Kim Phillips-Fein is Robert Gardiner-Kenneth T. Jackson Professor of History at Columbia University. Her most recent book is Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics.
The US presidential election in 1968 was one of surprises. First, the incumbent Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson withdrew from the race in the middle of primary season; after a strong challenge from the anti-Vietnam candidate Eugene McCarthy and facing dissent in his party, he became convinced he wasn’t going to win. Then Robert F. Kennedy, one of three main Democratic...
The night before Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president, he made sure that he got a good night’s sleep, carefully instructing his aides not to wake him until 8 a.m. Jimmy Carter, meanwhile, about to step down from office, had been awake for 48 hours, supervising the negotiations over the release of American hostages in Tehran. In the early hours of the morning on Inauguration Day,...
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