Hello and welcome to whistlestop, a presidential podcast. I'm John Dickerson of Face the Nation.

In 1968, the country was tearing itself apart. It was the year, said Washington-wise man Clark Clifford,

quoting William Manchester, that everything went wrong. The inner cities burned. In Cleveland,

young black men took up rifles and fired at

policemen parked in their cars, passing the time, lashing out at a system that had abandoned them

except to incarcerate them. National Guard troops marched on city asphalt and broken glass

to quell riots. Men of fighting age burned their draft cards and fled to Canada. To avoid a war

America was losing in Vietnam. On campus, they pushed and shoved and sat in. The two great protest movements,

the fight for racial justice and the fight to end an immoral war shared an awful kinship. In the spring of

that year, in April, Martin Luther King was shut down, and in June,

Bobby Kennedy was assassinated.

The nation was jumpy and jumping at little noises in the night, but the unrest wasn't uniform.

Conservatives in the South and Midwest had frayed nerves, too, but they revolted at the

excesses of the protest movement, the protests against the war and the demands of inner-city African-Americans,

and they hated the cultural rot that seemed to be eating America from the inside.

The Republican Coordinating Committee met and charged the nation was, quote,

rapidly approaching a state of anarchy.

In the White House, a president who had mastered tragedy in 1963, using the legacy of his predecessor's death to do more than any

president since FDR, seemed impotent. Vietnam was a bottomless pit, and he fed it with young

men and money. Money was that was a double waste because he'd promised

that he would use it to rebuild the nation at home. The pictures on the three television sets in the

president's office flickered from smoldering city blocks to jittery emergency movement of medical

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