From the host of MSNBC's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, an
important and enthralling new account of the presidential election
that changed everything, the race that created American politics as
we know it today 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 facade 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!
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