AT 7:30 P.M. ON APRIL 4, 1968, AS LBJ WAS PREPARING TO DEPART the White House to attend a Democratic fund-raiser for Vice President Humphrey, he was informed that Martin Luther King had been shot in Memphis. Earlier in the day, a white petty crook, James Earl Ray, had told his brother that he was going to “get the big nigger.”1 That evening, he did just that, shooting King while he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. At 8:20 George Christian informed LBJ that King was dead. “Everything we’ve gained in the last few days we’re going to lose tonight,” he remarked dejectedly to Joe Califano.2
As news of King’s death went out over radio and television, new waves of rioting racked the nation. “When white America killed Dr. King,” declared Stokely Carmichael, “she declared war on us.” In Washington, DC, over seven hundred fires turned night into day, and smoke from them completely obscured the Capitol. LBJ instructed his aides to convene a meeting of congressional leaders and prominent black activists the following morning. Among those invited were Whitney Young, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Bayard Rustin, Mayor Carl Stokes of Cleveland, and NAACP field director Charles Evers of Jackson, Mississippi. Johnson asked King’s father to attend, but his doctors would not allow him to travel. Told that the president’s prayers were with him, the elder King replied, “Oh no, my prayers are with the President.”3
The meeting got under way at eleven the next morning. Johnson paid tribute to King and promised to continue to work day and night to realize his dream. The real question was what his murder would mean to America. “Let us be frank about it,” he said. “It can mean that those—of both races—who believe that violence is the best means of settling racial problems in America, will have had their belief confirmed.” Black Americans must recommit to nonviolence and white Americans to “root out every trace of racism from their hearts.”4 The black leaders were generally receptive, but they warned that time was short. “The large majority of Negroes were not in favor of violence, but we need something to fight back with,” declared Reverend Leon Sullivan. “Otherwise we will be caught with nothing.”5 From the White House the president and his guests motored to the National Cathedral to attend a memorial service for King. Back at the Rose Garden, LBJ, flanked by prominent blacks and congressional leaders, issued a proclamation declaring Sunday, April 7, a day of national mourning for the fallen civil rights leader. He dashed off a note to Coretta Scott King: “My thoughts have been with you and your children throughout this long and anguished day. . . . Since early morning, I have devoted all my hours and energy to honoring your good husband in the manner he would most approve. I have sought—by word, deed and official act—to unite this sorrowing and troubled nation against further and wider violence.”6
From the Situation Room the president received hourly reports: “As of 8:00 P.M., 6 deaths, 533 arrests and 209 injuries treated at hospitals [in Washington, DC]; 8:55 P.M., confirmed report of four men with rifles on top of the Hawk and Dove Restaurant in the 300 block of Pennsylvania Avenue, SE.”7 General Westmoreland, in town for a meeting with LBJ and Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford, recalled that the capital “looked worse than Saigon did at the height of the Tet offensive.” He quipped that in 1814 the British had burned Washington, but this time we were doing it ourselves.8 From Chicago, Mayor Daley advised that he was probably going to have to request federal troops to quell postassassination disturbances. Burnings and shootings were reported from Detroit, Cleveland, and Houston.9 Somehow, Johnson managed to keep a sense of humor. Upon hearing rumors that Stokely Carmichael was organizing a group at 14th and U Streets Northwest to march on Georgetown and burn it down, the president smiled and said, “Goddamn! I’ve waited thirty-five years for this day!”10
By late Saturday night the White House had received reports of rioting and looting in more than a hundred American cities. The first contingents of nearly fourteen thousand regular Army, Marine, and National Guard troops began to deploy in Washington. Roadblocks were set up around the White House, and soldiers took up positions at the southwest gate. Johnson was determined that the world would not be treated to scenes of Americans shooting Americans, as he put it, in the nation’s capital. He ordered troop commanders and police to use the absolute minimum force necessary to maintain order. Senator Russell called Johnson to complain that Marines guarding the Capitol grounds had not been issued live ammunition. Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia phoned to ask why martial law had not been proclaimed and to insist that adult looters be shot on sight.11 The president stuck to his unloaded guns.
The next day, April 6, was Palm Sunday. LBJ gathered up Luci, White House secretary Marie Fehmer, Jim Jones, and Joe Califano and left to attend mass at Saint Dominic’s. On Monday reports of sporadic violence continued to trickle in, but black anger seemed to have crested. The president had every intention of attending King’s funeral scheduled for that day in Atlanta, but by that morning, the Secret Service and FBI were reporting several threats on Johnson’s life.12 From New York, UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg called: “The President should not . . . leave Washington and should stay right in the White House. This could be very explosive. His presence in the White House is a stabilizing influence.”13 LBJ dispatched Air Force One with Vice President Humphrey and top black officials, including Thurgood Marshall and Robert Weaver. One of Richard Nixon’s aides called the White House to suggest that Nixon, McCarthy, and Kennedy be invited to fly with the official party to show national solidarity, but Johnson demurred, so they traveled on their own. Bobby, who the day before had walked the streets of a burned-out neighborhood in northwest Washington, was cheered. Nixon was booed. McCarthy was ignored.14
KING’S MURDER COINCIDED WITH THE CLIMAX OF THE LATEST BATTLE over fair housing legislation. Undeterred by Congress’s rejection of the Civil Rights Act of 1966, which included an open housing provision, LBJ had in February 1967 submitted a successor measure. It called for adoption of a national policy against discrimination in housing, the strengthening of existing federal laws against interference with voting, legislation to further guard against discrimination in jury selection in both federal and state courts, authorization for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to issue judicially enforceable cease-and-desist orders, and a five-year extension of the United States Commission on Civil Rights.15 Virtually everyone in Johnson’s inner circle had advised the president not to proceed. Like Nicholas Katzenbach before him, Attorney General Clark warned the president that fair housing had no chance of passing. The urban riots of the three previous years had intensified the determination of northern whites to resist opening their neighborhoods to blacks. The violent white resistance to King’s efforts to integrate Chicago’s white neighborhoods had thoroughly spooked northern congressmen. Johnson remained undeterred.16 On February 6, 1968, Senators Walter Mondale (D-MN) and Edward Brooke (RMA) added a fair housing proviso to a pending bill making it a federal crime to interfere with or injure civil rights workers. Predictably, the conservative coalition filibustered. On February 20, a cloture vote failed by a vote of 55 for to 37 against. Republicans split 18 to 18, with Dirksen opposing both cloture and open housing.17
In a reprise of the drama surrounding passage of the 1964 civil rights bill, LBJ began working on Dirksen. Was he or was he not the chief representative of the party of Lincoln? Did the GOP want to be responsible for more urban rioting? Signaling that he was ready to bend to the president’s will, the minority leader began to bargain for his support. After a climactic meeting with Dirksen, Johnson told several of his aides, “We are going to get the Civil Rights bill! Dirksen is going to come out in support . . . and don’t ask me what I had to give him.”18 On March 4, by a vote of 65 to 32, cloture was invoked for the third time in the Johnson presidency. On March 11, the Senate version of HR 2516, amended to include the open housing provision, passed on a 71 to 20 vote.19 Attention now focused on the House.
On March 27, 1968, LBJ signed into law the Jury Selection and Service Act, banning racial discrimination in federal jury selection. He used the ceremony to blast the House for its refusal to enact fair housing legislation. “I am shocked to even think that the boys I put on a plane at the 82nd Airborne—most of whom were Negro boys going back to Vietnam the second time to protect the flag and to preserve our freedom—that they can’t live near the base where they have to train in this country,” he declared. “They must drive 15, 20, or 30 miles sometimes to get to their homes. . . . I think the conscience of America calls on the Congress to quit fiddling and piddling and take action on this civil rights bill. The time for excuses has ended.”20 Though Johnson had not been simpatico with King and resented particularly King’s outspoken opposition to the war, he was more than ready to use the man’s martyrdom to get the fair housing bill passed. In the days following the assassination, LBJ never missed an opportunity to invoke King’s name and to brandish his “dream” before Congress and the public. On April 10, the House passed the fair housing bill by a wide margin and sent it to the president for his signature.21
Johnson had no doubt seduced Dirksen by promising to place his candidates on federal regulatory boards and guaranteeing minimal Democratic opposition to the minority leader’s 1968 reelection bid. But he had also conceded to a major weakening to the open housing bill. Although it forbade discrimination in the rent, sale, or lease of housing by race, creed, national origin, or sex, Title VIII left it to private individuals or advocacy groups to file suit against owners, real estate agents, and others who might discriminate. The burden of proof, expensive and time consuming, would be on the victims.22
EVEN MORE IMPORTANT THAN HOUSING, TO THE PRESIDENT’S MIND, was the pending tax surcharge bill. Perhaps the time was right. “It seems to me,” White House aide Harold “Barefoot” Sanders observed, “that the President’s decision not to run and the assassination of King may have created a climate in Congress for a dramatic new approach to the financial crisis. That new approach should not emphasize appropriations cuts, but, rather, the need for new revenues.”23 Unfortunately, Wilbur Mills, from his chokehold position as chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, seemed totally unmoved by the events in Memphis and the March 31 abdication speech. Joe Califano argued that more was at stake than just the tax increase. “For the past month we have been moving with increased power and ability to get things done,” he wrote LBJ, “as you are doing whatever you do without any ax to grind and only because it is right. This has all resulted from your pulling out of the race. But this remarkable assertion of power in a lame duck status could deteriorate rapidly if Wilbur Mills rolls over us on the tax legislation.”24
By the close of April 1968, LBJ had persuaded liberals in his administration and organized labor that the best that could be gotten from Congress was a tax surcharge bill that would require $5 billion in spending cuts for fiscal year 1969. In conversations at the White House, Johnson told Mills, “If I could appoint you president, I would take Ways and Means and [you could] do what you think about it. . . . My God, I have given all I have got. I have given my life—my political life. . . . I don’t want to see this country go down the drain. . . . And I think I know more about it than you do. I don’t think you see what is happening. . . . And I think that there has got to be a position somewhere in between what you want in the way of a tax bill and what we want.”25 Mills told Johnson that he believed the nation could “get by” with the $5 billion figure.
Then, on May 2, the chair of Ways and Means announced that the president not only would have to agree to a $6 billion cut in his budget but also would have to give up an additional $14 billion in new obligational authority.26 At his news conference on May 3, LBJ came out swinging. “I want to make it perfectly clear to the American people,” he told the assembled reporters, “that I think we are courting danger by this continued procrastination, this continued delay. . . . I proposed a budget. If they [members of Congress] don’t like that budget, then stand up like men and answer the roll call and cut what they think ought to be cut. Then the president will exercise his responsibility of approving it or rejecting it and vetoing it.”27 That night he recalled to Joe Califano Senator Alvin Wirtz’s statement to him some thirty years earlier, that one could tell another man to go to hell, but making him go was another matter. “Well, I just told someone to go to hell,” he chuckled to his domestic policy adviser.28 Over the next six weeks the president called scores of members of Congress, warning liberals that if the tax surcharge were not enacted, runaway inflation would gobble up the monies available to finance programs of social justice, and warning conservatives that the soundness of the dollar and the stability of the international economy depend on passage.29
WHILE LBJ TWISTED CONGRESSIONAL ARMS, MINDS, AND CONSCIENCES in an effort to pass his housing and tax bills, some three thousand “poor people” trekked to the nation’s capital by rail, bus, mule train, and automobile. During the last two weeks in May 1968, they threw up a shantytown made of plywood and canvas huts on the Washington Mall near the Reflecting Pool; they named their encampment “Resurrection City.”
The Poor People’s Campaign had been the brainchild of Martin Luther King. Ghetto uprisings were continuing to whip up a white backlash that promised to make further reform impossible. But the violence was sure to continue if the lives of African Americans living in the nation’s cities did not improve. The 1966 freedom budget—which had called for job creation programs, a guaranteed annual income for poor families, and increased federal spending to eradicate slums, improve schools, and build public works—had died aborning with the conservative resurgence in the 1966 midterm elections. It would have to be revived. The key, King had believed, was to focus on poverty across racial lines, to realize the dream reformers had dreamed since the late nineteenth century: the creation of a political coalition in which blacks, poor whites, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans would seek to transform the nation’s political and economic landscape. To launch the campaign, King had envisioned a Poor People’s March on Washington that would be nonviolent but more radical and disruptive than the orderly marches of Selma and Birmingham. Something more along the lines of the antiwar demonstrations that had threatened to shut down the Pentagon.
In February 1968, King had traveled to Washington to meet with local activists and to gather the resources necessary to support the campaign. Convening a press conference, King announced plans for a Poor People’s March on Washington to dramatize the campaign’s objectives: $30 billion for antipoverty programs, full employment, guaranteed income, and the annual construction of five hundred thousand affordable residences. The SCLC subsequently recruited marshals, who first attended a training workshop in Atlanta in March and then returned home to recruit participants, raise funds, and solicit organizational support. Participants were required to sign an agreement to stick to nonviolence and to obey the marshals.30
Following the riots of 1967, LBJ had authorized the creation of a massive intelligence-gathering network in the nation’s inner cities. Led by the FBI, this web of spies included the Justice Department, CIA, Department of Defense, the intelligence arms of each of the military services, and local law enforcement officials. The goal was to gather information concerning potential ghetto rioters in order to foretell and prevent violent outbreaks before they began. The FBI recruited three thousand inner-city informants in the Ghetto Informant Program (GIP). The forthcoming Poor People’s March provided the first major opportunity for the FBI to test its network. The bureau’s plan, code-named POCAM, was launched on January 4, 1968.31 The administration’s program of spying and spoiling would give a new meaning to the War on Poverty.
King’s April trip to Memphis had been designed both to highlight a sanitation strike and to launch the march on Washington. In mid-March, the Reverend James Lawson, a pioneering civil rights activist and old friend of King’s, had called and urged him to come to Memphis to support the garbage workers’ strike then in progress. Lawson’s Community on the Move for Equality (COME) had stepped forward to convert what began as a wildcat walkout into a full-fledged civil rights battle in which COME backed the workers’ demands for a union, decent working conditions, and a living wage. Memphis city officials fired the striking workers, nearly all of whom were black, en masse, and refused to negotiate. Six thousand marchers, including black high school students, trooped up Beal Street, past the statue of blues great W. C. Handy. When some of the protesters began smashing store windows, organizers attempted to turn the group around. But by that time the police had massed, and they charged the demonstrators, clubs swinging. On March 18, King had addressed a rally of fifteen thousand strike supporters at the huge Masonic Temple in downtown Memphis. Caught up in the tumult, he promised to return later in the month to lead a one-day strike.32 King had flown back to Memphis on April 3 and was murdered on the 4th.
Following King’s assassination, his successor as head of the SCLC, Ralph David Abernathy, took up the gauntlet and assumed leadership of the Poor People’s March. “It isn’t going to be a Sunday-school picnic like the ’63 march on Washington,” said Andrew Young, one of Abernathy’s aides. “Something is going to change or we’ll all be in jail. This is do or die—not just for nonviolence but for the nation.”33 After the Poor People’s Campaign applied for a permit to camp on the Washington Mall,34 White House officials met with Abernathy and an advance party of some sixty people to try to establish ground rules for what promised to be a prolonged and perhaps inflammatory demonstration.35
On April 29, the Committee of 100, the campaign’s steering body, began lobbying members of Congress. On Sunday, May 12, Mother’s Day, Coretta Scott King came to Washington to agitate for an economic Bill of Rights. Five thousand people marched to protest 1967 cuts to Head Start funding and a legislatively mandated freeze on welfare payments; during the debate over the freeze, Senator Russell Long of Louisiana had described mothers on welfare as “brood mares.”36 “I want you to listen very closely and sympathetically to their appeals,” Johnson told his cabinet. “See if there is anything that your departments may have left undone that would help them.”37 From that directive came dozens of proposals, including a summer school program for the nation’s one hundred largest cities and one hundred poorest counties. Selected schools would be kept open “morning, noon, and night, seven days a week, to conduct work-study, athletic, and training programs,” in the words of the scheme’s authors.38
Upon hearing of the planned “occupation” of the mall, law-and-order advocates took up their cudgels. Senator Long called for the censure of members of Congress whom he accused of “bending the knee” to the campaign. “When that bunch of marchers comes here,” the Louisianan declared, “they can just burn the whole place down and we can just move the capital to some place where they will enforce the law.”39
Throughout May, nine large caravans of poor people set out for Washington. On Tuesday, May 21, participants set up a shantytown on the National Mall—Resurrection City. In return for a permit to camp on the most famous strip of grass in the United States, campaign leaders agreed to limit the population to three thousand and the duration to thirty-six days.40 SCLC leaders led small groups of residents on marches and attempts to meet with members of Congress, excursions that were mostly uneventful. The inhabitants of Resurrection City never conducted the large-scale civil disobedience operations in Washington that King had envisioned. There were reports of discipline problems, and Abernathy was criticized for living in a hotel. Continuous rain turned the tent city into a sea of mud.41
“I’m sitting here waiting for the delegation from the Poor People’s March to appear,” Orville Freeman wrote in his diary on May 21. “What a comedy of uncertainty and errors this performance is. They’ve got this town standing on its head. The problem of course is one of uncertainty. In the first place they can’t control their own people, although they are doing much better than I would have dreamed possible. They already have sent home by bus some gangs from various cities and groups that make trouble. This morning an off-shoot group went to the hill and when Mills wouldn’t see them began to picket and sing in a restricted area.”42 On the anniversary of Malcolm X’s birthday, Black Nationalists marched, distributed leaflets, and forced black merchants to close for the day, but true to King’s philosophy, the Poor People’s March remained peaceful.43
LBJ’s immediate concern was to see that the inevitable friction between the capital police and the residents of Resurrection City did not get out of hand. He told journalist Ken Crawford that he had been in Washington during the World War I veterans’ Bonus March and did not want a repetition of that sorry episode.44 But pressure was mounting on the administration to act. The conservative senior senator from Arkansas, John McClellan, had opened hearings on urban unrest and its causes. His staff managed to round up some gang members from Chicago who testified that they received OEO money that they used to stock weapons and plan riot and revolution.45 On Thursday, June 20, police fired several canisters of tear gas into the encampment—reportedly after members of the Milwaukee NAACP provoked them by throwing rocks. By this time, life in the camp had become increasingly chaotic. Reports circulated of vandalism perpetrated by escaped mental patients. As of late Friday the population of Resurrection City had dwindled to five hundred. “The poor whites from the Appalachian area left today in buses and the Mexican-Americans have indicated that they do not intend to go to the encampment,” Joe Califano reported to the president. Still, the police would have to tread lightly “since some of the people in Resurrection City have guns and some mean and mentally deficient individuals will be there.”46 When the Campaign’s National Park Service permit expired on Sunday the 23rd, assorted members of the House called for immediate removal. The next day a thousand police officers arrived and arrested those who would not leave voluntarily, a total of 288, including Reverend Abernathy.47
The summer of 1968 saw the African American civil rights movement in disarray. Ideologically and politically splintered, its leadership had lost its way. Martin Luther King’s power had stemmed from his success in holding up the nation’s Judeo-Christen ethic before its collective face and demanding that it adhere to its principles. That, coupled with nonviolent disobedience, proved dramatically effective in the South, less so in the North. In the wake of the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, King had suffered from a bout of mission overreach. Astride his new international stage and confronted with the dynamics of a civil rights movement whose focus had shifted to the North and Midwest, the SCLC chief had increasingly embraced the New Left critique of capitalism and the military-industrial complex. In attacking the war in Vietnam and calling for systemic changes in the economic and political life of the country, King played into the hands of law-and-order advocates who were working to link the civil rights and antiwar movements with the forcers of international communism. The Poor People’s Campaign, another attempt to mobilize the nation’s poor across ethnic and demographic lines, was doomed to failure, undone by the long-standing racism and job insecurity of the white working class and, to a degree, by the prosperity generated by the Great Society. Black power had little to offer in terms of overcoming chronic poverty. Its rejection of integration and emphasis on cultural nationalism did not help either. The African American community lacked the capital, infrastructure, and training for economic self-sufficiency. NAACP director William Rutherford, Roy Wilkins, and others of the civil rights old guard recognized this and spoke out, but all they were left with was New Deal–Great Society liberalism, and that was under attack on virtually all fronts.
Abernathy, out on bail, addressed fifty thousand people at the Lincoln Memorial and blasted the administration and Congress, calling the Great Society’s record on social justice and civil rights a series of “broken promises.” For Johnson, this was the last straw. He complained to Orville Freeman that “the very people we are seeking to help in Medicare and education and welfare and Food Stamps are protesting louder and louder and giving no recognition or allowance for what’s been done. Our efforts seem to have resulted only in anarchy. . . . The women no longer bother to get married, they just keep breeding. The men go their way and the women get relief—why should they work?”48 Why didn’t people pay attention to the positives? The number of individuals living below the poverty line had dropped by eight million. Overall spending for health, education, and welfare had increased from $23 billion to $46.7 billion during the Johnson presidency.49 On June 19 the director of the budget reported that summer jobs would increase by 285,000 over 1967 through the efforts of the National Alliance of Businessmen.50 LBJ remarked to presidential aide Tom Johnson that he had learned from reading Alexis de Tocqueville that the leaders of revolutions often become their victims.51
Johnson claimed to see Bobby Kennedy’s fine hand behind the Poor People’s Campaign. And, in fact, in the wake of the King assassination, RFK had met publicly with Abernathy, who subsequently declared to reporters, “In it, white America does have someone who cares.” Indeed, as several of RFK’s aides later admitted, the King assassination had given their man’s candidacy new life. Bobby had jumped into the presidential race after McCarthy’s strong showing in the New Hampshire primary. If the election was to be about LBJ, Bobby would be the perfect challenger, heir to the programs and vision that the Texan was allegedly betraying. But then Bobby’s great foil had withdrawn. Then, with King’s assassination, RFK could pose as champion of the Negro, the Hispanic, and the downtrodden in general.52
Bobby had found Abe Ribicoff’s hearings on neglect of the cities most useful in building his reputation as a modern-day Populist. He found another in Pennsylvania Democrat Joseph Clark’s Senate hearings on hunger, which began on March 13, 1968. The liberal Clark, one of Kennedy’s few good friends in the Senate, was running for reelection in 1968. His subcommittee had scheduled field hearings across the nation in the spring of 1967, and the first place on its itinerary was the Mississippi Delta. Kennedy was in attendance as locals told stories of intense suffering from inadequate diets; one spokesperson estimated that 95 percent of the children in the Delta were malnourished. Upon his return to New York, RFK exclaimed melodramatically to an aide, “You don’t know what I saw! I have done nothing in my life! Everything I have done was a waste!”53
The Clark subcommittee reconvened and summoned Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman. Senator Jacob Javits (D-NY) accused his department of ignoring the problem of malnutrition in America. When Freeman angrily rejected the charge, RFK waved a photo of a wide-eyed black girl with a swollen abdomen and ulcerated skin. “While we sit here arguing about whether hunger exists or not,” he proclaimed, “children are going to die!”54 The problem of hunger in rural areas of the South and Appalachia was real and acute, but the administration was getting whipsawed. “Both he [RFK] and Clark refused to say what we should do, refused to consider the need to replace the local authorities if we’re really going to get anything done,” Freeman complained to his diary. “Yet, they make their demands and now additional hearings are being held by the Committee. . . . Jamie Whitten [Democratic congressman from Mississippi] and Governor [Paul] Johnson keep insisting that there really aren’t hungry people and anyone who really wants food can get it through relief, work, or some way.”55
Then, on May 21, as the Poor People’s Campaign was picking up steam, CBS aired a heart-wrenching documentary entitled Hunger in America, depicting black, female-headed, inner-city families and white Appalachian and southern families, all of them with malnourished infants and toddlers, some of them suffering from tuberculosis and influenza. Abernathy and other campaign leaders had made hunger a major issue in their demand for a guaranteed income. Southern Democrats such as Senator Ernest F. “Fritz” Hollings of South Carolina had begun seizing on the issue as they confronted the political problem of appeasing newly enfranchised blacks without further accelerating the white backlash. There was no threat to the white power structure in feeding the hungry.56 The Clark committee charged that the administration was “permitting” fourteen million Americans to go hungry every day. Freeman denounced the CBS report as a pack of lies and demanded equal time.57 The network responded by re-airing its program.
A task force led by Joe Califano and including Freeman put forward a proposal “to guarantee to every American an adequate diet for the first time in the history of our country.” It would increase funding for the Food Stamp program from $225 million to $445 million and expand other programs for needy school children by $56 million and for preschool children by $32 million.58 The president was initially unreceptive. Congress was scheduled to vote on the surtax bill within a week, and the administration had just finished cutting $6 billion from the federal budget. In the short run, all he could think of was that the hunger program was just another attempt by liberals to ambush him. “He told me,” Freeman wrote in his diary, “that most of this was pure emotion rather than hungry people. Joe Califano told me later that the President doesn’t really believe there are hungry people and has on occasion said this is a good year, the rains have been good, anyone can grow a garden.”59 True to form, however, Johnson relented and approved a request for $250 million to $300 million in additional funds to feed the hungry.60
LBJ and his aides were, of course, afraid that the Poor People’s Campaign, Hunger in America, violence on college campuses, and RFK’s machinations would create a white middle-and working-class reaction that would make passage of the fair housing bill and the tax surcharge impossible. “It’s a real challenge as to how we handle this and keep them [protesters, demonstrators, marchers] active and participating and making progress without permitting them to become destructive of the functioning of Government and our society and without creating the resentments and apprehensions that will result in a middle class white backlash,” Freeman observed.61 But things did hold together. Congress passed the housing bill and in the last week in June enacted a 10 percent tax surcharge; LBJ had to agree in principle to a $6 billion spending reduction for the coming fiscal year, but he intended not to take the initiative, suspecting that when it came down to it, Congress would not have the will to make specific program reductions. He was proved right. Congress was unable to cut even $4 billion in pending expenditures. Fiscal year 1969 ended with a $3.2 billion surplus and with most of the Great Society programs intact.62
FROM THE EVENING OF MARCH 31, WHEN HE ANNOUNCED HE WAS not going to run, LBJ’s overriding objective was to keep himself and the presidency above politics so that he could preserve as much of the Great Society as possible and secure what he believed would be an honorable peace in Vietnam, two goals he saw as inextricably intertwined. During a congressional leadership breakfast on April 2, several of those present asked whether they could talk politics briefly. Johnson refused. He said that he was “tired of begging anyone for anything. I had a partnership with Jack Kennedy and when he died I felt it was my duty to look after the family and stockholders and employees of my partner. . . . [Now], the divisions are so deep within the party that I could not reconcile them.”63 Later, he promised both Bobby Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey that he would stay out of the campaign.
Through Joe Califano, LBJ let his cabinet officers and agency heads know that he did not want them participating in the presidential race either. If they felt the need, they should resign, like Postmaster General Larry O’Brien, who had departed to work for Bobby. Though he knew that Freeman, Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz, newly named HEW secretary Wilbur Cohen, and others wanted to attend Humphrey’s announcement luncheon on April 27, he would not let them. Freeman, especially, was incensed. He was a fellow Minnesotan and would undoubtedly be asked to participate in and even manage the Humphrey campaign, he told the president. Johnson would not budge.64
Of course, LBJ did not want Richard Nixon to be president. He detested the man, believing him to be devoid of principle, the ultimate political opportunist. But he also thought that Nixon would be hardest to beat. Johnson felt fairly confident that he could defeat the Californian, but he was not sure either Humphrey or Bobby Kennedy could. As a result, for six weeks in the spring of 1968 the president did everything in his power to persuade Nelson Rockefeller to run for president and touted him to Republicans who had voted for LBJ in 1964. The two men had long expressed mutual regard for each other. In 1962 Rockefeller had drawn the ire of Catholics and conservative Protestants when he divorced his first wife, Mary Todhunter Clark, and then a year later married Margaretta (Happy) Murphy. Johnson told friends that he felt “Nelson took a terrible beating in the press for marrying Happy” and repeatedly invited the couple to White House dinners to “put a stamp of approval on that marriage.”65 In April, LBJ and Lady Bird hosted a private dinner at the White House during which the first couple worked to persuade Rockefeller and his wife that the country needed them.66
By May, Bobby Kennedy’s well-financed campaign was in high gear. That month he defeated a favorite son candidate who was running as a Humphrey stand-in in the Indiana primary. Instead of focusing on organizing and fund-raising, the Humphrey campaign wallowed in self-pity.67 When Eugene McCarthy triumphed in Oregon, he and Kennedy prepared for a showdown in California, a state whose large electoral vote made it crucial to any presidential campaign. McCarthy’s young supporters stuck by him, but he was no match for the handsome, charismatic RFK. A bland speaker who seemed to lecture his audiences, the Minnesota senator sounded like “the dean of the finest English department in the land,” as Norman Mailer put it.68 The grinning Bobby, hair flopping, hand perpetually extended, blitzed the state and called in all of his family’s political debts. Shrieking young women vied with large contingents of Mexican farm workers for a glimpse of the candidate. On June 4 Kennedy won with 46 percent of the vote to McCarthy’s 42 percent. He was well on his way to the nomination.
At midnight Bobby collected Ethel and headed downstairs to address campaign workers in the ballroom of the Embassy Hotel in Los Angeles. Exhausted by the grueling primary campaign, he had spent the morning at Malibu bodysurfing with six of his ten children. He appeared fresh and exhilarated, and he addressed his worshipful audience with characteristic humor, self-effacement, and inspiration. At the last minute his aides had agreed to a press conference following the speech. Led by the NFL football great Roosevelt Grier and Olympic decathlon champion Rafer Johnson, Kennedy took a shortcut through the hotel pantry. Waiting for him there was a short, dark Palestinian American named Sirhan Sirhan. As Bobby approached, Sirhan pulled a .22-caliber pistol and shot him twice, once in the head and once in the armpit. As bodyguards struggled to subdue the assailant, the heir-apparent to the Kennedy dynasty lay motionless, his eyes open, staring blankly.69 Finally, an ambulance arrived and whisked him off to the hospital, where he hovered between life and death.
At 3:31 A.M. on the morning of June 5, Walt Rostow wakened LBJ to give him the news. “Too horrible for words,” Johnson responded. It was too horrible for words on many levels. If RFK should die, as his doctors privately predicted he would, the nation would be treated to yet another violent death and was bound to sink once again into a slew of despondency and self-questioning. Whatever momentum toward peace and reconciliation that had begun with the March 31 speech would be lost. And LBJ’s hopes of being remembered as one of the nation’s most effective and dedicated presidents would evaporate. The bookends to his administration would be the two Kennedy assassinations, he being reduced to a cipher and they elevated in the public imagination to the level of political demigods embodying the youth, vigor, and idealism of the nation.
The president had scheduled a ten o’clock broadcast to the nation, and he worked feverishly with his aides to come up with the proper words:
A young leader of uncommon energy and dedication, who has served his country tirelessly and well, and whose voice and example have touched millions throughout the entire world, has been senselessly and horribly stricken. . . . We pray to God that He will spare Robert Kennedy. . . . It would be wrong, it would be self-deceptive, to ignore the connection between . . . lawlessness and hatred and this act of violence. It would be just as wrong, and just as self-deceptive, to conclude from this act that our country itself is sick, that it has lost its balance, that it has lost its sense of direction, even its common decency. Two hundred million Americans did not strike down Robert Kennedy last night any more than they struck down President John F. Kennedy in 1963 or Dr. Martin Luther King.70
At 5:01 A.M. the next morning, LBJ was informed that Senator Kennedy had died. “It seems impossible,” Orville Freeman wrote in his diary. “That strange, moody, intense, combative, competitive but really gentle and sensitive human being is gone like the brother before him.”71
Once again Johnson moved to take advantage of a fallen hero’s martyrdom. He had been pressing Congress for gun control legislation since John Kennedy’s death, but to no avail. On the day of Bobby’s funeral on June 8, the White House taped and aired a gun control message. Two days later, LBJ met with the members of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. He pointed out that one in every five presidents since 1865 had been assassinated, and one in three had been the target of attempted assassinations. The crescendo of shootings associated with attempts to suppress the civil rights movement and with urban rioting had been made immeasurably worse by the ready availability of firearms. He asked the blue ribbon panel to draft a sweeping justification for gun control. Shortly thereafter, the president called on Congress to ban all mail-order and out-of-state sales of handguns, rifles, and shotguns; halt the sale of firearms to minors; and require the national registration of all guns. After a brutal behind-the-scenes battle, the administration’s bill was defeated. Congress did present the White House with a gun control measure, but it said nothing about registration and licensing. LBJ signed the measure but lashed out at the National Rifle Association. “The voices that blocked these safeguards,” he declared, “were the voices of a powerful lobby, a gun lobby, that has prevailed for the moment in an election year. . . . We have been through a great deal of anguish these last few months and these last few years—too much anguish to forget so quickly.”72
Congress reacted to RFK’s death not with effective gun control legislation but with a revised Safe Streets Act that posed a clear threat to the Fourth Amendment prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures. In the wake of the riots in Newark and Detroit, LBJ, then still a potential presidential candidate, had been whipsawed between the War on Poverty and the War on Crime. Presidential aide Harry McPherson had urged the president to take a strong stand on the issue of future riots. “Make no speeches about Constitutional inhibition,” urged McPherson, a moderate whose hardline advice thus carried extra weight. “Back up law and order in a hurry; be seen to be more concerned with securing the peace than with protracted legal discussions or political advantage.”73 In his 1968 State of the Union address, LBJ strongly denounced criminal violence and once again called for a Safe Streets Act—the only sections of the speech to draw sustained applause.74
On February 7, in a special message to Congress, Johnson proposed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act.75 As originally conceived, the administration bill would have provided federal grants to police departments for equipment, training, and pilot programs. The preferred method was through categorical grants to municipalities with specific priorities rather than through block grants to states with vague federal mandates. In mid-February, the House approved a bill opting for block grants and adding $25 million specifically for riot control. The Senate Judiciary Committee followed the House’s lead. Conservatives favored block grants to state planning agencies that would be responsive to governors and local authorities. Most offensive to the administration were Titles II and III of the bill. A direct assault on the Supreme Court’s Miranda decision, Title II held that in federal cases, a confession was admissible so long as the judge deemed it voluntary. It also stated that a delay in pressing charges, whether caused by holding the suspect incommunicado or questioning him at length, was not in itself grounds for disallowing a confession. It took away the Supreme Court’s authority to review federal and state criminal cases in which a voluntary confession was ruled admissible. The preeminent champion of Title II, Senator Sam Ervin (D-NC), wrote a colleague: “Those who are in favor of self-confessed murderers and rapists going free should vote against Title II.”76
Title II was bad, but Title III “may do more to turn the country into a police state than any law we have ever enacted,” an aide to Joe Califano advised him.77 A federal assistant attorney general, state district attorney, or local district attorney with the appropriate judicial approval could plant a bug or tap a phone if the crime or potential crime in question was punishable by a prison sentence of at least one year.78 Despite his authorization of bugging at the 1964 Democratic National Convention and his approval of the FBI’s wiretapping of Martin Luther King, Johnson was by this time a fanatical opponent of electronic eavesdropping. “It barely resembles the Safe Streets Bill we sent the Congress with such high hopes and ardent pleas,” Deputy Attorney General Warren Christopher observed to the president. “The bill is far more a reflection of the fears, frustration, and politics of the times than an intelligent carefully tailored measure.”79
The administration’s only real success came in the area of gun control. Title IV, which the White House supported, imposed strict limits on the purchase of handguns and marked the liberal shift from social programs to gun control as the primary response to violent crime and urban unrest. On April 4, Senator Thomas Dodd (D-CT) attempted to amend the Omnibus Crime Bill to empower the federal government to regulate the sale, distribution, and importation of all firearms. His proposal initially failed, but then word of King’s assassination arrived, and Washington erupted in rioting the next day. Polls taken at the close of the month indicated that the public supported more restrictive gun control by a margin of 71 percent to 23 percent. The day RFK died the House voted by a vote of 368 to 17 to accept the Senate bill, which included Dodd’s proposed amendment.80
Because of Titles II and III, LBJ was tempted to veto the Safe Streets Act, but even Attorney General Clark advised against it. “From a practical standpoint,” he told Johnson, “the result might be a worse bill. . . . If the Congress acted again it might . . . limit the jurisdiction and habeas corpus powers of the federal courts. This would be disastrous.”81 The president clenched his teeth, held his tongue, and signed the bill into law. Five years later, Congress would be forced to investigate abusive wiretapping by the FBI, and state surveillance programs such as Mississippi’s would become national scandals.82
AS LYNDON JOHNSON WATCHED THE CONSERVATIVE COALITION ONCE again assert itself, he moved to erect a judicial barrier around his Great Society programs. Like FDR in 1937, LBJ in 1968 was worried that a conservative court, sure to emerge if a Republican such as Richard Nixon won the presidency, would issue decisions dismantling Medicare, the various civil rights measures passed during his administration, and federal aid to education. On June 13, Chief Justice Earl Warren informed the president that he intended to retire “effective at your pleasure.” Warren admired Johnson and hated Nixon. If he could give LBJ a chance to appoint a new chief justice, he believed, it would be worth an early retirement.83 Johnson had long since decided that if Warren stepped down, he would nominate Associate Justice Abe Fortas, his longtime friend, confidant, and personal lawyer, to be chief justice.
From the outset he knew that it would be a tough fight. Fortas’s credentials as a liberal jurist had made him persona non grata among conservatives. While a student at Yale and editor of the Yale Law Journal, Fortas was deeply influenced by legal realism, the school’s dominant approach to jurisprudence. Yale was the center of a rebellion against the traditional case method, against “conceptualists” who insisted that law could be reduced to a few fundamental rules and principles derived from the study of individual cases. Conceptualists believed that a judge’s decisions should not reflect his or her own particular views, the specific circumstances of the case, or the greater good. Instead of “making” law, the ideal magistrate would discover concepts, rules, and principles that had been revealed in previous decisions and apply them. The conceptualists were descendants of Thomas Jefferson and the first Republican Party’s “strict constructionist” approach to constitutional interpretation.
Legal realism was part of a “revolt against formalism” that swept the intellectual world during the first half of the twentieth century. Philosophy, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, history, economics, and sociology questioned all received truths and abstractions, moving away from the study of structure to a concern with operations. Legal realism traced its historical roots back to Hamilton and the Federalist Party’s call for a broad interpretation of the Constitution, paving the way for an activist federal government with the power to promote the nation’s economic well-being.
Harvard was the bastion of conceptualism and thus the enemy. “Harvard people tended to look upon us as unsound maniacs, and we in turn looked upon them as sort of antiques whose time had passed by,” Fortas observed.84 As a teacher, practitioner, and justice, he had worked to perpetuate Justice Brandeis’s philosophy that jurists must adjudicate not only according to precedent but also in response to social and economic conditions that changed over time. He was an activist who, in interpreting the law, would not defer to Congress as often as most justices. In 1950 he had defended Owen Lattimore against the red-baiting assaults of Senator Joe McCarthy. Nor was he inclined to defer to the states. Fortas was an original New Dealer who defended Roosevelt’s decision to use the federal government to achieve a degree of economic justice. In Gideon v. Wainwright, which established the right of an indigent to publicly funded defense counsel, he had defended Clarence Gideon on appeal.85 Fortas had proved a staunch advocate for laws furthering the Second Reconstruction, and he was a known intimate of Lyndon Johnson, either of which alone was sufficient to raise the hackles of conservatives.
By the time the White House submitted Fortas’s nomination to the Senate to become chief justice, legal realism had become the order of the day. The Supreme Court, presided over by Chief Justice Earl Warren since 1953, was unquestionably an activist tribunal, an agency in service to the liberalism of the 1960s.86 Warren, generally supported by Justices Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, and William Brennan, engineered nothing less than a constitutional revolution in his application of the Bill of Rights to the states; in his generous interpretation of specific constitutional provisions of criminal justice safeguards for the individual; in the broad application and interpretation of both the letter and the spirit of the Civil War amendments; in rendering any executive or legislative classification by race or nationality constitutionally suspect; in the liberalization of the right to vote; and in an expansive definition of freedom of expression.
Among the Warren Court’s most famous and controversial decisions were the Brown decision outlawing segregated schools; Miranda, which protected criminal defendants against self-incrimination; Engle v. Vitale, which outlawed the recitation of state-prepared and prescribed prayers in public schools; and Reynolds v. Sims, in which the court ruled that both houses of state legislatures must be apportioned on a one-person, one-vote basis. In the latter decision, the chief justice declared that “legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interest.”87 Unlike Franklin Roosevelt, who saw his National Industrial Recovery Act and Agricultural Adjustment Act declared unconstitutional, with the Warren Court ascendant, LBJ did not have to worry that the Supreme Court would strike down major pieces of Great Society legislation. Installing Fortas as chief justice, he believed, would extend that protection for the foreseeable future
By the mid-1960s the Warren Court had become the bête noir of the conservative coalition. It was perceived to be a principal instrumentality of the welfare state that LBJ was building. Law-and-order advocates were appalled at the protections extended to defendants in criminal cases. Under Warren and his acolyte Fortas, they believed, the High Court had coddled criminals and encouraged the ghetto riots and violent antiwar protests that were threatening to destroy America. All of this was pleasing in the collective eyes of Moscow and Beijing, they declared.
Republicans were not about to stand idly by and see Johnson have his way with the high court. They resented the fact that the president had hedged his bets. In his response to Warren’s letter of resignation, LBJ had declared, “With your agreement, I will accept your decision to retire effective at such time as a successor is qualified.”88 If the Fortas nomination were to fail, LBJ wanted Warren still on the court. Yet the presidential election was only five months away. Dirksen and other GOP stalwarts believed that Nixon had an excellent chance of winning and that the victor ought to have the right to nominate Warren’s successor.89
Freshman senator Robert Griffin (R-MI) took it upon himself to lead the opposition. As a matter of principle, he would never support a Supreme Court nominee made by a lame-duck president, he announced. If necessary, he would lead a filibuster. Democrats Robert Byrd, Russell Long, and Sam Ervin let it be known that they would vote no. John McClellan of Arkansas told Jim Eastland that he was looking forward to having “that SOB formally submitted to the Senate” so that he could fight his nomination. Eastland, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told Mike Manatos, White House congressional liaison, that he “had never seen so much feeling against a man as against Fortas.”90 Eastland himself was under tremendous pressure from his white constituents in Mississippi. The state’s racist governor, John Bell Williams, was then blaming the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee for permitting confirmation of justices who had struck down various “freedom of choice” school plans. Indeed, Williams was threatening to run for the Senate himself in the next election.91
From July 16 to 19, Fortas testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the first nominee for chief justice and the first sitting justice to do so. He successfully turned aside questions concerning his liberal voting record, citing separation of powers and the need to respect the court’s independence. But he did agree to address himself to charges that he had had an inappropriately close relationship with President Johnson while he was on the court. He denied that he had violated the separation of powers or given advice improperly to LBJ. Yet Fortas had been a regular at White House meetings on everything from Vietnam to labor disputes. He had helped draft Johnson’s 1966 State of the Union address. All of this he denied. Asked whether he had written the president’s statement on sending troops into Detroit during the 1967 riots, he said no. It was another lie. “Fortas’ testimony was so misleading and deceptive,” Joe Califano later wrote, “that those of us who were aware of his relationship with Johnson winced with each news report.”92
LBJ was still hopeful. With August approaching, Congress would have to adjourn for the presidential nominating conventions. Just as the Senate Judiciary Committee appeared to be winding down its hearings, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, now a Republican, raised a new issue. Both as private counsel and as a Supreme Court justice, Fortas had given aid and comfort to pornographers. Thurmond cited especially a case in which the New York courts had found that the film Flaming Creatures had violated that state’s obscenity laws. Fortas had stood alone among his colleagues in voting to reverse the conviction.93 Dirksen began to waver. Sam Ervin declared that he could not vote on Fortas’s nomination because no vacancy had occurred. Warren should either resign or not resign. Thurmond promised to show the Judiciary Committee every salacious film on which Fortas had ruled. Behind the scenes, Nixon pressured Dirksen to rise above his friendship with LBJ and help block the Fortas nomination.94
The White House fought back. Spokesmen pointed out that never in the history of the Supreme Court nominations had one failed due to filibuster. Johnson, who by this time had come to regard the fight over Fortas as a personal battle between him and his reactionary enemies, lashed his subordinates to renewed effort. “We’re a bunch of dupes down here,” he told Califano and White House aide Larry Temple. “They’ve got all the wisdom . . . they’re smarter than we are. We’re a bunch of ignorant, immature kids who don’t know anything about this. . . . We’ve got to do something.”95 He had one of his aides draft two papers, one depicting Fortas as a liberal activist and the other as a strict constructionist. When the aide suggested that the White House might be criticized for sending out contradictory signals, LBJ reminded him of the story of the young man who was interviewing for a teaching job in a rural Texas district. The climax of the interview came when the redneck chairman of the school board asked the extremely stressed candidate, “Do you teach that the world is flat or do you teach that the world is round?” The young man hesitated and then replied, “I can teach it either way.”96 The object of the exercise, LBJ reminded his staffer, was to have Fortas named chief justice.
After the August recess, shortly before the committee reconvened on September 13, the White House learned that Griffin had come into possession of more damning evidence. Paul Porter, Fortas’s former law partner, had raised $30,000 from past and present clients to pay Fortas to teach a series of seminars at American University Law School. Some of the contributors could expect to be parties to cases that would reach the high court. Fortas had already been paid $15,000. At the time, that was a significant sum of money, greatly increasing Fortas’s income through an arrangement that risked creating conflicts of interest. Though no actual conflicts were claimed, it was a far more damaging scandal that any pornography decision or White House conversation. The Fortas nomination was dead.97 Thus did LBJ botch his effort to leave the Supreme Court in liberal hands. Richard Nixon would make three appointments to the high court.
WAS THERE ANY HOPE FOR A DEMOCRATIC WHITE HOUSE AFTER Johnson’s abdication and RFK’s assassination, pundits asked? If the void were to be filled it would have to be by Hubert Humphrey. Johnson wanted his vice president to win, but he doubted whether Humphrey could or even should be president. Above all, LBJ believed, his liberal protégé would have to sit tight on Vietnam. Meaningful negotiations to end American involvement were crucial to Humphrey’s successful candidacy. In order to ensure negotiations that would give Vietnamization a chance, and a settlement that would not enrage conservatives, the North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong first would have to be beaten bloody and then convinced that the best deal they could get from their enemy would be sooner rather than later. If Humphrey in his quest to attract Kennedy-McCarthy supporters prematurely called for de-escalation, a bombing halt, and even unilateral withdrawal, all would be lost—on the political battlefield at home and on the military battlefield in Vietnam. In the White House’s view, Humphrey’s best bet was for LBJ’s plan to work: for there to be a period of all-out war in Vietnam followed by meaningful negotiations that would give the nation a glimpse of peace with honor and thus vindicate the foreign policy with which Johnson had so long been identified. But the vice president would have to hold his water.
Shortly after LBJ’s abdication speech, negotiations between US and North Vietnamese representatives had begun in Paris. (At the secret urging of the Nixon camp, the South Vietnamese government was boycotting the talks.) Throughout June and July, LBJ labored to persuade the leading presidential candidates not to take positions on the war and the conversations in Paris that would tie his hands. As he told Richard Nixon—by then the frontrunner for the GOP nomination—at the White House on June 26, if he were the Democratic nominee and Nixon were president, he would issue a statement to the effect that he (Johnson) was not responsible for the country until he became president. He had similar conversations with Rockefeller, Humphrey, and Wallace. But not McCarthy; the other candidate from Minnesota was hopeless, Johnson believed. The contenders duly agreed to do everything possible not to interfere or narrow the president’s options.
But because he was vice president, Humphrey’s silence would link him irrevocably to Johnson’s policies. There were dangers for Nixon as well. Privately and publicly, he had indicated support for the war in Vietnam, for the assumptions that lay behind it, and for the notion of military victory. His criticism had been that the administration had been too timid, had placed too many restraints on the military. If Nixon continued this hawkish support for LBJ and his policies, and nothing changed, all would be well; but what if sometime during the fall and before the election, the administration initiated a bombing halt, and the talks in Paris began to move toward a settlement? Nixon would be left hanging, twisting in the wind, to anticipate a phrase.
IF 1968 HAD NOT ALREADY PROVEN ITSELF TO BE A DISASTROUS YEAR, through two assassinations, more urban rioting, and continued agony in Vietnam, events at the close of August were about to remove any doubt of it. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which met from August 26 through August 29, would be one of the most memorable in American history. The meeting itself was an angry, bitter affair in which the delegates quickly polarized into antiwar and pro-war factions. McCarthy managed to attract some of Kennedy’s delegates, and he consistently led Humphrey in the polls. Nonetheless, the vice president easily captured the nomination on the first ballot. Most professional politicians distrusted McCarthy and had heaped ridicule on his “Children’s Crusade.” Without winning one state primary, Humphrey had worked behind the scenes to line up almost fifteen hundred delegates. He had also made it clear that he supported “Johnson’s war.” “Nothing would bring the real peaceniks back to our side,” confided an aide to a reporter, “unless Hubert urinated on a portrait of Lyndon Johnson in Times Square before television—and then they’d say to him, why didn’t you do it before.”98 As his running mate, the Happy Warrior chose the environmentalist and moderately liberal Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine.
On the floor of the convention, black delegates from the Northeast sneered at white southerners, calling them racists, while antiwar delegates and administration supporters traded insults. Mayor Daley’s beefy security men were everywhere. As the nation watched, CBS reporter Dan Rather was knocked to the floor while covering the ejection of a regular Georgia delegate. Watching from his anchor booth, Walter Cronkite was incensed. “I think we’ve got a bunch of thugs down there,” he said, his voice quivering.99
Unbeknownst to the media, the delegates, and the American public, the chief challenger to Hubert Humphrey’s nomination at Chicago was Lyndon Johnson. In June, presidential aide Tom Johnson had reported to LBJ on a conversation he had had with Richard Moose, a former member of the National Security Council staff: “Dick said he is of the opinion that the President should be prepared to accept the nomination of the Democratic Party. He said he had talked with many young people . . . who are convinced that the President is the only man who can keep the country on the move after January. He doesn’t think Humphrey can beat Nixon, and unless the President runs, Nixon will be President.”100 LBJ was hearing the same thing from other contacts.
From the outset, Johnson labored to ensure that nothing transpired at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago without his knowledge or approval. His chief lieutenant in this effort was John Criswell, the treasurer of the Democratic National Committee and chairman of the convention. Criswell, a longtime friend of the Johnsons, headed a team that included Marvin Watson, presidential aides Jim Jones and Larry Temple, and Arthur Krim, another LBJ friend and financial supporter, among others.101 According to a plan developed by the Criswell team, Daley, in behalf of the Arrangements Committee, would issue a secret, open-ended invitation to the President to attend. No mention would be made in the program of LBJ’s visit. Johnson had expressed concern about being caught up in and embarrassed by antiwar demonstrations that were sure to occur. This would not be a problem, Criswell reported to the White House. “On Tuesday morning—we could make firm recommendations and we would not even need to know the decision until take-off from the Ranch. We would be flexible enough with the program so that it could be broken at whatever point for the President.”102 Ideally, LBJ would fly to Chicago and address the convention after the showing of a film tribute to the Great Society narrated by Gregory Peck. He would then attend a gala birthday celebration, replete with fireworks, on Michigan Avenue.
Shortly after he arrived in Chicago to attend the convention, Humphrey had learned that Johnson was exploring the possibility of a draft. Working through Jones, the president had John Connally survey southern governors to see how an LBJ candidacy would go down with them.103 He also instructed Arthur Krim to have a quick poll run to see how he would stack up against Nixon. On Sunday, LBJ’s lieutenants relayed bad news: “Nixon 42; LBJ 34; Wallace, 17; undecided 7.” Connally reported that he had found absolutely no support in the South at this stage for an LBJ candidacy. Finally, according to Krim, Daley was balking: “He said, ‘the President has got to announce or do something to show that he wants it. Otherwise there’s nothing I can do.’” At this point, Johnson told all concerned to go full bore for Humphrey.104
As the Democratic delegates jousted in Chicago’s cavernous amphitheater, a wrenching spectacle was unfolding on the streets outside. An army of antiwar protestors, anti-establishment crusaders, and counterculture figures had descended on the city. Tom Hayden told reporters, “We are coming to Chicago to vomit on the ‘politics of joy,’” a reference to Humphrey’s campaign slogan. “We are coming . . . to expose the secret decisions, upset the night club orgies, and face the Democratic Party with its illegitimacy and criminality.”105 The nihilistic Yippies spread rumors that they were going to put LSD in Chicago’s water supply and use female members to seduce Humphrey delegates.
Mayor Daley ordered an army of twelve thousand police officers to cordon off and control the demonstrators. He persuaded the governor to station some six thousand Illinois National Guard members armed with rifles, flame throwers, grenade launchers, and bazookas outside the city as backup. He also ordered his plainclothes police to infiltrate protest organizations and prevailed on the federal government to dispatch a thousand agents to Chicago. For every six demonstrators active during the convention, there was one undercover agent. The Chicago Tribune published a series of revelations concerning “plans by Communists and left-wing agitators to disrupt the city.” When some of the Yippies and SDS members began hurling bags of urine and screaming obscenities, the police went berserk. For three days, a national television audience watched as Daley’s men beat not only the demonstrators but some innocent bystanders as well. As journalist Nicholas von Hoffman noted, the police had “taken off their badges, their name plates, even the unit patches on their shoulders to become a mob of identical, unidentifiable club swingers.”106
Meanwhile, the Republicans had gathered in Miami Beach in early August and nominated Nixon on the first ballot. To be his running mate, he selected Spiro T. Agnew, the Maryland governor who had attracted national attention by his explicit, public denunciation of urban rioting in which he declared all involved to be criminals who should be incarcerated. In his acceptance speech, Nixon proclaimed that a “new voice” was being heard across America, not “the voices of hatred, the voices of dissension, the voices of riot and revolution.”107 He represented, he said, those who did not break the law, “people who pay their taxes and go to work, people who send their children to school, who go to their churches, people who are not haters, people who love this country.”108 The party platform was no surprise. It called for a national war against crime, reform of the welfare system to encourage a maximum number of poor to work, and a stronger national defense. The GOP program did not, however, call for abolition of Medicare, an end to federal aid to education, or repeal of the various civil rights acts. Although Republicans called for less government regulation of the private sector, they did not denounce the clean air, clean water, wilderness, or consumer protection acts. There was no call to restore national origin quotas to American immigration policy. On Vietnam, the platform promised simultaneously to “de-Americanize the war” and not to accept a “camouflaged surrender.”
Nixon’s advisers were perhaps more concerned about the candidacy of George Wallace than that of Hubert Humphrey. Following a brief run at the Democratic nomination, Wallace had founded the American Independent Party. Appealing to the worst in the American people, he blamed urban rioting on black power advocates and their “socialist” white allies. He none too subtly hinted that integration ought to remain a personal choice. He blamed the federal government and especially the Supreme Court for encouraging racial unrest and for coddling criminals and tolerating welfare cheats. His campaign would not be limited to the South, he assured his supporters: “the people of Cleveland and Chicago and Gary and St. Louis will be so god-damned sick and tired of Federal interference in their local schools, they’ll be ready to vote for Wallace.” To the delight of large, raucous crowds, he blamed the nation’s problems on “briefcase totin’ bureaucrats, ivory-tower guideline writers . . . and pointy-headed professors” who did not know how to “park a bicycle straight.”109 Selecting retired Air Force General Curtis E. LeMay, the former commander of America’s nuclear strike force, to be his running mate, the Alabama governor promised total victory in Vietnam.
Wallace’s candidacy constituted the cutting edge of the law-and-order movement. He embodied the hopes and fears of whites on the lower rungs of the middle class, a former core constituency for Democrats. His coalition comprised Goldwater voters in the South and union members in the North. The southern bloc was made up of rural white Protestants. The northern wing consisted of urban ethnic Catholics. Almost three-quarters of Wallace supporters wanted to halt the civil rights movement, and almost 70 percent expressed anxiety about urban riots and street crime. To those whites most proximate to urban lawlessness, the Alabama governor offered a more aggressive form of law and order than Nixon—rollback versus containment, in the words of one historian. Wallace countenanced the calculated use of massive force against rioters and protesters. If as president he were confronted by a riot, he would, he vowed, halt it by shooting arsonists and looters first, and asking questions later. There was also the usual rhetoric about permissiveness, welfare dependency, and rewarding the rioters.110 Ridiculed by black revolutionaries and white liberals alike, Wallace had turned on the establishment with a vengeance. Indeed, for him and his followers, the establishment was the liberal establishment. Wallace affirmed his supporters’ belief in the existence of a conspiracy by the media, the federal government, blacks, and communists to take what was theirs, especially their sense of worth and patriotism. Political prognosticators watched in amazement as the Alabama governor’s ratings in the polls climbed from 9 percent in May 1968 to 16 percent in June and, in September, just after the Democratic Convention, to 21 percent.
In the ensuing campaign, Nixon managed to seize the political middle, with Wallace on his right and antiwar liberals on his left, while subtly appealing to the same fears that Wallace was exploiting. The “new Nixon” appeared relaxed and self-confident, posing successfully as a harmonizer, an antidote to the angry and divided Democrats, and a conservative alternative to the race-baiting Wallace.
Nevertheless, Humphrey was a skilled, experienced campaigner. On September 30, the “Happy Warrior” established some distance between himself and President Johnson. “I would stop the bombing of North Vietnam as an acceptable risk for peace,” he told a Salt Lake City audience, “because I believe it could lead to success in the negotiations and thereby shorten the war.”111
Johnson was furious. Orville Freeman saw the president shortly after Humphrey’s Vietnam speech. “He called him a coward. He charged him with having been with this Administration, this was his family . . . and now he’s trying to back off from his own family.” LBJ insisted that the vice president was undermining his last-ditch effort to arrange a truce in Vietnam, to wit, bloody North Vietnam once again and then summon them to the negotiating table. But then at the close of his tirade, he told Freeman, “‘Now don’t tell Humphrey anything about this. After all he’s the candidate, its hard going, I know he’s discouraged . . . let’s see if we can’t help him.”112
As October progressed, some of Wallace’s labor supporters began to return to the Democratic fold, as did antiwar liberals who were more afraid of Nixon and “the bombsy twins,” as Humphrey dubbed Wallace and LeMay, than they were repelled by the Johnson foreign policy. When on November 1 Johnson announced a total halt in the bombing of North Vietnam, Humphrey drew virtually abreast of Nixon in the polls. Going on the attack, the Democratic nominee challenged his opponent to a debate. When the Republicans refused, Humphrey dubbed Nixon “Richard the Chickenhearted.” A week before the election, McCarthy endorsed his party’s selection: “I’m voting for Humphrey, and I think you should suffer with me,” he told the American people.113
When the final tallies were counted on election Tuesday, however, Richard Nixon had won a narrow victory. The Republican ticket polled 31.7 million votes, 43.4 percent of the total, while Humphrey and Muskie rolled up 31.2 million, and 41.7 percent of the whole. Wallace trailed far behind with 9.9 million, which amounted to 13.5 percent of the electorate. The Independent Party candidate carried 5 states (all southern), while Humphrey ran ahead in 13 and Nixon carried 32. In a sense, the election was close, but in another sense it amounted, as journalist Theodore White observed, to a “negative landslide” of gigantic proportions.
Since 1965 the Democrats had squandered a plurality of more than sixteen million votes. The solid consensus that Johnson had stitched together had been ripped apart by Vietnam, inflation, urban rioting, and the white backlash. The Democrats experienced defections from nearly every component of the New Deal coalition—labor, the South, urban ethnics, liberal intellectuals, and farmers. Humphrey won a mere 38 percent of the white vote; only massive majorities among blacks and Jews kept him in contention. Even the reliable black vote had fallen 11 percent from 1964. “What a year,” declared Time in one of its patented essays, “one tragic, surprising and perplexing thing after another.”114