Fourteen
RIGHTS AND WRONGS
NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV, STOUT AND SWAGGERING BENEATH a wide-brimmed white hat, looked like a circus barker; Richard Nixon was dressed like an undertaker. “KNOCK THEM DEAD IN RUSSIA,” Nixon’s television adviser had cabled him. “THIS IS MOST IMPORTANT TRIP OF YOUR LIFE.”1
Nixon, forty-six, went to Moscow in the summer of 1959 eyeing a presidential bid as the unsteady leader of a faltering party. The Republicans had been badly drubbed in the 1958 midterm elections, losing forty-eight seats in the House and thirteen in the Senate, and Democrats had won both Senate seats in the new state of Alaska. Nixon, keen to take advantage of the spotlight of a televised meeting with the Soviet premier, wanted to deliver to Americans shaken by Sputnik a technological triumph, or, at the very least, a little machine-made political magic.
Nixon had traveled to Moscow to open an exhibition. The United States and the USSR, unable to launch rockets without risking mutually assured destruction, had agreed to stage a proxy battle of the merits of capitalism and communism. At the Soviet Exhibition of Science, Technology, and Culture, held at the New York Coliseum, the Russians put a space satellite on display alongside a gallery that housed a model Soviet apartment, its kitchen outfitted with a samovar. Its counterpart, the American National Exhibition, mounted inside a ten-acre pavilion in Moscow’s Sokolniki Park, answered with electric coffeepots, offering visitors a tour of American consumer goods, especially home appliances of the sort that manufacturers pledged would spare women the drudgery of housework. One American family man, exactly capturing the spirit of the thing, wrote Eisenhower that he had a better idea: “Why don’t you let a typical American family make up an exhibit?” He said he’d be happy to bring to Moscow everything anyone in the Soviet Union needed to understand “typical, living, honest to goodness, truthful and democratic loving Americans”: striped toothpaste, a Dairy Queen cone, frozen pink lemonade, a GI insurance policy, his set of golf clubs, the family’s 1959 Ford station wagon, and “Two plump daughters, ages 10 and 11 complete with hula hoops, Brownie and Girl Scout outfits, and a Monopoly set and polio shots.”2 The president did not take him up on the offer.
In Moscow, a grinning, dark-suited Nixon cut the ribbon to open the American exhibit alongside beaming, stripe-tied Khrushchev. Inside, they sparred over the rewards of capitalism and communism while touring galleries stocked with vacuum cleaners and dishwashers, robots and cake mixes, garbage disposals and frozen dinners, a showcase meant to display the American way of life—abundance, convenience, and choice. The bottles of Pepsi were free.
Stopping at a makeshift television stage, the two men fell into an argument, Khrushchev toying with Nixon like a bear playing with a fish.
“You must not be afraid of ideas,” the vice president scolded the premier.
Khrushchev laughed. “The time has passed when ideas scared us.” Nixon pointed out that color television and the video recording of their meeting—American inventions—would lead to great advantages in communication, and that even Khrushchev might learn something from American ingenuity. “Because after all,” Nixon said with a stiff smile, “you don’t know everything.”
“You know absolutely nothing about communism,” Khrushchev shot back. “Nothing except fear of it.”
Awkwardly, they wandered the exhibit hall.
“I want to show you this kitchen,” Nixon said, excitedly ushering the premier to a canary-yellow, appliance-filled room and calling his attention to a washing machine and a television.
“Do your people also have a machine that opens their mouth and chews for them?” Khrushchev prodded.
Nixon dodged and parried. Still, he stood his ground.
The press dubbed it the Kitchen Debate and declared it a draw, but American photographers captured Nixon standing tall and fighting back, poking a finger in Khrushchev’s chest, and the visit was a triumph.3 For the United States, it was, in any event, a triumphant time: at the height of the Cold War, more Americans were earning more, and buying more, than ever before.
The Affluent Society, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith called it in 1958. “The fundamental political problems of the industrial revolution have been solved,” the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset wrote confidently in Political Man in 1960. For most of human history, the overwhelming majority of people have suffered from want. Industrialism had promised to end that suffering but turned out to produce vast fortunes only for the few, crushing the many under its wheels. Progressives and New Dealers had tried to lift those wheels. They’d legislated all manner of remedies and forms of mitigation, from a graduated federal income tax to maximum-hour and minimum-wage laws, from Social Security to the G.I. Bill. Since 1940, inequalities of wealth and income had been dwindling.4 Even while checked by the Constitution, the growing power of the state, exercised most dramatically in huge fiscal expenditures, especially military, and funded by a progressive income tax, made possible unprecedented economic growth and a wide distribution of goods and opportunities. By 1960, two out of three Americans owned their own homes. They filled those homes with machines: dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, electric mixers and blenders, refrigerators and freezers, record players, radios, and televisions, the engines of their own abundance. So high a standard of living, so widely distributed, had never been seen before. “Nearly all, throughout history, have been very poor,” Galbraith wrote. “The exception, almost insignificant in the whole span of human existence, has been the last few generations in the comparatively small corner of the world populated by Europeans. Here, and especially in the United States, there has been great and quite unprecedented affluence.”5
The economy a juggernaut, the triumph of liberalism and of Keynesian economics seemed, to many American intellectuals, all but complete. “The remarkable capacity of the United States economy in 1960,” one economic historian concluded, “represents the crossing of a great divide in the history of humanity.”6 Not only had the problems of industrialism been solved, many social scientists believed, but so had the problems of mass democracy, with the emergence of a broad and moderate political consensus, as seen on television. Notwithstanding the ongoing struggle over civil rights, Americans fundamentally agreed with one another about their system of government, and most also agreed on an underlying theory of politics. In The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, sociologist Daniel Bell argued that socialism and communism had bloomed and withered; ideology, itself, was over. “For ideology, which once was a road to action, has come to be a dead end.” Political debates lay ahead, tinkering around the edges, repairs to the appliance of government, and certainly, in Asia and Africa, new ideologies had emerged. But in the West, Bell insisted, the big ideas of the Left had been exhausted, replaced by a consensus: “the acceptance of a Welfare State; the desirability of decentralized power; a system of mixed economy and of political pluralism.”7
Some younger Americans, Left and Right, found Bell’s argument ridiculous. “It’s like an old man proclaiming the end of sex,” said one. “Because he doesn’t feel it anymore, he thinks it has disappeared.”8 Others suggested that Bell had failed to notice a rising tide of conservatism.9 But Bell hadn’t ignored conservatism; he’d discounted it. In 1955, he’d edited a collection of essays called The New American Right. Joseph McCarthy, to Bell’s contributors, was a man without ideas. “The puzzling thing about McCarthy,” Dwight Macdonald wrote, “was that he had no ideology.” As for the writings of economists like Friedrich Hayek, Bell dismissed them as nonsense. “Few serious conservatives,” wrote Bell, “believe that the Welfare State is the ‘road to serfdom.’”10
Considerable empirical evidence in fact supported Bell’s theory of consensus. At the University of Michigan, political scientists had been conducting interviews with voters every four years since 1948. They’d asked voters questions: “Would you say that either one of the parties is more conservative or more liberal than the other?” Between 1948 and 1960, many voters could not answer that one. Others answered badly. The researchers had asked a follow-up: “What do people have in mind when they say that the Republicans (Democrats) are more conservative (liberal) than the Democrats (Republicans)?” Voters found this kind of question difficult to answer, too. The bottom 37 percent of respondents “could supply no meaning for the liberal-conservative distinction” and only the top 17 percent gave what the interviewers deemed “best answers.” Everyone else fell somewhere in between, but the researchers were pretty sure that a whole bunch of them were just guessing.11 Ideologically minded politicians and intellectuals talked about liberalism and conservatism, for sure, but to ordinary voters these terms had virtually no meaning.
Elaborating on these findings, which were published in 1960 in a landmark study called The American Voter, the political scientist Philip Converse produced an influential essay, “The Nature of Mass Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” in which he divided the American electorate into political elites and the mass public. Political elites are exceptionally well informed, follow politics closely, and adhere to a set of political beliefs so coherent—or, as Converse termed, so “constrained”—as to constitute an ideology. But the mass public has only a scant knowledge of politics, resulting in a very loose and unconstrained attachment to any single set of political beliefs. Converse argued that the Michigan voter interviews revealed that political elites know “what-goes-with-what” (laissez-faire with free enterprise, for example) and “what parties stand for” (Democrats favor labor; Republicans, business), but much of the mass public does not. Political elites vote in a more partisan fashion than the mass public: the more a voter knows about politics, the more likely he is to vote in an ideologically consistent way, not just following a party but following a set of constraints dictated by a political ideology. What makes a voter a moderate, Converse concluded, is not knowing very much about politics. In the 1950s, there were a lot of moderates.12
What no one could quite see, in 1960, was the gathering strength of two developments that would shape American politics for the next half century. Between 1968 and 1972, both economic inequality and political polarization, which had been declining for decades, began to rise. The fundamental problems of the Industrial Revolution had not, alas, been solved. Nor had the problems of mass democracy. Even as social scientists were announcing the end of ideology, a new age of ideology was beginning.
By 1974, when Richard Nixon announced his resignation from the presidency, sitting before blue drapes in the Oval Office, fifteen years after his debate with Nikita Khrushchev in the canary-yellow kitchen in Moscow, liberalism had begun its long decline, and conservatism its long ascent. And the country was on the way to becoming nearly as divided, and as unequal, as it had been before the Civil War.
I.
GALBRAITH WASN’T HAPPY about the affluent society. He found it complacent and smug, and too willing to accept poverty as inevitable. The prosperous society, he thought, was a purposeless one. He called for higher taxes to build better hospitals and schools and roads to repair the public sector. Americans shrugged, and turned on their televisions. But beneath the cheerful gurgle of the percolating electric coffeepot could be heard a muffled thrum of despair. It began with a fear of the perils of prosperity: laziness, tastelessness, and purposelessness. “We’ve grown unbelievably prosperous and we maunder along in a stupor of fat,” the historian Eric Goldman complained. One journalist called the 1950s “the age of the slob.” It was also the age of the snob. Dwight Macdonald memorably lamented the rise of packed, boxed, and price-tagged, middlebrow mass culture—“masscult,” he dubbed it, as if it were a soft drink—especially in the form of trashy paperback novels and ticky-tacky TV shows produced for the sprawling and suburban middle class by corporations, arbitrated not by taste but by sales and ratings. Art is the creation of individuals in communities, Macdonald argued; middlebrow culture is a product manufactured and packaged for the masses. “Masscult is bad in a new way,” Macdonald wrote. “It doesn’t even have the theoretical possibility of being good.”13
After Nixon came back from Moscow, the Eisenhower administration announced a new resolve: to discover a national purpose. “The year 1960 was a time when Americans stopped taking their national purpose for granted and started doing something about it,” Life reported. Eisenhower appointed ten eminent men—politicians and editors, business and labor leaders, and the presidents of universities and charities—to a Commission on National Goals, and asked the commission to identify a set of ten-year objectives for the United States. A striking measure of the artificial nature of the era’s liberal consensus: every member of the commission was a white man over the age of forty-five.14 Yet the goals the commission would set would be steered, above all, by black college students, who, beginning in 1960, and without a blue-ribbon committee of eminent men, made civil rights the nation’s purpose.
On Monday, February 1, 1960, two days before Eisenhower named the members of his Commission on National Goals, four freshmen from North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, North Carolina, refused to give up their seats at a lunch counter in a segregated diner inside a Woolworth’s store. Theirs wasn’t the first sit-in—over the past three years alone, there’d been sit-ins in sixteen cities—but it was the first to capture national attention. That night, those four students called NAACP lawyer Floyd McKissick, who helped spread the word. They went back to Woolworth’s the next day, with friends; more came the day after that. They sat in shifts, at vinyl-and-chrome stools. They set up a command center and kept track of plans being laid in Durham and Raleigh to stage sit-ins of solidarity. By the end of the week, more than four hundred students were involved in the Greensboro sit-in alone. The movement spread to Tennessee, and then across the South, to Georgia, West Virginia, Texas, and Arkansas. It reached forty more cities in March. Within months, fifty thousand students had joined. Hundreds were arrested in Nashville. In South Carolina, police attacked the demonstrators with teargas and fire hoses, arresting nearly four hundred. Even students who’d doubted the philosophy of nonviolent protest began to see its power, as photographers captured images of thuggish whites pouring milk and squeezing ketchup onto the heads of college students sitting quietly at a lunch counter, or of angry, armored policemen beating them with clubs or dragging them down sidewalks. The students’ protest even earned the admiration of some hardened pro-segregation southern newspaper editors, including the editor of the Richmond News Leader:
Here were the colored students, in coats, white shirts, ties, and one of them was reading Goethe and one was taking notes from a biology text. And here, on the sidewalk outside, was a gang of white boys come to heckle, a ragtail rabble, slack-jawed, black-jacketed, grinning fit to kill, and some of them, God save the mark, were waving the proud and honored flag of the Southern States in the last war fought by gentlemen. Eheu! it gives one pause.
Ella Baker, acting director of the SCLC, arranged to invite the student leaders to an organizing meeting on Easter weekend, in April. Baker, born in Virginia in 1903, had been a longtime organizer for the NAACP, as a field secretary beginning in 1938 and as a director of branches across the South in the 1940s, working on, among many other projects, the campaign to win equal pay for black teachers. She’d agreed to join the SCLC in 1958, to head an Atlanta-based voter registration drive known as the Crusade for Citizenship, but she’d been frustrated by southern preachers’ relative inattention to voting rights, and she found Martin Luther King Jr. “too self-centered and cautious.” In 1960, when SCLC tried to convince Baker to persuade the students to join as a junior chapter, Baker, in a stirring speech, refused, and instead urged the students to start their own organization. “She didn’t say, ‘Don’t let Martin Luther King tell you what to do,’” Julian Bond later recalled, “but you got the real feeling that that’s what she meant.” Distancing themselves from both the NAACP and the SCLC, which many students found altogether too conservative, they founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). They raised an army; their weapon was nonviolent direct action. Baker left the SCLC to join them.15
Later in 1960, when Eisenhower’s ten distinguished commissioners delivered their report, they wrote that “Discrimination on the basis of race must be recognized as morally wrong, economically wasteful, and in many respects dangerous”; called for federal action to support voting rights; urged the denial of federal funds to employers who discriminate on the basis of race; and insisted upon the urgency of ending segregation in education.16 Although the final report wasn’t published until after the November election, its key findings were released earlier, and more than one observer remarked that the report, while prepared for the Republican White House, aligned very well with the campaign promises made by Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy. “If there were not abundant evidence Senator Kennedy has been fully occupied with other things lately,” said CBS’s Howard K. Smith, “one would swear he wrote the document.”17
Before that fall, the presidential prospects for Kennedy, the dashing Irish Catholic from Boston, had not seemed especially good. Liberals distrusted him because of his silence on McCarthyism, and few had much confidence in him. Kennedy, forty-three, was both young and inexperienced. Lyndon Johnson called him “the boy.”
Kennedy prevailed, in part, because he was the first packaged, market-tested president, liberalism for mass consumption. Weighing the possible party nominees and its platform, the Democratic National Committee, uncertain how to handle the question of civil rights, turned to a new field, called “data science,” a term coined in 1960, to predict the consequences of different approaches to the issue by undertaking the computational simulation of elections. To that end, the DNC in 1959 hired Simulmatics Corporation, a company founded by Ithiel de Sola Pool, a political scientist from MIT. Pool and his team collected old punch cards from the archives of George Gallup and pollster Elmo Roper, the raw data from more than sixty polls conducted during the campaigns of 1952, 1954, 1956, 1958, and 1960, and fed them into a UNIVAC. Using high-speed computation and “a simulation model developed out of historical data,” Pool aimed to both advance and accelerate the measurement of public opinion and the forecasting of elections. “This kind of research could not have been conducted ten years ago,” Pool and his colleagues reported.
Pool sorted voters into 480 possible types, explaining, “A single voter type might be ‘Eastern, metropolitan, lower-income, white, Catholic, female Democrats.’ Another might be, ‘Border state, rural, upper-income, white, Protestant, male Independents.’” He sorted issues into fifty-two clusters: “Most of these were political issues, such as foreign aid, attitudes toward the United Nations, and McCarthyism,” he explained. “Other so-called ‘issue clusters’ included such familiar indicators of public opinion as ‘Which party is better suited for people like you?’”18
Simulmatics’s work, which continued through the 1960s, marked the advent of a new industry whose implications for American democracy alarmed at least one of his colleagues, the political scientist and novelist Eugene Burdick. Famous for the 1958 best seller he coauthored with William Lederer, The Ugly American, and the 1962 novel Fail-Safe (written with Harvey Wheeler and made into a film directed by Sidney Lumet), Burdick published a novel called The 480, about the work done by Simulmatics, a fictional exposé of what he described as “a benign underworld in American politics”:
It is not the underworld of cigar-chewing pot-bellied officials who mysteriously run “the machine.” Such men are still around, but their power is waning. They are becoming obsolete though they have not yet learned that fact. The new underworld is made up of innocent and well-intentioned people who work with slide rules and calculating machines and computers which can retain an almost infinite number of bits of information as well as sort, categorize, and reproduce this information at the press of a button. Most of these people are highly educated, many of them are Ph.D.s, and none that I have met have malignant political designs on the American public. They may, however, radically reconstruct the American political system, build a new politics, and even modify revered and venerable American institutions—facts of which they are blissfully innocent. They are technicians and artists; all of them want, desperately, to be scientists.19
The premise of Simulmatics’s work, as Burdick saw all too clearly, was that, if voters didn’t profess ideologies, if they had no idea of the meaning of the words “liberal” and “conservative,” they could nevertheless be sorted into ideological piles, based on their identities—race, ethnicity, hometown, religion, age, and income. Simulmatics’s first commission, completed just before the Democratic National Convention, in the summer of 1960, was to conduct a study on “the Negro vote in the North” (so few black people were able to vote in the South that there was no point in simulating their votes, Pool concluded). Pool reported discovering that, between 1954 and 1956, “A small but significant shift to the Republicans occurred among Northern Negroes, which cost the Democrats about 1 per cent of the total votes in 8 key states.” The DNC, undoubtedly influenced by the viscerally powerful student sit-ins, absorbed Simulmatics’s report, and decided to add civil rights paragraphs to the party’s platform at its convention in Los Angeles in July.20
Civil rights had not been among Kennedy’s priorities as a member of the Senate. But the protests and the predictions altered his course. Needing to win both black votes in the North and white votes in the South, Kennedy decided to run as a civil rights candidate, to woo those northerners, and chose Lyndon Johnson for his running mate, hoping that the Texan could handle the southerners.
The DNC found Simulmatics’s initial report sufficiently illuminating that, after the convention, it commissioned Pool to prepare three more reports: on Kennedy’s image, on Nixon’s image, and on foreign policy as a campaign issue. Simulmatics also ran simulations on different ways Kennedy might talk about his Catholicism. He ought to employ “frankness and directness rather than avoidance,” Simulmatics advised.21 Kennedy therefore gave a frank and direct speech in Houston on September 12, 1960: “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute—where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote.”22
Meanwhile, Nixon, without much help from Eisenhower, who snubbed him, won the Republican nomination. Campaigns, Inc., ran his campaign in California. “The great need is to go on the offensive—and to attack,” according to the firm’s Plan of Campaign, which advised Nixon to forget “the liberal Democrats who wouldn’t vote for Nixon if he received the joint personal endorsement of Jesus Christ and Karl Marx via a séance with Eleanor Roosevelt.” In the spirit of going on the offensive, Nixon agreed to debate Kennedy on television, in a series of exchanges. “I would like to propose that we transform our circus-atmosphere presidential campaign into a great debate conducted in full view of all the people,” Adlai Stevenson had urged in 1959. But it was Kennedy—a man one notable columnist called “Stevenson with balls”—who made it happen.23
On September 26, 1960, Nixon and Kennedy met in a bare CBS television studio in Chicago, without an audience; the event was broadcast live by CBS, NBC, and ABC. By now, nearly nine in ten American households had a television set. Nixon was sick; he’d been in the hospital for twelve days. He was in pain. And he was unprepared. A skilled debater who’d enjoyed nothing but political gain from his appearances on television, and, most lately, from the Kitchen Debate, he’d barely been briefed for his appearance with Kennedy.24
The rules were the result of strenuous negotiating. The very scheduling required Congress to temporarily suspend an FCC regulation that required giving equal time to all presidential candidates (there were hundreds). Much negotiation involved seemingly little things. Nixon wanted no reaction shots; he wanted viewers to see only the fellow who was talking, not the other guy. But Kennedy wanted them, and Kennedy prevailed, with this concession: he agreed to Nixon’s stipulation that neither man be shown wiping the sweat from his face. Then there were bigger things. Each candidate made an eight-minute opening statement and a three-minute closing statement. The networks wanted Nixon and Kennedy to question each other; both men refused and instead insisted on taking questions from a panel of reporters, one from each network, a format that is more generally known as a parallel press conference. ABC refused to call what happened that night a “debate,” billing it instead as a “joint appearance.” Everyone else called it a debate, sixty-six million Americans watched Nixon scowl, and the misnomer stuck.25
On October 19, two days before the last of the candidates’ four scheduled debates, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Atlanta during a lunch counter sit-in. He’d waited a long time before joining the sit-ins. But now he was in, and he was sentenced to four months of hard labor. Kennedy called King’s wife, Coretta Scott King. His brother Robert intervened, and got King out of jail. Nixon, who had a much stronger record on civil rights than Kennedy, did nothing. He later came to believe that this lost him the election, one of the closest elections in American history, Kennedy winning by a hairsbreadth, 34,221,000 to 34,108, 000.
Nixon came to believe that the result had been rigged, and he may have been right; there appears to have been Democratic voter fraud in Illinois and Texas. Thirteen-year-old Young Republican Hillary Rodham volunteered to look for evidence of fraud in Chicago. “We won, but they stole it from us,” Nixon said.26
Nixon blamed Democrats. He blamed black voters. And, above all, he blamed the press.
II.
THE YOUNGEST MAN ever elected president, John F. Kennedy replaced the oldest man ever to hold the office. With his hand resting on a Bible carried across the ocean by his Irish immigrant ancestors, Kennedy looked more like a Hollywood movie star than like any man who had ever occupied the Oval Office. Wearing no overcoat, his every exhale visible in the freezing cold, he proclaimed his inauguration, on January 21, 1961, to mark the beginning of a new era: “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage.”27
Kennedy had taken that torch from Eisenhower. Three days before the inauguration, Eisenhower had delivered a farewell address in which he issued a dire warning about the U.S.-Soviet arms race. “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” he said. “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.” Kennedy, in his inaugural address, echoed his predecessor: “Neither can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort from our present course—both sides overburdened by the cost of modern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly atom, yet both racing to alter that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind’s final war.”28
One of the first acts of his administration was the announcement of the Peace Corps, in March 1961. But during a presidency that began with hope and ended with tragedy, Kennedy set the nation on a path not to peace but to war. In the world-stage struggle between communism and capitalism, Kennedy was determined to win over third world countries that remained, even if only nominally, uncommitted.29
In 1951, eyeing a run for the Senate, Kennedy and his brother Bobby had made a seven-week tour of Asia and the Middle East, stopping in Vietnam. Long colonized by the French and occupied by the Japanese beginning in 1940, Vietnam, led by the Communist revolutionary Ho Chi Minh—the man who’d tried to meet with Wilson at the Paris Peace conference in 1919—had declared its independence at the end of the Second World War, but France had launched a campaign to restore colonial rule. The United States viewed the spread of communism in Southeast Asia with alarm, chiefly for ideological reasons, but geopolitical and economic factors played a role, too. China and the USSR were plainly in the best position to exert influence in Southeast Asia, with its population of 170 million, but every Southeast Asian country that became part of the communist bloc threatened a loss of trade for Japan, which had already lost its trading relationship with China, its largest trading partner. The United States, attempting to exert its own influence in the region, redirected its foreign aid from Europe to Asia and Africa. Between 1949 and 1952, three-quarters of American aid went to Europe; between 1953 and 1957, three-quarters went to the third world; by 1962, nine-tenths did. When Indochina began attempting to overthrow French colonial rule, the United States supported France. The United States had been much admired after the war because of FDR’s staunch opposition to colonialism; its aid to France led to growing anti-Americanism. France lost the war in 1954. A treaty divided independent Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel; Ho Chi Minh and the Communist Party came to power in the North and U.S.-backed Catholic nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem in the South. Beginning in 1955, South Vietnam became the site of the largest state-building experiment in the world, training a police force and civil servants, building bridges, roads, and hospitals, under the advice of the Michigan State University Vietnam Advisory Group.30
In 1958, Kennedy was among a group of senators who handed out to every colleague a copy of Burdick and Lederer’s The Ugly American, which told the story of American diplomats and military men stationed in the fictional Asian country of Sarkhan, lost in a mire of misunderstanding and failure. In a factual epilogue, Lederer and Burdick reported “a rising tide of anti-Americanism” around the world arguing that the United States could hardly hope to wield political influence when, for one thing, American ambassadors to Asia did not speak the language. “In the whole of the Arabic world—nine nations—only two ambassadors have language qualifications. In Japan, Korea, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and elsewhere, our ambassadors must speak and be spoken to through interpreters.”31
Notwithstanding Burdick and Lederer’s caution, the U.S. government escalated its involvement when, by the late 1950s, a communist insurgency had begun in the South. Many people in Vietnam viewed the 1,500 American researchers and advisers in South Vietnam as an early signal that the United States hoped to place Vietnam under its own colonial rule, even though, by 1960, the American military presence consisted of only 685 American troops.32
Kennedy understood Vietnam through the lens of modernization schemes endorsed by intellectuals and above all by MIT’s Walt Rostow, whose Stages of Economic Growth (1960) helped convince Kennedy to commit more resources to Vietnam. Rostow’s MIT friend and colleague Ithiel de Sola Pool, having helped get Kennedy elected, turned to the project of using the tools of Simulmatics to help modernize South Vietnam. Convinced that, with enough data, a computer could simulate an entire social and political system, Pool would eventually earn a $24 million contract from ARPA for a multiyear research project in Vietnam.33 “Modernizing” South Vietnam meant building roads and airstrips. But guaranteeing the security of those roads and airstrips required sending and training soldiers, because the South Vietnamese were engaged in a war with North Vietnam. By the end of 1963, after Ngo Dinh Diem was murdered in a U.S.-sanctioned coup only three weeks before Kennedy was assassinated, 16,000 American troops were stationed in Vietnam. Eventually, winning the war became the mission.34
Meanwhile, Kennedy’s administration came close to deploying a nuclear weapon in a nearly catastrophic confrontation with Cuba. Eisenhower’s administration had developed a plan by which the United States would support an invasion of Cuba by forces opposed to Fidel Castro. Kennedy approved the plan, but in April 1961, Castro’s army destroyed the forces that came ashore at the Bay of Pigs. The following summer, American U2s flying over Cuba detected ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States. They’d been sent by Khrushchev, the latest move in the worldwide Cold War game of chess. On October 22, 1962, in a televised address, Kennedy revealed the existence of the missiles and argued for action. “The 1930s taught us a clear lesson,” he said, “aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war.” The navy would quarantine Cuba. “It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” Two days later, sixteen of nineteen Soviet ships headed for the American naval blockade turned back. The Soviet premier then sent the White House two entirely different messages: one promising that it would withdraw its missiles from Cuba if the United States would end the blockade; the other saying something sterner. Urged by his advisers to ignore the second message, Kennedy responded to the first message. Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles.35
As ever, Cold War confrontations abroad formed the backdrop for civil rights battles at home. To test the U.S. government’s guarantee of desegregation in interstate transit, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) sent thirteen trained volunteers, seven blacks and six whites—the Freedom Riders—to ride two buses into and across the Deep South. The riders were mostly students, like John Lewis, a theology student, who, although determined to finish his education, explained that “at this time, human dignity is the most important thing in my life.” They left Washington, DC, on May 4. Two days later, thirty-five-year-old Robert Kennedy, the president’s brother, gave his first public address as attorney general, at the University of Georgia, throwing down a gauntlet to segregationists. “We will move. . . . You may ask, will we enforce the Civil Rights statutes. The answer is: ‘Yes, we will.’”36
That promise was soon challenged. Eight days later, in Anniston, Alabama, a white mob attacked the Greyhound bus on which one group of the Freedom Riders had been riding, shattering the windows, slashing the tires, and, finally, burning it. “Let’s burn them alive,” the mob cried. The riders barely escaped with their lives. A Klan posse was waiting for the second bus when it arrived at a Trailways station in Birmingham. Robert Kennedy ordered that the riders, badly beaten, be evacuated. But CORE decided to send in more riders—students from Nashville. Birmingham police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor had his troops meet them at the bus station and put them in jail before they could board the bus—there they were held, without having been charged—while the State of Alabama dared the federal government to act.
“As you know, the situation is getting worse in Alabama,” the attorney general reported to the president. He convinced the president to call the governor of Alabama, Democrat John Patterson, who’d supported JFK’s campaign in 1960. But Patterson, in a shocking act of defiance, refused to take the call. Before he’d become governor, Patterson, as the state’s attorney general, had sought to block the NAACP from doing business; in 1958, he’d won the governor’s office with the support of the KKK. Robert Kennedy sent an envoy to Montgomery to meet with the governor. “There’s nobody in the whole country that’s got the spine to stick up to the goddamned niggers except me,” Patterson said to the man from the U.S. Justice Department. Told that if the state would not protect the riders, the president would send in federal troops, the governor reluctantly agreed to provide a police escort for the bus on its trip from Birmingham to Montgomery. But when the bus reached the station in Montgomery, another mob was waiting. John Lewis, the first off the bus, began speaking to a crowd of reporters and photographers, only to pause. “It doesn’t look right,” he whispered to another rider. Vigilantes hidden in the station emerged and began pummeling the press and setting upon the riders, attacking them with pipes, slugging them with fists, braining them with their own suitcases. When the badly beaten and bandaged Freedom Riders and 1,500 blacks met at the First Baptist Church, next to the Alabama State Capitol, to decide what to do next, 3,000 whites surrounded the church, eventually to be dispersed by the Alabama National Guard. The Freedom Riders decided to keep on, and rode all summer long.37
Even as 400 Freedom Riders were arrested in Mississippi, and schoolchildren across the South were beaten at the doors of elementary schools, CORE and SNCC and King’s Southern Christian Leadership Council continued to press for integration, pursuing a strategy of nonviolence, but they had to answer, more and more, to activists who favored separation and were willing to use force. Elijah Muhammad, the founder and prophet of the Nation of Islam, a Muslim movement begun in Detroit in the 1930s, had called for a black state. His most eloquent disciple, Malcolm X, had been criticizing King since the mid-1950s. He soon gained a new audience.
Malcolm Little, who’d left a juvenile home in Michigan in 1941 to move in with his half-sister in Boston, had been arrested for armed robbery in 1945, when he was twenty. During his six years in prison, he converted to Islam, studied Greek and Latin, and learned how to debate. “Once my feet got wet,” he said, “I was gone on debating.”38 Paroled in 1952, he’d gotten a department store job in Detroit and become one of Elijah Muhammad’s most talented and devoted followers. Lecturing in Detroit in 1957, he’d drawn crowds 4,000 strong, and, disobeying a Nation of Islam directive not to talk about electoral politics (or even to register to vote), he’d asked, “What would the role and the position of the Negro be if he had a full voting voice?” He’d also drawn the attention of the press, having been featured in The Hate That Hate Produced, a five-part 1959 documentary narrated by CBS News’s Mike Wallace and reported by the African American television journalist Louis Lomax. (Appalled by the documentary, which he considered delusional to the point of inciting hysteria, Malcolm X compared it to Orson Welles’s 1938 adaptation of The War of the Worlds.) In the early 1960s, in a series of college-sponsored debates, Malcolm X had taken on integrationists. In 1961, as the Nation of Islam’s national spokesman, he debated Bayard Rustin at Howard University and James Farmer, the head of CORE, at Cornell. Farmer, who had spent forty days in jail during the Freedom Ride campaign, insisted on the importance of nonviolent struggle. But Malcolm X had little use for SNCC, CORE, and least of all, SCLC. “Anybody can sit,” he liked to say. “It takes a man to stand.”39
He first reached a national audience in 1962, after police in Los Angeles gunned down seven black Muslims, members of Mosque No. 27—a mosque Malcolm X had organized in the 1950s—who were loading dry cleaning into a car. Ronald X Stokes, a Korean war veteran, was shot with both hands raised. Malcolm X, speaking at a rally, framed the killings in racial, not religious, terms. “It’s not a Muslim fight,” he said. “It’s a black man’s fight.”40
Many in the black community called for armed self-defense, the argument of Negroes with Guns, published in 1962. King, preaching Christianity and a sanctified democracy, lamented that black Muslims had “lost faith in America.” Meanwhile, white moderates urged SNCC, CORE, and SCLC to slow down. In one poll, 74 percent of whites, but only 3 percent of blacks, agreed with the statement “Negroes are moving too fast.”41
In April 1963, King led a protest in Birmingham, part of a long-planned campaign in the most violent city in the South. Of the more than two hundred black churches and homes that had been bombed in the South since 1948, more bombs had gone off in Birmingham than in any other city. King had gone to Birmingham to get arrested, but found that support for his planned protest had ebbed. After white liberal clergymen denounced him in the Birmingham News, calling the protests “untimely,” King wrote a letter from jail, in solitary confinement. He began writing in the margins of the newspaper, adding passages on slips of paper smuggled in by visitors. In the end, the letter reached twenty pages, a soaring piece of American political rhetoric, testament to the urgency of a cause.
“Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ‘Wait,’” he conceded, “but when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society . . . then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.”42
George Wallace, Alabama’s new governor, more or less answered that King would have to wait until hell froze. In June, Wallace said that if black students tried to enter the campus of the state university in Tuscaloosa, he’d block the door himself.
Wallace, forty-three, ate politics for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; he slept politics and he breathed politics and he smoked politics. He’d been a page in the state senate in 1935, when he was sixteen. At the University of Alabama, he’d been both a star boxer and class president. After studying law, he’d served as an airman in the Pacific during the war. He ran for state congress in 1946, the same year Nixon and Kennedy won seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. A loyal southerner, he’d never been a particularly ardent segregationist. As an alternate at the 1948 Democratic convention, he’d refused to bolt with the rest of the Dixiecrats. He’d endorsed Stevenson. But in 1958, running for governor with “Win with Wallace” as his motto, flanked by Confederate flags, he’d lost the Democratic primary to Patterson, who was more ardently opposed to desegregation; and, as the story goes, Wallace had pledged to his supporters, “No other son of a bitch will ever out-nigger me again.” In 1962, with a speechwriter who doubled as an organizer for the KKK, Wallace had won the governorship, with 96 percent of the vote. In his inaugural in Montgomery, delivered a week before Kennedy was inaugurated in Washington, Wallace stood in the shadow of a statue of the president of the Confederacy, who’d been sworn in on that very spot. “Today I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people,” Wallace shouted. “And I say, segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” He’d followed by meeting with educational leaders in the state and telling them: “If you agree to integrate your schools, there won’t be enough state troopers to protect you.” In May, when Kennedy celebrated his birthday, his staff gave him a pair of boxing gloves, for his upcoming bout with the heavyweight from Alabama.43 But when the day came, on June 11, Wallace gave in only three hours after the arrival of the National Guard.
That afternoon, King telegrammed Kennedy that “the Negro’s endurance may be at the breaking point.” Kennedy, who had been deliberating for months, went to Congress to meet with House members. He decided the time had come to speak to the public. On television that night, he addressed the nation: “If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public; if he cannot send his children to the best public school available; if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him; if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?” He talked about military service. “When Americans are sent to Viet-Nam or West Berlin, we do not ask for whites only.” He invoked history. “One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free.” And he asked Congress for new civil rights legislation.44 One hundred years had been too long. No longer would Kennedy counsel patience.
To mark the one hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Bayard Rustin had been charged with planning a March on Washington, scheduled for August 1963. The Kennedy administration, worried about violence, had arranged for military troops to be kept on alert. The District of Columbia had canceled two Washington Senators baseball games. Some 300,000—the largest crowd ever gathered between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument—assembled on a cloudless summer’s day, “this sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent,” King called it. They came by bus and train and subway. One young man roller-skated all the way from Chicago, wearing a sash that read “Freedom.” But Rustin had organized the march flawlessly and, by the time it was over, there would be only four march-related arrests; all the arrested were white.45
SNCC chairman John Lewis, earnest and only twenty-three, approached the microphone on the makeshift stage on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. He said he supported the proposed civil rights bill but with great reservations, because there was so much that the federal government had failed to do at every turn. The crowd stirred each time he spoke his speech’s refrain: “What did the federal government do?”
Television stations that had cut away from earlier speeches resumed coverage when Martin Luther King rose to the stage. It was the first time most Americans had seen King deliver an entire speech. It was the first time that President Kennedy had ever seen King deliver an entire speech.46
He began by welcoming “the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of the nation,” honoring Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, and condemning “the manacles of segregation and the chain of discrimination” that still shackled blacks one hundred years later. He spoke slowly and solemnly and formally. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were promissory notes, he said, a promise that all men would be guaranteed their rights. “It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note.” It was stock stuff, delivered sternly, and loaded with sorrow. He cautioned the movement about the dangers of the “marvelous new militancy,” the loss of the support of whites. He listed grievances. Ten minutes into the speech, his voice rising, he said, “We are not satisfied and will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” He looked down at the cumbersome next lines of his speech—“And so today, let us go back to our communities as members of the international association for the advancement of creative dissatisfaction”—and left them unsaid. Instead, he began to preach. Mahalia Jackson, behind him on the platform, called out “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin.” He paused, for an instant. “I still have a dream,” he said. “It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’” He found his rhythm, and the depth of his voice, and the spirit of Scripture. “I have a dream today,” he said, shaking his head. “I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted.” The crowd rose, and bowed their heads, and wept. “Let freedom ring!” he cried.47 It was as if every bell in every tower in every city and town and village had rung: a toll of justice.
III.
THREE MONTHS LATER, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Less than five years after that, King himself would be shot and killed in Memphis. By then, the dreams of American liberals had been felled in a hail of bullets and a trail of napalm bombs that rained down on the world from the streets of Newark and Detroit to the rice paddies of South Vietnam.
The long arc of American liberalism that began with the inauguration of FDR in 1933 reached its peak, and began its decline, during the administration of LBJ. Roosevelt pursued a New Deal; Truman promised a Fair Deal; Johnson talked about a Better Deal until he decided that made him sound like a footnote. He aimed for nothing less than a Great Society. A great society was more than an affluent society; it was also a good society, “a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.” Said the president, “The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time.”48
The day after Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson met with Walter Heller, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and told him that, contrary to his reputation as a conservative, he was not one. “If you look at my record, you would know I’m a Roosevelt New Dealer. As a matter of fact, to tell the truth, John F. Kennedy was a little too conservative to suit my taste.” In his first address to Congress, on November 27, 1963, he urged action on civil rights. “We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights,” he said. “We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.” Johnson always said his slogan was “He gets things done.” He wanted to further Kennedy’s agenda, and he had his own agenda, an “unconditional war on poverty,” which he announced in his first State of the Union address, in January 1964.49
Johnson once told reporters, “When I was young, poverty was so common that we didn’t know it had a name.” But, as Galbraith had pointed out in The Affluent Society, poverty hadn’t been eradicated; it had only been forgotten. “Few things are more evident in modern social history than the decline of interest in inequality as an economic issue,” Galbraith wrote. “Inequality has ceased to preoccupy men’s minds.” Some of the poor were far away from the cities and the suburbs: one-fourth of those who lived below the “poverty line” worked on farms. In the Kennedy administration, the War on Poverty had its origins in January 1963, after Kennedy read a long essay by Dwight Macdonald in The New Yorker, “Our Invisible Poor.” No piece of prose did more to make plain the atrocity of poverty in an age of affluence. Prosperity, Macdonald argued, had left the nation both blinded to the plight of the poor and indifferent to their suffering. “There is a monotony about the injustices suffered by the poor that perhaps accounts for the lack of interest the rest of society shows in them,” Macdonald wrote, in a scathing indictment of the attitude of the American middle class toward those less well off. “Everything seems to go wrong with them. They never win. It’s just boring.”50
Heller had given Kennedy a copy of Macdonald’s article. In February 1963, the entire text of the article had been entered into the Congressional Record. Johnson, leveraging the nation’s sympathy for the martyred president, pressed Congress for legislation. The next year, he signed the Economic Opportunity Act and the Food Stamp Act. He believed poverty would be eradicated within a decade.
He had more ambitions, too. Wrangling congressmen like cattle, as ever, he secured passage of the Civil Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; gave the attorney general power to enforce desegregation; allowed for civil rights cases to move from state to federal courts; and expanded the Civil Rights Commission. “No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long,” Johnson said, in a canny piece of political rhetoric.51
Both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X went to Washington to watch the congressional debates over the civil rights bill, a rare bringing together of the two men. Malcolm X had fallen out with the leadership of the Nation of Islam. He’d mocked the August 1963 March on Washington but, disobeying the explicit orders of Elijah Muhammad, had attended anyway. In December, he’d answered reporters who asked him to comment on Kennedy’s assassination—despite specific instructions from Muhammad not to speak on the subject. He said Kennedy’s assassination sounded to him like “chickens coming home to roost.” In the ensuing controversy, Muhammad had ordered Malcolm X to withdraw from all public activity, but in April 1964, having advocated that black men arm themselves, he delivered in Cleveland a speech called “The Ballot or the Bullet,” in which he argued that revolution required elections.52 That vantage had brought him to the halls of Congress.
The congressional debates that Malcolm X and Martin Luther King watched revealed fractures within both parties, with Democrats challenged by their southern flank and Republicans by their Right flank. “I’m not anti-Democrat,” Malcolm X said. “I’m not anti-Republican. I’m not anti-anything. I’m just questioning their sincerity.” The point is, he said, the time had come to vote.53 The debates also revealed the worst of American political chicanery. Southern Democrats filibustered for fifty-four days. Strom Thurmond said that the “so-called Civil Rights Proposals, which the President has sent to Capitol Hill for enactment into law, are unconstitutional, unnecessary, unwise and extend beyond the realm of reason.”54 A segregationist from Virginia, Howard Smith, introduced an amendment adding the word “sex” into the bill, a proposal so ridiculous that he was certain it would spell the legislation’s defeat. But after Maine Republican Margaret Chase Smith’s spirited defense of the amendment, it passed—a momentous if ironic achievement in the battle for equality for women.55
Meanwhile, George Wallace, running for the 1964 Democratic nomination, did surprisingly well in early primaries. On the campaign trail, he heard from white voters whose expressions of deep-rooted racial animosity were part of a backlash that would only gain force. At a Wallace rally in Milwaukee, a man named Bronko Gruber said, about the city’s blacks, “They beat up old ladies 83-years-old, rape our womenfolk. They mug people. They won’t work. They are on relief. How long can we tolerate this? Did I go to Guadalcanal and come back to something like this?”56
Wallace’s bid for the nomination was ended, not by Johnson’s popularity, but by the entry into the race of a conservative Republican. Barry Goldwater, a far right conservative Republican from Arizona, voted against the civil rights bill, making clear that he did so on constitutional grounds alone. “If my vote is misconstrued,” he said, “let it be, and let me suffer its consequences.”57 Supporters of the bill eventually broke the filibuster, and on July 2, 1964, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. Eleven days later, the Republican National Convention met in the Cow Palace, in Daly City, California, and nominated Goldwater as its candidate for president.
In 1960, Goldwater had published a ghostwritten manifesto, The Conscience of a Conservative, that had become a best seller. His positions, at the time, occupied the very margin of American political discourse. He called for the abolition of the graduated income tax and recommended that the federal government abandon most of its functions, closing departments and diminishing staffs at a rate of 10 percent a year. Goldwater also opposed the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board, insisting on states’ rights, a position that aligned him with southern Democrats and also with John Birchers, whose goals included impeaching Earl Warren and withdrawing the United States from the United Nations. Their leader, Robert Welch, had gone so far as to suggest that Eisenhower might be a communist agent; some Birchers believed Sputnik was a hoax. Birchers especially hated Kennedy. Right-wing radio commentator Tom Anderson said in Jackson, Mississippi, “Our menace is not the Big Red Army from without, but the Big Pink Enemy within. Our menace is the KKK—Kennedy, Kennedy, and Kennedy.”58
Conspiracy theorists who believed Eisenhower was a communist looked like an easy target, and some Kennedy advisers, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr., had urged him to tie the Republican Party to the John Birch Society. In 1961, Kennedy began talking about the “right wing” of the GOP. Daniel Bell, in The New American Right, had argued that the “right wing” was fighting nothing so much as modernity itself. Moderate Republicans, too, had energetically attacked Goldwater. New York governor Nelson Rockefeller warned that a “lunatic fringe” might “subvert the Republican party itself.”59 A matchup between Kennedy and Goldwater would have been interesting. Kennedy, who’d had much success debating Nixon in 1960, had apparently agreed to debate Goldwater if he won the Republican nomination in 1964. Goldwater later said that he and Kennedy had planned to cross the country together, debating at every whistle-stop, “without Madison Avenue, without any makeup or phoniness, just the two of us traveling around on the same airplane.”60
But Johnson had no reason to agree to debate Goldwater, whose chances of winning the nomination seemed remote. Rockefeller, vying with Goldwater for the nomination, painted him as a Nazi. (In fact, Goldwater had Jewish ancestry.) Liberals said much the same. “We see dangerous signs of Hitlerism in the Goldwater campaign,” said Martin Luther King. At the Republican National Convention, Margaret Chase Smith, who sought the nomination herself—the first woman to run for a major-party nomination—refused to release her delegates to Goldwater, in order to prevent him from gaining a unanimous vote.61
Richard Nixon did not share Smith’s principles. He’d run unsuccessfully for governor of California in 1962 and, having lost two elections in two years, he was in no position to seek the presidential nomination himself. Nevertheless, he set up a clandestine campaign, headquartered in a boiler room in Portland, Oregon. He considered his options. He toyed with running. He toyed with joining the moderate GOP’s stop Goldwater campaign. And he toyed with supporting Michigan governor George Romney. When he finally concluded that he had no chance of beating Goldwater, he threw his support behind him. Accepting the party’s nomination, Goldwater defended himself against the charge of extremism in language that lost him what little support he might have hoped to enjoy from party moderates. “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” Goldwater said. And “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Rockefeller and Romney refused to campaign for Goldwater. Nixon, with his eye on 1968, exerted himself tirelessly: he gave 156 speeches on behalf of the party’s nominee.62
Johnson was tickled. “In Your Heart, You Know He’s Right” was Goldwater’s slogan, to which Johnson’s campaign answered, “In Your Guts, You Know He’s Nuts” or, alluding to Goldwater’s enthusiasm for deploying nuclear weapons, “In Your Heart, You Know He Might.” Goldwater had campaigned for a constitutional amendment to guarantee Bible reading and prayer in public schools, but Johnson, who had broad support among evangelical Christians, made sure Goldwater had little success with that constituency. Days before the election, Billy Graham’s followers urged him to throw his support behind Goldwater, sending him more than a million telegrams and tens of thousands of letters. Johnson pounced. “Billy, you stay out of politics,” he told Graham in a phone call, and then invited him to stay the weekend at the White House—far from his mail.63
In November, Goldwater lost to Johnson by more than sixteen million votes, winning only his home state of Arizona and five states in the Deep South. So catastrophic was the loss that GOP leaders attempted to purge conservatives from leadership positions with the party. That meant purging conservative women.
Goldwater’s nomination had been crucially supported by Phyllis Schlafly, a former Kitchen Kabineter who was president of the National Federation of Republican Women. Born in Missouri in 1924, Schlafly would become one of the most influential women in the history of American politics. During the Second World War, she’d worked as a gunner, test-firing rifles in a munitions plant, to put herself through college, after which she’d earned a graduate degree in political science from Radcliffe. A devout Catholic, she had been an ardent supporter of McCarthy; her husband was president of the World Anti-Communist League. In 1952, she’d run for Congress under the slogan “A Woman’s Place Is in the House.”64
In 1963, Schlafly had nominated Goldwater as the speaker at a celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the federation of Republican women’s clubs. During that celebration, she’d also taken a straw poll: out of 293 federation delegates, 262 chose Goldwater as the party’s nominee. Conservative women had flocked to the Goldwater campaign’s “Crusade for Law and Morality” and to Mothers for Moral America, a fake grassroots organization that recruited Nancy Reagan to its board. But while conservative women had supported Goldwater, the mainstream of the Republican Party had not. The 1964 presidential election was the first in which as many women voted as men. They also voted differently than men. Overall, across parties, women were even more likely to vote against Goldwater than were men. Goldwater Republican women, it seemed, were out of touch not only with the party but with the country.
After Goldwater’s ignominious defeat, Elly Peterson, a Michigan party chairman and Romney supporter, set herself the task of keeping Schlafly from the presidency of the National Federation of Republican Women at its next election. This proved difficult, Peterson said, because “the nut fringe is beautifully organized.” Schlafly was narrowly defeated, but she contested the results, and police had to remove women from the convention floor when they began attacking one another. The “dame game,” Time said, had become altogether unladylike.65
Schlafly was not so easily defeated. She would never have called herself a feminist, but she believed women should be helping to lead the GOP. “Many men in the Party frankly want to keep the women doing the menial work, while the selection of candidates and the policy decisions are taken care of by the men in the smoke-filled rooms,” she complained. The book she wrote about her ouster includes an illustration of a woman standing at a door labeled Republican Party Headquarters, by a sign that reads “Conservatives and Women Please Use Servants’ Entrance.” Three months after she was kept from the presidency of the women’s arm of the GOP, she began writing a monthly newsletter, waging her own crusade for law and morality.66 It would take her years, but, in the end, she would retake the Republican Party.
Lumbering Lyndon Johnson, flushed with victory, decided to use his sixteen-million-vote margin to shoot for the moon. He had a big Democratic majority in the House, what’s known as a fat Congress. He knew his mandate wouldn’t last. “Just by the way people naturally think and because Barry Goldwater has simply scared the hell out of them, I’ve already lost about three of those sixteen,” he told his staff in January 1965. “After a fight with Congress or something else, I’ll lose another couple of million. I could be down to eight million in a couple of months.”67
Johnson headed what political scientists call a unified government, in which the executive and legislative branches are controlled by the same party, as opposed to a divided government, in which one party controls the White House and the other Congress. Unified governments and divided governments have legislative agendas of roughly the same size, but unified governments, unsurprisingly, are more productive than divided governments: they get more of their bills passed. Still, no unified government in American history was as productive as LBJ’s.68
Johnson, who’d begun his career in Washington in 1937, understood the nature of political power better than nearly every other American president. He met with leaders of Congress every week for breakfast. He called senators in the middle of the night. He cajoled and he threatened and he made trades and he made deals. He got Congress to pass an education act, providing millions of dollars to support low-income elementary and high school students. He convinced Congress to amend the Social Security Act to establish Medicare, health insurance for the elderly, and Medicaid, health coverage for the poor—“care for the sick and serenity for the fearful”—and he then flew to Independence, Missouri, so that Truman could witness the signing. “You have made me a very, very happy man,” said a deeply moved Truman.69
The flurry of bills was hardly limited to social reform. Johnson also persuaded Congress to pass a tax bill, a tax cut that had been introduced into Congress before Kennedy’s assassination, the largest tax cut in American history. He hoped it would relieve unemployment. Instead, it undermined his reform programs. It was as if he’d cut off one of his own feet.
“I want to turn the poor from tax eaters to taxpayers,” Johnson said, selling his tax cut to Congress. In this formulation, recipients of social programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), created in 1935, and Medicaid, created in 1965, were the tax eaters. Recipients of other kinds of federal assistance (Medicare, veterans’ benefits, farm subsidies) were the taxpayers. By making this distinction, 1960s liberals crippled liberalism. The architects of the War on Poverty, like the New Dealers before them, never defended a broad-based progressive income tax as a public good, in everyone’s interest; nor could they separate it from issues of race. They also never referred to Social Security, health care, and unemployment insurance as “welfare.” Johnson’s Council of Economic Advisers told him that when explaining how the government might fight poverty, he ought to “avoid completely the use of the term ‘inequality’ or the term ‘redistribution.’” The poor were to be referred to as “targets of opportunity.”70
At first, the tax cut worked: people used the money they once used to pay taxes to buy goods. In 1965, Time put Keynes on the cover and announced, “We Are All Keynesians Now.”71 But, as with everything Johnson did, his economic reforms were demolished by his escalation of the war in Vietnam.
When Kennedy died, Robert Kennedy had pressed Johnson not to abandon Vietnam, which had been Johnson’s inclination. By the spring of 1965, Johnson had come to understand that he couldn’t withdraw without losing, and he didn’t want to lose. “I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went,” he said. In March 1965, the United States began to bomb North Vietnam; that spring Johnson committed to ground forces. But because he didn’t want to abandon his domestic agenda, he decided to conceal the escalation. He lied about American involvement, and his administration lied about the war itself. By the end of the year, there were 184,000 troops in Vietnam. College students managed to avoid the draft. Disproportionately, American troops in Vietnam were poor whites and blacks. Johnson deliberately hid the cost of the war. Eventually, paying for the war would require raising taxes. To postpone that inevitability for as long as possible, he cut funding for his social programs. “That bitch of a war,” he later said, “killed the lady I really loved—the Great Society.” Even as the president insisted that “this is not Johnson’s war, this is America’s war,” protesters chanted, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”72
Johnson, elected in a landslide in 1964, would be so unpopular by 1968 that he’d decide not to run for a second term. And liberalism would be so shattered by Johnson’s compromises, by the rise of the New Left, by race riots, by the antiwar movement, by white backlash, and by the Right’s calls for law and order, that Nixon would gain the prize he’d been eyeing since his days on the high school debate team in Whittier, California: the White House.
IV.
“THERE ARE MORE NEGROES IN JAIL WITH ME THAN THERE ARE ON THE VOTING ROLLS,” read an ad placed in the New York Times by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference while Martin Luther King was in prison in Selma, Alabama. Civil rights workers had been trying to register voters in the Deep South for years, without much success. Still, the spirit of protest had spread.
In 1964, Mario Savio, a twenty-one-year-old University of California philosophy major, spent the summer—the Freedom Summer—registering black voters in Mississippi. When he got back to Berkeley that fall, he led a fight against a policy that prohibited political speech on campus by arguing that a public university should be as open for political debate and assembly as a public square. The same right was at stake in both Mississippi and Berkeley, Savio said: “the right to participate as citizens in a democratic society.”73 After police arrested nearly eight hundred protestors during a sit-in, the university acceded to the students’ demands. The principle of allowing political speech on campus was afterward extended from public universities to private ones. Without this principle, students wouldn’t have been able to rally on campus for civil rights or against the war in Vietnam, or for or against anything else, then or since.
But the fight for a democratic society divided the Left. When the civil rights movement turned its attention from desegregation to voting rights, it splintered. The fight for voting rights also hit a wall with the Democratic Party. Contesting the Democratic Party’s all-white delegation to the party’s nominating convention, SNCC set up an alternative party, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Ella Baker ran its Washington office and delivered the keynote speech at its state nominating convention in Jackson. At the Democratic Party’s August 1964 convention in Atlantic City, party leaders refused to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation. Stokely Carmichael decided to give up on party politics. Carmichael, who’d been a Freedom Rider in 1961, graduated from Howard University in 1964 with a degree in philosophy and was nominated for a Senior Class Humanity Award for his work registering voters in Mississippi; he’d been arrested half a dozen times. “The liberal Democrats are just as racist as Goldwater,” he concluded. Borrowing the word “black” from Malcolm X, Carmichael urged a new militancy. “If we can’t sit at the table,” said one leader of SNCC, “let’s knock the fucking legs off.” King, and the SCLC, still favored working with white liberals; SNCC, increasingly, favored black consciousness and black power. Selma would be their last stand together.74
In January 1965, one hundred years after Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment, Johnson delivered his inaugural address in Washington, and King went to Selma, where demonstrators had pledged to march all the way to Montgomery, a fifty-five-mile journey that would take them through a county whose population was more than 70 percent black but where hardly any African Americans had so much as attempted to vote since the rise of Jim Crow. On March 7, 1965, they met five hundred Alabama state troopers stationed on the far side of the Pettus Bridge, ordered by George Wallace to arrest anyone who tried to cross.
Malcolm X, who had by now been denounced by the Nation of Islam, flew to Selma. Though SCLC leaders worried that he’d incite violence, he spoke in support of the protesters. Only weeks later, his house was firebombed in New York, and, on February 21, he was assassinated in Manhattan by three men from the Nation of Islam armed with pistols and shotguns. He was shot ten times, once in the ankle, twice in the leg, and seven times in the chest.75 “I disagreed with him,” James Baldwin said, deeply shaken. “But when he talked to the people in the streets,” he went on, “if one ignored his conclusions, he was the only person who was describing, making vivid, making a catalog, of the actual situation of the American Negro.”76
Johnson, pressured by the televised spectacle of Alabama state troopers cracking the skulls of civil rights marchers in Selma as they repeatedly tried to cross the bridge, addressed Congress on March 15. “At times, history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom,” he said. “So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.” Calling on Congress to pass a Voting Rights Act, he closed, with his trademark Texas twang: “And we shall overcome.” King, watching in Alabama, fell to weeping.77
The week before Johnson sent Congress the Voting Rights Act, he’d sent Congress the Law Enforcement Assistance Act, saying he wanted 1965 to be remembered as “the year when this country began a thorough, intelligent, and effective war against crime.” The creation of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, which funded eighty thousand crime control projects, vastly expanded the police powers of the federal government. “For some time, it has been my feeling that the task of law enforcement agencies is really not much different from military forces; namely, to deter crime before it occurs, just as our military objective is deterrence of aggression,” the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee had said during hearings over the bill. After Johnson signed the act into law, his administration opened a “war on crime,” a war in which the police were empowered to act like a military force, using helicopters to patrol city neighborhoods and computer simulations to anticipate crime. Money that had gone to cities for antipoverty measures was used to fight crime. After-school programs and teen centers, instituted as elements of the war on poverty under Johnson, would come, under Nixon, beginning in 1969, to be run by police, elements of the war on crime. More Americans would be sent to prison in the twenty years after LBJ launched his war on crime than went to prison in the entire century before. Blacks and Latinos, 25 percent of the U.S. population, would make up 59 percent of the prison population, in a nation whose incarceration rate would rise to five times that of any other industrial nation. Dismantling the parts of Johnson’s program that were aimed to provide services to children and teenagers, Nixon would leave intact only the parts of the program that were aimed to punish them. Running the Great Society became the work of police. Block grants for urban renewal were used, instead, to build prisons. James Baldwin said urban renewal ought to be called “Negro removal.”78
On August 6, 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law. But the quiet that Johnson had anticipated did not come. The next day, the House Committee on Education and Labor held hearings in Los Angeles’s Will Rogers Park Auditorium to find out why the city had failed to implement federal antipoverty programs. A thousand people came; the hearings turned into a rally. Four days later, riots broke out in South Central Los Angeles, in Watts, the first in a series of riots that would shock the nation over four long, hot summers.
King flew to Los Angeles and preached nonviolence; no one really listened. The population density in the city of Los Angeles, outside of Watts, was 5,900 per square mile; in Watts, it was 16,400. The uprising lasted for six days and nights and involved more than 35,000 people. Thirty-four people were killed and nearly a thousand injured as the streets burned. Army tanks and helicopters turned an American city into a war zone. L.A. police chief William Parker said that fighting the people of Watts was “very much like fighting the Viet Cong.”79 Johnson asked, “Is the world topsy-turvy?”80
Watts, a neighborhood twice the size of Manhattan, had not a single hospital. An affluent society? Watts was an indigent society. From the outside, it looked as if rights had been answered with riots, as if the entire project of liberalism were collapsing in on itself.
Each riot over those four summers stood alone, but each began with police violence, in a segregated neighborhood in a northern city, where there were hardly any jobs, where the houses were falling down, where the right to vote hadn’t ended anyone’s misery. In Newark, the biggest city in New Jersey, where the population was 65 percent black, eighteen babies died at the City Hospital in a single year—of diarrhea—in a hospital infested by bats. And yet arguments that the federal government had failed cities like Newark were met with objections: the federal government had spent more on antipoverty programs per capita in Newark than in any other northern city.81
Violence begat violence. In the riots that began in Newark in the summer of 1967, police brutality led to protest, which led to looting, which led to shooting. A 4,000-strong force of National Guard sealed off fourteen square miles of the city with roadblocks. In the scenes broadcast on television screens across the country, Newark looked to some American viewers like Vietnam, a mayhem of snipers, of civilians slaughtered. A week and a half later, in riots in Detroit, more than 7,000 people were arrested and more than 2,000 buildings destroyed before order was enforced by 9,600 paratroopers from the 101st and Eighty-Second Airborne Divisions.82 That summer, a headline on page one of U.S. News & World Report read: IS THE U.S. ABLE TO GOVERN ITSELF?83
Conservatives had an answer: they could govern with a will of iron. Ronald Reagan, fifty-five and running for governor of California, declared the riots the result of the “philosophy that in any situation the public should turn to government for the answer.” Liberalism caused the riots, Reagan suggested, and only conservatism could end them.
Reagan, a man of charm and grace, as dapper as a groom, grew up in Illinois, the son of a shoe salesman who supported his family during the Depression through the largesse of the New Deal. Young Reagan, an ardent Democrat, memorized FDR’s speeches, those intimate, confident fireside chats. After graduating from a Christian college, Reagan began working as a radio broadcaster and sports announcer. He turned to film in 1937. During the war, he made films for the Office of War Information. A reliable B-movie actor, widely trusted, in 1947 he was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild, where he was an anticommunist crusader. In 1952, he began supporting Republican candidates. He registered as a Republican in 1962, and by 1964, supporting Goldwater, he’d become a Sun Belt conservative, convert to a new cause.
Other politicians railed; Reagan wooed. In a half-hour televised endorsement for Goldwater, a speech called “A Time for Choosing,” Reagan’s promise as a politician all but oozes out of the screen. For Reagan, the issue in the 1964 election, as in every election afterward, was a recasting of Alexander Hamilton’s question in Federalist 1 in 1787. Reagan asked not whether a people can rule themselves by reason and choice instead of accident and force but “whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”84 Not reason versus force, but the people versus the government.
Conservative and moderate Republicans didn’t agree on much, but they did agree that liberalism was to blame for the violence. King had cried, at the end of the march from Selma to Alabama, “How long? Not long. Because no lie can live forever.” In 1966, former college football star Gerald Ford, then the House Republican leader, turned that “how long” around, asking, “How long are we going to abdicate law and order—the backbone of our civilization—in favor of a soft social theory that the man who heaves a brick through your window or tosses a fire bomb into your car is simply the misunderstood and underprivileged product of a broken home?” Reagan went further. “Working men and women should not be asked to carry the additional burden of a segment of society capable of caring for itself but which prefers making welfare a way of life, freeloading at the expense of more conscientious citizens,” he said, inciting a racial animosity that came to be known as not backlash but “whitelash.”85
To run his 1966 gubernatorial campaign, Reagan had hired the California political consulting firm of Spencer-Roberts. The heyday of Whitaker and Baxter had ended; Whitaker died in 1961. But Spencer-Roberts used the Whitaker and Baxter rulebook. “You know something, Stu?” Reagan said to Stuart Spencer. “Politics is just like show business. . . . You begin with a hell of an opening, you coast for a while, and you end with a hell of a closing.”86
On the stump, Reagan found a new target: college students. He complained about undergraduate “malcontents,” and, as Election Day neared, he made a point of publicly denouncing invitations issued by students at the University of California, Berkeley, to two speakers: Robert Kennedy, who was slated to talk about civil rights, and Stokely Carmichael, who had been asked by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to deliver the keynote address at a conference on Black Power. “We cannot have the university campus used as a base from which to foment riots,” Reagan warned. He sent a telegram to Carmichael, urging him to decline the invitation, suggesting that the appearance in Berkeley of the head of SNCC would “stir strong emotions,” a clever way to guarantee that Carmichael would come.87
The FBI, which had been conducting illegal surveillance on and waging campaigns of harassment against hundreds of civil rights activists, including Martin Luther King, had opened a file on Carmichael in 1964, accelerating its collection in 1966, when he started talking about Black Power and police brutality and urging forms of protest later adopted by the Black Lives Matter movement. The month before Carmichael was scheduled to speak at Berkeley, a white police officer in Atlanta shot and killed a black man. Carmichael organized a protest and spoke at a rally that led to two days of unrest. An FBI informant in Atlanta sent an encrypted telegram to J. Edgar Hoover: “CARMICHAEL BELIEVED NEGROES SHOULD FORM VIGILANTE GROUPS TO OBSERVE POLICE AND SHOULD ANY ACTS OF POLICE BRUTALITY BE OBSERVED, A COMMITTEE SHOULD BE FORMED AMONG THE NEGRO ELEMENT TO PRESS SUCH MATTERS.” Carmichael was charged with inciting a riot. Hoover stepped up surveillance of what he described as “black nationalist hate-type groups.”88 Released on bail and challenged by Reagan—baited by Reagan—Carmichael headed to California.
Reagan had by now made his opposition to the free speech movement the centerpiece of his gubernatorial campaign, promising to crack down on Berkeley’s “noisy, dissident minority.” Urged on by UC regent H. R. Haldeman, Reagan talked about student unrest day after day, much to the dismay of his campaign manager, who told him that the issue hadn’t left a trace in the polls. “It’s going to,” Reagan promised.89 Three weeks before the election, Reagan’s campaign advised him that his prospects would improve “if the disorders boil into public prominence again.” Carmichael’s proposed visit offered Reagan the opportunity to tie his campaign against student protesters to his denunciation of black militancy. After Reagan issued a public call to Carmichael not to come to California and asked his opponent, the incumbent governor Pat Brown, to join him, knowing that Brown would refuse. Carmichael played right into Reagan’s hands.90
“This is a student conference, as it should be, held on a campus,” Carmichael, twenty-five, lean and grave, told a crowd of ten thousand Berkeley students. Echoing Frederick Douglass’s 1860 “Plea for Free Speech,” Carmichael said that the regulation of speech amounted to a struggle over “whether or not black people will have the right to use the words they want to use without white people giving their sanction.” With Carmichael and the New Left, the civil rights movement changed course. “We been saying freedom for six years, and we ain’t got nothing,’” Carmichael said in Berkeley. “What we gonna start saying now is Black Power.” SNCC’s H. Rap Brown, who called LBJ a “white honky cracker,” said, “John Brown was the only white man I could respect and he is dead. The Black Movement has no use for white liberals. We need revolutionaries. Revolutions need revolutionaries.” Huey Newton, a founder of the Black Panthers, cited Chairman Mao: “Political Power comes through the Barrel of a Gun.”91
Reagan won in a landslide and, in the congressional midterm elections, twenty-seven of the forty-eight Democrats who’d been swept into office with LBJ in 1964 failed to win reelection. Republicans won nine out of ten new governorships and gained control of statehouses across the country. But the 1966 election wasn’t so much a victory of Republicans over Democrats, it was a victory of conservatives over liberals.
Goldwater’s star fell; Reagan’s rose. The conservative standard-bearer, Reagan was the first national figure to bring the intensity of the Cold War to domestic politics. He served two terms as governor, held on to his conservative convictions, and bided his time while his party moved rightward. He set as his agenda nothing short of dismantling the New Deal.
From the California governor’s office, Reagan didn’t let up on either the rhetoric of law and order or his denunciation of free speech on college campuses. In May 1967, when the California legislature was debating a gun control measure, thirty Black Panthers, led by Bobby Seale, walked into the California State House, armed with a Magnum, shotguns, and pistols. “Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned, demonstrated, and everything else to get the racist power structure of America to right the wrongs which have historically been perpetuated against black people,” Seale said. “The time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.” Reagan, who went on to sign the law, told the press he saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.”92
Johnson called for a National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to investigate the riots. Chaired by Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois, the Kerner Commission issued a 426-page report calling for $30 billion in urban spending and, as conservatives read it, essentially blaming whites for the violence in black neighborhoods. The commission recommended spending more money on public housing, instituting a massive jobs programs, and committing to desegregation of public education. Kerner and his colleagues warned that failing to change course “could quite conceivably lead to a kind of urban apartheid with semimartial law in many major cities, enforced residence of Negroes in segregated areas, and a drastic reduction in personal freedom for all Americans, particularly Negroes.” Except for a recommendation about expanding urban policing, Johnson ignored it.93
With every instance of racial unrest, with each new form of public protest, Reagan’s political capital grew. “Free speech does not require furnishing a podium for the speaker,” he said in 1967. “I don’t think you should lend these people the prestige of our university campuses for the presentation of their views.”94 Later that year, black students at San Jose College, led by a dashiki-wearing sociology professor and former discus thrower named Harry Edwards, filed a protest against racism on campus and threatened to disrupt the opening day football game. Fearing a riot, the college president called off the game—“the first time a football contest in America had been cancelled because of racial unrest,” the Times reported. Reagan called the cancellation of the game an “appeasement of lawbreakers,” declared Edwards unfit to teach, and called for him to be fired. Edwards called Reagan “unfit to govern,” and two months later began organizing a nationwide campaign for black athletes to boycott the 1968 Olympics—beginning with an article in the Saturday Evening Post called “Why Negroes Should Boycott Whitey’s Olympics”—which led to the clenched-fisted Black Power protest of two medal winners (the inspiration, decades later, for NFL protesters who kneeled during the playing of the national anthem).95
Meanwhile, outcry against the escalating war in Vietnam galvanized the New Left, and gave a sprawling and mostly disorganized movement both focus and intensity by bringing together the free speech and civil rights movements. In 1966, John Lewis announced SNCC’s opposition to the war in Vietnam, and its support for draft dodgers, described by Lewis as “the men in this country who are unwilling to respond to a military draft which would compel them to contribute their lives to United States aggression in Vietnam in the name of the ‘freedom’ we find so false in this country.” At Berkeley, Stokely Carmichael had called on students to burn their draft cards. World champion heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali refused to fight in Vietnam, asking, “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs?” And the argument against the war grew both broader and deeper when Martin Luther King joined it in 1967, severing his alliance with Johnson by declaring, “We are fighting an immoral war.”96
Johnson lost himself in the war. Foreign policy had never been his strength. And he found out far too late that The Treatment didn’t work on Ho Chi Minh. By 1967, nearly half a million American combat troops were in Vietnam. That year alone, nine thousand Americans died in Vietnam, and the war consumed $25 billion of the federal budget. To pay for it, Johnson, refusing to raise taxes, having only just convinced Congress to push through a tax cut, starved the Great Society. By the time he was finally willing to ask for a tax increase, he was only able to get it by agreeing to still more spending cuts to his antipoverty programs. And by then, inflation had begun to surge, giving credence to economic theories endorsed by conservatives. By 1968, Robert McNamara, Johnson’s secretary of defense, and an architect of Johnson’s war, no longer willing to continue, resigned.97
In January 1968, during Tet, the Vietnamese new year, the North Vietnamese conducted raids all over South Vietnam, including on the U.S. embassy in Saigon. Johnson had claimed that the North Vietnamese were weak and that the war was nearly won. The Tet Offensive exposed the depth of that lie. In March, New York Times columnist James Reston declared, “The main crisis is not Vietnam itself, or in the cities, but in the feeling that the political system for dealing with these things has broken down.”98
While Americans reeled from news reports from Vietnam, the presidential primary season began. LBJ won the Democratic primary in New Hampshire with only 49 percent of the vote. An antiwar candidate, Minnesota congressman Eugene McCarthy had pulled 42 percent. Emboldened by Johnson’s narrow win, Robert Kennedy entered the race. Having urged Johnson in 1963 not to withdraw from Vietnam, Kennedy now ran against it as “Johnson’s war.” George Wallace entered the race, too. Johnson was being squeezed from the left and from the right, both for what was going on in American cities and for what was going on in Vietnam. Nor were the two often considered separately. In 1966, Wallace had been unable to run for reelection as governor of Alabama because of a law of succession, and had his wife, Lurleen, run in his stead (she won by a margin of two to one). In 1968, when George Wallace decided to campaign for the Democratic nomination, Stokely Carmichael, speaking in Birmingham, said that if the army gives a black soldier a gun and “tells him to shoot his enemy . . . if he don’t shoot Lurleen and George and little junior, he’s a fool.”99 Johnson was even left to campaign against the ghost of Barry Goldwater. A billboard in Chicago that in 1964 had read, “In Your Heart, You Know He’s Right” read four years later, “Now You Know He Was Right.”100
Disgusted and discouraged, Johnson announced on March 31 that he would not run for reelection. He had decided to dedicate himself to ending the war. “With our hopes and the world’s hope for peace in the balance every day,” he said in a televised address, “I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes.” The stunned New York Times ran a can-you-believe-it, three-tier headline:
JOHNSON SAYS HE WON’T RUN;
HALTS NORTH VIETNAM RAIDS;
BIDS HANOI JOIN PEACE MOVES.101
But peace would not come; nor would moderation abide. Four days later, on the balcony of a hotel in Memphis, Martin Luther King was shot by a white ex-convict. As word spread, riots broke out in 130 cities. From California, Reagan, granting barely a moment for mourning, declared that King’s assassination was part of the “great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they’d break.” Stokely Carmichael announced that “white America killed Dr. King” and in the doing had “declared war on black America.” He told a crowd in Washington to “go home and get your guns.”102
A stricken Robert Kennedy spoke from the back of a flatbed truck in Indianapolis. “What we need in the United States is not division,” he said, nervously grasping at the slip of paper on which he’d hastily scrawled some notes. “What we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but love and wisdom and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.” Two months later, after winning the California primary, Kennedy was shot while leaving the ballroom of a hotel in Los Angeles.103
The nation mourned as Job in the desert, fallen to his knees. What more?
V.
RICHARD NIXON’S MOMENT had come. He would repurpose his anticommunism in the form of a new political rhetoric: antiliberalism. As Reagan had done in the California governor’s race two years before, he would stake his campaign for the Republican nomination, and for the presidency, on a pledge to restore law and order. “We have been amply warned that we face the prospect of a war in the making in our own society,” he said in a radio address on March 7, 1968, days before the New Hampshire primary. “We have seen the gathering hate, we have heard the threats to burn and destroy. In Watts and Harlem and Detroit and Newark, we have had a foretaste of what the organizations of insurrection are planning for the summer ahead.” He promised that, if elected, he would not cower before those threats. In New Hampshire, he received 79 percent of the Republican vote.104
Nixon knew that the more violent the riots, and the worse the news from Vietnam, the better his chances. Deciding that peace would bar his road to the White House, he arranged for Anna Chennault, born in China and the widow of a U.S. general, to act as a conduit to promise South Vietnam that it would get better peace terms if it waited until after the election, and a Nixon victory. Johnson heard rumors about the arrangement, called Nixon, and confronted him. Nixon, lying, denied it. Johnson failed to negotiate a peace; the fighting would last for five more years, at a cost of countless lives. By the time the bombing ended, in 1973, the United States dropped on Vietnam and its neighbors, Laos and Cambodia, more than seven and a half-million tons of bombs, equal to one hundred atom bombs, and three times all the explosives deployed in the Second World War.105
Where King and Kennedy had called for love, Nixon, like Carmichael, knew the power of hate. His young political strategist, a number cruncher named Kevin Phillips, explained that understanding politics was all about understanding who hates whom: “That is the secret.” Phillips’s advice to Nixon was known as the “southern strategy,” and it meant winning southern Democrats and giving up on African Americans, by abandoning civil rights for law and order. As Nixon prepared for the Republican National Convention, meeting in Miami in August, he listened to Phillips, who explained that the election would be won or lost on the “law and order/Negro socio-economic revolution syndrome,” but that there was no need to talk like George Wallace. This could all be done so much more subtly. In his acceptance speech in Miami, Nixon invoked an apocalypse. “As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame,” he said. “We hear sirens in the night.” But there was another sound, a quieter sound, a quieter voice—a silenced voice—to which Americans ought to listen. “It is the quiet voice in the tumult and the shouting. It is the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans—the non-shouters; the non-demonstrators. They are not racists or sick; they are not guilty of the crime that plagues the land. . . . They are good people, they are decent people; they work, and they save, and they pay their taxes, and they care.”106
The GOP adopted a platform plank that billed itself as anticrime (and anti–Kerner Commission): “We must re-establish the principle that men are accountable for what they do, that criminals are responsible for their crimes, that while the youth’s environment may help to explain the man’s crime, it does not excuse that crime.” But as Nixon adviser John Dean later said, “I was cranking out that bullshit on Nixon’s crime policy before he was elected. And it was bullshit, too. We knew it. The Nixon campaign didn’t call for anything about crime problems that Ramsey Clark [Johnson’s attorney general] wasn’t already doing under LBJ. We just made more noise.”107
Two weeks after the Republicans met in Miami, the Democratic National Convention met in Chicago. Antiwar protesters arrived in Chicago, too, along with Students for a Democratic Society, Yippies, anarchists, and hangers-on. They were met with a military police force of an occupying army: some 12,000 Chicago police, 6,000 National Guardsmen, 6,000 army troops, and 1,000 undercover intelligence agents. Richard Daley, the city’s mayor, insisted that law and order would prevail.108 There were armed police, even, in the convention hall. The party had no leader: Johnson had stepped down, Robert Kennedy had been shot. Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, who had not entered a single primary, won the nomination, defeating Eugene McCarthy and arousing the ire of the party’s left flank.
In November, Nixon beat Humphrey by winning those Americans who believed that he was speaking for them, the “Silent Majority.” The parties were being sorted by ideology. And they were being sorted by race. In 1960, about three out of every five blue-collar workers had voted Democrat; in 1968, only one in three did. In 1960, one in three African Americans had voted for Nixon over John F. Kennedy; by 1972, only one in ten would vote for Nixon over the Democratic nominee, South Dakota senator George McGovern.109
A midcentury era of political consensus had come to an almost unfathomably violent end. After 1968, American politics would be driven once again by division, resentment, and malice. Even Leone Baxter began to have her regrets. Interviewed in the 1960s, she warned that political consulting must be kept “in the hands of the most ethical, principled people. People with real concern for the world around them, for people around them or else it will erode into the hands of people who have no regard for the world around them. It could be a very, very destructive thing.”110
And what of the American past? Was the schoolbook version of American history a lie? The civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam called attention to aspects of American history that had been left out of American history textbooks from the very start. The American Indian Movement, founded in 1968, challenged the story of the nation’s origins—the goal of AIM’s occupation of an abandoned prison on the island of Alcatraz, an occupation that lasted from the end of 1969 through the middle of 1971, was for the island to become a Native American Studies center. The Black Power movement, the Chicano movement, and a growing Asian American movement made similar demands. In Denver in 1969, Chicano activist Rodolfo Gonzales, who’d founded the Crusade for Justice, led a walkout of Mexican American students in protest over the American history curriculum, insisting that it be revised to “enforce the inclusion in all schools of this city the history of our people, our culture, language, and our contributions to this country.”111 Black studies departments were founded at colleges—the first in 1969, at San Francisco State—followed by Chicano studies and women’s studies departments—the first founded at San Diego State in 1970—and sexuality and gender studies. A revolution on the streets produced a revolution in scholarship: a new American past.
A new American history—along with the broadening of research in the social sciences and the humanities more generally—was long overdue. But in the context of the war in Vietnam, questioning academic authority and pointing out the biases of experts began to slip into a cynicism about truth itself. A great deal of university research, not only in engineering and in weapons technology, had been deployed to wage and support the war in Vietnam, a war most Americans deemed ill-judged and many considered immoral. The Cold War had asked many of the nation’s scientists and scholars to turn their research to the pursuit of military and foreign policy aims; the Vietnam War had contorted the academy itself. After the Tet Offensive, Senate hearings into military spending revealed, among many other academic scandals, the extent of Simulmatics’s years of work in South Vietnam, conducting public opinion surveys and analyzing the dreams of Vietnamese villagers as a way of understanding the insurgency, a project not unrelated to the company’s other research, on countering “urban insurgency.” Arkansas senator J. William Fulbright, who convened the hearings, denounced social scientists like Ithiel de Sola Pool for failing to provide “an effective counterweight to the military-industrial complex by strengthening their emphasis on the traditional values of our democracy” and instead having “joined the monolith.” Noam Chomsky, writing in the New York Review of Books in 1969, argued that much of academic life in the United States—the production of knowledge itself—had been suborned for the purpose of waging a grotesque war in which all the courage had been shown by the young, by young soldiers who fought the war, and by young students who protested it. “While young dissenters plead for resurrection of the American promise, their elders continue to subvert it,” Fulbright said damningly, charging the nation’s intellectuals with “the surrender of independence, the neglect of teaching, and the distortion of scholarship,” and accusing the university of abdicating its elemental function, in “not only failing to meet its responsibilities to its students” but in “betraying a public trust.”112
The academy would have its reckoning. Vietnam convinced a great many American intellectuals to withdraw from public life, on the grounds that the only defensible ethical position was to refuse to engage in discussions of policy and politics. But in colleges and universities, revelations about the betrayals of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, and about the complicity of scholars and scientists, easily descended into disenchantment and a profound alienation from the idea of America itself. “I learned to despise my countrymen, my government and the entire English speaking world, with its history of genocide and international conquest” said one sixties radical. “I was a normal kid.”113
In some corners of the left, the idea that everything was a lie became a fashionable truth. Poststructuralism and postmodernism suffused not only American intellectual life but American politics, too. If everything is politics, and politics is a series of lies, then there is no truth. “Suddenly I realized that they did not really believe that there was a nature of things,” the social critic Paul Goodman wrote about his students at the end of the 1960s. “There was no knowledge but only the sociology of knowledge. They had so well learned that physical and sociological research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they were doubtful that there was such a thing as simple truth.”114 And that was before Watergate.
Meanwhile, on the right, a new political wisdom involved a new political math that produced a new and even deeper cynicism. Nixon’s 1968 campaign, with its southern strategy, had been singularly divisive. Almost as soon as he entered office, Nixon began thinking about his reelection, planning a still more divisive campaign that would determine the direction of his presidency. Kevin Phillips’s The Emerging Republican Majority appeared late in 1969. Nixon read it over Christmas and told his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, “Go for Poles, Italians, Irish, must learn to understand Silent Majority . . . don’t go for Jews & Blacks.”115 (Haldeman, a Californian, had volunteered for Eisenhower-Nixon in 1952 and had left his job to manage Nixon’s first presidential campaign: he’d learned how to campaign from Campaigns, Inc. “Whitaker and Baxter was the great old campaign,” Haldeman once said, “the granddaddy.”)116
Democrats plotted their own path to a majority, no less interested in market segmentation. Two Democratic strategists, Richard M. Scammon and Ben J. Wattenberg, published their own manifesto just months after Phillips’s book appeared. Like Phillips, Scammon and Wattenberg were using computers to study election returns and public opinion polls. In The Real Majority (1970), the two men argued that, in addition to the bread-and-butter issues that had for so long determined how citizens voted, “Americans are apparently beginning to array themselves politically along the axes of certain social situations as well.” The GOP was moving to the right, to capitalize on backlash against civil rights, and some in the Democratic Party were planning to move to the left. Scammon and Wattenberg explained, “Under the banner of New Politics there is talk of forming a new coalition of the left, composed of the young, the black, the poor, the well-educated, the socially alienated, minority groups, and intellectuals—while relegating Middle America and especially white union labor to the ranks of ‘racists.’” This coalition would be a disaster for the Democratic Party, Scammon and Wattenberg predicted, and they argued strenuously against it. “The great majority of the voters in America are unyoung, unpoor, and unblack; they are the middle-aged, middle-class, middle-minded,” they pointed out, and the average voter, statistically speaking, was a forty-seven-year-old Catholic housewife from Dayton, Ohio, married to a machinist:
To know that the lady in Dayton is afraid to walk the streets alone at night, to know that she has a mixed view about blacks and civil rights because before moving to the suburbs she lived in a neighborhood that became all black, to know that her brother-in-law is a policeman, to know that she does not have the money to move if her new neighborhood deteriorates, to know that she is deeply distressed that her son is going to a community junior college where LSD was found on campus—to know all this is the beginning of contemporary political wisdom.
Scammon and Wattenberg recommended that Democrats move to the center though they feared Democrats wouldn’t take their advice, and they were right.117
But Nixon did not ignore their advice. He read an advance copy of The Real Majority three weeks before it was published. The president “talked about Real Majority and need to get that thinking over to all our people,” Haldeman recorded in his notes. “Wants to hit pornography, dope, bad kids.” Nixon said, “We should aim our strategy primarily at disaffected Democrats, at blue-collar workers, and at working-class white ethnics” and “set out to capture the vote of the forty-seven-year-old Dayton housewife.” He decided to change the course of the White House’s strategy in the midterm 1970 elections, halting a campaign against Democrats as “big spenders” and replacing it with a campaign for the votes of blue-collar workers, on the basis of social issues, from marijuana to pornography. He charged his vice president, Spiro Agnew, with pushing Democrats out of the political center by calling people like Edward Kennedy “radical liberals.” Nixon’s staff crafted this argument into campaign rhetoric, urging him to use this message when talking to voters: “Today, racial minorities are saying that you can’t make it in America. What they really mean is that they refuse to start at the bottom of the ladder the way you did. They want to surpass you. . . . They want it handed to them.” Eyeing this state of affairs, political scientist Andrew Hacker announced 1970 “the end of the American era,” arguing that the nation was no longer a nation but a collection of “two hundred million egos.”118
Nixon, whose strength had always been foreign policy, wasn’t much interested in domestic policy, which he largely relegated to his aide John Ehrlichman. He was interested, though, in using domestic policy to better divide his opponents. He called the welfare state “building outhouses in Peoria.” He chose to address unemployment and the growing ranks of welfare recipients with a proposal first made by the University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman in the 1950s. His chief domestic initiative, announced in August of 1969, was a guaranteed income program that he called the Family Assistance Plan. It would have eradicated the welfare system and eliminated social workers and many social programs and replaced them with a cash payment to everyone earning below a certain wage level. Unlike the existing welfare program, the Family Assistance Plan provided an incentive for the poor to work; the cash payment rose with income level. When a Gallup poll asked, “Would you favor or oppose such a plan?” 62 percent said they would oppose it.119
During Nixon’s first term, opposition within policy circles grew. Conservatives objected to the Family Assistance Plan because it was a government handout; the Left, especially the National Welfare Rights Organization, objected to it because it wasn’t generous enough (“Zap FAP,” read their placards). Nixon enjoyed watching them battle it out. And, when the time was right for him politically, he abandoned it. Make a “big play for the plan,” he told Haldeman, but “be sure it’s killed by Democrats.”120
Nixon’s machinations with Congress weren’t all that much more cynical than those of some other American presidents. But his commitment to making sure the American people didn’t trust one another really was something distinctive. He often charged Agnew with the nastier part of this work, especially when it came to attacking the press and liberal intellectuals. “Dividing the American people has been my main contribution to the national political scene,” Agnew later said. “I not only plead guilty to this charge, but I am somewhat flattered by it.”121
Many of the means Nixon used to discredit and attack his opponents, both at home and abroad, involved abuses of power that had become commonplace during the Cold War, when anticommunist hysteria and the urgency of national security had triumphed over judgment and the rule of law. Other Cold War presidents had used the CIA to conduct covert operations abroad, the FBI to spy on American citizens, and the IRS to audit political opponents. But Nixon got found out, partly due to his own paranoia, insecurity, and recklessness. And the proof of his duplicity, in the form of tape recordings made in the White House, brought a new kind of historical evidence not only into the archives but into the public mind, a species of evidence much more intimate, and unchecked, than the collection of self-conscious memos and self-serving memoirs that chronicle most presidencies. The tapes would ultimately lead to impeachment proceedings, and Nixon’s resignation. But they also altered how Americans understood the presidency, since they altered the historical record, granting a view of even the most casual conversations, which very frequently revealed Nixon’s bigotry, suspicion, and mean-spiritedness. Consider a conversation between Nixon and Haldeman about the television talk show host Dick Cavett in June 1971:
HALDEMAN: We’ve got a running war going with Cavett.
NIXON: Is he just a left-winger? Is that the problem?
HALDEMAN: Yeah.
NIXON: Is he Jewish?
HALDEMAN: I don’t know. He doesn’t look it.122
FDR had holes drilled in the Oval Office floor to allow wires for recording press conferences. Truman had used a microphone hidden in a lampshade on his desk. Eisenhower had recorded conversations in the Oval Office, and bugged his own telephone. Kennedy and Johnson used a recording system installed by the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Nixon, after his inauguration, had ordered Johnson’s system dismantled; he didn’t like having to remember to turn the switch on and off. Still, his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, had secretaries listen in to meetings and take notes. In the end, a recording system seemed simpler than a fleet of secretaries, but because Nixon wanted the tapes to serve as a full and accurate chronicle of his presidency, he wanted a system that turned on automatically, at the slightest noise. Early in 1971, Haldeman installed a new, secret tape recording system that was voice-activated, and highly sensitive, to record meetings and telephone conversations in the Oval Office, the Lincoln Sitting Room, and the Cabinet Room. (Only Nixon and Haldeman knew about the system; Kissinger and John Ehrlichman were among those who did not.)123
During the very months that Haldeman was arranging for the new recording system at the White House, Daniel Ellsberg, a defense analyst, had been trying to find a way to release to the public a 7,000-page, 47-volume study of the war in Vietnam that had been commissioned by Robert McNamara in 1967, not long before he announced his resignation. The Pentagon Papers, as the report came to be called, was a chronicle of the lies and blunders of one administration after another in pursuing an ill-considered, cruel, and wanton campaign in Vietnam. Ellsberg, who had worked on the report, had made a set of photocopies in hopes that their exposure would bring an end to the war. Beginning in 1969, he had tried to gain the interest of members of Nixon’s administration, including Kissinger, to no avail. He had tried to get a member of Congress to leak the report, without success. He finally approached the New York Times early in 1971; the paper began publishing excerpts of the report on June 13. “Four succeeding administrations built up the American political, military and psychological stakes in Indochina,” the Times reported, introducing the chronicle of a decades-long conflict that the U.S. government had conducted to maintain “the power, influence and prestige of the United States . . . irrespective of conditions in Vietnam.”124
The Pentagon Papers did not indict the Nixon administration; the study ended in 1968. If anything, the release of the papers strengthened Nixon’s hand, allowing him to blame Vietnam on Kennedy and Johnson. But Nixon’s aides understood the implications of the leaked study. “To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook,” Haldeman told him. “But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing: you can’t trust the government; you can’t believe what they say; and you can’t rely on their judgment.” Nixon, who harbored deep fears of being found out—about anything—became convinced that Ellsberg’s leak to the Times was part of a conspiracy against him, “a Jewish cabal,” as he described it, “the same media that supported Hiss.” His aides did not disabuse him of this theory. Kissinger, a German Jew, warned him, “If this thing flies, they’re going to do the same to you.” Kissinger convinced Nixon to ask the Justice Department to forbid the Times to publish any further portions of the report. While that case made its way to the Supreme Court, the Washington Post began publishing the papers. On June 30, the Supreme Court ruled that the publication of the papers could continue; the Justice Department nevertheless proceeded with charges against Ellsberg.125
Faced with the possibility that their political opponents were gaining power, other presidents had simply called up J. Edgar Hoover and put the FBI on the case. But after the release of the Pentagon Papers, Hoover had grown cautious about engaging in unlawful surveillance and other, still less licit, tactics. The Nixon administration was left to do its own dirty work, much of which it also managed to capture on tape, as when, in July 1971, Nixon ordered his staff to blow up a safe at the Brookings Institution to find files about Vietnam that would embarrass Johnson, a measure motivated by nothing but malice, since he had been out of office for over two years.126 The administration also established a Special Investigations Unit, headed by a zealot and former aide of Ehrlichman’s named G. Gordon Liddy, who was subsequently sent to work for the Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP, popularly known as CREEP). On Saturday, June 17, 1972, Liddy directed five men to break into the offices of Lawrence O’Brien, the DNC chairman, at the Watergate Hotel, to steal documents and repair wiretaps that had earlier been placed on office phones. After finishing that job, the burglars were supposed to proceed to the headquarters of the George McGovern campaign, on Capitol Hill, to do much the same, but they never got there, because they were arrested at the Watergate Hotel. Nixon hadn’t known about the break-in before it happened, but six days later, on June 23, he was captured on tape discussing a cover-up with Haldeman.127
While the Nixon administration conducted its cover-up in secrecy, secure in its expectation that the president could use executive privilege to prevent anyone from ever hearing anything on its tape recordings, the Nixon reelection campaign proceeded. In November 1972, Nixon won 61 percent of the popular vote and became the first presidential candidate to win forty-nine states, losing only Massachusetts and Washington, DC, to McGovern. Both Nixon’s neediness and the way his hunger for approval was fed by his aides are richly illustrated in a conversation he had with Kissinger following McGovern’s concession speech, which Nixon considered too scanty in its acknowledgment of his own victory. Nixon called McGovern a “prick.”
NIXON: Don’t you agree?
KISSINGER: Absolutely. He was ungenerous.
NIXON: Yeah.
KISSINGER: He was petulant.
NIXON: Yeah.
KISSINGER: Unworthy.
NIXON: Right. As you probably know, I responded in a very decent way to him.
KISSINGER: Well, I thought that was a great statement. Year after year the media were harassing you. All the intellectuals were against you and you’ve come around—
NIXON: That’s right.
KISSINGER: —and had the greatest victory.128
Five days before his inauguration, in January 1973, Nixon announced the end of the war in Vietnam; the peace treaty would be signed in Paris later that month. In his inaugural address, on the twentieth, he heralded the beginning of a new era of peace and progress, driven by a conservative revolution. “Abroad and at home, the time has come to turn away from the condescending policies of paternalism—of ‘Washington knows best,’” he said. “Let us encourage individuals at home and nations abroad to do more for themselves, to decide more for themselves.” If Americans had trusted too much in government, this wasn’t because government couldn’t be trusted, because presidents had lied to the American people; this was because people should do more for themselves. The atrocities waged in the name of the American people in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, the chaos on American streets—these were not the fault of elected officials who made grave mistakes, lied to the press, and obstructed justice. These things were the faults of liberalism, which had taught Americans to expect too much of government. “In trusting too much in government, we have asked of it more than it can deliver,” Nixon declared. “This leads only to inflated expectations, to reduced individual effort, and to a disappointment and frustration that erode confidence both in what government can do and in what people can do.” Kennedy had urged Americans, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Nixon urged Americans to ask what they could do for themselves.
Two days after the inauguration, Lyndon Johnson, sixty-four, had a heart attack at his ranch in Texas. Johnson, who had given up his sixty-cigarettes-a-day habit after his first heart attack in 1955, had smoked his first cigarette in fourteen years on the plane ride home from Nixon’s first inauguration. Alone at home on January 22, seized with pains in his chest, he telephoned for help, but help arrived too late.
Ten days before his death, in his last interview, with Walter Cronkite, a weary Johnson, in a button-down flannel shirt and thick, wire-framed eyeglasses, had talked with a swelling pride about the role he’d played in advancing civil rights: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the “We Shall Overcome” speech he’d made during the crisis at Selma, and his 1967 appointment of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court. “We’re living in a fast age, and all of us are rather impatient, and, more important, we’re rather intolerant of the opinions of our fellow man and his judgments and his conduct and his traditions and his way of life,” Johnson told Cronkite, his languid voice heavy with pain. When Johnson died, Thurgood Marshall said, “He died of a broken heart.”129
Nixon’s own collapse came more slowly, a festering, self-inflicted wound. In February, the Senate voted to convene a special committee to investigate the Watergate burglary. In May, Nixon’s incoming attorney general, Elliot Richardson, named Archibald Cox as a special prosecutor. In July, the Senate committee learned about the tapes, but when Cox subpoenaed them, Nixon refused to turn them over, citing executive privilege. The cover-up had gone badly. Charges against Ellsberg were dropped when the Watergate investigation revealed that Liddy’s operatives had broken into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in California. Still, Nixon had little fear of impeachment with the notoriously corrupt and much-despised Agnew as his vice president. (He called Agnew the “assassins’ dilemma.”)130 But in October, Agnew pled no contest to a charge of tax evasion and resigned. Ten days later, in what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre, Nixon told Richardson to fire Cox; when Richardson refused and resigned instead, Nixon told Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to do it; Ruckelshaus also resigned. Finally, Nixon got Solicitor General Robert Bork to fire Cox—an abuse of power that would haunt Bork, the FBI, and the Justice Department itself.
“Act like a winner,” Nixon wrote in a note to himself, listing his New Year’s resolutions. But his efforts to block the release of the tapes failed. Finally, in April 1974, he released 1,200 pages of transcripts to 46 tapes. The public discovered the nature of Nixon’s wrath, his pettiness, and his vengefulness. But the June 23, 1972, transcripts were not included, and when the committee demanded them, the White House refused, and the case went to the Supreme Court, in United States v. Nixon. While the justices were deliberating, eighty-three-year-old Earl Warren, who had retired from the court five years before, had a heart attack. On July 9, Justices William O. Douglas and William J. Brennan went to see him at Georgetown University Hospital. Warren grabbed Douglas’s hand. “If Nixon is not forced to turn over tapes of his conversations with the ring of men who were conversing on their violations of the law,” Warren warned, “then liberty will soon be dead in this nation.” Brennan and Douglas assured him that the court would order the president to hand over the tapes. Warren died hours later. The Supreme Court delivered its unanimous opinion on July 24 (Nixon nominee William Rehnquist recused himself): the White House had to release the tapes.131
The content of the tapes was reported on August 6, 1974. Impeachment seemed certain. To avoid it, Nixon announced his resignation the next day, speaking into television cameras from his desk at the White House. In a brief, curt speech, he touted his foreign policy achievements, which were many, and of deep and abiding significance. He’d opened diplomatic relations with China, after a quarter century. For all that he’d done to prolong it, he had in fact ended the war in Vietnam. He’d improved U.S. relations in the Middle East. He’d negotiated arms limitation agreements with the Soviet Union, building on relationships he’d established on his trip to Moscow in 1959. He said nearly nothing about conditions in the United States, except to allude to “the turbulent history of this era”—a turbulence he had done little to alleviate and much to aggravate.132
The next morning, bidding farewell to his White House staff, he said, “Always remember, others may hate you—but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”133 Then, carrying on his stooped shoulders the weight of a troubled nation, he walked down a red carpet on the South Lawn to a waiting helicopter, climbed the stairs to its open door, and turned back to deliver his trademark wave, spreading both arms wide. Disappearing inside, he flew away, last seen peering out through a bulletproof window as the whirling helicopter wended its way toward the Washington Monument and over the National Mall, where another man had not so very long ago told a story about a dream.