John F. Kennedy Lyndon B. Johnson From March 10 to June 2, 1964, voters of the Democratic Party chose its nominee for president in the 1964 United States presidential election.

Wallace appeared on the ballot in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland; while he lost all three primaries, he surpassed all expectations, and his performance set the stage for his 1968 third-party run.

[1] However, Wallace had received over 100,000 letters and telegrams of support, nearly half from non-southerners, following his 1963 Stand in the Schoolhouse Door in defiance of a court order to integrate the University of Alabama, and he subsequently became "Tennyson's Mordred, exposing the dark side of Camelot".

A series of riots over civil rights in cities throughout the U.S., notably in Cambridge, Maryland, and the Black Power movement further heightened the tension on which Wallace was able to capitalize.

[9] Amid a Republican Party that struggled to find a candidate and the protests of African Americans over civil rights, the Democratic primaries received relatively scant national attention outside Wallace's entry into the race.

[11] Although Johnson faced no real opposition for the Democratic nomination, a plan had been hatched by a number of southerners to run favorite son candidates in the general election in an attempt to send the Electoral College vote to the House of Representatives under the Twelfth Amendment.

This plan never materialized, but on May 5, 1964, voters in Alabama voted by a five-to-one margin for a slate of unpledged electors controlled by Wallace, which prevented Johnson's name from appearing on the ballot in the general election.

[13] Wallace's third-party run in 1968 would have a similar premise, aiming not to win but to force one of the two major parties to make concessions, and nearly succeeded in throwing the election.

Although Johnson confided to aides on several occasions that he might be forced to accept Kennedy in order to secure a victory over a moderate Republican ticket such as Governor of New York Nelson Rockefeller and the popular Ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., Kennedy supporters attempted to force the issue by running a draft movement during the write-in New Hampshire primary.

When attempts to ease Kennedy out of the running failed, Johnson searched for a way to eliminate him with minimal party discord, and eventually announced that none of his cabinet members would be considered for the position.

"[22] Wallace's strong showing was due in part to his appeal to ethnic neighborhoods made up of immigrants from countries such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia.

Despite initial apprehension about campaigning in these communities, Wallace biographer Stephen Lesher credits him with recognizing that they were "powerfully attracted to the message that the civil rights bill might adversely affect their jobs, their property values, the makeup of their neighborhoods, and children's schools".

[24] "What Reynolds and most commentators would miss," Lesher writes, was that Dolores Herbstreith, who had never participated in politics until she became the de facto Wallace campaign chair in the state, was "neither a racist nor a crazy ... less interested in race and the Communist menace than in sowing conservative seeds that began sprouting with Barry Goldwater later that year and flowered with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

[27] Welsh considered Wallace a formidable opponent and took no chances, manipulating party machinery and arranging for a photograph of himself shaking hands with President Johnson; meanwhile, the Democratic State Committee began a $75,000 advertising campaign on his behalf.

[30] As Wallace excoriated what he called "sweeping federal encroachment" on the gradual process of desegregation, described the Civil Rights Act as a "back-door open-occupancy bill", and appeared alongside a popular Catholic bishop in support of a constitutional amendment to allow school prayer, tension continued to mount.

At a speaking engagement at the University of Notre Dame, Wallace was interrupted when nearly 500 of the 5,000-member audience began heckling him while protesters outside sang the civil rights anthem "We Shall Overcome".

Wallace refused to hold such a ceremony and Alabama's captured battle flags still remain on display in the Indiana World War Memorial.

[35] He also found a Bible Belt of moderate-sized cities running through central Indiana where, despite a negligible black population, Wallace similarly dominated the Fundamentalist Christian white vote.

[37] Once again, religious and labor leaders (in the latter case, the AFL-CIO again found itself at odds with many of its members[38]), the press, and even Milton Eisenhower, brother of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, lined up against Wallace, and a number of popular senators, including Edward M. Kennedy, Birch Bayh, Frank Church, Daniel Inouye, and Abraham Ribicoff, and popular former Baltimore Mayor Thomas D'Alesandro, Jr. who was the father of future Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and then-City Council President Thomas D'Alesandro III who went onto become Mayor as well in 1967 and campaigned himself in the Italian wards of Baltimore on Brewster's behalf.

Riots in Cambridge had erupted over the repeal of an equal access law, and as the rioters clashed with the National Guard, civil rights leader Gloria Richardson led peaceful demonstrations against the measure.

Shortly after the convention, Kennedy decided to leave Johnson's cabinet and run for the U.S. Senate in New York, where he won the general election in November.