Chapter Seven - The Madman Returns

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Madman Returns

BY 1968, THE United States was exhausted.

Vietnam had dragged on with no end in sight. Cities were erupting. College campuses were war zones. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in April. Robert Kennedy was gunned down in June. The Democratic National Convention turned into a street fight on live television. Trust was gone. Optimism was gone. The country didn’t feel like a country anymore.

And into that vacuum stepped Richard Nixon.

He announced his candidacy in February, and this time he was careful. Measured. Disciplined in a way that made the old Nixon, the bitter one from ‘60 and ‘62, look like someone else entirely.

He spoke about peace. About unity. About restoring order. But underneath all of it was the same cold calculation as before. He didn’t win by raising his voice. He won by reading the room. And right now, the room wanted calm, control, and someone who wouldn’t cry on camera.

Nixon ran against Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s vice president, who got stuck defending a war no one wanted and a party that couldn’t stop tearing itself apart. Nixon didn’t have to fight him. He just had to wait for the country to get tired of the noise.

Behind the scenes, things got dirtier.

The Johnson administration was working on a potential peace deal to end the war in Vietnam before the election. Nixon, through back channels, made sure the South Vietnamese government stayed out of the talks. He didn’t want a deal. Not yet. A peace agreement right before the election would help Humphrey, and Nixon wasn’t about to let that happen.

It worked.

The deal fell apart. The war dragged on. Nixon kept his hands clean in public and let the chaos boost his numbers.

He won the presidency in November with just under 44% of the vote. It wasn’t a landslide, but it was enough. Wallace split the South. Humphrey couldn’t catch up. Nixon walked through the wreckage of a divided country and claimed victory.

And this time, he didn’t have to play second.

He was finally at the top.

And once he got there, he started playing a very different game.

The Nixon presidency didn’t begin with ideology or sweeping vision. It began with strategy. Cold, layered, and locked down. He trusted very few people. He kept plans close. And he wanted to project one thing above all else. Control.

That’s where the Madman Theory came in.

It wasn’t a joke. It was real policy.

Nixon told his advisors that if they could make foreign leaders believe he was unstable, capable of doing something reckless, maybe even nuclear, then they’d think twice before crossing him. It was part bluff, part psychological warfare, and completely in character.

Because Nixon didn’t just want power. He wanted unpredictability on his side.

If fear had gotten him into the game, madness might be what helped him win it.