At the same time, Alabama Governor George Wallace led a third-party revolt that drew strength from southerners opposed to integration and northern blue-collar voters alienated by the scenes of radical protest and by Johnson's Great Society programs of social welfare benefits for minorities and the poor. had resulted in the Democratic Party's nomination of Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey, to head the party ticket. Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy had emerged as serious challenges to Johnson's leadership, although Robert Kennedy's assassination - just months after the assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Lyndon Johnson, who had soundly defeated Republican archconservative Barry Goldwater in 1964, had decided not to run for re-election, having been forced to withdraw by bad publicity that focused, in particular, on the quagmire in Vietnam and Johnson's poor showings in the primaries. National television had broadcast the social and political protests by young people on college campuses, including footage of the police brutally breaking up demonstrations in the park near the convention center during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The economy, once strong, strained under government efforts to conduct war and support social welfare programs simultaneously. At home, the country was divided over the civil rights movement and how to fix racial segregation in schools. In 1968, the year of his election, Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union shaped American foreign policy, and Americans were at loggerheads over U.S. When Richard Nixon became the thirty-seventh president of the United States, he assumed leadership of a country in turmoil.
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