Pinback buttons satirizing Vietnam era presidential politics, 1968-71. National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC), under license of New York Review of Books. Feature caricatures by political cartoonist David Levine. Two reference the 1968 election, depicting Nixon and a faceless VP candidate, and Nixon and Democratic rival Hubert Humphrey as worms in a rotten apple. A third depicts Nixon riding a bomber while holding a missile sign, inverting the peace symbol.
The desire for change was strong in 1968, but this was hardly reflected in the presidential nominations of the two major parties. Ironically, both Democrats and Republicans were asked to rally behind candidates who in many ways were an endorsement of the status quo. With his simple but incisive imagery, Pulitzer-Prize-winning cartoonist David Levine captured the growing malaise of the American body politic, a sense that the system was increasingly rotten to the core.
Critics of Richard Nixon were quick to cast his surprise choice of Maryland governor Spiro Agnew in an unfavorable light. Agnew had placed Nixon's name in nomination at the convention, but otherwise was new to the national spotlight. Even Nixon later admitted to knowing almost nothing about him, and once quipped that he chose Agnew as insurance against assassination. The Levine caricature used on this button gives the Republican ticket a decidedly sinister cast.
Saddled with an increasingly unpopular war he had inherited from the previous administration, Nixon drew down American combat forces in Vietnam, but stepped up the bombing of North Vietnam, and expanded operations to neighboring Laos and Cambodia. He soon found himself vilified in the liberal press, in much the same way that LBJ had been.
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