CHAPTER 15

The Great Society: In Descent

IN AUGUST 1965, I lunched at Washington’s historic Occidental Restaurant with Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He was resigning as an assistant secretary of Labor to seek the Democratic nomination for city council president of New York (his first attempt at elective office and the only election he ever lost). Moynihan brought a going-away present: a seventy-eight page Labor Department report. This was the soon-to-be famous—or infamous—“Moynihan Report” (as I labeled it for the first time). It would place unfairly a racist tag on the Evans & Novak column and permanently alienate Pat Moynihan from the Democratic Party’s liberal wing that had been his home.

Thanks to me, the column had taken a turn increasingly hostile to the new, more radical black leadership. An early example was the December 2, 1964, column in which I viewed with alarm young leaders of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) who were “moving faster than most politicians realize, and in a frightening direction.” I reported that Robert Moses, a future legend of the civil rights movement, and John Lewis, a future congressman from Georgia, had visited Guinea where they conferred at length with President Sekou Toure, a leftist tyrant and Soviet fellow traveler. I noted, too, that Moses “was a speaker last week in New York at the annual dinner of the National Guardian, a publication widely regarded as the most flamboyant exponent of the Chinese Communist line in this country.”

Many columns of this nature written by me brought accusations of “Red-baiting” (with the novelist Joseph Heller attacking us in a letter to the New York Herald-Tribune). Conservatives expressed delight (with National Review reporting that “even the liberals Evans and Novak” were alert to what was happening).

The column resulting from lunch with Moynihan addressed a problem deeper than leftist penetration. Passing one civil rights bill after another, I wrote, would not resolve America’s race question. Northern racial riots of the long, hot summer of 1964 led Moynihan to ask questions that no government official ever had posed. I reported them in our column of August 17, 1965:

He [Moynihan] wondered, for instance, why in a time of decreasing unemployment, the plight of the urban Negro was getting worse—not better. His answer: a 78-page report (based largely on unexciting Census Bureau statistics) revealing the breakdown of the Negro family. He showed that broken homes, illegitimacy, and female-oriented homes were central to big-city Negro problems.

Moynihan’s boss, Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz (a Kennedy holdover) felt this was too much truth to handle and would feed racist prejudices. Wirtz thwarted Moynihan’s desire to release the report, but it leaked to several media outlets. Although my column was far from the first disclosure of Moynihan’s report, it intensified the debate because I did not soften racial implications—especially when I repeated what Moynihan had been indiscreet enough to tell me at the Occidental.

Moynihan believes the public erroneously compares the Negro minority to the Jewish minority. When discriminatory bars were lowered, Jews were ready to move. But the implicit message of the Moynihan Report is that ending discrimination is not nearly enough for the Negro. But what is enough?

The phrase “preferential treatment” implies a solution far afield from the American dream. The white majority would never accept it….

Yet, the Moynihan Report inevitably leads to posing the question.

I had opened the door to a national debate over affirmative action and racial quotas that would still be raging forty years later. Civil rights legislation did not solve the problem of race as Lyndon Johnson, the quintessential legislator, believed it would.

         

THE CONTEMPT Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert F. Kennedy had for each other focused on Vietnam. Kennedy, elected to the U.S. Senate from New York in 1964, gradually drew away from the intervention his brother had instituted, as Democrats divided between these two strong-willed men.

On Saturday, February 19, 1966, Bobby Kennedy burned his bridges. “Viet Coalition Rule Urged by Kennedy,” was the headline on page one of Sunday’s Washington Post. “Negotiated Settlement Must Include Reds as Concession, He Says.” Senator Kennedy told a Washington news conference that “military victory” in Vietnam “was at best uncertain, and at worst unattainable.” He proposed a “middle way” between a “widening war” that might bring in China and the Soviet Union and unilateral U.S. withdrawal: a “compromise government” with cabinet posts for the Communist National Liberation Front (NLF).

It is difficult to replicate the shock in Washington that winter weekend. I was on the telephone Sunday and Monday for political reaction. While no expert on Vietnam, I considered myself a good political reporter and this was a political story. That’s what I told Rowly in the office Monday morning.

I had written exactly one column dealing with Vietnam at that point, while Evans had written dozens. Still, I insisted this was a political column that I should write. Rowly seemed in physical pain late that afternoon when he read my draft. He questioned whether this wasn’t “a little too rough on Bobby.” I asked for his specific disagreements. There were no major ones, he said, and then revealed his problem.

He had lunched with Kennedy at the Sans Souci restaurant near our office on Saturday before the senator’s news conference. Bobby had shown him his prepared statement. Rowly told me he had made a few suggestions, but said to Kennedy that it was okay. (“The thrust of it, as I read it very fast, seemed okay,” Evans said in a Kennedy Library oral history interview on July 30, 1970.)

“Rowly,” I said, “it was a coalition government proposal. We’ve been against it all along. How could you say it was okay?” “You don’t understand,” he replied. “Bobby was waiting for me to finish, waiting for my verdict. It was a terrible situation.” In the oral history interview, Rowly said: “I just kind of glanced through it very quickly…. He knew how I felt on Vietnam. I was on the hawkish side.” While Kennedy had become a dove, Rowly had “this ambivalence in my own mind as to how much of it [Kennedy’s opposition] was pure, raw politics—anti-Johnson politics.”

What I did not know until I read the oral history forty years later in researching this book was that Kennedy called Evans from New York that Monday morning. “I told him we were writing a column,” Evans said in the 1970 interview, adding Kennedy wanted “to make sure that I understood certain nuances. I said, ‘I understand that.’” So Rowly had been personally briefed by Bobby about how to write the column after he had been given an advance look at and an opportunity to critique his statement.

Nevertheless, Rowly agreed to my column after a few edits toning down criticism of Kennedy. (In the oral history interview, Evans said: “It was a difficult column for me to write because of my relationship with Bobby. It was, in terms of an accurate political [assessment], 100 percent…It was a tough column, it was a rough column.”)

The column (to run Wednesday, February 23) began by saying that Kennedy “is now aligned on the extreme edge of the Senate peace bloc,” adding:

Kennedy and his friends failed to realize that his pro-coalition stand was more extreme than the public position of peace Senators….

[B]itter words are being said by old friends in Washington. He is privately accused of seeking headlines, undermining U.S. foreign policy, and dividing his party….

[I]t points up a political fact about Kennedy: his need to play the role of critic, when it serves no apparent political purpose.

Tuesday was George Washington’s birthday, and I remember Rowly coming into the office without a tie, wearing a sweater and a very long face. I never had seen this vivacious, upbeat man so morose. He told me he regretted the column that would run the next day, which he was sure would prove enormously embarrassing to him when Bobby read it.

We had to change our procedure, he said. Henceforth, he went on, we must have the option of single bylines when we disagreed with each other. I told him that was not possible after three years of double-byline columns. It would, I said, lead to rival Evans & Novak columns dueling on consecutive days over Kennedy and Vietnam. “Then, perhaps,” I remember Rowly saying, “this is the end of the column.”

How could it be that Rowly had so readily acquiesced to my column on Monday but the next day, after it had been transmitted to newspaper clients and already was in type in some papers, was ready to dissolve our partnership? I don’t know, because we never discussed it in the years that followed. I speculated silently that perhaps on Monday night Rowly talked about it with his wife, Katherine Evans, an intimate friend of Bobby’s wife, Ethel, and even closer to the Kennedys than Rowly was.

After suggesting the imminent end of our partnership, Rowly admitted to me that his friendship with Bobby Kennedy was incompatible with being an independent journalist. “I never again will have that kind of relationship with a politician,” he said. “Never again.” Four years later, he told the oral history interviewer: “Without question, the closest and probably the last close friend that I’ll ever have in the area of politics is Bobby. It was much more difficult with him than anybody else. I mean George McGovern, Fritz Mondale, or Chuck Percy are acquaintances. They’re not friends.”

After the column was published Wednesday morning, Rowly talked with Bobby on the phone. He never told me about that conversation, which I learned from the oral history. “Listen,” Evans said he told Kennedy, “you know I really hated to write that column, Bobby, and I wouldn’t blame you for being really, really furious, and I understand all that.” According to Rowly, Bobby replied: “Don’t give it another thought. I know what you’re going to have to do. This doesn’t make any difference. Don’t worry about it.”

I learned forty years later from the oral history that Rowly went out to Hickory Hill for breakfast on Thursday with the senator. Rowly quoted himself as telling Kennedy: “Well, you know Bobby, when two people are writing a column, sometimes it doesn’t come out to fit wholly the views of either one of them. Compromises, you know. Having a partner isn’t the easiest thing in the world.” While driving back to Washington from McLean after breakfast, Rowly told the Kennedy Library interviewer, “Bobby said: ‘I’ve spent my life with a partner’—meaning Jack. He understood. He was very understanding about that.” After that breakfast with Bobby, Rowly never again brought up single-bylines, much less termination of our partnership.

Oddly, for the twenty-seven subsequent years of that partnership, we never mentioned this incident that almost killed it. In the remaining two years of his life, Robert F. Kennedy grew ever more dovish on Vietnam while Evans & Novak remained hawkish, though increasingly critical of the way Lyndon Johnson conducted the war. Bobby made no effort to influence our course, apparently resolved not to risk his friendship with Rowly.

Read forty years later, the column that caused us so much anguish seems less “rough” than Rowly claimed. The criticism could have been harsher if we had addressed the substance of Kennedy’s position and not just the politics. Despite his reputation as a tough pragmatist, Bobby shared the liberal illusions of the sixties. He did not realize that the Communists were determined to achieve a unified Communist Vietnam and the NLF was an appendage of Hanoi. His fear of Chinese or Soviet intervention had no basis in reality.

         

ON SUNDAY, APRIL 24, 1966, the New York Herald-Tribune, the voice of the Republican establishment on the East Coast, closed its doors forever. Its last editor, Jim Bellows, had turned the Trib into one of America’s most readable newspapers but had not made it solvent. The paper’s proprietor, John Hay Whitney, would not indefinitely pour his fortune into this money-loser unless a break-even point was visible, and it never was.

Field Enterprises, which owned both the Chicago Sun-Times and Publishers Newspaper Syndicate (which distributed our column), decreed that the Sun-Times would be our home newspaper.

Undetermined was our New York City newspaper outlet. The New York Journal-American (the city’s last Hearst paper) and the Scripps-Howard New York World-Telegram and Sun ended their independent lives and combined with the Herald-Tribune to form the new World Journal Tribune. The new hybrid, though managed by Hearst, would be honeycombed with Herald-Tribune editors and writers (including most of its columnists). Rowly and I saw it as the Herald-Trib reincarnated, and assumed the new paper would run our column.

However, the syndicate informed us that Dorothy Schiff, proprietor of the New York Post, wanted Evans & Novak and would pay a lot more for us than would the WJT. The syndicate advised us to take the money. Rowly was noncommittal, but I protested vociferously. The Post was a left-wing tabloid whose views I abhorred. Its columnists ran from liberal to far left, and I could not imagine what Dolly Schiff—a grande dame of the New York Left—wanted with a middle-of-the-road reporting column straying rightward.

The syndicate’s salesmen had other products they wanted to sell the Post and did not want to offend Mrs. Schiff. Sales manager Bob Cowles reluctantly agreed to refuse to sell her Evans & Novak only if she was told that it was the authors of the column—not Publishers Newspaper Syndicate—who preferred to be in the WJT. We agreed, and were kept out of the Post’s leftist clutches.

The WJT was a wretched concoction that died a deserved death a year and a half after its birth. Its demise reduced New York City’s daily newspapers to three—the Times, the Daily News, and the Post. Of these, only the Post was a potential purchaser of our column. The left-wing tabloid that was so abhorrent to me eighteen months earlier was now our necessary window in New York.

I thought we were cooked. But Mrs. Schiff told Cowles she would buy the column—with one caveat. Evans or Novak would have to call personally and tell her they really wanted to be published in the New York Post. Since I had been so adamant in resisting, Rowly said I would have to shoulder this onerous duty.

I called Mrs. Schiff, fearing the worst. But, belying her ferocious reputation, she graciously did not bring up my previous rudeness. That began a treasured relationship (now approaching four decades) with the Post through multiple changes in ownership and ideology at the paper. Dolly Schiff, an ardent supporter of Israel, staved off demands to drop the column from Jewish subscribers and advertisers who objected to our columns on the Middle East, when other newspapers succumbed to such pressure.

After the death of the Herald-Tribune, and its news service, some fifty newspapers were quickly signed up by Publishers Newspaper Syndicate as their salesmen launched a lightning offensive for Evans & Novak clients. They included thirty-three of the thirty-five subscribers to the Herald-Tribune News Service, keeping the column in every large American city. For the first time, we were a genuine syndicated column. We shared half of all royalties, giving each of us $22,000 a year ($143,000 in 2007 dollars)—more money than I ever imagined making when I became a newspaperman.

Executives of the Chicago Sun-Times, our new home newspaper, gave me the impression they felt that Field Enterprises had forced them into a morganatic marriage. The Sun-Times had hitherto published us sporadically, and for several years even after 1966 did not run every column. But as in other arranged marriages, Evans & Novak and the Sun-Times learned to love each other. Rowly and I developed a more intimate relationship with the Chicago newspaper over forty years than we had in our three years with the Herald-Tribune, writing special pieces for the Sun-Times (a practice I continue today).

The Washington Post, our column’s most important outlet, remained just a client—subject to cancellation. Its managing editor in 1966, Ben Bradlee, wanted to take us aboard and syndicate us, and so did we. But Field convinced us we had an unbreakable contract. For some time, Evans & Novak has been the Post’s only regularly published column not produced by its writers, and that has been an immeasurable blessing for me.

         

I HAVE ALREADY mentioned luncheon at Sans Souci, where Rowly and I conducted business for more than a decade. Located a five-minute walk from the White House, it seated no more than forty people for lunch (making it economically vulnerable even in its heyday). It was not all that expensive. My diary for 1966, which shows me eating at “San Sook” (as Art Buchwald called it) about every other day when I was in Washington, reflects an average bill of ten dollars for two diners (about sixty-two dollars in 2007 dollars). That included a premeal drink apiece, usually a Scotch or bourbon highball or a gin martini.

Alcohol was then a way of life in Washington. A Nixon subcabinet officer as my guest at Sans Souci on one occasion downed three double bourbons on the rocks before lunch and sipped a single bourbon during the meal, telling me nothing unintended in the process. I regarded as a wimp the rare news source who would order campari and soda or kir. I cannot remember anybody ordering iced tea (today’s preluncheon beverage of choice for power lunchers, including me).

Sans Souci’s menu was so-so, and there were several better French restaurants in Washington, but nobody went there for the food. It was for seeing and being seen. San Souci operated commercially for evening meals, with a stranger getting a booking if there was a vacancy. But for lunch, San Sook was a virtual club. If you were a regular (as Rowly and I were), you could always be seated. If you weren’t, you never got a table even if you called months in advance.

Art Buchwald lunched there every day he was in Washington, often with the other two members of his nameless “club”—Ben Bradlee and Edward Bennett Williams—with a metal plaque marking his banquette. Sometimes, I would be startled to see First Lady Pat Nixon coming in with a couple of lady friends for a late lunch.

So pleasant an institution was bound to go under, as life in the capital was hardened by Vietnam and Watergate. San Souci declared bankruptcy in 1981 and closed. Its space now is occupied by a McDonald’s. When I occasionally enter to buy a Big Mac, I always note how small it is, even for fast food.

         

IN JANUARY 1965, Evans and I signed with McGraw-Hill to write Lyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise of Power, a full-scale biography of the new president. Our editor was Robert A. Gutwillig, who would play a major role in my life over the next three decades. He was a published novelist, editor, journalist, political operative, businessman, salesman—and lover (as certified by three marriages and many girlfriends).

I still am unsure how we pulled off this book, while taking off no time from writing a six-day-a-week reporting column. In addition to drawing on our personal experiences covering LBJ, we conducted over two hundred interviews. Rowly and I divided the chapters, setting strict deadlines for submitting chapters to each other for editing. All-nighters were common for me, even though they were followed by a full day’s work on the column.

Rowly and I took to Gutwillig as a shrewd editor and delightful companion. Consequently, Rowly and I were devastated to learn early in 1965 that he was leaving McGraw-Hill for a better job at New American Library. Our contract was with the company and not the editor, but we were having none of it. We informed McGraw-Hill that we would not write the book for them and wanted to give back our advance to be free to sign with NAL so that Gutwillig could edit the book. We pulled off this shift of publishers, and Gutwillig became close to a third collaborator who mediated noisy late-night disputes between Rowly and me.

         

A COUPLE OF weeks before the 1966 election, I received a telephone call from a man who identified himself as Ed Turner, news director of WTTG, Channel 5 in Washington. He was to become our principal television guru for a quarter of a century.

Turner asked us to be commentators on Channel 5 for the 1966 midterm elections. Relying on old movies and syndicated programming, WTTG previously had gotten by with no news staff. Turner, a professional broadcast journalist, was hired by Metromedia to change all that. He put together an excellent staff for a full hour of news at ten p.m., one hour ahead of other Washington stations. For the national midterm elections, while the networks were preempting their regular schedules Turner decided to show the movie classic Casablanca. He would break into the movie for ten minutes every hour with election returns, relying on the Associated Press wire plus comments from Evans and Novak.

Ed Turner was a rare conservative Republican among broadcast news executives, and he thought Evans and Novak in 1966 were the least liberal political columnists he could find.

Evans had been appearing for years on network Sunday interview shows, but I did not get my first chance until late 1963 after our column started when I questioned guests on CBS’s Face the Nation and then the next year on NBC’s Meet the Press. Lawrence A. Spivak, the originator, producer, and absolute boss of Meet the Press, was the toughest interrogator in television, and I tried to copy him.

I became one of Spivak’s favorite guest questioners, and once filled in for him—when he was stranded in New York by a blizzard on Saturday, January 29, 1966. The Meet the Press guest was Julian Bond, a twenty-six-year-old firebrand civil rights leader from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He had just been denied a seat in the all-white, segregationist Georgia House of Representatives that he had won in a landslide the previous November. I cited SNCC’s statement that the U.S. government “squashes liberation movements”:

Novak: Do you mean this is not the Viet Cong we are fighting in Vietnam? Are we fighting someone else besides the Viet Cong?

Bond: There are a lot of differences of opinion about who is fighting.

Novak: You don’t think it is a Communist-led operation, the Viet Cong?

Bond: I don’t know if it is.

After the program, Bond asked me for a ride back to Capitol Hill, where the SNCC headquarters was located not far from my house. Bond and his two associates squeezed into Geraldine’s new Mustang, and we made slow progress through snow-covered streets until, going up Constitution Avenue just beyond the Capitol, the car got stuck. At that point, the three black men left the car to push their white tormentor out of the snow and up the hill. It was a bizarre tableau, but there was nobody to witness it.

Even when sitting in Larry Spivak’s seat on that one occasion, I was still a guest. The 1966 election night bit on Channel 5 in Washington marked my debut as a professional television performer. While the movie played, Rowly and I telephoned sources around the country for our hourly commentaries. Thanks to Casablanca, we beat the network stations in the ratings, and Rowly and I became regulars on Channel 5.

         

ON TV THAT night we reported a disaster for Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Party—a startling change from the Democrat-LBJ landslide two years earlier that had led to instant analysis that the Republican Party was dead. Everybody—Evans and Novak included—was taken aback by Republicans gaining a net of forty-seven seats in the House of Representatives, though Democrats still maintained big margins in both houses of Congress. As Rowly and I worked the phones at Channel 5, we reported Democrats blaming LBJ for losses. I wrote it more carefully in the Evans & Novak column of Thursday, November 10, 1966 (“Johnson in Trouble”).

In the early morning hours yesterday after their Election Day debacle, Democratic leaders of Michigan were whispering that Lyndon Johnson must be removed from the top of the ticket in 1968 to avert another disaster two years hence….

The widely shared belief among key Democrats across the country is that if President Johnson had been on the ballot Tuesday, he would have been beaten and beaten badly.

         

IMMEDIATELY AFTER President Johnson’s humiliation in the 1966 midterm elections, Lyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise of Power by Rowland Evans and Robert Novak was published. It began with serialization in four issues of the Saturday Evening Post and newspaper syndication in fifteen parts (with the Washington Post trumpeting its publication of “this widely acclaimed political biography” in full-page advertisements). Deals were made for publication in Britain and West Germany and for paperback publication in the United States.

The hardcover book was the main selection of the Literary Guild. Trade publications heralded a major printing by New American Library. I appeared on NBC’s Today program. Evans and I were guests at book and author luncheons (I was thrilled to be seated next to John Dos Passos at one event, but could not bring myself to tell him that he was an idol of mine when I was studying modern American literature in college).

William Henry Chamberlin in the Wall Street Journal called it “an uncommonly interesting book, a full, objective survey of Johnson’s political life.” Newsweek’s Kenneth Crawford, for the Washington Post’s daily review, wrote: “The facts are permitted to speak for themselves through scores of meticulously researched episodes.” The Sunday New York Times review by John Pomfret praised “a masterly job of analytical and retrospective reporting.” The Times daily reviewer Eliot Fremont-Smith, apparently not expecting much, called the book a “fascinating, detailed and surprisingly perceptive political biography.” Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in the cover review for the Washington Post’s Sunday book section, wrote:

[Evans and Novak] have at last produced the first serious political biography of the 36th American President. But they have done a good deal more than fill a gap in the literature; they have written a book impressive in its own right for its research, its objectivity, its astute understanding of American politics, and its dramatic and often poignant evocation of an incredibly complicated man caught in the turbulent rush of national and world affairs.

By the time The Exercise of Power was published, the Evans & Novak column—originally thought by Nixon and other Republicans to be a mouthpiece for the Kennedy Democrats—was regarded as Republican and moderately conservative. Consequently, many reviewers expressed surprise at our objectivity, fairness, and even sympathy in dealing with LBJ.

(The most authoritative review in my eyes was not written until 2002 and consisted of one sentence: “For Robert Novak, whose own book on Lyndon Johnson has enriched mine in more ways than I can ever count. With thanks, Robert A. Caro.” He wrote that in a copy he gave me of The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate, the brilliant third volume of his LBJ biography. The Exercise was cited by Caro fifty-six times in footnotes with forty-one mentions in the index, high praise for a thirty-six-year-old book that long had been out of print coming from the esteemed biographer who had made Lyndon Johnson much of his life’s work.)

The United States Information Agency (USIA) let it be known that it would not purchase any copies of The Exercise for U.S. libraries around the world. (The USIA previously had purchased an extraordinary 214,000 copies of The Lyndon Johnson Story, a panegyric by longtime LBJ aide Booth Mooney.) Reviewing our book in the New Republic, Larry L. King noted the USIA’s censorship and commented: “This is a shame. No more definitive biography of Lyndon B. Johnson exists.”

The Exercise never made the best-seller list, but did sell more than 75,000 hardcover copies, better than any Johnson book did for a generation. A paperback edition, ordered by many college professors as the best available description for political science classes of how the U.S. Senate works, provided us modest royalties for twenty years. But Evans and I never thought of this book as a money machine. We did come to regard it as the best we could do in our chosen trade.

         

IN 1967, THE American Society of Newspaper Editors was meeting in Washington, and Publishers Syndicate executives suggested that Rowly and I entertain editors who purchased our column when it had gone on the open market following the New York Herald-Tribune’s demise a year earlier. Rowly arranged a dinner party at his home.

It was the only time we ever did anything like that—because of the way things turned out. We invited the editors of ten of our most important newspapers and three prominent officials including Robert S. McNamara, the secretary of defense, who managed the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War. Editors from the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, and other major papers were there, but the most imposing figure on our guest list was John S. Knight, publisher and editor in chief of his large and growing newspaper chain (including the Miami Herald and Detroit Free Press).

Jack Knight, seventy-two years old, arrived a little late—but quickly stepped up his drinking and was into his cups by the time of the men’s postdinner conversation over brandy and cigars.

Knight blamed President Johnson for persecuting American business while leading the nation into a disastrous war. Everybody else present wanted to avoid a debate with a tipsy press lord—everybody but Bob McNamara. He declared he was not going to sit there and permit somebody to defame a president defending the free world against the Communist tide. “I really am exasperated with businessmen like you,” McNamara told Knight, “not appreciating that President Johnson gave you a tax cut you never got from the Republicans, and I say that as a Republican.” Knight, not accustomed to being contradicted in public by a man thirty years his junior, exploded with a shouting denunciation of the Democratic war policy. The defense secretary responded with a didactic exposition of how well he was running the war. Only with difficulty did Rowly break up the debate.

If an establishment figure like Jack Knight was denouncing the Vietnam War with passion, LBJ was paying the price for failing to build public support. For the first time, I appreciated that Bob McNamara was humorless and authoritarian, unwilling to see that anyone had a contrary opinion worth entertaining. I saw hard going ahead for the Great Society.

         

IN 1967, Katherine Graham, president of the Washington Post Company, invited Rowly and me to lunch at the newspaper. Rowly knew Mrs. Graham well from the Georgetown social circuit, but this was the first time he had ever received an invitation of this kind (and it certainly was new to me).

I awaited the luncheon with apprehension. Kay Graham, age fifty in 1967, had become one of the most powerful women in journalism. I admired her, but never felt comfortable in her presence. She was a shy woman, and her shyness seemed to deepen when she was around me—causing me to be more uncomfortable.

J. Russell Wiggins, the Post’s editor and vice president, made it four for lunch in the newspaper’s private dining room. He shaped an editorial policy making the Post the nation’s strongest liberal newspaper voice supporting LBJ’s prosecution of the Vietnam War. Wiggins and Mrs. Graham were staunch Johnson backers—especially Wiggins. (In 1968, Wiggins would retire from the paper at age sixty-five and be named by Johnson as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations).

The purpose of the luncheon emerged. President Johnson had urged Mrs. Graham to get Evans and me to ease up on him. Of course, she could not dictate even to her own columnists, much less the two of us who were not on her payroll though printed regularly by her paper. Yet, because the president of the United States had pressed her to do this, she obviously felt obliged to put in a few good words for him.

“Lyndon is really doing such a good job under such difficult conditions, coming in after the assassination,” she told us, “and he is trying so hard to take a prudent course in Vietnam. I hope you can try to look at the problems he faces through his eyes.” She was embarrassed, as was everybody at lunch. Only Rowly’s charm enabled us to survive this difficult encounter.

Several weeks later, on Monday, October 9, 1967, I received a phone call from my good friend Andrew J. Glass that led to a much more serious confrontation with Mrs. Graham. Andy, our former Herald-Tribune colleague, now on the Washington Post’s national staff covering Congress, told me he wanted to come over to show me something important.

Glass was at my office within a half hour with a thirteen-page, double-spaced memorandum. It was a detailed, nearly verbatim account of an off-the-record session with Secretary of State Dean Rusk over lunch on September 27 at Newsweek’s Manhattan headquarters with executives of the magazine and its sister publication, the Washington Post, including company president Katherine Graham. It was dynamite.

Andy told me that what Rusk had to say revealed so much about him and the Johnson administration’s attitude toward the war that it had to be published. But neither Newsweek nor the Post was going to reveal what was said. Since Rusk had spoken under cover of an off-the-record agreement, Glass knew his leak could cost him his job. So he gave me the memo under the caveat that if anybody from the Post should ask where I received the information, I would say it came from somebody at the State Department. I agreed to lie.

On this day, Rowly was beginning the final week of a monthlong round-the-world reporting trip. I have no idea whether Rowly would have heard alarm bells in my writing this column, to which I seemed oblivious. All I could think was that an unknown number of copies of a thirteen-page document might be floating around town, and I did not want to be beaten on a story already two weeks old. My desire to be first prevailed over prudence.

My only concern was whether what Rusk said in New York was an aberration. I called my only good high-level source at the State Department, Assistant Secretary Bill Bundy, read him Rusk’s comments, and asked, strictly off-the-record, if he could tell me if he had ever heard the secretary of state say anything like that. Indeed he had several times, Bundy replied. That was enough for me to write the column for publication two days later. I omitted the fact that the executives Rusk addressed in New York were from the Washington Post Company. I am not sure what purpose this little deception served other than to indicate that I sensed I was entering dangerous territory.

My column of Wednesday, October 13, 1967, published as usual in the Washington Post, began by saying the soft-spoken Georgian, secretary of state throughout the Kennedy-Johnson years, revealed the “embitterment and alienation” of that administration caused by Vietnam. He “shed the public image of long-suffering serenity” and “bitterly lashed out at ‘pseudo-intellectual’ critics of the war.” Much of the opposition, he said:

…resulted from Communist influence. FBI infiltrators in the Communist apparatus, he said, tipped him to the exact wording of a peace telegram from an “innocent” peace group weeks before he officially received the same message….

Communist influence, Rusk continued, helped build rabid anti-Vietnam sentiment among college students. But he placed a greater responsibility on what the students learn from their professors—Rusk’s “pseudo-intellectuals”:…

“Have you ever noticed how these people react against a Southern accent?” the Secretary asked his luncheon hosts. “Almost any other—British, New England, Hungarian, French—is acceptable to them. But not Southern.”

…he told how one of his cousins in Georgia, when asked by a reporter why the United States was in Vietnam, replied: “We promised ’em we would, didn’t we?” Rusk’s comment: “There was a great deal of profundity there. Compare it with the gossamer threads spun by Arthur Schlesinger.”

Rusk expressed his contempt for his fellow former New Frontiersmen who had left the administration and turned against Vietnam policy, such as Schlesinger and former Assistant Secretary of State Roger Hilsman. My column continued:

The Schlesingers and Hilsmans, according to Rusk, only deepen the unpopularity of the war with a naturally isolationist American public. He believes the public’s attitude, in turn, augments Hanoi’s conviction that the American people will not support the war over the long haul.

The Washington Post copy editors who processed my column were unaware of the identity of the “select group of New York executives” that I mentioned in the lead paragraph. But Kay Graham was well aware.

She phoned me Wednesday morning at the start of the business day. It was the first call she had ever placed to me. Gone was the shy and halting manner I had associated with her. She did not raise her voice, but her upper-class accent was covered with frost. She told me that I had caused her personal humiliation. Dean Rusk had been promised that nothing he said would be published, and he unburdened himself to editors of a newspaper that supported him and his policy. It was intolerable for a near verbatim account of his remarks to be published in that newspaper and probably crippled the Post’s future efforts to talk to news sources on a confidential basis. She concluded by telling me: “Our personal relationship is now at an end.” With that, she terminated our one-sided conversation.

In truth, I was not aware I had much of a personal relationship with Kay Graham. What terrified me was that our professional relationship was endangered—that the column’s position in the most important newspaper running it was at risk.

I immediately sat down at my Royal office typewriter and wrote a five-hundred-word letter to Mrs. Graham on the Western Union copy paper we used. Fulfilling my promise to Andy Glass to protect him, I lied that I had received the memo from a State Department official. “We have tried to shed light on public affairs by revealing what public officials say and do in private,” I wrote. “I felt the Rusk luncheon minutes fit that category and did cast light on the Administration’s position toward the most difficult problem facing it.”

I took the position that there would have been no question that I would have used the memo without thinking had Rusk made such comments in a government meeting and that it “would have been back-scratching inside the journalism fraternity” if I spiked the story because of its venue. I then used a lame but familiar excuse: “…if the meeting’s minutes were slipped to me, they would be given to somebody else if I didn’t write it.” I concluded by shamelessly throwing myself on Mrs. Graham’s mercy:

Finally, and most important, I did not for a moment consider all this in relationship with you and with the Washington Post. In retrospect, I am afraid this was a grievous error in judgment…. I have greatly admired you and the job you have done to turn the Post into a great paper, and I have been proud of your kind words for our column. Had I viewed this column as a personal affront or embarrassment to you, I can assure you I would not have written it and, consequently, now regret doing so. At this stage, however, all I can offer is my sincere apologies.

I had our assistant, Mary Jo Pyles, type the letter on my personal (not office) stationery and mailed it Special Delivery to Mrs. Graham at the Post’s offices about six blocks away. (In 1967, there were no faxes, e-mails were far in the future, and I did not use messengers to carry letters.)

Rusk was asked about the column the next day at his Thursday press conference. While declining comment “on third-hand reports,” the secretary took an on-the-record whack at anti-Vietnam intellectuals. The New York Times and Los Angeles Times ran stories crediting the Evans & Novak column, which were distributed nationwide on their wire services. The New York Times account went beyond my column to identify the mysterious executives in New York as coming from Newsweek and the Washington Post.

Rowly and his wife, Katherine, were returning Saturday. Not wanting him to hear about Mrs. Graham’s rage before I could warn him, I drove to Dulles International Airport to break the news. I was in a bad state of nerves. Arriving early at the airport, I went into a bar for a double Scotch. The Evanses knew something was up when they saw me (the only time I ever welcomed him home). After hearing the bad news, Rowly displayed his normal WASP cool and said he doubted there was anything to worry about.

On that Saturday, Katherine Graham wrote me a two-page handwritten letter—mailed, of course—that reached me Monday. “I think I owe you an apology,” she began. “My temper about this episode can only be described as shrewish.” She added, “I also agree with you that there is too much back-scratching within the journalistic fraternity, including too much non-reporting of news when it concerns ourselves.” But she wasn’t happy:

Having said all that—of course I still feel it hurt us very much as a news gathering entity to have an off-the-record interview with Rusk appear verbatim—and I don’t suppose it will help future interviews of this kind.

She concluded that “your letter was awfully nice and I appreciate it,” but I feel the incident cooled my future relations with a woman I greatly admired. We never again mentioned what happened, and I shall never know how much it seriously endangered the column’s relationship with the Post.

Nor did I discuss the incident with Andy Glass until March 2004 when I brought it up in connection with this book. Andy told me he was not at the New York meeting and that he had been given the verbatim account by someone who was: Walter Lippmann, whose column had been syndicated by the Washington Post. Glass had just written a sympathetic front-page interview with Lippmann on the occasion of his retirement and return to New York City from Washington in a state of bitterness over Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam. America’s most prestigious liberal voice was appalled by Rusk’s remarks, wanted them published, and gave a copy to Glass for that purpose.

LBJ’s Era of Good Feeling II had led to a Washington where such dignified establishmentarians as Dean Rusk and Walter Lippmann were at each other’s throats. Washington had lost its civility and never would regain it. And the bitter, angry election campaign of 1968 was just ahead.