Promising to end the war, Nixon had won the presidency by a hairsbreadth, the second-closest popular vote margin in history. There was a widespread sense that the center would not hold, the country more bitterly divided than at any time since the Civil War. Presidential chronicler Theodore White wrote: “The United States faced a crisis equal in magnitude to Lincoln’s in 1860, or Roosevelt’s in 1932. Those crises, however, had been defined—freedom rather than slavery, employment rather than hunger. Richard M. Nixon’s crisis was far more complex; it defied definition…thus it was graver.”
