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For the old-line party loyalists, Lyndon Johnson came out at his fightingest. Before a Democratic National Committee group in New York City, Johnson, red-faced and leaning forward as though to bite the microphone, waved his fist and slammed at Nixon as "a man who distorts the history of his time." For a change, Johnson seemed to be enjoying the battle and to believe, like Humphrey, that the party might survive this week.
"Disorganized Rabble." The race, in its climactic phase at least, could hardly fail to engage the politician's imagination. The times seemed made for Nixon, yet despite his urbane demeanor and finely honed organization, there remained until the end the possibility that tension and fatigue might combine to bring out the rabbit-punching infighter that the "new Nixon" had kept so firmly in control. For very different reasons, Humphrey's battle for survival also was a fascinating study. Chronically late, incorrigibly loquacious, hopelessly disorganized, the Vice President had seemed to everyone but himself to be a walking case of rigor mortis until the final stretch, when suddenly, somehow, the impassioned humanitarian soul of Humphrey began to flare through the servitor's mask he had worn for four years under Johnson.
The candidates themselves seemed resigned to whatever came their way Nov. 5. Nixon was determined not only to win, but to win big so that he could govern with a clear mandate. There was probably not even a notion of what he would do should he lose; law would certainly seem dull. Just as bent on victory —and apparently convinced it is in his grasp—Humphrey would no doubt be better prepared psychologically for defeat at this juncture and would work for the next four years to unite the party.
Until the end, the rivals zigzagged across the country, concentrating on the largest states. They traveled so fast and talked so heatedly that they finally almost overshadowed the Wallace campaign, giving the race the aura of a tight, old-fashioned two-man contest. Yet the oddities that have marked the campaign's course continued to show up regularly. Humphrey, long tormented by his low marks among college students but helped by the leadership of organized labor, got a far better reception from kids at Malone College in Canton, Ohio, than among the steelworkers in western Pennsylvania. Though still the underdog, he occasionally allowed his schedule to lapse back into its old inefficiency, so that he sometimes saw more billboards and countryside than voters. Nixon, who had run a precise and frequently leisurely campaign to avoid mistakes born of weariness, was looking—and sounding—a bit tired. He was making occasional small fluffs, as when he declared his intention to move into "1400 Pennsylvania Avenue." The White House address is 1600; Nixon's Washington headquarters is at 1400, in the old Willard Hotel that will soon be razed. And the candidate showed a tendency to re-create his rough "old" Nixon style.