative vote, to convince Nixon to run, and to bring Johnson and Nixon together.
During his lecture, Nichter laid out what happened, from Graham’s trip to Key Biscayne, Florida – while recovering from viral pneumonia – to see Nixon at Nixon’s request during which he convinced him to run (Nixon later wrote that Graham’s input was decisive).
Also a June 1968 conversation with Johnson where the president said Nixon was “probably the best qualified man in America to be president,” to running messages between the two cementing their relationship with support from Johnson and promises to Johnson from Nixon that he wouldn’t speak ill of him or tarnish his legacy.
“Politics might not be what we’ve been told,” Nichter said as he was ending his lecture, “that the personal element and the relationships behind the scenes, because they’re rarely ever written down like Graham’s diary, can matter tremendously at certain moments in U.S. history.”
In addition to his comments on the 1968 election, Nichter pointed out similarities between how things played out then and how politics have played out through the last two election cycles.
Before a brief question-and-answer segment, he ended with an admonishment to the students to appreciate the fact that someday, maybe 50 years down the road, when information that has been held back by people active in the current political sphere comes to light, they may find what they actually believed happened was far from the truth.
“Every day you have news feeds and social media which are telling us how to think about politics and political parties, and history suggests that’s not actually how it happens behind the scenes,” Nichter said.