The electoral vote was not close.
Nixon 301
Humpfrey 191
Wallace 46
Point taken and that may well be what Col. North meant. I was very involved as a volunteer in that election, even though I was too young to vote myself, and I recall it as a close run thing (Electoral College numbers aside). I would still argue that Johnson’s ploy nearly succeeded. A less than one percent change in the popular vote could have reverberated into a change in the EC results and a Humphrey presidency. Until the weekend before the election Nixon looked like a shoe in and then things tightened up in all the polls. Of course, at that time “all the polls” was Mr. Gallup.