At the August Republican National Convention in Miami Beach , Florida , Reagan and Rockefeller discussed joining forces in a stop-Nixon movement , but the coalition never materialized and Nixon secured the nomination on the first ballot . He selected Governor Spiro Agnew of Maryland as his running mate , a choice which Nixon believed would unite the party by appealing to both Northern moderates and Southerners disaffected with the Democrats . The choice of Agnew was poorly received by many ; a '' Washington Post '' editorial described Agnew as " the most eccentric political appointment since the Roman Emperor Caligula named his horse a consul . In his acceptance speech , Nixon articulated a message of hope , stating , " We extend the hand of friendship to all people ... And we work toward the goal of an open world , open sky , open cities , open hearts , open minds . " At the start of 1968 , most Democrats expected that President Lyndon B. Johnson would be re-nominated . Those expectations were shattered by Senator Eugene McCarthy , who centered his campaign on opposition to Johnson 's Vietnam policies . McCarthy narrowly lost to Johnson in the first Democratic Party primary on March 12 in New Hampshire , and the closeness of the results startled the party establishment and spurred Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York to enter the race . Two weeks later , Johnson told a stunned nation that he would not seek a second term . In the weeks that followed , much of the momentum that had been moving the McCarthy campaign forward shifted toward Kennedy . Vice President Hubert Humphrey declared his own candidacy , drawing support from many of Johnson 's supporters . Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan in June 1968 , leaving Humphrey and McCarthy as the two remaining major candidates in the race . Humphrey won the presidential nomination at the August Democratic National Convention in Chicago , and Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine was selected as his running mate . Outside the convention hall , thousands of young antiwar activists who had gathered to protest the Vietnam War clashed violently with police . The mayhem , which had been broadcast to the world in television , crippled the Humphrey campaign . Post-convention Labor Day surveys had Humphrey trailing Nixon by more than 20 percentage points . In addition to Nixon and Humphrey , the race was joined by former Democratic Governor George Wallace of Alabama , a vocal segregationist who ran on the American Independent Party ticket . Wallace held little hope of winning the election outright , but he hoped to deny either major party candidate a majority of the electoral vote , thus sending the election to the House of Representatives , where segregationist congressmen could extract concessions for their support . The assassinations of Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. , combined with disaffection towards the Vietnam War , the disturbances at the Democratic National Convention , and a series of city riots in various cities , made 1968 the most tumultuous year of the decade . Throughout the year , Nixon portrayed himself as a figure of stability during a period of national unrest and upheaval . He appealed to what he later called the " silent majority " of socially conservative Americans who disliked the 1960s counterculture and the anti-war demonstrators . Nixon waged a prominent television advertising campaign , meeting with supporters in front of cameras . He promised " peace with honor " in the Vietnam War but did not release specifics of how he would accomplish this goal , resulting in media intimations that he must have a " secret plan "
assassinated
Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy
Presidency of Richard Nixon