ALBANY AND BIRMINGHAM: LESSONS OF NONVIOLENCE
Albany, Georgia, was a peaceful place which progress forgot. Surrounded by fields of cotton and peanuts, the town was racially mixed—in 1961, 40 percent of its 56,000 inhabitants were black—but in fact it was two towns, one black, one white, separate and unequal. Blacks had power only within their own community, and then only to a limited extent. The vast majority did not vote; they held the most menial jobs and fatalistically accepted their lowly status. “Most . . . people who had lived in Albany all of their lives had . . . come to expect things as they were,” William Anderson, a local civil rights activist, recalled.1
The black community drew strength from marginalization. It was downtrodden, but still proud. That pride brought strength, but not success. In an age increasingly dominated by television, a campaign was judged a success if it managed to attract attention. Violence caused viewers to take notice. Good feelings did not.
After the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–1956, the civil rights struggle shifted from the courts to the marketplace. Battles henceforth took place at lunch counters, on interstate buses, and in public facilities throughout the South. The struggle was conducted by an army of agitators who had experienced the injustices they protested. Direct action offered ordinary blacks an opportunity to assert themselves, in the process fostering empowerment.
On February 1, 1960, four young black men—Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, David Richmond, and Ezell Blair—politely took their places at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. They sat passively while they were spat upon, verbally abused, and had food and drinks thrown at them. The tactic soon spread. By October, sit-ins had been staged in 112 Southern cities. Activists, rather than being humiliated by white abuse, were invigorated.
The new spirit was evident in the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on Easter weekend, 1960. SNCC capitalized on the popularity of the lunch counter protests by providing an outlet for young people—black and white—who were inspired by the possibilities for direct action. While the new group mirrored the adherence to nonviolence common among most civil rights groups, it was uniquely impatient and ambitious. “The pace of social change is too slow,” James Law-son, one of the founders, argued. “At this rate it will be at least another generation before the major forms of segregation disappear. All of Africa will be free before the American Negro attains first class citizenship.”2
A new front was opened the following spring, when activists targeted interstate bus companies. In the 1960 Boynton versus Virginia case, the Supreme Court had ruled that segregation of interstate transport facilities was unconstitutional. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) decided to test the ruling by staging a “Freedom Ride” across the South. Thirteen volunteers left Washington on May 4, 1961, headed for New Orleans.
When they reached Anniston, Alabama, their bus was met by 200 angry whites, who threw stones and slashed tires. Forced to stop six miles farther on for repairs, the bus encountered another violent mob. During the ensuing melee, a firebomb was thrown through the rear door, enveloping the bus in flames. While the attacks were undoubtedly frightening for the Riders, newspaper photos of the burning bus provided valuable publicity for the movement.
President Kennedy was desperate to avoid having to send troops into the South, but could not ignore a burning bus. He accepted that the Supreme Court ruling had to be enforced, but still hoped that white Southern authorities might see reason and that Freedom Riders might decide their protests were too dangerous. The latter was never likely, given the courage and solidarity the protests fostered. The Nashville Student Movement, with John Lewis at their head, stepped into the breach, vowing to continue to New Orleans.
Another attack occurred at Montgomery on May 20. It later transpired that police commissioner L. B. Sullivan had given white vigilantes ten minutes to use “as they saw fit.” On learning of this arrangement, an angry Kennedy ordered federal marshals to protect the Riders and obtained an injunction banning the Ku Klux Klan and other white mobs from harassing them. The Riders meanwhile pushed on to Jackson, Mississippi, where they were attacked and arrested when they attempted to use facilities at the station. Thanks to white intransigence, the Freedom Rides were attracting much more attention than organizers had dared hope. Unable to ignore the steadily swelling protest, Kennedy asked the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to draw up regulations banning segregation on bus routes. These came into effect on November 1, 1961.3
The publicity generated by the Rides convinced Martin Luther King Jr., the acknowledged leader of the civil rights movement, that the time was ripe for a new offensive. Beneath the surface, however, dissension was brewing. The young enthusiasts of SNCC, perturbed by King’s failure to take an active part in the Rides, accused him of cowardice. Divisions were exacerbated by the concurrent voting rights campaign. Voter registration efforts posed a more direct threat to the edifice of white supremacy than did sit-ins or bus rides. For that reason, they were resisted vigorously. The level of commitment required, and the danger involved, rendered SNCC ideally suited. “When SNCC came, it didn’t seem to matter what these white people thought,” one black resident remarked. “The only thing . . . that gave courage and determination to the blacks in the South was SNCC.” That achievement, however, went largely unnoticed by the Northern press, since small local campaigns did not have the glamour of high profile actions. Yet those actions would not have been possible without the groundwork carried out by SNCC. This caused tension within the movement, since the big protests were often carelessly credited to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and particularly to King.4
In November 1961, SNCC activists in Albany decided to test the ICC ruling on the desegregation of interstate transport by asserting their rights at the local bus terminal. The police cajoled, then harassed, then threatened the demonstrators, who refused to budge. They were finally dragged from the terminal—exactly what SNCC wanted. In the wake of the protest, campaigners gathered to form the Albany Movement, a broad-based coalition intent upon a comprehensive nonviolent campaign against segregation. Despite the local group’s enthusiasm, seasoned civil rights leaders feared that Albany was ill-suited to a sustained campaign.
Nonviolent protest is most successful when it is met with violence, for that is when it becomes newsworthy. In Albany, police violence was sorely absent. Black activists were comprehensively outmaneuvered by the local chief, Laurie Pritchett. Using informants from within the black community, he anticipated the campaigners’ every move. “I did research,” he later explained. “I found [King’s] method was nonviolence, that his method was to fill the jails—same as in India . . . . After learning this . . . I started orientation of the police department into nonviolent movement—no violence, no dogs, no show of force. I even took up some of the training the SNCC originated there—like sitting at the counter and being slapped. Spit upon. I said, ‘If they do this, you will not use force. We’re going to out-nonviolent them.’” By mid-December, more than 500 demonstrators had been arrested, but the campaign had reached a stalemate, thanks mainly to Pritchett. Since the press was unable to produce photos of brutal policemen clubbing protesters, the campaign did not become sufficiently newsworthy to arouse Northern sympathies or provoke the intervention of attorney general Robert Kennedy. Organizers decided to call in King, in order to drum up more publicity. That was not an easy decision. The strength of the Albany Movement had so far been its local character. Calling in help from outside constituted an acknowledgment of defeat and also played into the hands of the white establishment, whose spokesmen invariably described Albany as a peaceful, harmonious community under attack by outside agitators.5
King’s arrival broke the stalemate. In a rally at City Hall, he urged sympathetic supporters to come to Albany. Around 250 people were arrested, including King. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, negotiations took place between local politicians and the Albany Movement. City commissioners, keen to restore order, offered concessions in exchange for a suspension of the demonstrations. Jailed protesters were also released, thus relieving the pressure on Pritchett’s jails. Confident that a victory had been gained, King left Albany. As it turned out, however, the negotiations were a ruse designed to pull the rug from under the movement. Local authorities immediately reneged on their promises.
Albany resumed its war of attrition. Protests were incessant, but progress imperceptible. Pritchett’s outsmarting of King and SNCC gave heart to bigots everywhere. Emboldened by their success, city officials grew ever more stubborn. When Kennedy urged mayor Asa Kelly to compromise, Kelly bluntly refused. Another setback occurred when the Federal District Court issued a restraining order banning further protests. Activists split over whether to obey the order. King, not wanting to alienate the federal government, insisted on compliance. Others, however, argued that an unjust law had to be defied. Demonstrators took to the streets in open defiance of King.
On July 25, Albany’s streets were crowded with 2,000 marchers, not all of them committed to nonviolence. When rocks were thrown, town authorities could hardly contain their delight. “Did you see them nonviolent rocks?” Pritchett crowed. King called for a day of penance, but the more intemperate members of SNCC had grown tired of his saintly ways. They began to argue that rigid adherence to nonviolence jeopardized progress. Nonviolence, they decided, might be useful in certain circumstances, but could not be allowed to become an overriding goal.6
After ten months of virtually continuous agitation, little had been achieved. More than a thousand protesters had been jailed but the penal system had not collapsed. The campaign ran out of activists before Pritchett ran out of jail space. Organizers struggled to construct positive interpretations of the events. Anderson subsequently insisted that the movement was “an overwhelming success”: very simply, people had decided “they would never accept that segregated society as it was anymore.” This might have been true, but it was not the sort of success that could be celebrated on the front pages of national newspapers. The civil rights movement had reached the stage where it needed concrete results, not vague notions of empowerment.7
King drew his own lessons. “When Martin left Albany he was very depressed,” his friend Andrew Young later recalled. “The weakness of the Albany movement was that it was totally unplanned and we were totally unprepared.” All that effort had merely revealed deep divisions. The campaign had also demonstrated the limits of what could be expected from the federal government. Washington’s first priority was order, not justice. Since Albany had never provided embarrassing scenes of disorder, the government did not feel inclined to intervene. In addition, points of confrontation were poorly chosen. The blanket challenge to segregation in the town confronted local statutes, not national ones, thus rendering the federal government powerless to intervene. “When the movement in Albany moved out of the bus station . . . and into other areas of the city,” recalled Burke Marshall, head of the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department, “we didn’t have the authority we could wave at the city of Albany that we had in the case of the bus stations.”8
Albany demonstrated that there was great merit in a community movement where local residents joined together to address injustices they themselves suffered. Its strength, however, was also its weakness: a plethora of locally based actions led to disunity and disorganization. Albany also revealed that a balance needed to be struck between the kind of local infiltration that SNCC was so good at and the courting of national attention, which was the expertise of SCLC. Down in the trenches, many activists concluded that SNCC did the work and SCLC got the glory. Feelings like that were inevitably corrosive.
After the disappointment of Albany, civil rights activists were desperate to find a battle they could win. Birmingham, Alabama, seemed just the place. There, an elementary school reader showing black and white bunnies playing together had been banned on the grounds that it endorsed integration. Segregation was enforced by law and by fear. The Ku Klux Klan operated without impediment, staging fifty cross burnings in the years 1960–1963. The same period saw eighteen racially motivated bombings, earning the city the nickname “Bombingham.” The city also possessed the one element missing in Albany—namely, a violent, unstable, politically obtuse local lawman. Police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor was the perfect caricature of the bigoted sheriff.
In contrast to the Albany efforts, the protests in Birmingham were, from the outset, led by national organizers. The official aim was to attack segregation in public facilities and to end discriminatory employment practices, but the underlying goal was to produce a spectacle that would arouse the nation’s conscience. The campaign began in early April 1963, with King’s announcement of an economic boycott against segregationist businesses. On the 6th, a small crowd marched on City Hall, prompting police to arrest demonstrators on the flimsiest of charges. Over subsequent days, marches grew, as did the number of arrests.
The first week seemed the perfect model of a civil rights campaign. Protests were carefully orchestrated, an image that suggested unity of purpose. White businesses suffered terribly when the boycott took hold. Above all, the national media paid attention. Images of angry policemen with vicious dogs attacking hymn-singing protesters aroused the nation. Frustrated at the way they had been comprehensively outmaneuvered, city authorities attempted on April 10 to put a stop to the action by issuing an injunction against street protests. Two days later, King openly challenged the injunction, and was arrested.
While King was in jail, eight prominent Alabama clergymen published a statement criticizing his tactics. While they sympathized with the struggle, they resented outsiders poking their noses into the affairs of Birmingham. Counseling patience, they accused King of provoking violence and jeopardizing the chances for peaceful negotiation. He responded with his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” “I am in Birmingham because injustice is here,” he retorted. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives in the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.” King insisted that he wanted negotiation, but maintained that white Southerners would not talk unless forced to do so. “The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.” As for provoking violence, he replied: “Isn’t this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery?” In response to the call for patience, he argued: “For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’”9
On April 23, W. L. Moore of CORE was shot dead during a “freedom walk” through the South. For Birmingham protesters, the murder provided a shot of adrenalin. On May 2, which organizers called D-Day, 6,000 blacks, most of them under the age of sixteen, marched. The young protesters came dressed in their Sunday best, thus underlining their respectability and innocence. Most noticeable were little black girls in freshly ironed dresses with white bobby socks and white gloves—harmless waifs individually weak but symbolically invincible. In stark contrast were Connor’s cops, with their billy clubs, snarling dogs, and water cannons. Organizers had set a trap into which Connor obligingly charged. Images of dogs set loose on children instantly changed the temper of the civil rights struggle.
The scenes were repeated the next day. Eventually, more than a thousand children were jailed for daring to confront segregation. Connor prided himself on his toughness, but the rest of the world saw base brutality. America was taught a lesson by a few thousand black schoolchildren. King and his followers had sought not only to expose the injustice of Southern segregation but also to embarrass America, to expose her tolerance of segregation to the world. As a media event it was perfect, but those who cared to look beneath the surface felt unease at the cynicism of putting children in the line of fire. Critics called it the Children’s Crusade. “Real men don’t put their children on the firing line,” a disgusted Malcolm X spat.10
Kennedy, though sickened by Birmingham, was still preoccupied with order, not justice. He dreaded a confrontation with the South over states’ rights, yet could not see how the crisis could be resolved without federal intervention. Southern hardliners, he feared, would interpret any involvement by him as an attempt to impose a new racial order. Given the narrowness of his victory in 1960, he could not afford to alienate Southern Democrats. Desperate to find a compromise, he appealed to Birmingham officials to negotiate, but they refused. King, realizing he had both the city and the White House on the ropes, was equally intransigent.
Demonstrations continued into May, reaching a peak on the 7th, when thousands of protesters mobilized. Never one for subtlety, Connor deployed a tank. Police wielded fire hoses so powerful they could strip bark from trees. Under the circumstances, demonstrators found it difficult to remain faithful to nonviolence. Instances of rock throwing grew more common with each passing day, much to the chagrin of King. A delighted Southern press was quick to exploit photos of blacks hurling stones.
As King had predicted, unrelenting direct action finally convinced stubborn city officials to see reason. On May 10, a truce was reached, with vague concessions on issues of segregation and the release of prisoners. The truce, however, fired the wrath of hardliners on both sides. White vigilantes responded with a wave of bombings. Meanwhile, disgruntled blacks, disappointed by the concessions, rioted on the 12th.
The campaign was technically over, even though the city remained on a knife-edge. Birmingham was more important for what it achieved across the nation than for what it accomplished within the confines of the city. While local intransigence continued to thwart reform, outside the city significant progress was apparent. From May to September 1963, some fifty cities in the South implemented desegregation measures. White businesses, concerned more with the bottom line than with the racial divide, started making high-profile donations to civil rights organizations. The brutal scenes from Birmingham had also aroused the moral conscience of Northern whites to an unprecedented extent. They donated money, went on marches, wrote to Washington, and, in many cases, journeyed south to join the struggle. The flood of volunteers reached a peak in the Freedom Summer voter registration drive of 1964.
The effect upon blacks was also profound. While Birmingham was largely nonviolent, the protests marked the emergence of a new generation of protesters who were proud, assertive, impatient, and unwilling to compromise. They did not fear going to jail or putting their lives on the line. While most still believed in nonviolence, that belief was pragmatic, not philosophical. Since adherence was not absolute, the possibility of resorting to violence remained open. Meanwhile, a growing number of activists, impatient with the pace of change, were drawn to the militant tactics espoused by black nationalists like Malcolm X. The pace of protest now seemed to be dictated by the rank and file, rather than by their leaders. Gandhi’s aphorism, “There go my people—I must catch them, for I am their leader,” plagued King.
Southern hardliners answered progress with intransigence. On January 14, 1963, during his inaugural address, the newly elected governor George Wallace told the people of Alabama: “Let us rise to the call of the freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that ever trod the earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation now . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.” Wallace, who had promised voters that he would “stand in the schoolhouse door” in order to stop integration, did precisely that on June n, 1963, when he personally prevented two black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama. Prior to Birmingham, Kennedy would have been inclined to negotiate. The rules of engagement had, however, changed. Kennedy instead issued a cease-and-desist order and mobilized the National Guard. After four hours of stubborn posturing, Wallace surrendered.11
On that same day, Kennedy addressed the American people on the civil rights issue. Using the confrontation with Wallace as his starting point, he argued:
It ought to be possible . . . for American students of any color to attend any public institution they select without having to be backed up by troops. It ought to be possible for American consumers of any color to receive equal service in . . . hotels and restaurants and theaters and retail stores, without being forced to resort to demonstrations in the street, and it ought to be possible for American citizens of any color . . . to vote in a free election without interference or fear of reprisal. It ought to be possible, in short, for every American to enjoy the privileges of being American.
A nation which professed to be a defender of freedom abroad could not, Kennedy argued, deny basic freedoms at home. “Now the time has come for this Nation to fulfill its promise.” While his appeal was based on morality, Kennedy also warned that if reforms were rejected, chaos would ensue. Rock throwers in Birmingham had clearly had their effect. “The fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city, North and South . . . . Redress is sought in the streets, in demonstrations, parades, and protests which create tensions and threaten violence and threaten lives. We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and as a people. It cannot be met by repressive police action. It cannot be left to increased demonstrations in the streets. It cannot be quieted by token moves or talk.” The solution, Kennedy had decided, lay in legislation. “Next week I shall ask the Congress . . . to make a commitment . . . to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law.” A comprehensive Civil Rights Bill designed to outlaw segregation in all public establishments, integrate public schools, and provide greater protection of the right to vote was put before Congress a week later, on June 19,1963. “Those who do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence,” Kennedy concluded. “Those who act boldly are recognizing right as well as reality.”12
For the first time, Kennedy had made it patently clear that the civil rights issue was a moral one—“as old as the Scriptures and . . . as clear as the American Constitution.” Yet his appeal to the American sense of decency went unheeded in many parts of the South. Just as Birmingham had strengthened the solidarity of the black community, so too it had fired the wrath of those determined to resist. Militant whites, feeling the weight of the nation upon them, developed a bunker mentality. The appeal of violence was growing on both sides. This was patently demonstrated just a few hours after Kennedy’s speech, when the white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith gunned down Medgar Evers, director of the NAACP in Mississippi.13
Birmingham, an interminably ugly battle, provided a lesson in media management. The campaign demonstrated that violence was a prerequisite to national awakening. The use of young children was cynical but highly effective. Henceforth, organizers chose new battlegrounds on the basis of whether the local sheriff could be relied upon to overreact. Protests were carefully stage-managed in order to provoke the most violent response. Journalists were assiduously nurtured. Andrew Young, unofficial public relations man for King’s SCLC, discovered, in the course of his work, what we now call the soundbite—a brief, self-contained, dramatic statement which could be incorporated directly into a news report, without editing. For maximum impact, the soundbite had to be accompanied by striking visual material—and this, in the context of the civil rights movement, inevitably meant shots of brutality and suffering.
“TV does nothing better than spectacle,” the journalist and political commentator Theodore White wrote of Birmingham. “The police dogs and the fire hoses . . . have become the symbols of the American Negro revolution—as the knout and the Cossacks were symbols of the Russian Revolution. When television showed dogs snapping at human beings, when the fire hoses thrashed and flailed at the women and children, whipping up skirts and pounding up bodies, . . . the entire nation winced as the demonstrators winced.” Birmingham had ramifications beyond the civil rights movement. Henceforth, political agitation became a ritualized dance choreographed for the media. In Berkeley, for instance, student protesters timed actions so that they could be shown live on the late-afternoon news. The media inevitably favored the firebrand. People who had a point to make realized that they could do so more effectively by shouting. Truth was secondary—what counted was drama. Thus, at Selma in 1965, photographers captured shots of the local sheriff clubbing Annie Lee Cooper while she was held down by three officers. They did not, however, show that Cooper had provoked the punishment by first slugging the sheriff.14
News had to be extraordinary—a network producer was not likely to devote valuable minutes to the protester or policeman who held his temper, or to the politician who lacked a sense of dramatic timing. The nightly news was sandwiched within a schedule packed with sitcoms, Westerns, and crime dramas. While it is perhaps unfair to argue that it had to be entertaining, it did have to sustain attention. Network executives kept a cold eye on audience figures, aware that a viewer who switched to another channel because of a boring news item might not switch back.
The tyranny of television worried King. His method of protest was noble, but not always newsworthy. Gandhi had not had to worry about the Nielsen ratings, but King did. He realized that he was in danger of losing his movement to militant firebrands who were always ready to satisfy the media’s hunger for noise. In a private conversation with the CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr, he pointedly asked: “When Negroes are incited to violence, will you think of your responsibility in helping to produce it?”15
PORT HURON: STUDENTS FOR A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY
Being a student wasn’t easy in the 1960s. One study described a “bleak” environment in which the student was “confronted . . . with indifferent advising, endless bureaucratic routines, gigantic lecture courses, and a deadening succession of textbook assignments and bluebook examinations testing his grasp of bits and pieces of knowledge.”16
A good university did not necessarily provide escape from that desert of boredom and sterility. Prestigious universities were judged not by the quality of their teaching, but by their ability to land lucrative research contracts. During the Cold War, those contracts were often defense-related, a sore point among sensitive students. Research demands rendered the professor less accessible to the student, whose instruction was left largely to postgraduates only slightly older and marginally more mature. Since the mainly middle-class students at prestigious universities sought intellectual fulfillment, not simply a career, they were sensitive to these deficiencies, and inclined to complain. For many, the campus seemed a microcosm of an imperfect world.
Universities confidently assumed that since students were not adults, they needed to be chaperoned as well as educated. The assumption of quasi-parental authority led to the regulation of “adult” pursuits, among them sex and politics. In sexual matters, universities tried diligently but unsuccessfully to curb promiscuity. In political affairs, they proudly defended the ivory tower, discouraging activism. There was, however, a problem with their efforts to act in loco parentis: universities aspired to be parents, but managed only to be neglectful ones.
A small core of disgruntled students took seriously C. Wright Mills’s advocacy of the intelligentsia as the “radical agency of change.” Mills, a sociologist admired in the Soviet Union as a harsh critic of capitalism, was in truth a champion of the individual: he realized that, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, individuality was suppressed. He attacked the oppressive sameness of capitalist culture, which offered limitless abundance but little genuine variety. In doing so, he gave intellectual voice to the alienation that many young people felt—an alienation exacerbated by an oppressively liberal political system offering no outlet for radicalism.
Liberals, argued Mills, had convinced themselves that history ended in 1945. For them, “there are no more real issues or even problems of great seriousness. The mixed economy plus the welfare state plus prosperity—that is the formula. US capitalism will continue to be workable; the welfare state will continue along the road to ever greater justice.” The Berkeley activist Mario Savio clearly had Mills in mind when he published his essay “An End to History” (1964), in which he argued that
America is becoming ever more the Utopia of sterilized, automated contentment. The “futures” and “careers” for which American students now prepare are for the most part intellectual and moral wastelands. This chrome-plated consumers’ paradise would have us grow up to be well-behaved children. But an important minority of men and women coming to the front today have shown that they will die rather than be standardized, replaceable and irrelevant.
“The Age of Complacency is ending,” Mills proclaimed. “We are beginning to move again.” He became a mythic figure to a generation of American youths who shared his discontent, or at least thought it fashionable to do so. In time, almost every rebellious act would be justified as a blow struck for individuality, and a tribute to Mills.17
Another popular thinker was the German-American philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Unlike Mills, he was a Marxist, but also a devout libertarian, which explains why he had little truck with the Soviets. By the mid-Sixties, hip people were quoting his Eros and Civilization, many without ever having read a single page. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the leaders of the French student revolt, remarked: “People wanted to blame Marcuse as our mentor; that was a joke. Not one of us had read Marcuse.” It’s ironic that a thinker who warned about the superficiality of society should owe his popularity to such a superficial appreciation of his work. “What he does,” argued James Jupp in Political Quarterly, “is to echo feelings and sentiments which are widespread, but are incoherently expressed by millions.” Underneath his mind-numbingly prolix style, Marcuse had some valid things to say about technology and the state. In One-Dimensional Man, he argued that “a comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technological progress.” He warned against the careless tendency to confuse change with progress, pointing out that technological developments could close doors as easily as open them. The “communications revolution,” for instance, seemed liberating, but was predominantly used for purposes of control. Likewise, the constant flood of new products gave the illusion of choice, when in fact those choices had little significance. The worth of a society, in other words, should not be measured by its ability to produce twenty brands of deodorant.18
Marcuse’s appeal to activists, not to mention his threat to the status quo, arose from his argument that oppression, in the modern age, came less from poverty than from affluence. While this idea intrigued and occasionally inspired middle-class baby boomers, for the vast majority of people happily stuck on the escalator of ambition it seemed utter nonsense. For them, creature comforts were the outward and visible signs of material success—proof that they had been liberated from the scourge of want. Attempts by radicals to turn alienation into a mass movement failed miserably, for the simple reason that the masses coveted the sort of life that activists despised. It was impossible to convince the working man that the new car he desperately wanted was actually an instrument of his oppression.
Marcuse’s solution to the problem of “unfreedom” was revolution; he suggested that only by defying the system could people achieve true liberation. That idea undoubtedly appealed to those in the counterculture who naively thought that revolution would be great fun—people who worshiped the word without ever pondering its implications. But while Marcuse espoused revolution, in other ways his philosophy undermined it. His libertarian ideas, though attractive to those who wanted to “do their own thing,” were antithetical to unity and organization. As Tom Hayden later reflected, “Our profound distrust of leadership and structure doomed us to failure on the level of political organization.”19
Student activism was also encouraged by Old Left radicals only just resurfacing after years of McCarthyite persecution. They saw students as a new proletariat, much more promising than the working class who had failed them. Many Sixties student radicals were “red-diaper babies”—children of parents who had once been active in the Communist party. The repudiation of Joseph McCarthy seemed to them an opportunity: for the first time in a generation, dissenters were not automatically pariahs. Todd Gitlin sensed, among his fellow travelers, “the grand illusion that we, the New Left, could solve the problems of the Left by being young.”20
Among Hayden’s fellow students at the University of Michigan were a number of restless souls keen to embrace good causes. One such activist was Robert Haber, who in February 1960 founded Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) from the remnants of the Student League for Industrial Democracy. Haber, inspired by the lunch counter sit-ins, envisaged an organization which could contribute to the civil rights struggle and agitate against other injustices. He originally imagined a national network of activists on campuses around the country, not a mass movement.
Hayden’s decision to join came as a result of his travels through America in the summer of 1960, inspired by Kerouac. At the University of California, Berkeley, he witnessed a contagious activism among students and also interviewed the nuclear physicist Edward Teller, a deeply frightening man able to contemplate nuclear Armageddon while he played Chopin on his piano. Later, he attended the Democratic convention in Los Angeles where he met Robert Kennedy, with whom he was hugely impressed. Equally inspiring was Martin Luther King, who told him: “Ultimately, you have to take a stand with your life.” Hayden returned home determined to devote himself to a political cause, but he did not want to replicate what he had encountered in the South—a pattern of “beating to beating, jail to jail.” SDS seemed the perfect oudet.21
After joining, Hayden persuaded the executive committee to transform SDS into a mass movement. Toward that end, around sixty activists converged on Port Huron, Michigan, in 1962. Though the group was politically radical, they hardly looked it. Photos reveal staid-looking, conventionally dressed students who could easily have been mistaken for members of a chess club. This image of geekish industriousness would stick with the group for the rest of its life. Granted, some activists eventually grew their hair long and wore jeans, but their political intensity never waned.
Out of the meeting came the Port Huron Statement, “an agenda for a generation” largely written by Hayden, in homage to Mills. The decade produced few documents more boring, but SDS activists, being dull, loved it. The tedious nature of the statement perhaps explains why the most frequently quoted sentence comes on page 1: “We are the people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.” Continuing in that melodramatic strain, the document proclaimed: “We may be the last generation in the experiment with living.”22
At the heart of the statement was the idea of participatory democracy. SDS called upon the individual to “share in the social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life.” Society had to be organized to “encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.” This was a Utopian idea, but also a quintessentially American one in the importance assigned the individual. It was not enough for people to submit to being governed by representatives of their choice; they had to participate actively in their governance. A logical corollary was the belief that all authority was suspect because it quashed individual expression.23
SDS was a religion, and the Port Huron Statement its Scripture. Large parts read like a Sunday sermon. “We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love.” On the subject of youthful alienation, the document maintained: “Loneliness, estrangement, isolation describe the vast distance between man and man today. These dominant tendencies cannot be overcome by better personnel management, nor by improved gadgets, but only when a love of man overcomes the idolatrous worship of things by man.” Hayden sought to redefine the American Dream, replacing material success with spiritual fulfillment, albeit of a secular variety.24
Gitlin, another SDS activist, later reflected that “only true believers in the promise of America could have felt so anti-American.” The faithful argued that the bureaucracy of government would have to be torn down in order for society to get back to original American ideals. “Political institutions designed to perpetuate a system of power will never become instruments for the transformation of that system,” wrote the long-winded Carl Oglesby. “If you want to stop not only the Vietnam war but the system that begot it, if you want not merely to blur the edges of racism but to change the system that needed slaves in the first place and could ‘emancipate’ them only into ghettoes in the second, if you want not merely to make deals with irrationality but to liberate reason for the conquest of joy, then you will have to go outside the system.” SDS sought to sweep away the sterile hypocrisy of the older generation, replacing it with a new, dynamic, people-centered system—an amalgam of European socialism, Jeffersonian democracy, and the participatory politics of the Greek city-state. Politics, being personal, could be practiced anywhere—it need not be confined to the grim bastions where gray men in suits conspired in secretive cabals.25
Fueling the movement was the high-octane naïveté of self-important young people who have just discovered “eternal truths.” SDS wanted to sweep away the elites—military, business, political—that were controlling America and replace them with a new elite: students. Reflecting on his experiences many years later, Hayden confessed: “I still don’t know where this messianic sense, this belief in being right, this confidence that we could speak for a generation, came from.” The answer was quite simple: it came from their egos, all of which were extraordinarily large. Their self-proclaimed status as the gifted of their generation convinced them that they had a right and duty to lead the masses back toward the American Dream—as they defined it.26
Participatory democracy was fine in theory but difficult in practice. “We [must] . . . reach out to people who are tied to the mythology of American power and make them part of our movement,” SDS president Paul Potter proclaimed in 1965. In truth, activists had no idea how to find or communicate with “the people.” They spent too much time reading fashionable philosophers, and not enough among the masses. There’s little in the Port Huron Statement calculated to appeal to the poor, the workers, minorities, or women. It articulates a young, white, male intellectual’s perspective on materialism, democracy, foreign policy, and education, but says hardly anything about class, gender, or ethnicity.27
Among the great body of students, SDS activists stood out as an elite, a group who had actually read Sartre and Marcuse, and who took politics and life perhaps too seriously. Oglesby described how, for people like him,
the Cold War pre-empted the traditional privileges of youth . . . . By any usual standard, youth never really happened for us. Our high school philosophy was already a well-understood existentialism, whether or not we had heard the word. Our first and abiding god was consciousness. Our first social moves were experiments in freedom. Our first political encounter was with our own world’s victims, an encounter in which we found one main source of that superficially serene world’s deep discontents.
Oglesby, Hayden, Haber, and the rest made the great mistake of thinking that the alienation they felt was an epidemic. Yet even those who admired the activists did not necessarily feel inclined to follow them. Since fun was such an important element in the youthful rebellion—virtually a prerequisite—the sober politics of SDS had limited appeal. As a formative experience in politicizing students, the civil rights movement had a much greater effect, even if that effect was mere by-product. That campaign appealed because of its simple practicality: pragmatic efforts were devoted to achieving a recognizable goal, without the encumbrance of theory.28
SDS, in contrast, was nine-tenths hot air. Its excessive theorizing came under attack by, among others, the historian Howard Zinn, who advocated a more action-oriented radicalism similar to that which he had experienced in the South. “The contributions of the Old Left,” he reminded members, “came not out of its ideological fetishism but out of its action. What gave it dynamism was not the classes on surplus value but the organization of the CIO, not the analysis of Stalin’s views on the National and Colonial Question, but the fight for the Scottsboro boys, not the labored rationale for dictatorship of the proletariat, but the sacrifices of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.” Zinn attacked the New Left’s fondness for “solemn, pretentious argument.” Instead of debating “what Marx or Machiavelli or Rousseau really meant,” activists needed to take to the streets. “Too much of what passes for theoretical discussion of public issues is really a personal duel for honor or privilege . . . . While we argue, the world moves, while we publish, others perish.”29
Most SDS members agreed with Zinn, even if their behavior suggested otherwise. They were great believers in the idea that action provided an antidote to apathy. Activists failed to realize, however, that the apparent apathy of the masses was in truth a rejection of the SDS message. The problem was revealed in the SDS approach to the Vietnam War. Members saw the war as a manifestation of the deficiencies of the American political system. “There is no simple way to attack something that is deeply rooted in the society,” Paul Potter argued on April 17, 1965. “If the people of this country are to end the war in Vietnam, and to change the institutions which create it, then the people of this country must create a massive social movement.” By trying to make opposition to the war into a wider revolutionary struggle, SDS did nothing for their ideals of revolution and weakened their campaign to end the war. The constituency of people who shared Potter’s political ideals was tiny. Making their cause predominant alienated the ever-growing group of disenchanted who wanted nothing more ambitious than peace.30
Six months later a second demonstration in Washington again heard calls for revolution. Oglesby, the new president of SDS, focused his attack on the American liberal establishment, the nice fellows who espoused progress but only succeeded in killing peasants in Vietnam. Borrowing heavily from Marcuse, he called this approach “corporate liberalism”—the establishment con-trick which made reactionary power appear liberal.
We are here to protest against a growing war. Since it is a very bad war, we acquire the habit of thinking that it must be caused by very bad men. But we only conceal reality, I think, to denounce on such grounds the menacing coalition of industrial and military power, or the brutality of the blitzkrieg we are waging against Vietnam, or the ominous signs around us that heresy may soon no longer be permitted. We must simply observe, and quite plainly say, that this coalition, this blitzkrieg, and this demand for acquiescence are creatures, all of them, of a government that since 1932 has considered itself to be fundamentally liberal.
Oglesby wanted Americans to get back in touch with the values that had made them great. America, he argued, had lost “that mysterious social desire for human equity that from time to time has given us genuine moral drive.” In other words, he wanted Americans to reacquaint themselves with their own revolutionary values. Some people, he admitted, would conclude that he sounded anti-American. “To them I say, don’t blame me for that! Blame those who mouthed my liberal values and broke my American heart.”31
SDS, which started out as an effort to revitalize liberalism, ended up as a revolt against liberalism. Its favorite enemy was not the reactionary right but those seemingly goodhearted liberals who had given America Cuba, the Congo, and Vietnam. Liberals, as Marcuse argued, were experts at “repressive tolerance”; they had developed a system “capable of containing social change,” a system in which traditional forms of protest were “dangerous because they preserve the illusion of popular sovereignty.” Mills made a similar point. “Reasoning collapses into reasonableness,” he wrote. “By the more naive and snobbish celebrants of complacency, arguments and facts of a displeasing kind are simply ignored.” As they grew increasingly frustrated at their inability to free themselves from the straitjacket of liberalism, SDS radicals came to the conclusion that the system itself had to be destroyed. For many, that implied a descent into violence. When the dust settled, liberalism was indeed vanquished, but in its place came an even more formidable, and much more repressive, authoritarianism.32
In 1964, Savio compared the university to a machine and urged his fellow students to throw themselves in its gears. He was not the first to use that metaphor, or the last. The obvious bears mentioning: machines are made of steel and students of flesh. The outcome of their challenge was, therefore, entirely predictable. In 1968, Zbigniew Brzezinski, then a professor at Columbia University, described student radicalism as the death rattle of a group left behind by “technetronic society,” an entity he defined as “a society in which technology, especially electronic communications, is prompting basic social changes.” Painful as it is to admit, he was probably right. The fact that students—like the nineteenth-century Luddites, who also tried to smash machines—had an admirable cause does not make their quest any less futile.33
The March on Washington began without leaders. The crowd had come from all directions—some walking from places as far away as New York City and the Deep South. At least 250,000 people, perhaps double that number, gathered at the Washington Monument. Impatient to begin their march to the Lincoln Memorial, they ignored stewards and set off well in advance of the official start time of noon. John Lewis, one of the organizers, was surprised to see a great tide of humanity moving away without him, and, like King, remembered Gandhi’s words. “I recall thinking, ‘There go my people—let me catch up with them.’” Eventually, he and his fellow organizers made it to the front, thus providing a semblance of control. Amid all the drama of the march, the symbolic significance of its leaderless beginning went unnoticed.34
The idea had arisen two decades earlier, when A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, had threatened President Franklin D. Roosevelt with a march against discrimination. Roosevelt responded by establishing the Fair Employment Practices Committee, prompting Randolph to cancel his march. The proposal was revived in 1962, in response to what Lewis called “an increasing sense of discontent and frustration with the pace of progress on civil rights.” The aim was not simply to protest segregation in the South, but rather to draw attention to the economic plight of blacks everywhere. A broad coalition gave the impression of unity. The organizers consisted of the “Big Six” of civil rights leaders—Randolph, Lewis (SNCC), Roy Wilkins (NAACP), James Farmer (CORE), Whitney Young (Urban League), and King (SCLC).35
This group approached Kennedy in early June, not to seek permission but to present a fait accompli. “Mr. President, the black masses are restless and we are going to march,” Randolph announced. Kennedy, worried about the effect on his Civil Rights Bill, was annoyed at the news. “You could tell by the President’s body language that he did not . . . like the idea,” Lewis recalled. “We want success in Congress, not just a big show at the Capitol,” Kennedy argued. “Some of these people are looking for an excuse to be against us; and I don’t want to give . . . them a chance to say, ‘Yes, I’m for the bill, but I am damned if I will vote for it at the point of a gun.’” Randolph answered Kennedy’s objections: “Mr. President, the Negro people are already in the streets and there will be a march on Washington.” Once Kennedy realized that the demonstration would go ahead despite his objections, he reluctantly threw his support behind it.36
Bayard Rustin, chief coordinator of the march, sent comprehensive instructions to 2,000 local planners. Publicity agents issued a steady stream of press releases in the weeks preceding the event. News agencies, suitably prepped for drama, mobilized large crews of reporters and arranged for helicopters to provide aerial coverage. Satellite time on the newly launched Telstar was booked, so that live broadcasts could be beamed around the world. The three major television networks spent over $300,000, more than twice the march committee’s budget.
Fearful of a riot, local officials canceled all police leave and brought in forces from surrounding communities. Fifteen thousand paratroopers were put on alert, and seventy different emergency scenarios were assiduously studied. The government cooperated with march organizers in developing a state-of-the-art public address system, which officials suspected might come in handy if the crowd grew unruly. Unbeknownst to the organizers, the police wired the system so that they could take control if trouble arose.
Determined to stop the march, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover tried to convince John and Robert Kennedy that King was influenced by Communists. Hoover ruthlessly exploited Rustin’s Communist links and the open secret of his homosexuality. On the eve of the event, he released photos of Rustin talking to King while the latter was in the bath, the suggestion being that the pair were lovers. Hoover also distributed information obtained from wiretaps about King’s extramarital affairs. Unable eventually to stop the march, he had his agents pressure celebrities to withdraw support, without success. The “arts contingent” included, among others, Charlton Heston, Ossie Davis, Marlon Brando, Sammy Davis Jr., Sidney Poitier, Lena Home, Diahann Carroll, Paul Newman, and Harry Belafonte.
Before setting off, the marchers were entertained by Odetta, Josh White, Bob Dylan, the Albany Freedom Singers, and Peter, Paul, and Mary. Joan Baez opened the program with “Oh, Freedom” and also led a rendition of “We Shall Overcome.” Dire predictions of disorder were not fulfilled. “From the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, you saw a sea of humanity,” Lewis recalled. “You saw Black and White; Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish; old and young; rich and poor . . . . You could feel the great sense of community and family. The March . . . represented America at her best.” Surveys indicated that about 15 percent of the participants were students, about 25 percent were white, and a majority of the blacks present were middle-class Northerners. Writing in the New York Times, Russell Baker commented: “No one could remember an invading army quite as gentle as the two hundred thousand civil-rights marchers who occupied Washington today . . . . The sweetness and patience of the crowd may have set some sort of national high-water mark in mass decency.”37
Once the marchers reached the Lincoln Memorial, speeches began. Most speakers, on the urging of organizers, synthesized the prevailing moods of protest and hope, while avoiding the stridency that might alienate those on Capitol Hill. Roy Wilkins politely warned Kennedy not to let his Civil Rights Bill get watered down by cynics in Congress. Whitney Young, focusing on economic themes, emphasized that black suffering was not confined to the South. Blacks, he argued,
must march from the rat infested, overcrowded ghettos to decent, wholesome, unrestricted residential areas dispersed throughout the cities. They must march from the relief rolls to the established retraining centers . . . . They must march from the cemeteries where our young, our newborn, die three times sooner and our parents die seven years earlier . . . . They must march from the congested, ill-equipped schools which breed dropouts and which smother motivation . . . . And finally, they must march from a present feeling of despair and hopelessness . . . to renewed faith and confidence.
Lewis’ original draft reflected the angry impatience of SNCC, criticizing the Civil Rights Bill as “too little, too late.” “We will march through the South, through the Heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did,” he wrote. “We will pursue our own ‘scorched-earth’ policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground—nonviolently. We will fragment the South into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of democracy.” Fearful of frightening whites and inflaming blacks, Randolph prevailed upon Lewis to think again. His toned-down version delighted most of the crowd, but annoyed black radicals. “I did not think it necessary for [the] speech to be changed,” Fred Shuttlesworth complained. “I didn’t think we were going up there to be sweet little boys. We were suffering. People were going to jail, people were dying and would be dying. So I didn’t think we should . . . act as if everything was pie in the sky.”38
King came last. “I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation,” he began. He urged followers to remain faithful to nonviolence. “In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred . . . . We must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.” Then came a rallying cry more inspiring than any King had ever delivered:
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.” I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.
King’s closing words were delivered not by a single man, but by a lead singer with a chorus of a quarter million: “When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Tree at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’” Nothing further could be said. After singing “We Shall Overcome,” the crowd drifted peacefully away. As marchers withdrew, Rustin noticed Randolph standing alone at the dais. He walked over and put his arm around the old man and said, “It looks like your dream has come true.” Randolph, tears streaming down his face, replied that it was “the most beautiful and glorious day of his life.”39
“The March on Washington established visibility in this nation,” King’s friend Ralph Abernathy later claimed. “It showed the struggle was nearing a close, that people were coming together, that all the organizations could stand together. It demonstrated that there was a unity in the black community for the cause of freedom and justice. It made it clear that we did not have to use violence to achieve the goals which we were seeking.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Unity had been carefully engineered for one day. Underneath the surface, the civil rights movement was a boiling cauldron of discord. Militants complained that the event had been meticulously scripted to project an image of racial harmony in order to satisfy a worried president. Stokely Carmichael of SNCC protested that the march was “only a sanitized, middle-class version of the real black movement.” Malcolm X, calling it a “sellout,” complained that speeches had been censored and that an act of civil disobedience had been transformed into something altogether more docile. It was, he said, the “Farce on Washington.” “Who ever heard of angry revolutionists swinging their bare feet together with their oppressor in lily-pad park pools, with gospels and guitars and ‘I Have a Dream’ speeches?”40
The warm glow of nostalgia obstructs the realities of what actually occurred. King’s magnificent speech is remembered for the dreams it evoked rather than warnings it delivered. It is prudent to remind oneself of sentences subsequently forgotten:
We have . . . come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism . . . . It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment and to underestimate the determination of the Negro. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual . . . . The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundation of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.
The march seems a triumphant moment, but King did not see it that way. His speech was an expression of worry as much as of hope. Like Malcolm X, he understood that the unity engineered on that day was indeed illusory.41
A significant section of black America had given up on the idea of racial harmony and was growing impatient with nonviolence. Lewis, while still prepared to toe the line at the Lincoln Memorial, was already headed in a different direction:
The shedding of blood is not a part of our framework; it’s not part of our philosophy, but I think that when we accept nonviolence, we don’t say that it is the absence of violence. We say it is the present assumption—much more positive—that there might be the shedding of blood. You know what Gandhi says: “If I had the personal choice to make between no movement and a violent movement, I would choose a violent movement.” . . . In SNCC now, there’s a growing . . . trend toward “aggressive nonviolent action.” You no longer walk quietly to paddywagons and happily and willingly go to jail.
Compared to his friends in SNCC, Lewis was moderate. The brash young firebrands who had imparted so much energy to the civil rights movement had grown openly contemptuous of King. While in Washington, they met with Malcolm X. King, realizing that his hold over the movement was slipping, warned against the appeal of black nationalism: “The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to distrust of all white people.” Brotherly love was, however, difficult to maintain when white supremacists carried out ever more desperate acts of vengeance. Less than three weeks after the march, a bomb exploded in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four young black girls. On the following day, black youths battled with police. Their reaction was deeply regrettable, but entirely understandable.42
Contrary to Kennedy’s fears, the March on Washington did not jeopardize the Civil Rights Bill. It passed with relative ease on July 2, 1964. That was due partly to the fact that it had become a tribute to an assassinated president, partly also to the expert way it was steered through Congress by Lyndon Johnson. But it was incomplete, since it did not address the issue central to the struggle for freedom—namely, the vote. Suffrage provisions had been omitted in order to secure passage. Lewis was right: the Civil Rights Act was too little, too late.
James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, three Freedom Summer volunteers, went to Neshoba County, Mississippi, in order to further a cause that the federal government would not embrace: the realization of black enfranchisement. On June 21, 1964, they were arrested on trumped-up charges, imprisoned for several hours, and then released into the hands of the KKK, who murdered them. A huge outcry ensued, but black activists rightly concluded that the tumult was due mainly to the fact that Schwerner and Goodman were white, since the murder of blacks was hardly news. At Chaney’s funeral, David Dennis, the assistant director of CORE, spoke for a significant proportion of the black community when he complained: “I’m sick and tired of going to memorials! I’m sick and tired of going to funerals! I’ve got a bitter vengeance in my heart tonight! And I’m sick and tired and can’t help but feel bitter, you see, deep down inside and I’m not going to stand here and ask anybody not to be angry tonight.”43
At the March on Washington, before the speeches began, two Dylan songs were sung. First came Peter, Paul, and Mary with “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which evoked perfectly the mood of that day. Then came Dylan himself, who sang “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” written in angry response to the murder of Medgar Evers. Few noticed it, but the two songs symbolized the two strands of the civil rights movement which were being unraveled by the pressure of events. One song suggested the patience that King embodied; the other, the frustration that Malcolm X and others would henceforth seek to exploit.
ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY: KENNEDY AND VIETNAM
For many people, the Sixties ended before they had hardly begun—on November 22, 1963, when John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. He had defined the spirit of the decade: the importance of youth, the impression of new beginnings, the lure of new frontiers. His assassination left the nation confused and frightened. The doors he had opened seemed to slam shut.
The assassination ripped something fundamental from the soul of America, leaving a chasm never to be filled. It has often been called the end of American innocence, a statement no less accurate for being trite. Innocence died not just because a promising president had been murdered, but also because, in time, it would become apparent how much the Kennedy myth depended upon the public’s gullibility. As years passed, Americans would cling desperately to the hero, while they were battered by evidence of the man. The illusion of greatness could be maintained for the very simple reason that Kennedy died before he had to grapple seriously with the very divisive, costly, and soul-destroying problems of the mid-Sixties: Vietnam, race riots, budget cuts, and student unrest. He was killed before his personal perfidy could surface. As a result, he would forever be given credit for triumphs he supposedly inspired, while escaping blame for problems he bequeathed.
In 1983, Newsweek found that Kennedy was the most popular president in American history. While in office, his approval rating hovered around 63 percent, the third-highest rating of all postwar presidents. Yet what is the basis for this massive admiration? Strip away the myths and Kennedy’s achievements seem rather thin. But that is the point—it is virtually impossible to separate myth from man. During his presidency, Kennedy was admired more for the dreams he inspired than for the man he actually was. The times required an energetic, dynamic, charismatic leader. Sentimental Americans also wanted a family man, since the good father would also, it was assumed, be good to his country. What Americans wanted they willed: Kennedy became what they craved, an object of worship. Like a warm cloak, hope kept out cold reality.
Kennedy’s assassination was so painful because the myth was so perfect. It seemed that something almost divine had been taken from the American people, violently ripped from their grasp in Dealey Plaza. From that day forward, everything that went wrong in America—and so much did—could, it seemed, be traced back to his assassination. Because so much importance had been invested in him while he lived, so much magnitude was assigned his death. It became, inevitably and automatically, a watershed.
On a hill in Arlington Cemetery stands a moving memorial to Kennedy. On one side lies his grave, lit by an eternal flame. Turn around, toward Washington, and one encounters a semicircular granite plinth on which inspirational passages from his inaugural address are carved. They seem designed to remind a cloth-eared capitol of a time when ideals were sacred and presidents articulate.
One tablet reads: “To those peoples in the huts and villages across the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required—not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”44
Look up from the stones and far in the distance, across the wide Potomac, one can just barely see crowds gathering around another stone plinth. On black marble are carved the names of 50,000 Americans who died in Vietnam. In a spatial sense, the distance between the two memorials is huge. In a spiritual sense it is tiny. On the Vietnam Memorial one finds the names of people who died acting out Kennedy’s illusions.
Oliver Stone, one of the greatest mythmakers to emerge from the Sixties, blames the Vietnam War on Lyndon Johnson. Larry Berman, the consummate Johnsonian scholar, recalls an encounter with his own son after the latter had been to see Stone’s film JFK. Berman’s son, who had never paid much attention to his dad’s work, asked: “How come you never told me that Johnson had Kennedy killed in order to fight the war in Vietnam?”45
Stone drew his inspiration from John Newman’s book JFK and Vietnam. In that book, Newman argues that Kennedy’s National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 263, his last policy document to deal with Vietnam, ordered the immediate withdrawal of 1,000 soldiers, preparatory to complete disengagement by 1965. Then, on November 22, Kennedy was assassinated. Four days later, Johnson issued NSAM 273, canceling the withdrawal. The simple conclusion: Johnson escalated a war Kennedy planned to end.
The paranoiac Oliver Stone turned Newman’s skewed reasoning into an enthralling conspiracy: Kennedy was assassinated in order to bring about a war lucrative for the American arms industry. The danger of such a suggestion lies in the fact that it resonates with a public besotted with Kennedy and addicted to conspiracy. For such people, the Vietnam nightmare represents the antithesis of the Kennedy dream. Without the war, they feel, Camelot might have been realized: no war would have meant no defeat, no budget cuts, no Vietnam syndrome, more money, better social programs, better race relations—ergo a more confident and harmonious America. Time, pivoting on a single moment in Dallas, can be imagined to assume a different, more pleasing trajectory. Conspiracy theories are a religion in which the devoted, instead of imagining a better future, pretend a better past.
Kennedy, it seems, did want out of Vietnam. He told Senator Mike Mansfield that “he had changed his mind and wanted to begin withdrawing troops beginning . . . January 1964.” Complete withdrawal would be delayed “until 1965—after I’m reelected.” Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s secretary of defense, claims JFK planned to “close out Vietnam by ’sixty-five, whether it was in good shape or bad.”46
But then there is the other Kennedy, the one who, in September 1963, told Walter Cronkite that withdrawal would be “a great mistake.” On November 22 he was planning to tell a Dallas audience: “We in this country . . . are—by destiny rather than choice—the watchmen on the walls of freedom . . . . Our assistance . . . to nations can be painful, risky, and costly, as is true in Southeast Asia today. But we dare not weary of the task.”47
With Kennedy, a huge gulf existed between rhetoric and action. “[His] attitude on Vietnam should be derived from what he said and did while president,” Rusk maintained, “not what he may have said at tea table conversations or walks around the Rose Garden.” His commitment to Vietnam was never half-hearted. During his short presidency, the number of American soldiers increased from 700 to more than 16,000. Strategic hamlets, covert terror, sabotage, and clandestine incursions into North Vietnam were introduced. In other words, he was doing his best to win. He did not, however, possess a very clear idea of how to win, or of what in fact was happening. Military advisers, keen to protect their position, told him what he wanted to hear. Optimism became official policy. The disastrous battle of Ap Bac, it will be recalled, was reported as a victory.48
In other words, Kennedy concluded that the war was going well because his advisers told him so. Contrary to what Newman has argued, NSAM 263 was predicated on a belief that victory was in sight. Rusk recalled “a period of optimism in the summer of 1963 when we thought the war was going well and we could begin to think of withdrawing American advisers.” The McNamara-Taylor report of October 1963 reinforced this confidence, maintaining that, if trends continued, the situation would stabilize “by the end of 1965.” The report concluded: “It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of US personnel by that time.”49
The one obstacle was the South Vietnamese premier, Ngo Dinh Diem, an expert at alienating his people. While not personally corrupt, he allowed corruption to flourish around him. Peasants were fleeced by his loyal crooks. Meanwhile, Diem’s persecution of Buddhists angered his people and embarrassed America. RVN forces broke up Buddhist demonstrations with shocking brutality, killing peaceful protesters. During a demonstration in Saigon on June n, the Venerable Thich Quang Duc quietly sat down in a public intersection, doused himself with gasoline, and set himself alight. The incident, televised around the world, called into question America’s choice of allies. Matters worsened when Madame Nhu, Diem’s sister-in-law, referred to the episode as a “barbecue.”
Much to the annoyance of Kennedy, Diem was a puppet who pulled his own strings. Though utterly dependent on US support, he pretended to be his own man. His refusal to do as he was told was made worse by the fact that he seemed incapable of holding his country together. In consequence, Kennedy grew convinced that, if the war was to be won, Diem had to go. He could not be allowed to jeopardize progress made on the battlefield.
Kennedy dreamed of a world without Diem. The prime minister could not be removed democratically, since, thanks to the CIA, he’d won election by a landslide. But Vietnam was a dependably violent country. Important people occasionally got murdered. Wish fathered thought. The US ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, contacted a CIA operative named Lucien Conein who had links with Diem’s enemies. Conein hinted that the US would not stand in the way of a coup. The only requirement was plausible deniability—that favorite phrase.
On October 25, Lodge confidently assured McGeorge Bundy (special assistant to the president for national security affairs) that “the next government would not bungle and stumble as much as the present one has.” With this in mind, Kennedy patiently waited for murder. On November 1, a group of South Vietnamese Air Force officers ambushed Diem and took him away to be shot. The US quietly stood aside. Diem’s body was later found in the back of an American armored personnel carrier, a nuance not lost on those sensitive to intrigue.50
A few days later, Lodge told Kennedy that the “prospects of victory are much improved.” That was grossly optimistic. The US would soon discover that Diem’s ruthlessness had been the only thing keeping chaos at bay. In the eighteen months that followed the assassination, Saigon went through five different prime ministers, all of them more corrupt or incompetent than Diem. The US role had, however, changed significantly because of its sponsorship of the coup. It was now committed to supporting each new regime. As Saigon unraveled, American involvement deepened.51
Three weeks after Diem’s assassination, Kennedy was dead. He bequeathed his successor a problem much more complicated than that which he had inherited from Eisenhower. While a graceful withdrawal might have been possible during Kennedy’s presidency, it was never conceivable during Johnson’s. Referring to Vietnam, Johnson confessed that he felt like “one of those catfish down in Lady Bird’s country . . . . I feel like I just grabbed a big juicy worm with a right sharp hook in it.”52
Mark Lawson has written an intriguing novel called Idlewild, which rests on the premise that Kennedy survived the assassination attempt and won reelection in 1964. Within this counterfactual, the Vietnam War remains a constant, but Johnson becomes the best president America never had. In the novel, Kennedy chats with his former mistress Marilyn Monroe, who, by miraculously surviving her overdose of 1962, is also denied the grace of dying young. Monroe asks: “Do you think Johnson or Nixon—someone else—would have done the same in Vietnam?” Kennedy replies: “I’ve seen it argued that Lyndon wouldn’t. But I have to believe that it would have happened, anyway. Vietnam was more the product of American history than individual whim.”53
On that score, the fictional Kennedy was probably right. Vietnam was not his war or Johnson’s war. It was an American war—an expression of America’s self-confidence, of the country’s belief in the possibility of reshaping the world. There was no alternative scenario to futility, disillusionment, and sorrow—no defining moment in Dallas.
By 1968, Johnson was hopelessly stuck in a quagmire. He saw no way out and no way forward. The White House was under virtual siege from protesters, among them hollow-eyed veterans recently returned from Vietnam. From the streets came an endlessly repeated refrain: “Hey, hey, LBJ! / How many kids did you kill today?” In his agony, Johnson must have contemplated the fact that the chant scans equally well if “JFK” is substituted for “LBJ.”