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As the first returns began trickling in, Nixon supporters crowded the balconied ballroom of the WaldorfAstoria to celebrate what they were certain would be a swift, almost surgical victory. The great salon was bedecked with red, white and blue bunting and eleven huge Nixon portraits. Lionel Hampton's band belted out dance tunes. Huge posters proclaimed: THIS TIME. The candidate himself monitored the returns in a 35th-floor suite, accompanied by several aides. Wife Pat, Daughters Tricia and Julie and Julie's fiance, David Eisenhower, watched in a separate suite down the hall. Night-Long Scare
The first returns gave Nixon an early lead—but by no means a commanding one. The third-party threat posed by Alabama's George Wallace simply failed to materialize in the Border States, and Nixon's strategy of the "periphery"—to nail down those states while retaining the ones he had won in 1960—seemed to be paying off. He quickly captured Kentucky, Tennessee and Oklahoma, amassed big leads in Indiana and Kansas. Wallace, as expected, took Alabama and Mississippi in the Deepest South, later added Louisiana, Georgia and Arkansas for a total of 45 electoral votes. And that was it for the feisty little demagogue—except, of course, for the damage he did to both candidates in the industrial states. Humphrey's early victories were expected: the District of Columbia, where two-thirds of the voters are Negroes; Connecticut; West Virginia, the state that had doomed his presidential hopes in 1960 by going for John F. Kennedy in the primary; Massachusetts; Rhode Island.
Then came the surprises. New York was expected to go for Humphrey by a narrow margin; it gave him an edge of nearly 480,000 votes. Pennsylvania was supposed to be a squeaker; the Negro and Jewish wards in Philadelphia went so overwhelmingly for Humphrey—by more than 90% in several cases—that the whole state was his. New Jersey was supposed to be safely Nixon's; it finally went narrowly to the Republican, after proving all night that nobody was going to make a Cakewalk out of the 1968 presidential race. An ebullient Humphrey left a friend's home in the fashionable Minneapolis suburb of Lake Minnetonka at about 10:30 to watch the late returns from a 14th floor suite of the Leamington Hotel. Exclaimed the Vice President: "We're scaring the hell out of them!"
They were indeed. "It is closer than we originally expected," Nixon's Communications Manager Herb Klein told newsmen. "I wouldn't advise any of you to go to bed early." Nixon, for one, stayed up, checking by telephone with operatives all over the country, occasionally wandering down the corridor, but refusing to make any public appearance until the following day. By 3:45 a.m., his survey convinced him that he was in. He phoned Agnew in Annapolis, Md., and told him not to worry −"we've got it."