An American Melodrama:
The Presidential Campaign of 1968

By Lewis Chester, Godfrey Hodgson and Bruce Page, Viking Press,1969, 789 pages
Reviewed by Jim Stasiowski, April 27, 2023

Three British journalists penned this account of what promised to be a most exciting American presidential election. But they suffered two misfortunes: Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey.

1968’s carnival midway of colorful characters – LBJ, Bobby, “Clean Gene,” Abbie Hoffman, George Romney, Ho Chi Minh, Teddy, Rockefeller, MLK, Reagan, Wallace – was an endless dais of incandescence. For what should have been the rousing grand finale, the authors and voters got stuck with Humpty v. Dumpty.

A hundred pages from the end, the authors wrote: As a mark of the state that intelligent men and women could be reduced to by this organized tedium, there was the controversy which broke out in South Dakota over whether or not Nixon shaved his nose.

“Clean Gene” McCarthy, a U.S. senator eliminated before the general election, is fun because he lives up to his reputation among his Senate colleagues, who, “Melodrama” says, “regarded him as aloof, indolent, arrogant, and annoying.” His strong stance against the mess in Vietnam is the closest any candidate in these pages comes to integrity, and his personality is best summarized by one of the book’s shortest retorts. When a campaign aide asks McCarthy’s daughter, Mary, “How’s the senator this morning?” she replies, “Oh! Alienated as usual.”

Early in the book, the British Trinity presumptuously diagnoses America’s ailment: “hubris.” Ever after, I was the skeptic, unable to shake the feeling that when any American did anything at all, the three made eye contact, nodded knowingly, then mouthed, “Hubris,” in amused unison.

I lived this “Melodrama.” If you didn’t, read it. If you don’t, you know what the British will think: “Your hubris is showing.”