ON JANUARY 31, 1966, LBJ ORDERED AN END TO THE CHRISTMAS bombing halt of North Vietnam. The president had authorized the halt as part of a dual effort to bring Hanoi to the negotiating table and to sidetrack the antiwar movement in the United States that was beginning to gather steam. That same evening, Senator J. William Fulbright appeared on “CBS Evening News” to declare the war morally wrong and counterproductive to the interests of the country. The administration, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC) declared, was still a prisoner of the Munich analogy, a comparison that was totally inapplicable to Southeast Asia. To him, Vietnam did not represent Sino-Soviet aggression, but a genuinely indigenous revolt against colonialism. He subsequently announced that the SFRC would hold public hearings on the war in Southeast Asia in the immediate future.
Fulbright’s hearings stretched across more than two weeks in February. Administration officials refused to testify, so the SFRC chair turned to prominent establishment figures who were having doubts about the war. General James Gavin presented the case for the enclave strategy—limiting American combat troops to action within a certain number of miles of their base—that Fulbright and columnist Walter Lippmann had earlier advocated and that the Johnson administration had already discarded. On February 11, Fulbright pulled out his big gun: George Kennan. The former head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff and the author of the containment policy toward the Soviet Union agreed with Gavin that it was essential to avoid further escalation, and he urged that the war be ended “as soon as this could be done without inordinate damage to our prestige or stability in the area.”1 Like the Kefauver crime hearings of 1951 and the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, the Fulbright hearings were watched and discussed by millions.
Congressional doubters were echoed by a variety of groups in the general population. Traditional pacifists such as A. J. Muste and the organizations they headed, the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the War Resisters League, spoke out against the ongoing carnage in South Vietnam because they were against all wars. The taking of human life, no matter what the reason, was immoral. Antinuclear activists who had organized the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) in the mid-1950s opposed the war in Vietnam because they feared it would lead to a nuclear confrontation between the United States and the communist superpowers. Student activists who, energized by the civil rights movement, formed the Students for a Democratic Society in 1960 enlisted in the antiwar movement as part of a larger campaign to fundamentally alter American society. Indeed, by late 1966, opposition to the conflict in Southeast Asia had become an article of faith for members of the New Left. Building on the economic determinism of Charles Beard and Fred Harvey Harrington, New Leftists insisted that because it was a capitalist society, America was dominated by financiers and manufacturers who, having subdued the American proletariat and exploited the nation’s resources in the nineteenth century, had set out to establish their economic hegemony throughout the rest of the world in the twentieth. Because politics always follows economics, the government and military were permanently and primarily committed to Wall Street’s agenda. Liberals of a more moderate stripe, concentrated in one wing of the Americans for Democratic Action, had become convinced by the end of 1965 that the war in Southeast Asia was a perversion of the liberal internationalism that they had espoused since the end of World War II. In its quest to protect democracy and liberty from communist totalitarianism, the United States was allying itself with brutal military dictatorships and facilitating the murder of thousands of innocent people.
Joining the growing antiwar chorus were religious leaders. In October 1965, the Reverend Richard Neuhaus, Rabbi Abraham Heschel, and Father Daniel Berrigan formed Clergy Concerned about Vietnam, a particularly ominous development for LBJ and the architects of the Great Society, who had tapped into deep currents of Judeo-Christian beliefs to generate support for domestic reform. “A year ago . . . it seemed that the United States might be about to undergo something of a social revolution,” Senator Fulbright observed. “But for the present at least, the inspiration and commitment of a year ago have disappeared. They have disappeared in the face of deepening involvement in an Asian war, and although it may be contended that the United States has the material resources to rebuild its society at home while waging war abroad, it is already being demonstrated that we do not have the mental and spiritual resources for such a double effort.”2
“Washington is a city obsessed by Vietnam,” journalist and historian Ronald Steel wrote in the New York Review of Books later in the year. “It eats, sleeps, and particularly drinks the war. There is virtually no other subject of conversation worthy of the name, and no social gathering or private discussion that does not inevitably gravitate toward the war. . . . The administration . . . has not had the time, or the aptitude, or perhaps the understanding to explain this war in terms that could reconcile it with traditional American values. As a result, it has lost the support of much of the nation’s intellectual community.”3 Steel was right.
In a spate of essays and books, LBJ was portrayed as a power-mad Machiavellian figure who was establishing in America an “imperial presidency,” to use Arthur Schlesinger’s famous phrase. Typical was a series of articles written by University of Chicago political scientist Hans Morgenthau. Johnson was about power, he declared in one piece; intellectuals (read: dissenters) were about truth. The two could never meet.4 In an essay entitled “The Colossus of Johnson City,” Morgenthau wrote, “What is so ominous in our present situation is not that the President has reasserted his powers, but that in the process he has reduced all countervailing powers, political and social, to virtual and seemingly permanent impotence. What the Founding Fathers had feared has indeed come to pass: the President of the United States has become an uncrowned king. Lyndon B. Johnson has become the Julius Caesar of the American Republic.”5 “Who could have foreseen it?” opined the New Republic. “The Great Society exponent, the practitioner of common sense compromise and consensus, has become The War President—sworn to prevent at any cost one set of Vietnamese (unfriendly, we have guaranteed that) from overcoming other Vietnamese (who could not hold power without us.)”6
The burgeoning antiwar movement, not surprisingly, left LBJ distraught. He was particularly disturbed by those who were arguing that the administration was deceiving and manipulating the public and those who questioned the efficacy of the political and economic system. “There’s a great infiltration in the government and in the press particularly and in the networks of folks that have little faith in our system and who want to destroy it every way in the world they can,” he complained to a Texas friend.
They are making an all-out pitch against everything—getting out of Vietnam. . . . I think we’re going to have to start a drive to run ’em underground because they’re getting to a point now where they’re dangerous. . . . No mother and no daughter and no married woman wants her husband or her son to go to Vietnam. The only thing that would . . . compel ’em to go would be love of country and their honor and their duty. But they no longer think it’s an honor or duty; they think it’s a terrible thing to do. . . . It’s just too cruel, too brutal. It’s all right if they have an alternative and debate the alternative, but to say that you’re maneuvering ’em and lacking candor and you’re lying . . . it just goes a little bit further than it oughta go.7
AS THEY PREPARED FOR THE 1966 MIDTERM ELECTIONS, LBJ AND THE Democratic Party had much to boast about. During Johnson’s thirty-six months in office, the unemployment rate had dropped from 5.7 percent to 3.7 percent. Industrial production had risen by 25 percent. GNP had increased by 17 percent, and the average American’s real income had risen by 14 percent. While four million Americans moved above the poverty line, both profits and wages had increased. Medicare had helped three million elderly Americans to obtain access to health care, eight million new workers were covered by the minimum wage law, and Jim Crow was on the run in the South.8
Yet for all this, Democratic leaders approached the elections with apprehension. “The American people are concerned about Vietnam,” Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman wrote in his diary. “There is a dark void there, and they don’t know exactly where we’re going as a Nation. . . . The same thing seems to be true about the economy. The President’s obsession with it, with inflation, with what should be done about it, and the failure to act . . . and certainly these civil rights disturbances and riots everywhere and the whole white backlash problem is another [area] where there is such doubt and indecision.”9
Although LBJ had won in a landslide in 1964, and Democrats had coat-tailed to large majorities in both houses, the major elements of the Great Society had carried only by an average 235 to 200 vote in the House. A shift of a mere 18 votes would have meant the failure of much of the president’s program.10 In general, except for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a suprapartisan, centrist consensus favoring liberal programs for poor, powerless, neglected segments of the American population did not seem to exist. Less than a month before LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a Gallup poll showed that 57 percent of its respondents expected race relations to worsen during the next six months. In a May 12, 1965, poll, a plurality of nonsouthern whites claimed that LBJ was “pushing integration too fast,” while only 8 percent said that his backing was not strong enough. Only 35 percent of poll respondents supported the enactment of a fair housing law.
By contrast, two of the Big Four domestic policy goals of the Great Society, the income tax cut and Medicare, enjoyed consistent, widespread public support in the opinion surveys. Opposition to tax increases remained strong even if for the purposes of reducing inflation and avoiding a budget deficit.11 If the tax cut, Medicare, public television and radio, federal support for the arts and higher education, clean air and water legislation, and consumer safety were all initiatives to buy white middle class support for programs focused on poverty and racial injustice, they had failed in their objective. Indeed, what white middle class support there was for the War on Poverty may have stemmed more from fears that the situation in the nation’s cities would get worse if the government did not act than from an aroused social conscience.
Matters were not helped by the fact that the president had grossly neglected the party and its machinery. Indeed, Johnson was proving to be one of America’s least partisan presidents. “I hear rumors you were a politician,” presidential adviser John Roche memoed the president, “but have no evidence of it.”12 The Johnson administration featured a running feud between John Macy, LBJ’s chief talent scout who was also head of the Civil Service Commission, and Democratic Party operative Jim Rowe. Without success, Rowe hounded Macy to recommend some good party loyalists for appointment to government office. In filling federal jobs, LBJ was motivated by his search for excellence and expertise as well as by his determination to be beyond reproach. “You know,” he told Rowe, an old friend from New Deal days, “I can only feel safe if I pick civil servants or military men, because their whole life has been under such complete scrutiny, they won’t surprise me. . . . You lawyers, you are not trustworthy, you have always got a client some way or other that’s embarrassing.”13 Johnson’s neglect of the Democratic National Committee was common knowledge.
AS THE CAMPAIGN SEASON GOT UNDER WAY, THE JOHNSON ADMINISTRATION discovered that the two-party system was alive and well. By 1966, the GOP was on its way back to the center of political life in America. Heading this resurgence was a new, sleeker, more relaxed Richard Nixon. Since his 1960 presidential defeat and his loss in the 1962 California gubernatorial contest, Nixon seemed to have shed the insecurity and humorlessness that had plagued him. “Remember when the Democrats tried to run with LBJ?” Nixon told a whooping throng of Republican loyalists. “Now they’re trying to run away from him.”14
The Kennedys were of two minds about the election. They wanted the Democrats to retain their majorities in both houses, but they wanted to see the Johnson administration discredited. Above all, the warriors of Camelot had their sights set on 1968. RFK worked to stake out an alternative position: on the war in Vietnam (the administration was too inflexible), on the Great Society (the administration was quitting too early), and on the plight of the cities (the administration was not doing enough). Polls by both Gallup and Quayle taken in the first week in September indicated that Democrats favored Bobby 40 percent to 38 percent for the 1968 presidential nomination and that independents would vote for him by a margin of 38 percent to 24 percent. The “exquisitely modulated battle,” as Newsweek termed it, between RFK and LBJ was having an immediate and detrimental impact on the Democrats’ prospects in the midterm elections.
Martin Luther King did his best to help with the upcoming elections. On September 29, he extracted a promise from Stokely Carmichael, chair of SNCC, that he would, until after the midterm elections were over, stop using the term “black power” or advocate the use of nonviolence and refrain from organizing street demonstrations. The moving force, ironically, behind King’s efforts to rein in the tempestuous Carmichael was J. Edgar Hoover’s number one red bait, Stanley Levison. SNCC had organized demonstrations in Atlanta that had turned violent. Levison and others blamed the gubernatorial nomination of arch-segregationist Lester Maddox on those disturbances. “Stokely must be politically isolated,” Levison declared.15 But it was all to no avail.
Election Day proved to be humbling, if not disastrous, for the Democrats. The GOP gained forty-seven seats in the House, three in the Senate, eight governorships (including California’s Ronald Reagan), and perhaps most significant, over five hundred seats in state legislatures. Critics of the administration were elated.16 Liberals predicted a revival of the Dixiecrat–conservative Republican coalition. Some Democrats saw a silver lining, however. “It is, I think, a brand-new ballgame,” political activist Frank Mankiewicz wrote Bobby Kennedy after the elections. “In every contested election the young, attractive, more non-political candidate won. And the oldest, least attractive, most political candidate is LBJ.”17 Vietnam was not as important in explaining GOP gains, Schlesinger told reporters, as “the picture—true or false—which people have about President Johnson’s character.”18 LBJ tried to put the best face on the outcome. Democratic margins had been reduced from 249 to 187 in the House and 64 to 36 in the Senate—still working majorities. And though he did not say it, LBJ believed that some of the newly elected Republicans might be easier to get along with than some of his liberal fellow Democrats.19
IN DECEMBER 1966, BILL MOYERS LEFT THE WHITE HOUSE TO BECOME publisher of Newsday. A break had been in the offing since he first took the job as press secretary. At the time, Moyers had remarked to his wife, “This is the beginning of the end, because no man can serve two masters,” meaning LBJ and the press.20 Particularly when those two masters were so continually and vexatiously at odds. Johnson was dissatisfied with his relationship with the media, and increasingly he tended to blame his press secretary. For its part, the White House press corps began to view Moyers less as a witty, informed, sincere individual who was doing his best to defend them than as the defender of the paranoid, arbitrary, dishonest man in the White House. In the summer of 1966, Moyers had gone to the hospital with a bleeding ulcer.
Despite Vietnam, his trouble with the press, and GOP gains, LBJ’s appetite for reform had not abated. As he prepared for his fourth State of the Union address, he was as determined as ever to forge ahead on the domestic front. Shortly after Christmas, Joe Califano arrived at the Ranch to go over the next year’s program. For months, Johnson had been thinking about upgrading nursing homes. At the president’s direction, Califano had put together a task force to make recommendations. LBJ’s charge to the members had been memorable. As he described some of the conditions he had witnessed, his voice rose and he became more agitated: “Fire traps, rat traps, a disgrace . . . no one of you would let your mother near one.” He invoked the Bible and the commandment to honor thy father and mother. “I want nursing homes that will be livable, happy places for people to serve out their old age, places where there will be a little joy for the elderly, but most of all places that take care of their special needs.” There needed to be “flat floors, and grades, so that the wheelchairs can easily be used. . . . And when you design toilets . . . ”—at this point he leaned sideways on his left buttock, put his elbow on the arm of his chair, took his right arm and hand, and strained to twist them as far behind himself as he could, and, grunting and jabbing his hand behind his back, he continued—“make sure that you don’t put the toilet paper rack way behind them so they have to wrench their back out of place or dislocate a shoulder or get a stiff neck in order to get their hands on the toilet paper.”21
Califano suggested legislation requiring tobacco companies to reveal the tar and nicotine content of cigarettes on their packaging. LBJ was sympathetic but did not want to do anything to further alienate the tobacco states. His civil rights initiatives were doing enough of that. LBJ was enthusiastic about lowering the voting age to eighteen but wanted to wait a year (he proposed a constitutional amendment to that effect in June 1968). He wanted a truth-in-lending bill, the president told his advisers. And more consumer protection. Earlier that year, Califano’s young son, Joe, had swallowed the contents of an aspirin bottle and had had to have his stomach pumped out. “There ought to be a law that makes druggists use safe containers,” LBJ declared on hearing of the accident. “There ought to be safety caps on those bottles so kids like little Joe can’t open them.” Thus was born the Child Safety Act, which Congress eventually passed in 1970.22
LBJ and his advisers picked the evening of January 10, 1967, for the State of the Union address. Johnson did not want to conflict with Everett Dirksen’s birthday party scheduled for the 11th, and he did not want to shoulder aside popular television programs. “I don’t want millions of people looking at me for an hour and thinking, ‘This is the big-eared son of a bitch that knocked my favorite program off the air,’” he told Califano.23 Still, the 10th turned out to be an unfortunate choice. “On the Hill today there had been a death [the aged Congressman John E. Fogerty of Rhode Island] and an expulsion,” Lady Bird recorded in her diary. “Adam Clayton Powell had been expelled from the House [for misuse of public funds and other offenses] in an atmosphere tense with violence and hatred.”24
Observers noted a different LBJ who strode into the House chamber that January evening. There was a diffident, almost apologetic smile on his face. His tone was subdued, his rhetoric measured. He admitted that sundry “mistakes” and “errors” had marred his leadership. He alluded to the need sometime in the future for a tax increase. He promised safer streets, maintenance rather than expansion of most Great Society programs, and, as in 1966, emphasis on quality-of-life issues. Johnson mentioned civil rights only briefly. The theme of the speech was not what the federal government was going to do for America, but what could be achieved in partnership with state and local government.25 James Reston of the New York Times hailed the speech as the beginning of a new and creative federalism. In a laudatory column entitled “Johnson and the Age of Reform,” Reston wrote:
This is not a conservative but a radical program. He is not trying to follow but to transform the New Deal. He is not proposing to console the poor in their poverty but to give them the means of lifting themselves out of poverty. He is not using Federal funds to keep them where they are or to impose Federal control over the states and cities, but to finance the passage of the poor into useful, effective jobs, and create new partnerships between Washington and the state capitals and the cities and other political centers in the world.26
Johnson seemed to be saying to the South Vietnamese, to African Americans, to the white middle class, to labor, to management that he had carried forward and modernized the Rooseveltian vision; he had put in place the tools with which to achieve the goal of a just, peaceful, diverse, and democratic society. Now it was up to the people to determine whether they had the will and the wisdom to sustain that vision. On the war itself, the president offered little solace. “I wish I could report to you that the conflict is almost over,” he said. “This I cannot do. We face more cost, more loss, and more agony. For the end is not yet. I cannot promise you that it will come this year—or come next year.”27 America and its allies would stay the course, Johnson declared.
Given the facts that civil rights leaders and representatives of the poor in general were complaining that the money spent on the War on Poverty was insignificant and that the Great Society’s obsession with the cult of opportunity was insufficient to the day, that conservatives were demanding law and order to include a government crackdown on both ghetto rioting and nonviolent civil disobedience, that hawks on the Vietnam war believed that the administration was not doing enough, and that doves were insisting that Washington was doing too much, it was not a message many people wanted to hear, Reston notwithstanding.
Two weeks later, the United States endured its first manned space tragedy. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Virgil I. Grissom, Navy Lieutenant Commander Roger B. Chaffee, and Air Force Colonel Edward H. White II were burned to death when a ball of flame engulfed their Apollo I spacecraft at Cape Kennedy as they rehearsed one of the steps designed to take man to the moon. Grissom, Chaffee, and White were buried on a clear, wintry day in Arlington Cemetery. Both Lyndon and Lady Bird attended the service. The Greatest Generation had suffered yet another blow to its collective ego. Increasingly, it seemed, all things were not possible.
BEGINNING IN 1966, ALLARD LOWENSTEIN, A FORMER STUDENT ACTIVIST at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a past head of the National Student Association, and a leader of the reform wing of the Americans for Democratic Action, launched a campaign to persuade the ADA to support someone other than Lyndon Johnson for president in 1968. Though Lowenstein did not succeed, the national board at its annual meeting in Washington in the spring of 1967 did denounce the war in Vietnam. At the same time, a group of antiwar enthusiasts in New York opened the “Citizens for Kennedy-Fulbright” headquarters in preparation for the 1968 presidential election.28 In July the group organized some fifty former delegates to the Democratic National Convention, who sent a public letter to the president urging him not to run in 1968. Because of deep divisions over foreign affairs, they declared, “millions of Democrats will be unable to support Democratic candidates in local, state or national elections.”29 From that time on, Lyndon Johnson viewed the ADA as nothing less than a “Kennedy-in-exile” government.
There had always been a complicated but crucial connection between the civil rights movement in the United States and the war in Vietnam. The moral imperative that Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, and others had invoked to persuade white, middle-class America to support the drive for racial equality had reinforced and been reinforced by the liberal internationalist notion that the United States had an obligation to help the peoples of the Third World—most of whom were nonwhite—resist communist domination. Johnson’s talk of internationalizing the Great Society and of transforming the Mekong Delta (the river system that dominated Southeast Asia) into another TVA had woven the connecting fabric tighter and tighter. But as the black power advocates co-opted the civil rights movement and intimidated white liberals, and as a new wave of urban rioting swept the nation’s cities, a white backlash had erupted that threatened not only the Great Society—especially the Second Reconstruction—but the war in Vietnam as well. Liberals who surrendered to the New Left and who joined with Tom Hayden and Stokely Carmichael in indicting American institutions and political processes played their part in eroding the Vietnam consensus, but it was the growing doubts among the average American that the Judeo-Christian ethic could or should be applied to social problems at home and abroad that did the real damage.
Harry McPherson persuaded LBJ to take advantage of Lincoln’s birthday anniversary on February 12, 1967, to speak out on race, to affirm the administration’s continuing commitment to equal opportunity and equality under the law both at home and abroad.30 Standing before the majestic Lincoln Memorial, LBJ gestured to the statue designed by Daniel Chester French and called the crowd’s attention to the aura “of brooding compassion, of love for humanity; a love which was, if anything, strengthened and deepened by the agony that drove lesser men to the protective shelter of callous indifference.” Speaking for himself as well as the Great Emancipator, LBJ declared, “Lincoln did not come to the Presidency with any set of full-blown theories, but rather with a mystical dedication to the Union—and an unyielding determination to always preserve the integrity of the Republic.” Then he forged the link between civil rights and internationalism: “Today, racial suspicions, racial hatred and racial violence plague men in almost every part of the earth. . . . The true liberators of mankind have always been those who showed men another way to live—than by hating their brothers.”31
What Johnson and McPherson were trying to do was to persuade black Americans to acknowledge a positive connection between the Second Reconstruction and the war in Vietnam: both were struggles for self-determination, campaigns to spread the blessings of freedom and democracy to nonwhite peoples. “I have come to speak . . . about the morality of nations,” LBJ had declared in a commencement address at Catholic University back in June 1965. “For while I believe devotedly in the separation of church and state, I do not believe it is pleasing in the sight of God for men to separate morality from their might. . . . What America has done—and what America is doing around the world—draws from deep and flowing springs of moral duty . . . we of the United States cherish the right of others to choose for themselves what they shall believe and what their own societies and institutions shall be.”32
Instead, the black power movement, the SDS, the SNCC, and the leadership of the SCLC, including Martin Luther King, were joining hands to portray the war in Southeast Asia as just another attempt by the white power structure in the United States to exploit and oppress colored people everywhere. There was a link between the struggle for black civil rights in America and for social and economic justice in South Vietnam, they acknowledged, but black soldiers ought to be fighting with the Vietcong against American imperialism rather than with the Armed Forces of the United States. Only the most radical went that far, of course, but, increasingly, black revolutionaries such as Floyd McKissick and New Left leaders such as Tom Hayden were joining with evangelical civil rights activists like King in calling for an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam in order to free up funds for the antipoverty program and other aspects of the Great Society.
The SDS and SNCC were thorns in the administration’s side, but nothing compared to King, whose decision to publicly question US policy in Vietnam had grown out of his December 1964 trip to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. At the annual convention of the SCLC in Birmingham on August 12, 1965, he announced that he planned to write to the Vietnam combatants, calling on them to reach a negotiated settlement. He subsequently abandoned the project but then, after meeting with UN ambassador Arthur Goldberg, issued a public statement calling on the United States to include the Vietcong in peace negotiations, to stop bombing North Vietnam, and to support Communist China’s bid for a seat in the United Nations.33
Following the Watts riot, Johnson and King had met at the White House. The president noted that members of Congress had “the impression that you are against me in Vietnam. . . . You better not leave that impression,” he said. “I want peace as much as you do, and more so, because I am the fellow that wakes up in the morning with a report that fifty of our boys died last night. These folks just will not come to the conference table.”34 In this conversation and ones to follow, the president and the head of the SCLC shadowboxed over Vietnam. King knew full well that if he followed his moral inclination to speak out against the president’s foreign policy, it would seriously risk his ability to influence Johnson on poverty and civil rights. In September 1965, the civil rights leader assured the White House that he was not strong enough to carry on two struggles at the same time—the civil rights battle and the Vietnam peace struggle. He intended to get back to civil rights.35 But as the war continued to escalate and King’s conviction that racism and imperialism stemmed from a common root hardened, he decided he had to speak out.
In the spring of 1966, King and Dr. Benjamin Spock, a prominent pediatrician and antiwar leader, led a Holy Saturday procession of eighty-five hundred people down State Street to the Chicago Coliseum. Then, on April 4, 1967, came King’s memorable speech at New York’s Riverside Church. The war in Vietnam was a “symptom of a far deeper malady” that throughout history had prompted the United States to oppose revolutions in behalf of social justice and self-determination by the nonwhite peoples of the Third World.36 He declared that there was an inseparable connection between the battle for civil rights and antipoverty programs at home and the war in Vietnam. “A few years ago,” he said, “there was a shining moment in [our] struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor—both black and white—through the poverty program there were experiments, hopes, and new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broke and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war.” He had finally realized, he said, that “I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.” His comments provoked a firestorm. A Washington Post editorial called his remarks “bitter and damaging allegations that he did not and could not document.”37
Actually, King’s position on the war was fairly moderate: bombing halt, cease-fire, negotiations, and implementation of the 1954 Geneva Accords. But the White House, recognizing his significance as the moral arbiter of the civil rights movement, came to see him as “the crown prince of the Vietniks,” as Harry McPherson put it.38 Johnson’s dismay turned to “cold anger,” the president’s new press secretary, George Christian, recalled.39 LBJ and his advisers believed that by blaming the war in Vietnam for society’s ills, King was undercutting their efforts to bring the Second Reconstruction to fruition. Conservatives were aching for a justification to starve the Great Society of funds. While the administration argued for guns and butter, leaders of the conservative coalition could cite the “dubious loyalty” of figures like King to block further appropriations.40 From this point on, LBJ refused to view King as a troublesome partner but saw him instead as an avowed enemy.
King’s apostasy on the war played directly into the hands of J. Edgar Hoover and others who were determined to establish a link between the forces of international communism and the civil rights movement. If the ghetto uprisings and the violent rhetoric of the black power movement were not enough, King, whose principal advisers were former communists or communist sympathizers, would do the trick. Hoover continued to benefit from an ally within the inner sanctum of the Oval Office, Chief of Staff Marvin Watson. He was an avid reader of the raw reports on King’s activities that arrived at the White House on an almost daily basis. His summaries for the president unerringly ended with the Hoover-like coda: “One of King’s advisers is still Stanley Levison who is a long-time Communist” and “[Harry] Wachtel is a former member of the National Lawyers Guild, which has been cited as a communist front.”41 Following the Riverside speech, Johnson asked George Christian to quietly start contacting “reliable” reporters and columnists and supplying them with information about King’s ties with the “secret Communist” Stanley Levison.42
Not surprisingly, the administration did everything in its power to mobilize and publicize black supporters of the war. And there were supporters, although most were unenthusiastic. A. Philip Randolph, Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, and even James Farmer had varying reservations about the conflict in Southeast Asia. They, like King, worried that it would divert attention and funding away from antipoverty and other programs vital to African Americans, but they kept these sentiments to themselves. “I felt that the civil rights movement should not get involved in this,” Farmer later recalled. “I felt it would simply confuse the issue.”43 Wilkins and Young recognized the idealism, misguided though it may have been, that was responsible for America’s decision to go to war. The White House encouraged Young to make a trip to Vietnam and applauded when he subsequently reported to the Saigon press corps that black soldiers seemed to be faring no better or worse than their white counterparts, that they generally supported the war, and that, for the most part, they saw service in the military as a way to get ahead in the world.44
The board of directors of the NAACP voted on April 10, 1967, that any attempt to merge the civil rights and peace movements would be “a serious tactical mistake.”45 At the prompting of the White House, General Louis B. Hershey and the Selective Service Board made a concerted effort to get blacks on local draft and appeal boards in the South. As a result, between December 1966 and June 1967, the number of blacks on local boards increased from 267 to 413, including Florida with 5 and Louisiana with 8. The White House ordered a study to determine whether African Americans were fighting and dying in Vietnam in a higher proportion than their percentage of the draft-age population. The study found that blacks were serving in disproportionately high numbers in combat, but those in combat were dying at the same rate as whites.46
Ironically, LBJ’s staying the course in Vietnam won him scant credit with the ultranationalist white South. Although most whites approved of the war, they continued to disapprove of him. A September 1966 poll in Louisiana showed the president’s job rating at 31 percent favorable and 69 percent unfavorable. When divided by race, the numbers stood at 16 percent to 84 percent among whites and 94 percent to 6 percent among blacks. As hawkish South Carolina congressman Mendel Rivers told White House aide Henry Wilson, his constituents loved the bombing but hated the federal registrars.47
Soon, however, Americans were to be confronted with two insurgencies: one in South Vietnam and one in the black ghettoes of their own cities.