IN THE “100 DAYS OF 1965,” stretching from June to late October of that year, Congress passed and the President signed the Medicare bill, long heatedly fought by the American Medical Association; the epochal Voting Rights bill; Omnibus Housing, which mandated stepped-up rent supplements to low-income families; a measure to create a new Department of Housing and Urban Development; another measure to establish the National Foundation for the Arts and the Humanities; a major broadening of the immigration laws; the Water Quality bill, requiring states to set and enforce water quality standards for all interstate waters within their borders; and the Clean Air Act of 1965, which supplemented and strengthened the Clean Air Act of 1963, targeting now automobile exhaust, following three years of controversy touched off by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Earlier in the year the first large-scale program of aid to elementary and secondary schools had been enacted, and fueled with a grant of $1.3 billion.
In the midst of this flood of legislation stood Lyndon Johnson, still using the techniques of personal persuasion he had honed in the Senate, techniques now backed up by a formidable array of White House resources. With a shrewd eye for the strengths and vulnerabilities, appetites and sensitivities of his targets, the President spent hundreds of hours on the telephone or face to face, bullying and pleading, bidding and dealing, placating and mediating, all in the currency, now hard and now soft, of presidential-congressional exchange. If the Kennedys had gloried in using the arts of “blarney, bludgeon, and boodle,” LBJ inflated all these, Texas style.
It was by no means a one-man show. Working closely with the White House in the Senate were Hubert Humphrey, still ebullient even as Vice President, and Mike Mansfield, the dour Majority Leader. In the House, where John McCormack was Speaker and the well-liked Carl Albert of Oklahoma was Majority Leader, a band of liberal Democrats, headed by the astute and resolute Missourian Richard Boiling, helped marshal the huge Democratic majority that Johnson had helped bring into the lower chamber in the 1964 election.
These were the creative months of the Great Society that Johnson sought to build. The currents of history converged in a fashion that the labor-liberal-left forces in America had rarely known: the program that John F. Kennedy had advanced with his glowing rhetoric; the homage the nation wished to pay to the martyred young President; Barry Goldwater’s conservative campaign, which catalyzed and united a new Democratic party coalition; the Congress and its committees liberalized; and a new President determined to show that a Texan and a Southerner could fight for a progressive program, that a politician stigmatized for his wheeling and dealing on Capitol Hill could become a great President in the tradition of FDR.
These should have been the memorable, the glory times of the Great Society, when programs were introduced that would transform the lives of countless Americans for decades to come—but glory times they were not. For the attention of Americans was increasingly distracted by events nine thousand miles away, and LBJ seemed as crippled in dealing with this growing crisis as he had been creative in leading his domestic program through Congress.
For Johnson was now swaying under the full burden of the divided legacy of Kennedy’s foreign policy—the pacific legacy of the Peace Corps, the resolution of the missile crisis, the test ban treaty, the hard legacy of confrontation in Europe and escalation in Vietnam. The Peace Corps, established by Kennedy within six weeks of his inauguration, had become a special link with his successor. It was a reminder to LBJ of the hopes and ideals of his days in the National Youth Administration; he liked its chief, Sargent Shriver, whom he made head of his Job Corps; and the work of the volunteers—helping people grow better crops and dig better wells and build better habitations—was the kind of thing that appealed to the new President’s belief in benign progress, in gritty, hands-on social change without trauma. Attacked on the right as “global do-goodism” and on the left for being merely a disguised form of American cultural imperialism and indeed as an opiate to calm the potentially revolutionary masses, the Peace Corps, with its thousands of volunteers in developing countries around the world, was nevertheless an exquisitely appropriate living memorial to John Kennedy.
But Kennedy had left another living heritage—thousands of American troops in Vietnam. The onetime “military advisers” had escalated to a force of some 16,000 personnel by the time of JFK’s death. They were now conducting “combat support” missions and they were now dying in action—77 had in 1963. Lyndon Johnson inherited Kennedy’s war—and the divisions within the Administration over its conduct. He would continue the creeping escalation.
At the start the peace movement appeared innocuous, even quixotic. It was indeed hard to find a start. Ever since Hiroshima, of course, antiwar activists had been protesting the bomb. Radical pacifists, many of them Quakers, had agitated especially against civil defense drills, but the scourge of McCarthyism had thinned their ranks. Scientists, including some who had worked on the bomb, became so alarmed about the dangers of radioactive fallout that they sought to educate their colleagues and the public; some even hoped to “bridge the gap between East and West” and unite the world scientific community as a step toward peace. Made credible by such technical expertise, the issue of atmospheric testing galvanized a movement to stop nuclear tests, just when the orbiting of Sputnik heightened America’s fear of Soviet technological progress.
At the cutting edge of the peace movement in the mid-fifties was the Committee for Nonviolent Action, which sponsored a number of daring and imaginative projects. In 1958, Earle and Barbara Reynolds and their family, piloting the good ship Phoenix built in Hiroshima, penetrated the vast Pacific area that the Atomic Energy Commission had blocked off for H-bomb tests that summer. Arrested and detained at the navy base on Kwajalein atoll, Barbara Reynolds and her son witnessed in the night a dirty orange light, like a “gigantic flash bulb,” illuminating the dark clouds.
Later that year, after CNVA protested the construction of a missile base near Cheyenne, Wyoming, five men and women were imprisoned for blocking trucks. The next year, when the militants launched Omaha Action, a campaign of community education and civil disobedience to halt the building of missile silos, one of those arrested for climbing over a fence was A. J. Music, the seventy-four-year-old ringleader and chair of CNVA, longtime radical pacifist, labor leader, strike organizer, incorrigible civil disobedient. After CNVA settled in New London, Connecticut, where missile-firing Polaris submarines were built, peace guerrillas paddled out to board the subs or block their launching. They were repulsed.
Tired of being yelled at to “tell it to the Russians,” a group of Americans and Europeans walked through the Iron Curtain into East Germany and Poland, made their way to Moscow’s Red Square, held a vigil, and passed out leaflets urging disarmament. “I went to jail because I refused to serve in the U.S. Army,” Bradford Lyttle told a crowd in Minsk. “I have protested against American rockets aimed at your cities and families. There are Soviet rockets aimed at my city and my family. Are you demonstrating against that?”
CNVA carried on two more years of peace walks, test site invasions, campus rallies, marches. Women Strike for Peace organized a simultaneous protest by 50,000 women in a few dozen cities. To complement the direct action of CNVA with more conventional political activity, peace activists and “nuclear pacifists”—among them Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling and noted journalist Norman Cousins—had in 1957 formed the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. SANE quickly grew into a major national organization and, like CNVA, broadened its goal to general disarmament. But it underwent a purge of alleged communist members and many radical pacifists resigned in protest.
Then, when Washington and Moscow in August 1963 agreed on a limited test ban treaty, some activists for a time assumed that the government was serious about negotiating a halt to the arms race, that a thaw in the cold war might even be at hand. After all the bold and quixotic actions— was it in part because of them?—a little chunk of peace had been won but the peace movement seemed defused. New allies were soon to arrive, however, from ranks of young Americans who saw themselves as among the most powerless people in America.
Sixty members of a little-known student group, Students for a Democratic Society, convened in June 1962 at the United Auto Workers’ FDR Camp on the southern shore of Lake Huron, forty miles north of Detroit. This was not the usual student beer bust—these men and women were deadly serious. Under a different name SDS had served for decades as the student wing of the democratic-socialist League for Industrial Democracy, but since 1960 it had been asserting more independence, symbolized by its change of name. SDS field secretary Tom Hayden, a journalism student at the University of Michigan and editor of the campus paper, had worked with SNCC on voter registration in Georgia and had suffered the usual beatings and jailings. Hayden and SDS president Al Haber hoped that radical students could link up with the black student activists. But much as they admired SNCC’s spirit and political style, their aims were broader.
The conferees broke off into small study groups to revise the rough draft of a manifesto mainly written by Hayden, who had been analyzing the ideas of myriad thinkers. The students then focused on what they called the “bones,” essential matters worth an hour’s debate, as against “widgets,” of medium importance, and “gizmos,” worth only ten minutes. The pieces were then sewn back together into a patchwork quilt that emerged as a stinging moral critique of American society and a compelling vision of a regenerated democracy.
“We are people of this generation,” the Port Huron Statement began, “bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.” They did not spare their teachers—“their curriculums change more slowly than the living events of the world; their skills and silence are purchased by investors in the arms race; passion is called unscholastic.” Indeed, they spared virtually nothing and no one—the brokers of politics, militarism, the economic system, the universities, passive students.
The manifesto proclaimed in fresh and forceful prose a radicalism that exalted aspirations for personal empowerment, wholeness, and authenticity; transformed what might seem personal needs and troubles into legitimate political concerns; and brought to light the hidden linkages in the web of issues that plagued the nation and the world. From the heart of the message issued its call for a new kind of democracy:
“We would replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity. As a social system we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life, that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.” Politics should bring people out of isolation into community. All major institutions—political, economic, cultural, educational—had to be fully democratized. Thus the students, historian Wini Breines noted, “sought to create both a community within the movement and structural transformation in the larger society.” They were eager to serve as transforming leaders who would rise above the shabby brokerage of institutional life. But even the most ardent, as they left Port Huron after five days of nonstop debate, could hardly know that they had helped set the stage for the surge of grass-roots democratic activity and New Left militance in the 1960s.
It was not by historical accident that the SDS appeared at this time. Its members and the New Left in general were catalyzed by the southern freedom movement and in particular by SNCC, some of whose values and organizing style SDS imitated and refined, as well as by the ban-the-bomb movement and efforts to restore civil liberties in the wake of McCarthyism. At a deeper level, the New Left was a direct response to the cool conformist culture of the 1950s with its ethic of acquisitiveness, its model of the unquestioning “organization man,” its “Catch-22” insanities that seemed to apply more to the cold war than to World War II. Caught in the yawning chasms between American ideals of self-fulfillment and the felt experience of bureaucratic manipulation and personal emptiness, between the possibilities for freedom and creativity offered by technology and the harsh realities of spiritual poverty, middle-class youth was “growing up absurd,” the title of Paul Goodman’s book. Our abundant society, Goodman wrote, “has no Honor. It has no Community.”
Unable to make sense of their world, angered by what they saw as almost universal hypocrisy, many young people acted out their semi-conscious critique of the “system” through deviant behavior of one kind or another: as rebels without causes, as followers of the Beat subculture of nonconformity, as spiritual dropouts. Beat figures like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were role models for many of the rebels, and the existentialisms of Sartre and Camus their chosen philosophy.
If the passionate and sardonic Goodman was the chief interpreter of youthful cultural alienation, the equally committed and iconoclastic C. Wright Mills, a Texas-bred Columbia University sociologist, was centrally involved in translating it into overt political expression and commitment. Criticized for imputing too much power to the interlocking “power elite” of corporate, military, and political leaders, and for other nonconforming social science, Mills feared that in both superpowers “we now witness the rise of the cheerful robot, the technological idiot, the crackpot realist,” all of them embodying the common ethos of “rationality without reason.” His solution was less programmatic than a matter of transforming consciousness: to make reason into an instrument for restless and rebellious social criticism, for penetrating society’s invisible controlling assumptions and interlocking power systems; to convince intellectuals, especially the young intelligentsia, of their moral responsibility to tackle the real problems of the era; and to lead the academy, and then all of society, out of conformity and apathy and into informed engagement. His words and spirit had shone through every page of the Port Huron Statement, adopted three months after his death from a heart attack at forty-five.
High noon, Berkeley, October 1, 1964. Two deans and the campus police chief advanced on a young man sitting at a table in Sproul Hall Plaza at the University of California’s 27,000-student campus across the bay from San Francisco. The table displayed literature on the Congress of Racial Equality and a collection jar, violating a campus ban on advocacy and fund-raising. When CORE organizer Jack Weinberg refused to take down the table the security people put him under arrest, but a large crowd gathered around him shouting, “Take all of us!” A police car arrived, the cops hustled Weinberg into it, only to find a sea of students surging around them and then sitting down. Mario Savio, a philosophy major just in from the Mississippi Freedom Summer, jumped on top of the police car—a perfect soapbox—and after politely removing his shoes demanded Weinberg’s release and an end to the ban on free speech.
For thirty-two hours the students held the police car hostage—with Weinberg still in it—while student reinforcements lined up to revel in the delights of free speech. Bettina Aptheker, who as a teenager had marched against the bomb and Jim Crow and had picketed her local Woolworth’s in Brooklyn in support of the southern sit-ins, “got inspired,” as she said later. After fending off nervousness she climbed up to face the television lights and cameras that pierced the darkness. “There was this tremendous glare of light” and “roar from the crowd” that seemed to come out of nowhere. She remembered one of her favorite quotations from black leader Frederick Douglass and yelled at the crowd, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” The next evening Savio announced an armistice with university administrators. The students freed the police car and later paid for its badly dented roof. A brief calm settled over the campus.
Unexpected though it was, the police-car sit-in was a spark struck off from long-growing friction between students and authorities, and a spark that ignited afresh the fires of campus rebellion. A “free speech” movement had been kindling at least since May 1960, when Berkeley students had tried to attend hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee in San Francisco; repeatedly refused admission, they staged a sit-in, only to be washed out of the rotunda and down the steps of city hall by fire hoses. Dozens were arrested. Savio and others involved in the police-car sit-in had been suspended by the university after earlier protests. Then, when the university abruptly extended its ban on political activity to a small strip of pavement that had been a haven for political talk and recruiting, activists lashed back that October noon. They were being treated like southern blacks, they protested—their own civil rights were being violated. The university authorities were thrown off guard by the readiness and vehemence of their young adversaries.
In the heady days after the armistice an unusually broad coalition of student groups, ranging from Goldwaterites and Young Republicans to socialists and Maoists, formed the Free Speech Movement. Because of lingering McCarthyism and relentless red-baiting, “we had to convince people that we were small ‘d’ democrats in addition to whatever else we were,” Savio said later. “We were hung up about democracy.” They sought to make FSM a model of participatory democracy. Students chose representatives to a large executive committee, which in turn elected delegates to a small steering committee that carried out the larger body’s policies and tactics from day to day. The steering committee tried to act by the Quaker method of consensus and the FSM ethic of openness. Aptheker, Savio, and others spent many long nights churning out leaflets with detailed accounts of the day’s happenings; these were printed by dawn and handed out, 20,000 daily, by 8 A.M. The FSM, however, lacked a key dimension of democracy—there were few women in leadership positions.
The university itself served as one of FSM’s best organizers. When the movement seemed to be losing steam, Berkeley’s chancellor rejuvenated it by bringing new charges against Savio and another leader. Aroused once again, a thousand students took over Sproul Hall, administration headquarters. After a night electrified by Joan Baez’s singing “We Shall Overcome,” and nourished by peanut butter sandwiches, Charlie Chaplin films, and “Free University” classes, the students were beset by hundreds of police who rooted them out floor by floor. Eight hundred were arrested, the biggest campus civil disobedience in the country’s history.
In response, graduate students organized a strike so widely supported that it shut down the university. Scores of professors emerged from their studies to back the movement. In a remarkable faculty decision the Academic Senate voted overwhelmingly to back the FSM demands. After the vote, Aptheker recalled, “we students parted ranks, forming an aisle through which the faculty seemed to formally march in a new kind of academic procession.” It was only then, ten weeks after the police-car sit-in, that the regents rescinded the ban on campus free speech.
The Berkeley rebellion, scrupulously nonviolent, the first major white student movement since the 1930s and the first to employ mass direct action on campus, involved much more than traditional political freedoms. Many students felt alienated by the intellectual assembly line of a huge, impersonal “multiversity” harnessed to the needs of large corporations and the Pentagon. Berkeley political theorists Sheldon Wolin and John Schaar observed that the students were “ill-housed, and ill-clad, and ill-nourished not in the material sense, but in the intellectual and spiritual senses.” Students contended that they were being bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated by faceless bureaucrats; they were fighting to gain more control over their lives. They saw the university’s intellectual repression as of a piece with its contribution to basic social ills, from automation to the nuclear arms race, and they hoped that by forcing the institution to live up to its original scholarly ideals, they could take a big step toward reshaping the entire society.
Clark Kerr, president of the University of California, did not feel like a faceless bureaucrat, pawn of the power elite, or a master of power. He felt more like a punching bag. “The university president in the United States,” he wrote in 1963, “is expected to be a friend of the students, a colleague of the faculty, a good fellow with the alumni, a sound administrator with the trustees, a good speaker with the public, an astute bargainer with the foundations and the federal agencies, a politician with the state legislature, a friend of industry, labor, and agriculture, a persuasive diplomat with donors, a champion of education generally, a supporter of the professions (particularly law and medicine), a spokesman to the press, a scholar in his own right, a public servant at the state and national levels, a devotee of opera and football equally, a decent human being, a good husband and father, an active member of a church.” Kerr played most of these roles with skill and versatility.
Yet there was something gravely lacking in all this, and the students sensed it. In trying to deal with what historian Frederick Rudolph called the “delicate balance of interests,” in searching ever for consensus, in settling for day-to-day “practical steps” of management and persuasion, Kerr and a host of other university heads evaded the crucial tasks of clarifying educational goals, setting priorities, being controversial, leading rather than mediating and bargaining. Students saw themselves as the least of a president’s concerns. They were now making the multiversity a political battleground.
While a few of the FSM leaders like Savio had been tutored in civil rights protest in Mississippi, most of the campus dissidents were so immersed in their own battles against the multiversity that for a time they paid little attention to struggles hundreds of miles away in the South or nine thousand miles away in Southeast Asia. The Port Huron Statement had referred to the “Southern struggle against racial bigotry” and Vietnam, American imperialism, and the bomb only as items in a much wider set of problems. Southern black leaders were also so preoccupied with endless crisis and confrontation that they had little time either for the “rich rebels” in northern universities or for peasants far across the Pacific. As the civil rights struggle moved North during the 1960s, widening the arc of black concerns, and as the war in Vietnam escalated, blacks and students were drawn together in the vortex of a new conflict. But the civil rights battle in the North still remained to be fought out.
In mid-August 1965, just a few days after LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act, the Watts section of Los Angeles burst into violence. It seemed a curious location for a “race riot”—not a place of dark and towering tenements, but a ghetto, in the Los Angeles style, of bungalows and ranch houses, intermixed with trash-filled alleys, boarded-up stores, bars and pool halls, drunks and drug peddlers. It was 98 percent black. Starting with a routine arrest of a black youth suspected of drunken driving, the violence whirled out through the streets on the wings of rumor. Day after day, in torrid heat, blacks looted and torched stores, pelted cops and passing cars, randomly attacked whites, hurled Molotov cocktails, ambushed firemen and policemen.
Once again neighborhood people—in this case street people—were taking the lead, but this was a leadership of nihilism. In their fury blacks set scores of major fires, tried to burn a local community hospital, and torched the shops of other blacks despite signs on storefronts pleading ownership by a “Black Brother” or “Soul Brother.” The rioters were “burning their city now, as the insane sometimes mutilate themselves,” wrote a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, himself black.
Martin Luther King flew to Los Angeles and walked the debris-strewn streets of Watts among smoldering ruins of shops and houses, imploring the locals to turn away from violence, which had brought ten thousand National Guard troops into the area. King provoked argument, skepticism, even heckling. Some youngsters told him, “We won.”
“How can you say you won,” King demanded, “when thirty-four Negroes are dead, your community is destroyed, and whites are using the riots as an excuse for inaction?”
“We won,” a jobless young man responded, “because we made the whole world pay attention to us.”
Increasingly blacks were turning to the ideas King had fought—to separation from whites rather than integration, to street riots rather than nonviolence, to the religion of the Nation of Islam rather than Christianity. Elijah Muhammad, suspected by some of having instigated the murder of Malcolm X, continued to lead the Nation, with its Muslim schools, businesses, and publications, including Muhammad Speaks, the Muslim weekly newspaper. In 1962 the paper had printed Muhammad’s “Muslim Program,” in which he had trumpeted that since blacks could not get along with whites “in peace and equality, after giving them 400 years of our sweat and blood and receiving in return some of the worst treatment human beings have ever experienced, we believe our contributions to this land and the suffering forced upon us by white America, justifies our demand for complete separation in a state or territory of our own.” He demanded separate schools and a ban on “intermarriage or race mixing.”
Such an ideology called for political separatism as well. This was the strategy of Black Power. Born in the anger of the Meredith march through Mississippi, this potent idea was carried North by Stokely Carmichael and other militants and debated at a National Conference on Black Power attended by a thousand delegates in Newark in midsummer 1967. In the spirit of Malcolm X’s black nationalist program, the aim now was to organize a separate black “third force,” which was either to gain control of one or both major parties or to strike out on its own. The most extreme expression of political separatism was the Black Panther party, founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby George Seale a year and a half after Malcolm’s death. His party, Panther chairman Seale said, “realizes that the white power structure’s real power is its military force.” So blacks had to organize themselves “and put a shotgun in every black man’s home.”
The force of black desperation and anger was now both vitalizing and fragmenting the black leadership. The once liberal-left NAACP now stood on the right of an array of black groups. King’s SCLC was shifting a bit to the left, and SNCC even more so, as it dropped much of its white membership. Also on the left stood CORE, but it still sought to work through the machinery of the two big parties. On the far left, separated from the rest -by their cult of violence, stood the Panthers. “The thrust of Black Power into national politics sounded the death knell of civil-rights alliances,” according to historian Thomas L. Blair. “It brought the black masses into what Frederick Douglass called the ‘awful roar of struggle.’ It revealed basic differences over ideology, methods, tactics, and strategy” among black groups as well as conflicts over power and status within the Democratic-liberal-labor-left civil rights coalition.
Yet at the heart of the new black politics was a powerful political consciousness rooted in an old and expanding black culture. More blacks were turning, for reasons ideological and spiritual, to their origins in Africa, to their way stations in the Caribbean. They looked up to their own heroes and celebrities, to their own artists, writers, musicians, dancers, their own actors on and off Broadway and in the ghetto, their own black history and myths. They read such journals as Black Theatre, Black Scholar, Black Poetry, Black Enterprise. Negro Digest changed its name to Black World, as blacks drove the very word “Negro,” and all it connoted, out of their vocabulary and their conscious lives. There was black dress, food, slang, jazz, hairstyles, and black jive and rapping, and above all black soul, which encompassed all of these things and more. Black religion embraced Christianity, Islam, and varieties thereof, including fundamentalism, evangelicalism, Catholicism, belief in the Kawaida value system or in a Christian black nationalism that proclaimed Jesus as the Black Messiah. Many of these beliefs were in flux; black Roman Catholics, for example, tripled in number over the three postwar decades.
Thus Black Power had its own rich culture, history, literature, religion, style, values. But it lacked a coherent political strategy, and the issue of strategy more and more arrayed black against black. Even while he led the Meredith march through the Mississippi heat, King could hear young blacks behind him bitterly criticizing nonviolence. “If one of these damn white Mississippi crackers touches me,” he heard a young voice say, “I’m gonna knock the hell out of him.” They should sing, someone said, “We Shall Overrun,” not “Overcome.”
The issue of strategy came to a head in a new and bitter battlefield: Chicago. After his successes in the South, King decided to make the “City of the Big Shoulders” his first major northern target, not only to force Mayor Richard Daley to end racism in hiring and housing but to prove that nonviolence could work in northern ghettos. To show his commitment he settled in a shabby, urine-stenched tenement in one of Chicago’s worst slums. During the long planning and mobilizing process Black Power militants booed King on the streets. Though hurt and angry, he reflected that he and the other leaders had preached freedom and promised freedom but had been “unable to deliver on our promises.” Few could question King’s militance in Chicago. After affixing a set of demands to the metal door of City Hall, in Martin Luther style except for the adhesive tape, King readied his forces for nonviolent sit-ins, camp-ins, boycotts.
It was too late. The street people moved first. In the 100-degree heat youths turned on water hydrants and reveled in the cold jets, but when they were accosted by the police, violence erupted, turning that night and the next day into open war between hundreds of police and thousands of blacks. In vain King and his associates toured the war-swept area preaching nonviolence. By the time several thousand National Guardsmen started patrolling the area, two persons had been killed, 56 injured, almost 300 jailed. King grimly proceeded with his demonstrations. Day after day blacks marched through white areas of Chicago. They were met with epithets, Confederate flags, rocks, bottles, bricks.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” King said. In all the demonstrations down South he had “never seen—even in Mississippi and Alabama—mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I’ve seen in Chicago.” Somewhat intimidated, and under heavy pressure from Chicago’s Catholic hierarchy, Daley met with King and other black leaders to patch together an agreement on housing, mainly consisting of promises. Some blacks praised King for forcing the mayor to the bargaining table. Others called it a sellout.
So the black leaders continued to divide and argue over political ways and means. In all the diversity of attitudes and style, however, there could be discerned a remarkable agreement over the highest values and ultimate ends. Just as blacks from left to right apotheosized liberty and equality, so did both black nationalists and Muslims. Elijah Muhammad’s 1962 manifesto proclaimed at the very start, “We want freedom,” as did the Black Panther party program six years later. Blacks invariably backed egalitarian ideas as well. Inevitably interpretations of such values differed. Thus the Muslims declared they wanted “full and complete freedom” and spelled this out, while the Panthers defined their freedom as “power to determine the destiny of our black community.” Whether this kind of agreement on overarching values, camouflaging disagreement over specific policies and tactics, could serve as a basis of political unity remained as dubious in the black community as it always had in the white.
A storm was rising in the mid-sixties, however, that would bring blacks into stronger harmony. As LBJ’s escalation in Indochina proceeded apace, blacks were drawn more and more into the Vietnam resistance, out of motives ranging from compassion for people of color in Indochina to distaste for “whitey’s war” fought so disproportionately by black men. As King became increasingly outspoken against the war, the White House distanced itself from him and the black movement. This hurt, because time and again King still needed Administration help. But he could not resist this higher call. “We must combine the fervor of the civil rights movement with the peace movement,” he said in February 1967, in his first talk entirely devoted to Vietnam. “We must demonstrate, teach and preach, until the very foundations of our nation are shaken. ”
He had known from the start, Lyndon Johnson told Doris Kearns the year after he left the White House, that he would be crucified either way he moved.
“If I left the woman I really loved—the Great Society—in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home. All my programs. All my hopes to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless. All my dreams to provide education and medical care to the browns and the blacks and the lame and the poor. But if I left that war and let the Communists take over South Vietnam, then I would be seen as a coward and my nation would be seen as an appeaser and we would both find it impossible to accomplish anything for anybody anywhere on the entire globe.”
LBJ elaborated. “Oh, I could see it coming all right. History provided too many cases where the sound of the bugle put an immediate end to the hopes and dreams of the best reformers.” The Spanish-American War had drowned the populist spirit—World War I, Wilson’s New Freedom—World War II, the New Deal. It could happen again. The conservatives always loved a war. “Oh, they’d use it to say they were against my programs, not because they were against the poor—why, they were as generous and charitable as the best of Americans—but because the war had to come first. First, we had to beat those Godless Communists and then we could worry about the homeless Americans. And the generals. Oh, they’d love the war, too.” That was why he had been so suspicious of the military.
“Yet everything I knew about history told me that if I got out of Vietnam and let Ho Chi Minh run through the streets of Saigon, then I’d be doing exactly what Chamberlain did in World War II. I’d be giving a big fat reward for aggression. And I knew that if we let Communist aggression succeed in taking over South Vietnam, there would follow in this country an endless national debate—a mean and destructive debate—that would shatter my Presidency, kill my administration, and damage our democracy.” Truman and Acheson had lost their effectiveness when the communists took over in China. The “loss” of China helped cause the rise of McCarthy. But compared to what might have happened in Vietnam, all that was “chickenshit.”
The former President had lost none of his bombast, sarcasm, Texas high coloring, his capacity to oversimplify history. But wholly authentic in this discourse was the self-portrait of a leader who had been deeply divided about his choices as he had perceived them. As usual, he had dealt with his options by personalizing them. He remembered just what he had felt and whom he had feared in those years: Bobby Kennedy would be out front telling everyone that Lyndon Johnson had betrayed John Kennedy’s commitment to South Vietnam. LBJ would be called a coward, an unmanly man, a man without a spine. He had nightmares, he said, about people running toward him shouting “Coward! Traitor! Weakling!” But he feared World War III even more.
Always the image of Roosevelt loomed before him as exemplar and guide—FDR, who had led the nation so skillfully against Hitlerism despite the doubters and the defeatists. World War II had shown that the defense of little nations like Czechoslovakia was necessary to the security of big nations; that the democracies must unite in the face of aggression; that nations must live up to their promises and commitments. LBJ knew of Hans Morgenthau’s warning against treating Vietnam in European terms—but had not Roosevelt’s and Truman’s way of standing up to aggression worked against Japan? Against North Korea?
So Johnson had reasoned. It seemed historically fitting, in retrospect, that he had dealt with his first Vietnam “crisis” much as Roosevelt had exploited Nazi “aggression” in the North Atlantic. Just as FDR had converted provocative acts on both sides into a simple act of Nazi hostility, just as he had grossly oversimplified murky actions in the misty waters south of Greenland, so Johnson seized on equally minor, two-sided, and confused encounters between an American destroyer and North Vietnamese patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964 to step up the war. After ordering reprisal air strikes against North Vietnam, LBJ asked congressional approval for a resolution—drafted in the White House several months before the Tonkin Gulf incident—that would empower the President as Commander-in-Chief to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against forces of the United States. After brief hearings at which the Administration failed to provide Congress with vital information about the Gulf of Tonkin encounters, disingenuously suggesting that the attack on the destroyer had been unprovoked, the House gave Johnson his mandate by a vote of 414-0, the Senate by 88-2. Only the outspoken former Republican Wayne Morse of Oregon and Democrat Ernest Gruening of Alaska voted against the White House.
The escalation continued. National Liberation Front forces attacked a U.S. base at Pleiku in February 1965, killing eight Americans. Johnson ordered air strikes and sent in the first official American troops—no longer “advisers.” The sequence became tedious: land battles, more troops mobilized on both sides, lulls in the struggle marked by calls for negotiation, more battles.
Later, when Johnson talked to Kearns and others about his nightmares, about awaking and prowling the White House and visiting the situation room to scrutinize the latest battle reports, some said that the President had become unhinged. But if this was the case, the whole White House had been a little mad, for the President had acted not alone but on the advice of such presumably sober and experienced advisers as Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, and many others who were largely holdovers from the JFK White House. Some said that LBJ had become a fanatical anticommunist in the face of Hanoi’s resistance. But the President was no fanatic. He often spoke loudly while wielding a relatively small stick, limiting attacks in both intensity and duration, holding back the military all-outers, spending hours selecting bombing targets that would not provoke Chinese or Soviet retaliation. He constantly pleaded that he was seeking not to crush communism in Russia or China or North Vietnam—merely to preserve South Vietnam as a bastion of present, or future, freedom. Indeed he staked his most eager hopes on his numerous economic aid and social reform programs in Vietnam—a kind of Indochinese Great Society. He would bring to the Vietnamese democracy American style, honest elections, Bill of Rights liberties. Like his predecessor, he failed to see that the Vietnamese wanted freedom as they defined it—and the first freedom was liberation from imperial or neocolonial control.
His motivation was far less psychological or ideological than political and conceptual. The Gulf of Tonkin brush occurred hardly two weeks after the nomination of Barry Goldwater, and the Republicans were already making clear that they would campaign against the party that had lost Poland and China and was now about to lose Indochina. Even after his November triumph, Johnson feared that other rivals lay in wait for him, not only in the GOP but in both the hawk and dove wings of the Democratic party. Yet the conceptual factor was perhaps more influential, certainly more insidious. Every small escalation seemed so sensible, so practical, so moderate. Each little step was based on careful analysis, ample intelligence, elaborate quantification. Like good pragmatists, like eminently reasonable men, the leaders experimented with a variety of strategies and tactics. When none worked—and none ever did—they tried something else.
Moreover, they were not wholly distracted by Southeast Asia—not at first anyway. They were guarding Atlantic ramparts against communism as well. Early in 1963, Kennedy had dispatched Vice President Johnson to the Dominican Republic for the inauguration of Juan Bosch, a litterateur and leftist, noncommunist politician, as President. Photographs depicted LBJ and Bosch in a warm Latin abrazo. After the generals overthrew Bosch six months later, civilian and army supporters of the deposed President struck back in April 1965. Johnson promptly dispatched the Marines, ostensibly to save lives but mainly because of some scattered indications that communists were among the pro-Bosch forces. Within three weeks 22,000 American troops were patrolling the small nation—the first major overt military intervention in a Latin nation in forty years. The Administration never produced convincing evidence of significant communist involvement, but once again Washington was captive to the phantom threat of unified global communism. God forbid that there be another Cuba in the Caribbean!
The Americans used the latest, most sophisticated intelligence technology in Indochina, but their analysis of political information was faulty. Otherwise they might have grasped that the communists too lacked global unity; that the communist world too was torn by geopolitical differences, national rivalries, factional quarrels, leadership rivalries; that Hanoi faced many of the same types of problems with friends and foes that Washington did—faithless allies, coalition weaknesses, great powers ultimately devoted to their own national interests and perhaps willing in a pinch to “lose” Vietnam or some other small communist ally.
As usual, big powers had plenty of advice for small allies. Mao Tse-tung urged the Vietnamese communists to follow the strategy of protracted conflict he had developed and tested against the Japanese and the Chinese Nationalists. Lin Piao wrote an important article humbly analyzing mistakes made during the Chinese Revolution but obviously reproaching Hanoi for being intent on escalating and not knowing when to pull back. The Vietnamese hardly took this advice with fraternal grace. They had long memories of Chinese aggression over the centuries, of Chinese arrogance toward lesser peoples, of the Chinese “sellout” of their Vietnamese comrades at Geneva in 1954, when Vietnam was partitioned at the 17th parallel. Did Peking wish to keep Vietnam divided and impotent so that the Chinese could dominate Indochina?
Nor did the Hanoi regime have any more comradely love for the Russians. Moscow too had been a party to the Geneva Accords; at a critical moment Molotov, surrounded by Mendès-France, Chou En-lai, and Eden, had hammered down with the finality of a blacksmith’s blows the agreement that provided for partition. Hanoi rightly suspected that the Russians saw Vietnam as a pawn in great power rivalry, were far more concerned about their relationship with China, and above all feared that escalation in Southeast Asia would lead to World War III. Hanoi no doubt suspected all this—what it did not fully grasp was the extent to which Lyndon Johnson too feared that escalation might trigger a nuclear war.
What Hanoi did know by 1965 was that Hanoi must go it alone. The North Vietnamese could extract help from Moscow and Peking by expertly playing one off against the other, but the extent of military and logistical aid finally turned on shifting great power relationships as well as Hanoi’s needs. The North Vietnamese people had to survive under merciless American bombing while Hanoi mounted its own land infiltration and attacks to the south. During 1966 the Pentagon’s Rolling Thunder saturated North Vietnamese military centers, supply depots, and infiltration tracks with 136,000 tons of bombs. Mammoth B-52S, each carrying almost thirty tons of explosives, left the countryside scarred and towns and villages destroyed. McNamara privately admitted that North Vietnamese civilian casualties were running up to one thousand a month.
Rolling Thunder was ill named, for it implied an Administration steadfastness that did not exist. The Joint Chiefs were urging a stepped-up, unrestricted air war; others contended that bombing could not succeed against a government and people like the North Vietnamese. Here too Johnson took the “practical” middle path, adopting a stop-and-go escalation. This not only hardened popular anger and resistance in North Vietnam without shocking it into defeatism but enabled Hanoi, with its small and widely dispersed factories, to establish alternative transportation routes and place workers underground. Tens of thousands of men, women, and children worked and even lived in an estimated 30,000 miles of tunnels.
Under the holocaust of bombs Hanoi was still able to dispatch troops and supplies to the south. Even the official United States estimates acknowledged that perhaps 90,000 men infiltrated south in 1967, almost three times the number that had done so two years earlier. As usual the airmen boasted of bombing with surgical precision and as usual they exaggerated—it was hard to identify the infiltration routes and even harder to hit them. North Vietnamese engineers and laborers quickly filled in craters and improvised pontoon bridges, while drivers camouflaged their trucks with palm fronds and traveled at night, their headlights turned off, by following white markers along the roads. Americans marveled at the “ant labor” that could put back into operation in several days a key pass leading to the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
In the south the Americans massed military technology on the ground as awesome as the B-52S in the air. In what their general, William Westmoreland, called the “most sophisticated war in history,” they tried to apply the latest weapons to old-fashioned guerrilla warfare. “To locate an ever elusive enemy,” in George Herring’s summary, “the military used small, portable radar units and ‘people sniffers’ which picked up the odor of human urine. IBM 1430 computers were programmed to predict likely times and places of enemy attacks. Herbicides were used on a wide scale and with devastating ecological consequences to deprive the Vietcong of natural cover. C-123 ‘RANCHHAND’ crews, with the sardonic motto ‘Only You Can Prevent Forests,’ sprayed more than 100 million pounds of chemicals such as Agent Orange over millions of acres of forests, destroying an estimated one-half of South Vietnam’s timberlands and leaving human costs yet to be determined. C-47 transports were converted into awesome gunships (called ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’) that could fire 18,000 rounds a minute.”
But it was still the human factor that made the difference. “I have no army, I have no finances, I have no education system,” Ho Chi Minh had said. “I have only my hatred”—a hatred, Frances FitzGerald wrote later, that was the “key to the vast, secret torrents of energy that lay buried within the Vietnamese people.” But it was more than hatred. It was the determination of a rigorously propagandized and disciplined people led by ideologues. It was pride in their defeat of the French and now their standing up against the Americans. It was hope in their future of national independence—a hope that had stirred Americans two centuries before. It was faith in their kind of freedom.
Washington, D.C., Holy Saturday, April 17, 1965.A warm cloudless day in the nation’s capital, one of those dreamlike spring days that made the city of cherry blossoms appear like a fairy-tale picture book of democracy. While military officials in the big government buildings toiled during the weekend over escalation plans for Vietnam, tens of thousands of war protesters were flocking into town on buses and trains and on foot. After picketing the White House the petitioners moved on to the Washington Monument, where they heard peace songs by Joan Baez and Judy Collins and speeches by Bob Moses, Staughton Lynd, I. F. Stone, and Senator Gruening. Paul Potter, head of SDS, which had organized the march, closed it with a passionate and prophetic call to his listeners to build a broad social movement that “will, if necessary, respond to the Administration war effort with massive civil disobedience all over the country,” and beyond that, to try to change the whole “system” that had produced the war.
One by one Lyndon Johnson was also losing the support of men who had backed him. Martin Luther King, wondering when America would learn to understand the nationalistic spirit awakened within the colored people of the world, including the Vietnamese, broke with the Administration during the summer of 1965 on the issue. Walter Lippmann, discovering that the President had been planning to escalate the war even while telling the columnist that the war “had to be won on the non-military side,” and feeling the Administration’s cool breath to boot, never set foot in Johnson’s White House after the spring of 1965. Other notables also broke with the White House and the response was the same—excommunication.
But it was the protesters in the streets—especially the young—who were still leading the way. In the wake of the April march, SDS campus chapters, coffers, and protests burgeoned, with excited coverage by the media. Others had not waited for SDS to lead the swelling movement. In an earlier striking display of the 1960s phenomenon of leadership welling up from below, University of Michigan students and faculty in March had organized an all-night teach-in that drew thousands—an idea quickly copied at scores of other campuses, where antiwar professors debated State Department “truth teams” before large audiences. In late July 1965, just after LBJ announced a doubling of draft calls, CNVA troops marched on the New York induction center, carrying signs reading: “The President has declared war—we haven’t.” On the twentieth anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki an “Assembly of Unrepresented People” gathered in Washington for workshops and direct action that would connect black voting rights with Vietnam, creating a “peace and freedom” movement; a few hundred were arrested as they tried to invade the Capitol nonviolently with a “Declaration for Peace.” The Assembly gave birth to the first national antiwar coalition, the National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam, composed of thirty-three organizations.
It was across the country that the thunder rolled. In Oakland, protesters sat down in front of army trains carrying soldiers bound for Vietnam. An eighty-two-year-old woman, a refugee from Nazi Germany, followed the example of Vietnamese Buddhist monks and nuns and set herself afire on a Detroit street. In New York, pacifist David Miller lighted a flame to his draft card before cameras at the induction center, the first public defiance of a new law which had made draft card destruction punishable by five years in prison. In the fall of 1965 the National Coordinating Committee sponsored international days of protest, with thousands taking to the streets in cities across the country and as far-flung as Tokyo. A thirty-two-year-old Quaker from Baltimore also sat down—within view of McNamara’s window at the Pentagon—poured kerosene over his body, and died in a small inferno. A young Catholic Worker activist immolated himself in front of the United Nations, after having witnessed a draft-card burning during which hecklers yelled, “Burn yourselves, not your cards!”
As protests erupted across the country, attracting ever-greater numbers of people and intense television coverage, antiwar activists hotly debated age-old questions of strategy and organization: Should they maintain their bias against centralization or recognize the frequent need for leadership? Should they concentrate on the single issue of the Vietnam War or reach out to the varied concerns of other groups, especially blacks and students? Should they admit, or at least work with, communists, or steer clear of them as dangerous allies? The last issue was especially complex not only because liberal groups like the ADA and old-line labor unions in general opposed inclusion of “Stalinists” but because the communists were as usual divided into orthodox CPers, Maoists, Trotskyites, young communists, and other factions, who fought among themselves.
Cutting across these questions and groups was a conflict that pervaded the whole antiwar movement, a conflict, partly of generations, of classes, of tactics, a conflict of the Old Left, of the industrial trade unions, the nonrevolutionary socialists, the League for Industrial Democracy, of ADA “liberal reformism,” of political writers like Max Lerner and John P. Roche and novelists like Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison, arrayed against the New Left, with its own dogmas, against SDS and other militant organizations, against numerous academic Marxists, writer Norman Mailer and poet Robert Lowell, The Nation and the New York Review of Books, radical chic, “resistance and reconstruction.” Intellectuals pitched ferociously into the fray— some critics said because of guilt over their having legitimated confrontation by the young. Susan Sontag described America as a “criminal, sinister country—swollen with priggishness, numbed by affluence, bemused by the monstrous conceit that it has the mandate to dispose of the destiny of the world, of life itself, in terms of its own interests and jargon.”
“These alienated intellectuals,” exclaimed John Roche, now an LBJ aide, to Jimmy Breslin. “Mainly the New York artsy-crafty set. They’re in the Partisan Review and the New York Review and publications like that. The West Side jackal bins, I call them. They intend to launch a revolution from Riverside Drive.” He named names—Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Mailer …
Anti-Vietnam protest reached a new peak in April 1967, when at least a quarter million people gathered at the sprawling Sheep Meadow in Central Park and marched to the United Nations to hear King, Spock, Carmichael, and other notables speak passionately against the war. Though dizzied by the size of the New York rally, SDS leaders and some of their older associates were becoming convinced that protest was not enough—they must move on to resistance. Once again the rank-and-file activists took the lead: a three-day takeover of the University of Chicago administration building—Harvard SDS activists surrounding McNamara’s car and heatedly interrogating him—“We Won’t Go” statements and signings of students on dozens of campuses—an intense but nonviolent effort to obstruct Dow Chemical recruiting at the University of Wisconsin, triggering a ferocious assault by riot-clad police—and in late October 1967, a march on the very center of the “military-industrial complex,” the Pentagon, that huge, squat, World War II rampart across the Potomac from Washington.
The battle of the Pentagon was carefully planned as a rally for beginners, a “be-in” for hippies, an act of militant civil disobedience for the already committed, and as a “creative synthesis” of “Gandhi and guerrilla.” First an array of “witches, warlocks, holymen, seers, prophets, mystics, saints, sorcerers, shamans, troubadours, minstrels, bards, roadmen, and madmen,” led by the Diggers, a West Coast group of artists-organizers and “anarchists of the deed,” and by a rock band called the Fugs, invoked every bit of their magic to levitate the Pentagon and exorcise its demonic spirits. Unaccountably the Pentagon did not levitate. After an SDS vanguard and others broke through a cordon of MPs and National Guardsmen and seized high ground in the plaza before the building, several thousand more protesters pressed their way up against solid rows of rigid young soldiers carrying bayoneted M-14s. Through bullhorns and face to face the protesters conducted a teach-in to win over the troops.
“Join us!” they shouted, and then more gently, “You are our brothers.” They pleaded with the soldiers, sang to them, placed flowers in their upraised gun barrels. The rigid lines hardly wavered, nor did their confronters. As night fell and cold set in, protesters built campfires from posters and debris and shared their marijuana joints. When someone yelled “Burn a draft card! Keep warm!” hundreds of little flames flickered in the darkness—the ultimate “burn-in.” When the television cameras were gone, a flying wedge of troops broke them up with clubs and rifle butts. The next day the remaining protesters, singing “This Land Is Your Land,” quietly offered themselves for jail.
By this time, late 1967, the number of American troops in Vietnam was approaching a half million. Facing resistance in Vietnam and at home as strong as ever, Johnson struggled with his own ambivalence. He burned under the protesters’ caricature of him as a wild Texan aching to fire his six-shooters come high noon. Even in the White House he could hear the protesters, out on Pennsylvania Avenue, chanting, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?” More and more the war heightened the war within himself. He hated to escalate, while step by step he escalated. Close associates—George Ball, Bill Moyers, and more recently McNamara—had broken away from him largely because of Vietnam. To the Chiefs of Staff, especially anxious for even fewer restrictions on bombing, he grumbled, “Bomb, bomb, bomb, that’s all you know.” He would not provoke Peking or Moscow. “I’m not going to spit in China’s face,” he said. On the other hand, “We can’t hunker down like a jackass in a hailstorm.” LBJ was no longer exhibiting the kind of Rooseveltian leadership that he prized.
It was now Hanoi, not Washington, that was preparing for a major escalation. Even more than Johnson, the communist leaders recognized an intensifying deadlock in the south. They detected worrisome signs. The party cadres seemed to be losing some of their revolutionary zeal after years of war. They were ignoring the doctrine “from the masses, to the masses,” losing touch with the villages, appearing even “passive and pessimistic.” It was time for bold revolutionary action, for the shock of violence. Hanoi carefully planned devastating attacks at over a hundred cities and towns, aimed at reinvigorating the military cadres, carrying the war for the first time from the countryside into urban areas, arousing the revolutionary potential among the South Vietnamese masses, and throwing both the Americans and the Saigon regime off balance. The attack would be launched at the start of Tet, the lunar new year holiday that by long custom had been observed with a cease-fire.
The Tet offensive burst out in South Vietnam like an eruption of electrical storms. From the tip of the delta to the northern border the communists struck at five of the six major cities and most of the provincial capitals. Their most publicized feat was an invasion of the fortresslike United States embassy in Saigon, their most dramatic victory the temporary capture of Hué. No quarter was shown: the attackers executed hundreds of soldiers and civilians in Hué; the chief of South Vietnam’s national police shot a bound captive out of hand on the streets of Saigon in full view of cameramen. Taken by surprise, American and South Vietnamese forces rallied strongly enough to recapture all the lost centers, usually after savage combat.
Blood-soaked bodies lying on the embassy lawn—the corpses of American dead piled on a personnel carrier—a Saigon official murdering a frightened and helpless captive—these pictures shocked the American public all the more after a series of optimistic statements by the commanding general in Vietnam, William Westmoreland. A serious military setback to Hanoi was converted by the press coverage into proof that the Administration had been lying about progress in Vietnam. Even the avuncular Walter Cronkite, who had flown to Vietnam for a firsthand look at Tet, was said to have demanded, “What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning the war! “ “It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate,” the CBS newscaster told his huge audience in a special report when he returned to New York.
In vain LBJ insisted that once “the American people know the facts,” the communists would not “achieve a psychological victory.” This was what they had achieved. The public after a decade of Vietnam had had enough “facts.” It wanted the truth.
And the truth was that the United States could win this war only at a price it would not pay. The Administration even now did not fully recognize this; intense debates broke out in the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon in response to the generals’ request for another 206,000 men—which would have required mobilization of the reserves—to launch a post-Tet counterattack. Even the Pentagon was at war with itself. Civilian advisers to McNamara’s successor, the noted Washington lawyer Clark Clifford, warned that further escalation would send shock waves through the nation. But the military pressed for more. Clifford, who himself had turned against the war, convened for Johnson’s benefit a meeting of the so-called Wise Men, pillars of the national security establishment like Dean Acheson, John McCloy, McGeorge Bundy, Cyrus Vance.
It was a moment of truth for men brought up in a world when, time and again, American power had made the crucial difference in Europe, in the Pacific, in Korea. Now they told LBJ, like the gentlemen they were but in blunt language, that the war policy was bankrupt, the cost, political and financial, was too high. The key point, Vance said later, was that division in the country “was growing with such acuteness” as to threaten to “tear the United States apart.” Said LBJ: “The establishment bastards have bailed out.”
Politics was already dividing the nation—this was election year 1968. Vietnam dominated the scene as the presidential primaries got underway. “The President is confronted with the resistance, open or passive, of the whole military generation, their teachers, their friends, their families,” Walter Lippmann wrote. Public approval of Johnson’s handling of the war dropped to an all-time low of 26 percent after Tet—hard reading for a President who followed polls as closely as his blood pressure. Sensing LBJ’s weakness, Senator Eugene McCarthy entered the New Hampshire primary. A product, along with Humphrey and a dozen other national leaders, of Minnesota’s potent Democratic-Farmer-Labor school of doctrinal politics, McCarthy was committed to ending the Vietnam war. When he gained a remarkable 42 percent of the New Hampshire Democratic vote, he lost to the President but captured the nation’s headlines. For LBJ it was a political Tet—he had mobilized the most electoral power but lost the psychological battle.
No leader was more confounded by the New Hampshire surprise than Robert Kennedy, Senator from New York since 1964. Tet had shocked him into making his most passionate speech against the war; it had also made McCarthy formidable. Yet a Gallup poll showed that 70 percent of the American people wanted to continue the bombing. All save Johnson assumed that LBJ would run again; no major party in the twentieth century had repudiated its man in the White House. Now, after New Hampshire, McCarthy might have LBJ on the run. For weeks Kennedy and his old political friends had agonized over the New York senator’s running. They divided over it too: Ted Kennedy and Ted Sorensen opposed the idea, while others saw no alternative. Robert Kennedy, as competitive as ever, could not allow this rival to preempt the Vietnam issue or indeed the whole anti-Johnson movement. In mid-March, Kennedy announced for the presidency in the caucus room of the old Senate office building, where John Kennedy had thrown his hat into the ring eight years earlier.
During this month the White House had been undergoing its own agonizing over Vietnam. On March 31, Johnson took to the airwaves to announce a unilateral halt of all United States air and naval bombardment of most of the populated areas of the north. He called on Hanoi to join in negotiations. Then, as his listeners stared speechless at their television screens, the President said at the end of his talk, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.” He had had enough, he told Doris Kearns later. He was being stampeded from all directions—“rioting blacks, demonstrating students, marching welfare mothers, squawking professors, and hysterical reporters.” Then the thing he had feared most—Bobby Kennedy back in the fray, embodying the Kennedy heritage.
April was the cruelest month. Martin Luther King’s dream came to an end, for him, on the balcony of the black-owned Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where he had been championing a strike by garbagemen. One shot from a sniper’s rifle flew across the motel’s courtyard, cut King’s spinal column, and crumpled him to the floor. Within hours blacks in cities and towns across the nation exploded in wrath and frustration against this ultimate racial crime. Over 2,000 fires were set, over 2,000 people arrested, over 20,000 injured. The nation’s capital suffered the worst devastation, with ten deaths and over 700 fires. A white man was dragged from his car and stabbed to death. William Manchester noted the bitter irony: the death of the greatest prophet of nonviolence touched oil the worst outburst of arson, looting, and crime in the nation’s history.
Clearly the war issue had catalyzed black revolt and student unrest, not superseded them. The three issues collided and coalesced at Columbia University in the same tempestuous month of April. A few hundred student activists, after demonstrating against the university’s ties with a Pentagon think tank for war research, left the campus and descended into the hilly Harlem park—a buffer zone between the old university and the teeming ghetto below—where Columbia was building a gymnasium with a bottom level that would offer a “separate-but-equal” facility for Harlem. After tearing down a fence and denouncing “Gym Crow,” the students headed back to the campus, occupied the main undergraduate building, and “imprisoned” an acting dean. When black students who had joined the takeover asked the whites to leave so that the blacks could “go all the way,” the white activists surged toward the administration building, Low Library, heaved a board through a window, and made themselves at home in the suite of President Grayson Kirk.
For several days the strike gathered momentum, as the blacks renamed their captive building Malcolm X Hall, the whites experimented with techniques of participatory democracy and communal living, and three more buildings were occupied. An arm’s-length alliance between black and white students kept the forces of law at bay while the administration negotiated with the occupiers through the faculty. The stickler was amnesty. Several tense days of deadlock followed—then a thousand cops smashed through the barricades and arrested 700, leaving 150 injured. A new strike ended classes for the year. In the end the gym was abandoned, so the children of Harlem lost; students never won amnesty; Kirk retired from the university.
“Oh, God. When is this violence going to stop?” Robert Kennedy had cried out when he was told that King had been shot. His cry could as well have resounded in Europe, as 1968 became the “year of the barricades,” with eruptions of protest and reprisal in a long arc from art colleges in Britain to huge labor walkouts and street violence in France to university turbulence in Madrid to students marching in Belgrade and chanting “Free art, free theater” in Warsaw. By late June Kennedy was campaigning in the style his brother Jack had made famous. But people were sensing in him a compassion and desperate concern beyond anything Kennedys had before exhibited on the hustings. His blue eyes, Jack Newfield had noticed earlier, “were now sad rather than cold, haunted rather than hostile.” He spoke for the poor, the underclass that establishment and students alike had bypassed. The poor “are hidden in our society,” he would say. “No one sees them any more.” But he did.
Liberals backing McCarthy were furious with him as a Johnny-come-lately and as a Kennedy. McCarthy himself, waging a campaign of issues, warned against presidential power and the Kennedy type of “personalization of the presidency” at the expense of the kind of leadership that “must exist in every man and every woman.” Such adversaries Kennedy could at least see and even respect. Out there somewhere were the haters and the killers. Early in June, on a Tuesday evening in Los Angeles, after hearing the California primary returns that gave him a clear win over McCarthy and a realistic chance for the presidency, and after giving a brief talk for the poor and against violence, he left the hotel ballroom by a “safer” route through the kitchen for his own appointment in Samarra.
In a very real sense, David Broder wrote later, the Democratic party never recovered in 1968 from the shock of Robert Kennedy’s assassination. Certainly the suspense was gone, for Hubert Humphrey, inheriting the established labor-liberal leadership in the Democracy, was bound to win the convention endorsement in Mayor Daley’s Chicago. Others did keenly look forward to the convention—most notably the Youth International Party or “Yippies,” which aimed at shaping the youth culture into a revolutionary fighting force, using sensational media events instead of grass-roots organizing. They would nominate for President a live pig named “Pigasus.” While the Yippies helped turn the convention into the theater of the absurd, with others they made it a theater of conflict. Bathed in the eerie glare of TV lights, protesters and police fought it out in the heart of the city. In the convention hall Senator Abraham Ribicoff, in a dramatic nominating speech for Senator George McGovern, told Mayor Daley and the other delegates, “With George McGovern, we wouldn’t have Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago,” turning the mayor purple with rage.
When Richard Nixon completed the first leg of his comeback from the bitter defeats of the 1960 presidential election and the 1962 California gubernatorial race by easily winning the Republican nomination over New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, the stage seemed set for a climactic and even historic collision between warring philosophies, programs, and politicians. No one provoked Democrats as readily as Nixon, who intended to keep the focus on Democratic failures rather than Republican proposals. President Johnson’s anointment of Humphrey, however grudging, put the burden of defending the Democratic party record on the Vice President, however much he might want to strike out on his own. George Wallace’s entrance into the race challenged both parties but especially the Administration’s civil rights record. Eager to meet this challenge, black leaders stepped up their voter registration efforts. In a year already filled with tumult and bloodshed some observers anticipated a “real Donnybrook.”
The campaign did indeed get underway amid suspense and excitement, as Humphrey sought to reach out to the peace forces without antagonizing the still powerful and still proud President in the White House, as Nixon tried to go on the attack without reviving memories of the red-baiting “Tricky Dick” of the 1940s and 1950s, and as Wallace made a direct populist pitch to segregationists, fundamentalists, and blue-collar labor in their own vernacular. Wallace enlivened matters by choosing as his running mate on the American Independent ticket retired general Curtis E. LeMay, former chief of the Strategic Air Command, who presented a caricature of the bomb-wielding militarist and appeared, in Marshall Frady’s words, as “politically graceful as an irate buffalo on a waxed waltz floor.”
These political pyrotechnics were deceptive. The campaign became largely a battle of personalities rather than policies, mainly because Humphrey and Nixon hewed so closely to a centrist, consensual position on the issue of Vietnam that most voters saw little difference in their positions—and those voters who did see a distinction did not agree on which candidate was more hawk or more dove. Nixon was a “master of ambiguity” on Vietnam, a scholarly study concluded, and Humphrey “alternated between protestations of loyalty to current policy, and hints that he really disagreed with it.” Wallace, charging that there was not a “dime’s worth of difference” between the Tweedledum and Tweedledee candidates, appealed directly to the “forgotten Americans” and their sense of political alienation, powerlessness, estrangement from government, loss of freedom— and to their chauvinism, racism, and hatred of war resisters in the colleges.
“I’m going to ask my Attorney General,” he said in his standard speech, “to seek an indictment against every professor in this country who calls for a communist victory”—voice rising—“and see if I can’t put them under a good jail somewhere.” Loud cheers. “I’m sick and tired of seeing these few college students raise money, blood, and clothes for the communists and fly the Vietcong flag; they ought to be dragged by the hair of their heads and stuck under a good jail also.”
In the end the election contest settled into the electoral pattern of the preceding two decades. After assiduously courting the southern vote, Wallace carried five states of the old Solid South and Nixon five of the southern “rim states”; Humphrey won only Texas. Since southern states had been voting Republican or independent for President off and on for several decades, this was a predictable outcome in light of the Democrats’ civil rights posture. Winning 9.9 million votes nationally against Nixon’s 31.8 million and Humphrey’s 31.3 million, Wallace ran the strongest race against major-party candidates since La Follette in 1924. Humphrey, holding the labor vote against Wallace, carried the old Democratic party bastions of the industrial Northeast.
In splitting their vote almost evenly between Nixon and Humphrey, voters gave little guidance to leaders on Vietnam, for the major-party candidates had given little guidance to them. Well could reporter David Broder sum up the central paradox of the 1968 election: “a year of almost unprecedented violence and turmoil, a year of wild political oscillations and extremes, produced a terribly conventional result.” But the election had one decisive outcome. Richard M. Nixon was the next President of the United States.
On January 19, 1969, the day before the inauguration of Richard Nixon as President, ten thousand “militant—but for the most part genial” demonstrators, led by four active-duty GIs, marched on the Capitol in opposition to the continuing war. The next day, armed only with banners, chanting protesters organized by the National Mobilization Committee conducted a peaceful incursion into the inaugural ceremony and the parade to the White House. But as the presidential motorcade crawled down Pennsylvania Avenue, a shower of projectiles—sticks, stones, bottles, smoke bombs—landed on the limousines of the new regime. The Mobe publicly condemned this violent action by an SDS faction—the first such disruption of an inaugural.
The world did not pay much attention. Its eyes were on the new President, who had come back from the defeats of 1960 and 1962 to inch his way up to the top of the greasy pole. It was the new Nixon, certified so by publicists and politicians. The old President-watcher Walter Lippmann, in choosing him over Humphrey, had discerned a “new Nixon, a maturer and mellower man who is no longer clawing his way to the top.” Theodore White would say, in his best-seller on the 1968 election, that the “Nixon of 1968 was so different from the Nixon of 1960 that the whole personality required re-exploration.” A happy Nixon on election night had promised to “bridge the generation gap” and “bring the American people together.” His inaugural address was conciliatory too.
But was there indeed a new Nixon? The first test was bound to be Vietnam. Nixon had promised—and the country expected—more decisive action to end the war in Indochina without dishonor. But how? On what terms? Leaders of both parties had long broadly agreed on the strategy of “Vietnamization”—of phasing out American troops while South Vietnam took control of its own military defense. Johnson’s strategy had been gradual escalation, extensive though selective bombing, and promises to Saigon of support for the South Vietnam regime along with assurances to Hanoi that he would not challenge its legitimacy in the north. Nixon too favored help to Saigon along with a phased pullout, but twenty years later, after studying the available records and the myriad memoirs, historians were not clear whether Nixon and his adviser Henry Kissinger planned on keeping South Vietnam viable no matter what—the old policy—or on pulling out of South Vietnam no matter what. And that would be a crucial distinction.
“We will not make the same old mistakes,” Kissinger said in 1969. “We will make our own.” But the American people would not tolerate many more mistakes in Vietnam.
From the start Vietnam brought out Nixon’s basic dualism. He would step up negotiation with Hanoi and speed up withdrawal of American troops. Maintaining continuity with previous Presidents, he would “seek the opportunity,” as he said in an address to the nation in mid-May 1969, “for the South Vietnamese people to determine their own political future without outside interference.” If the war had to go on, it was “a war for peace.” If that phrase reminded some less of Woodrow Wilson than of George Orwell (“War Is Peace”), the new President still was eager to end the bloodletting in Vietnam. “I’m not going to end up like LBJ,” he said, “holed up in the White House, afraid to show my face on the street. I’m going to stop that war. Fast.”
But his other means of stopping the war—“fast”—was to enhance it. He could not forget his days in the White House under Eisenhower when Ike had won a favorable settlement in Korea, as Nixon saw it, by threatening China with massive escalation, even the use of nuclear weapons. Surely a jolting threat would succeed against another obdurate enemy in Asia.
“I call it the Madman Theory, Bob,” Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman reported his boss’s telling him during the 1968 campaign. “I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button’—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”
Certainly Ho was not begging for peace at the moment. Late in February his forces launched a new offensive that inflicted heavy losses on American troops, now approaching their peak level of 543,400. Within a few weeks the President expanded the bombing in Laos, sending in B-52S for the first time, and began a secret air war in Cambodia; for over a year the bombing orders were burned after each sortie. By intensifying the war outside Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger were showing Hanoi and Moscow that they would break the restraints LBJ had imposed. Sensing that the war would not soon end, the antiwar and black movements during Nixon’s first hundred days escalated in size and militance as dramatically as the secret enlargement of the war. More and more students were taking part in protests, which often brought a rash of strikes and building takeovers, amid considerable property destruction and violence.
And now a strange thing happened to the Nixon White House. It fell into the same Vietnam pattern as had the previous Administration it had so condemned—the same heavy military actions interspersed with clandestine negotiations, the same expansion and contraction of the war as the prospects of a settlement waxed and waned, the same effort to strengthen the South Vietnamese forces, the same caution about unduly provoking Moscow or Peking.
The White House did not understand that the Vietnam War, despite all the escalation, refused to fit the pattern of Western wars—authoritative decisions by the political and military leaders at the top, the marshaling of disciplined armies on the field, the mobilization of patriotic support at home. To an extraordinary degree the course of events in Vietnam turned on the motivation, morale, and self-discipline of third cadres, whether regulars or guerrillas, in the field, and on the protesting activists in the streets and neighborhoods of America. The outcome of all wars of historic importance is determined to a degree by the skill and resoluteness of foot soldiers on the political battlefield as well as the military. The crucial role of these factors in Vietnam was enormously enhanced by the fact that not two opposing armies but five had thrown their weight into the shifting balance of forces: Hanoi’s regulars in the south, the NLF, Saigon’s troops, American GIs, and the army of protesters back home. These military and political cadres formed a grid of countervailing forces that dominated Nixon’s White House even more than Johnson’s.
Of the staying power of the communists there could be little doubt, after almost a decade of their battling the American invader following their earlier rout of the French. Despite extensive indoctrination by Hanoi in its version of Marxism, the regulars and the guerrillas were motivated far more by sheer hate—of all invaders, Chinese, Japanese, French, or American, of imperialists and exploiters who had controlled their country, cruel landlords, greedy police, and village officials who acted as puppets of the alien rulers—and by hope of freedom as they defined it. “Only by revolutionary violence can the masses defeat aggressive imperialism and its lackeys and overthrow the reactionary administration to take power,” their leader General Vo Nguyen Giap had written in 1964. Violent revolution was their means of achieving power; whether this means of achieving freedom might ultimately corrode that noble end was a question postponed. At times recruitment and morale sank, especially among the guerrillas, but their ideology of hate and hope and their refusal, unlike their enemy, to be distracted by the “illusion of peace” always brought them back to one transcending goal, victory.
With Nixon’s critical decision to push “Vietnamization” of the war in order to assure American families that their fathers, sons, and brothers, husbands and boyfriends, would soon be returning, the staying power of Saigon’s troops became of central importance to the White House during 1969. Most Americans in Saigon, forgetting that their own politicians had pioneered in the arts of bribery and boodle, had little but contempt for the corrupt, divided Saigon government with its brief king-of-the-rock regimes. They often lost patience with the South Vietnamese troops they sought to instruct in the techniques of mechanized war. Still, the fifth government after Diem was stabilized under Nguyen Van Thieu, and after intensive efforts by Saigon and Washington to beef up and modernize the South Vietnamese armed forces, these numbered about a million strong by the end of 1969, with ample weapons and supplies at their disposal. Everything then depended on the working out by Saigon and Washington of long-range plans for an orderly and successful execution of Vietnamization, but the necessary control and consistency were lacking in both capitals. Given the weaknesses at the top, the South Vietnamese troops showed more staying power than might have been expected.
So did the American troops in Vietnam, but their situation was quite different. Fighting nine thousand miles from home, holding only the vaguest notions of what they were fighting for or against, facing day after day appalling mud, heat, dust, downpours, and an elusive enemy who attacked with grenades, mines, ambushes, night infiltrations, and other guerrilla tactics, the GIs held up relatively well until Nixon’s troop pullback policy left the remaining Vietnam force even less aware of the purpose of the war and even more eager to get out fast. As morale and discipline fell, a whole drug culture developed. Ugly racial hatreds surfaced. “Fragging”—men killing their own officers—rose to unprecedented heights. Americans at home were shocked to learn, eighteen months after it happened, that in March 1968 GIs had gunned down at least 450 helpless South Vietnamese civilians—children, women, old men—at My Lai. The great number of GIs dug in and held on, but by 1969 they were a declining part of the grid of countervailing forces.
The most dynamic force in this grid was busy mobilizing, recruiting, and deploying not in Indochina but in the United States, as antiwar protesters stepped up their demonstrations across the country. Far more ominous for the Administration, protest was now flaring in and around the armed services. More and more soldiers were going AWOL to avoid being sentenced to Vietnam; a few found temporary sanctuary in churches and movement dwellings. Service people were now joining peace marches as “GI coffeehouses” in Vietnam, elsewhere abroad, and back home helped to galvanize discontent at military bases. Draft resistance and evasion were widening. During the Vietnam era it was estimated that more than half a million men were draft offenders; of these over 200,000 were actually accused of draft offenses, 25,000 were indicted, almost 9,000 were convicted, and 4,000 were sentenced to prison, serving an average of eighteen months. Nearly half of the half million draft offenders had failed even to register for the draft; of these only a few were prosecuted. Some 40,000 presumed draft offenders and military deserters fled to Canada and other countries.
Protest took spectacular forms, as activists vied for headlines. In July 1969, five women, calling themselves Women Against Daddy Warbucks, darted into Manhattan draft board offices, stole dozens of draft files, and tore the “1” and the “A” from typewriters to exorcise the l-A denoting draft eligibles. Two days later they surfaced at Rockefeller Center to toss the confettied draft records into the teeth of the multinational corporations concentrated there. This climaxed a dozen nonviolent raids on draft boards and on Dow Chemical that had started two years earlier when Jesuit priest Philip Berrigan and two others poured their own blood (mixed with duck blood) on draft files in Baltimore as their way of combining Gandhi and guerrilla, thus pushing nonviolent direct action to its outer limit. Some months later the Catonsville Nine—Berrigan, his brother Daniel, also a Jesuit priest, and seven other radical Catholics—made a bonfire of draft files with homemade “napalm,” declaring, “We believe some property has no right to exist.” These activists, carefully avoiding harm to persons, calmly accepted the consequences, often jail.
In a relentless spiral, militant protest edged toward outright armed struggle, as New Left activists lost patience with nonviolence. Many SDSers felt frustrated with their failure to build a more radical movement, except at a few places like Stanford. With the infiltration of SDS by the Progressive Labor party, a self-styled Marxist-Leninist-Maoist cadre, SDS meetings became scenes of ideological forensics. Bitter quarrels and shouting matches erupted over the correct line—“vanguarditis,” Carl Oglesby called it—in recruiting and organizing. To counter the growing appeal of PL’s organizational vigor and anti-imperialist political dogma, the National Office won adoption of a proposal to forge a “Revolutionary Youth Movement” of the working class. Marxism became, wrote Jim Miller, “a weapon in an internal power struggle.”
This sectarian extremism culminated at the SDS convention in Chicago in June 1969. The National Office contingent handed delegates a long-winded RYM treatise entitled “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows”—a line from Bob Dylan—and setting forth what Kirkpatrick Sale described as “a peculiar mix of New Left attitudes clothed in Old Left arguments, the instincts of the sixties ground through a mill of the thirties, the liberating heritage of SDS dressed up in leaden boots from the past.” The assembly soon degenerated into mindless name-calling and slogan-shouting, enlivened by a few fistfights in the back. RYM leader Bernardine Dohrn, a brilliant young attorney who had worked with the National Lawyers Guild, led a walkout of a majority opposed to PL. When she returned later to the rump session with her forces and declared that all PL members were expelled from SDS, the RYM faction, several hundred strong, marched out into the Chicago night. Over the summer RYM in turn split into two parts, one of which became “Weatherman,” pledged to urban guerrilla warfare in support of Third World revolution.
And so SDS died as a national entity. The “organized New Left disintegrated into warring factions over precisely the question of how to transcend the limits of student radicalism,” Richard Flacks, a leader of SDS in the early days, concluded. “The era of campus confrontation and student revolutionism has ended not because it failed, but because it reached the limit of its possibilities.”
Divided as they were, the protesters could hardly grasp their growing impact on the White House. Nixon was still groping for some kind of middle way even while the student-led demonstrations single-mindedly focused on ending the war, and even while Hanoi’s spokesmen made clear their absolute determination to win it. The White House was caught in a vise largely of its own making. It was trying to fend off protest at home, conduct air and ground attacks against North Vietnam, and “Vietnamize” the war even while the Saigon regime feared the departure of the Americans. In early summer 1969 the President decided to “go for broke” to end the war, according to his memoirs, “either by negotiated agreement or by an increased use of force.”
It must have been the first time in history that a war leader adjusted his war-and-peace scenario to the academic calendar. “Once the summer was over,” Nixon remembered, and the colleges as well as Congress returned from vacation in September, “a massive new antiwar tide would sweep the country during the fall and winter.” He decided to set November 1, 1969— the first anniversary of a bombing hall that LBJ had desperately gambled on during the final days of the 1968 election—as the deadline for an ultimatum to North Vietnam. He instructed Kissinger to draw up an operation—“Duck Hook” it was called—to force Hanoi to its knees. Soon the national security aide and his staff were working up such alternatives as massive carpet bombing of Hanoi and other cities, mining Haiphong harbor and inland waterways, bombing dikes on the Red River delta, even using tactical nuclear weapons to cut off supply routes from Russia and China. But Nixon had been right about the protesters. Four blocks from the White House another team of planners was hard at work organizing a huge Moratorium, a day of nationwide protest against the war.
The peace forces got there first. On October 15, another thunderous wave of protest rolled across the nation. Students, workers, homemakers, politicians, executives broke from their routines to join marches, rallies, vigils, teach-ins, doorbell ringings, and readings of the rolls of war dead. Few campuses were untouched. At Whittier College, Nixon’s alma mater in California’s Orange County, the college president’s wife lit a “flame of life” to burn until the war ended. Women in Los Alamos, New Mexico, birthplace of the atomic bomb, blocked a bridge leading to war plants. At the county courthouse in Lexington, Kentucky, a large crowd listened quietly to the names of the state’s war dead; a woman walked up to the microphone and uttered a single name. “This is my son,” she said. “He was killed last week.”
Caught between Hanoi’s steadfast pursuit of victory and the protesters’ demand for peace, Nixon suddenly switched from his intended ultimatum to a speech in defense of Vietnamization. Delaying his address for two days so that it would not adversely affect a Republican candidate in a New Jersey state election, the President contended that a quick pullout from Vietnam would produce a bloodbath and a loss of confidence in American leadership at home and abroad. Vietnamization would mean peace with honor. He had seen in San Francisco, he said, demonstrators with signs reading: “Lose in Vietnam, bring the boys home.” Well, he would not allow a “vocal minority” to prevail over “the great silent majority.” It was Nixon at his most ambidextrous:
“Let us be united for peace. Let us also be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.”
The protesters would have none of it. They saw Vietnamization as Nixon’s “invisibility” stratagem to turn over the ground war to Saigon while he further expanded the air war, which was less accessible to the media. By reducing troops, draft calls, costs, and caskets returning from combat, he would make a pretense of winding down the war while in fact it would become more destructive than ever. In November the Moratorium and the Mobe’s successor coalition, the New Mobe, in uneasy alliance, led the most ambitious demonstration yet, blanketing the nation but concentrated in Washington. In long, dark robes tens of thousands of protesters walked silently in a “March Against Death” from Arlington National Cemetery to Capitol Hill. Each wearing a cardboard placard with the name of an American soldier killed or a Vietnamese village destroyed, they shouted out the names as they passed the White House. The next day eleven coffins bearing the placards headed a vast procession from the Capitol to the Washington Monument. Over half a million people gathered there in the cold, setting a new turnout record.
By January 1970, the end of his first year in the White House, Nixon’s Vietnam policy was still wavering between attack and withdrawal. Given time—much time—he might have stayed atop his swaying tightrope indefinitely. But the dynamics of war were not so easily balanced abroad and brokered at home. In March 1970, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia’s Chief of State, who had been walking his own tightrope in dealing with Hanoi, Peking, Washington, and Saigon and with ambitious subordinates in his capital at Phnom Penh, was deposed while on a trip to Europe. Whether or not Washington had any hand in the overthrow—and Kissinger hotly denied it—the new President, Lon Nol, was friendly to the Americans.
The coup upset a delicate balance. Hanoi’s forces had been taking advantage of long-established “sanctuaries” in Cambodia that protected their vital supply lines to the south, and Washington had been blasting these strong points. South Vietnamese certainly, and Americans probably, had been infiltrating across the South Vietnam border into Cambodia, for various reasons and with various covers. All parties concealed—or at least denied—their involvement. Now facing an unfriendly government in Phnom Penh, Hanoi’s forces in the sanctuary areas attacked farther west into Cambodia in order to avoid entrapment by U.S. and Saigon forces and strengthen their hand for future operations.
Whether this episode remained merely one more of the age-old shifts of power in the murky politics of Indochina depended on how the rival capitals responded. Commander-in-Chief Nixon was already poised for action. Hanoi’s “aggression” struck at all his vulnerabilities—his feeling that he had been playing the good guy in not escalating the war, his awareness that the fall election campaigns would be starting soon and the Administration had little to boast about, his fear of “losing” Cambodia, and above all his concern that Hanoi was strengthening its capacity to disrupt Vietnamization. Bypassing his Secretaries of State and Defense, who had expressed qualms about the idea, but with the solid support of Kissinger and some of the military, the President late in April resolved on a joint “incursion” by Americans and South Vietnamese against Hanoi’s sanctuaries.
“If, when the chips are down,” he said in announcing the invasion, “the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.” Like so many of Washington’s much-touted operations in Vietnam, the Cambodia incursion gained mixed results at best. GIs and South Vietnamese forces captured large stocks of supplies and cleared a few square miles of jungle, but once again the elusive North Vietnamese troops and their headquarters personnel escaped the net.
Back home the reaction of the antiwar forces was not mixed. Furious students protested on several hundred campuses, some of which were closed for months. Student outrage boiled over following press reports that Nixon during a visit to the Pentagon had said of other protesters, “You see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses.” At some universities students attacked or sacked ROTC buildings. After a weekend of turmoil at Kent State University in Ohio, during which the ROTC building was gutted, edgy National Guardsmen, ordered to disperse even peaceful assemblies, suddenly turned and fired on a crowd of demonstrating students. They killed two women and two men, two of them bystanders. Less noticed by a stunned nation was the even more arbitrary killing of two black students by police at Jackson State College in Mississippi. The Vietnam bloodbath had overflowed into the groves of academe.
Militarily, Cambodia left the war little changed. Washington pulled its troops back by the end of June; Hanoi, its timetable somewhat disrupted by the operation, restocked its supply depots and reestablished its sanctuaries. There followed a year of fight-talk-fight on both sides. Hanoi could not mount a decisive attack, nor could the Americans. Protests continued, fueled by a rising number of Vietnam veterans, some of whom at Christmastime 1971 occupied the Statue of Liberty as a war protest and hung the American flag upside down from Liberty’s crown. The Administration appeared physically as well as politically under siege, as demonstrators ringed the White House.
In his cell in the grim, fortresslike Latuna prison near El Paso, Texas, where he was doing two years for draft resistance, Randy Kehler opened his New York Times on a Sunday in mid-June 1971. Splashed across the front page was the first installment of the Pentagon’s own secret history of the Vietnam War, ordered by Defense Secretary McNamara in 1967 to uncover what had gone wrong. The forty-seven volumes of memos, cables, reports, and analysis documenting a pattern of governmental deception and confusion might never have seen the light of day without Kehler. For a few weeks publication of the Pentagon Papers in the Times and the Washington Post once again fired up the debate over Vietnam.
The man who leaked the secret history was forty-year-old Daniel Ellsberg. For years he had seemed the model young careerist on the rise. After a stint as a Marine infantry commander, he had spent years as a national security bureaucrat, a specialist in crisis decision making and nuclear command and control, a Pentagon functionary involved intimately in the early escalation of the Vietnam War, a “pacification” officer in South Vietnam, and an author of the Pentagon history. He returned from Vietnam opposed to the war effort—at first not because it was wrong or immoral but because of its dishonesty, corruption, and futility. For two years he crusaded in the corridors of power, lobbying high officials like McNamara and Walt Rostow and advising presidential candidates in 1968, especially Robert Kennedy. Nothing seemed to work.
Gradually Ellsberg fell in with people who had been remote from his world—a nonviolent activist from India who said that “for me, the concept of enemy doesn’t exist”; war resisters who defied the popular image of them as “guilt-ridden, fanatic extremists”; a Quaker activist, about to be locked up for refusing induction; and Kehler, who said he looked forward to joining David Harris and other friends in jail and had no remorse or fear, because he knew, he told a war resisters’ conference, that “lots of people around the world like you will carry on.” Later Ellsberg thought: these were “our best, our very best, and we’re sending them to prison, more important, we’re in a world where they feel they just had to go to prison.”
It was Kehler who provided the spark. Now Ellsberg knew that he would have to join the war resisters even if it meant jail. With the help of his children he xeroxed his top-secret volumes of the Pentagon report, and after fruitless efforts to involve prominent Senate doves, he turned the history over to The New York Times. When the Pentagon Papers appeared a month later the Justice Department won injunctions against further publication in the Times and the Post, a “prior restraint” on press freedom that was overturned by the Supreme Court.
With his mind on reelection in 1972, Nixon saw the Pentagon Papers flap as an opportunity to create another Alger Hiss, who had served his earlier ambitions so well. By painting Ellsberg as the symbol of the extreme left, the Administration could tar with the same brush both the New Left and antiwar Democrats. As a political functionary named Charles Colson reported to the White House, moreover, the Pentagon Papers were “a tailor-made issue for causing deep and lasting divisions within the Democratic-ranks.” The Democratic party hardly needed GOP help on divisiveness. Already carrying their heritage of disunity, they were busy seeking to recruit blacks, students, war resisters, and women, all of whom had plenty of divisions of their own.
When they’d finally all arrived they were, they sang, half a million strong—probably an exaggeration by a hundred thousand or so, but the Woodstock festival appeared so grandiose, in scope of music, attendance, media coverage, and social significance, that hyperbole seemed the only way to communicate its bigness. Attendance reached twice the anticipated 50,000 per day before dusk the first evening—and the organizers were forced to declare the concert free to all who had made the trek that August 1969 weekend to Max Yasgur’s farm in upstate New York. A participant called it “three days of mud, drugs, and music.” And how it rained, defiantly, on the greatest assemblage of rock ’n’ roll and folk talent of the decade: Richie Havens; Joan Baez; Arlo Guthrie; Joe Cocker; Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young; Santana; the Jefferson Airplane; Sly and the Family Stone; Jimi Hendrix; and the Who.
For three days music blasted from the amplifiers scattered around the eighty acres of natural bowl. But the music was secondary. Though Woodstock came “as a logical consequence of all the be-ins, love-ins, pop festivals, and tribal convocations that preceded it,” wrote Bruce Cook, it was more than all of these, giving “to an entire generation not so much a sense of who they are, but (much more important) who they would like to be.… The first Eucharistic Congress of a new rock religion.” And Life wrote: “Woodstock was less a music festival than a total experience, a phenomenon, a happening, high adventure, a near disaster and, in a small way, a struggle for survival.”
The roots of rock ’n’ roll—so named by a white Cleveland disc jockey who wanted to avoid the racial stigma carried by rhythm and blues—lie embedded in the early years of blues and country music. Before the 1950s whites had recorded “white music” while blacks recorded “black,” and though their listeners crossed color lines, musically and thematically country and rhythm and blues remained equal but separate.
In the mid-1950s, when white groups began recording black songs, rhythm and blues gained hold and rock took off. “To make R &B acceptable,” wrote composer and performer Frank Zappa, “the big shots of the record industry hired a bunch of little men with cigars and green visors, to synthesize and imitate the work of the Negroes. The visor men cranked out phony white rock.” But whatever the commercially imposed limitations of the music, it was an infusion of energy into popular culture. Rock ’n’ roll fans drove the new songs to the top of the charts. Opposition from the black artists whose works were being pilfered, from a Congress responding to industry pressure, and from the AM radio stations who recognized the exploitation for what it was, were all insufficient to halt the infestation of “phony white rock.”
The music called “black” had faced all the usual objections from the conventional, but rock ’n’ roll encountered a new and unique brand of opposition. Many adults found rock loud, often incomprehensible, and intolerably sexual. “If we cannot stem the tide of rock ’n’ roll,” warned a Columbia University professor, “with its waves of rhythmic narcosis and of future waves of vicarious craze, we are preparing our own downfall in the midst of pandemic funeral dances.” Boston Catholic leaders demanded the banning of rock. The San Antonio city council banished it from municipal swimming pool jukeboxes because it “attracted undesirable elements given to practicing their spastic gyrations in abbreviated bathing suits.” Parents shuddered at such insinuating lyrics as “I need it / When the moon is bright / I need it / When you hold me tight / I need it / In the middle of the night” and their blood curdled when Little Richard yowled, “Wop-bop-a-loo-bop / A-wop-bam-boom!”
But that was part of the idea—the more adults deplored rock, the more it meant to the young. Rock burst in on a generation that, Nik Cohn noted, felt it had no music of its own, no clothes or clubs, no tribal identity. “Everything had to be shared with adults.” The music began to generate its own social significance, at first vaguely and immaturely, but nevertheless giving a “divided people a sense that they may have something in common.”
“The culturally alienated went in for cool jazz, and folk music was the vehicle for the politically active minority,” wrote Jeff Greenfield. Folk had its origins in depression-era, vagabond protest music, but it was only infrequently available on commercial releases, and usually heard by the already converted until the voices and vibrancy of Joan Baez; the Kingston Trio; Peter, Paul and Mary; Phil Ochs; Pete Seeger; and, above all, Bob Dylan introduced a larger, if still selective, audience to the true music of protest and disaffection.
Dylan was “discovered” in a Greenwich Village club in 1961, where, upon entering, he had been asked for proof of age. His roots were middle-class, middle-American, but his voice was coarse, his music was of the road, his style was that of “the hungry, restless, freedom-loving friend and comrade of the oppressed.” He rambled into New York from Minnesota with dreams of emulating Woody Guthrie—“the greatest holiest godliest one in the world.” After his “discovery” he made his first album, playing alone with a harmonica and an acoustic guitar. The record cost Columbia Records just $402 to produce.
Dylan was not the popularizer of his greatest hit, “Blowing in the Wind.” He performed the song on tour and the mimeographed magazine Broadside published the lyrics, but not until the popular folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary heard and recorded it did it sell a million copies.
How many roads must a man walk down
before you call him a man?
How many seas must a white dove sail
before she sleeps in the sand?
How many times must the cannonballs fly
before they’re forever banned?
The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind,
the answer is blowing in the wind.
That recording single-handedly “established topical song as the most important development of the folk revival,” and Dylan as its premier artist.
Though he was never to dominate the music industry as the Beatles would, Dylan earned a commitment from his fans perhaps even deeper than the loyalty the Beatles enjoyed. Yet his followers’ expectations of him as the “musical great white hope of the Left” proved a burden. When, on the last night of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan stepped onto the stage carrying an electric guitar and launched into a rocking version of “Maggie’s Farm,” the audience for a moment sat in stunned silence, then heckled him off the stage with shrill cries of “Play folk music! … Sell out! … This is a folk festival!”
If Dylan’s folk fans felt betrayed by his electrification, he saw it as evolution and synthesis. Village Voice critic Jack Newfield commented, “If Whitman were alive today, he too would be playing an electric guitar.” Dylan had succeeded in bringing the feeling of folk—modern, protest folk—to the masses of rock. Proof of his success came in one month of 1965, when no fewer than forty-eight Dylan originals were recorded and released to a rapturous public.
They were four scruffy lads from the run-down port city of Liverpool playing seedy clubs in Britain and Germany until a shrewd manager repackaged them as waggish, cuddly moptops. The Beatles’ first success was sudden and phenomenal. In the annus mirabilis of 1963, their music became “one of the most persistent noises heard over England since the air-raid sirens were dismantled.” They sold more than two and a half million records that year, performed for royalty on the same bill with Maurice Chevalier and Marlene Dietrich, and needed squads of bobbies to protect them from screeching, scratching, fainting Beatlemaniacs.
The Beatles commenced their personal conquest of the United States when, on February 7, 1964, ten thousand teenagers gave them a hysterical welcome at Kennedy Airport in New York. Airport officials were incredulous—they had seen nothing like it, “not even for kings and queens!” 73 million people watched the Beatles perform on Ed Sullivan’s television show. They played at Carnegie Hall in New York, and one fifteen-year-old fan from New Hampshire who was there with 6,000 others described the essential Beatlemaniacal delusion: “You really do believe they can see you, just you alone, when they’re up on the stage. That’s why you scream, so they’ll notice you. I always felt John could see me. It was like a dream. Just me and John together and no one else.”
With such albums as Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles, and Abbey Road, the Beatles revolutionized rock and opened it to new possibilities. They spearheaded a British invasion that, as Ellen Willis noted, proved “that the mainstream of mass culture could produce folk music—that is, antiestablishment music.” Most antiestablishment and jolting to American sensibilities were Mick Jagger’s Rolling Stones, with their “twentieth century working-class songs.” As Jerry Hopkins put it, the “Beatles asked teenaged American females for their hands; the Stones asked for their pants.” Their music harked back to rock’s gritty, jarring, erotic origins in the blues, and in appearance the Stones cultivated ugliness and overt sexuality. They exuded contempt—and earned millions.
Groups inspired by the Beatles, such as the Beach Boys, and duos, such as Simon and Garfunkel, carried a sound even President Reagan would, years later, admit appreciating. But still newer sounds—more moody, less accessible, more personal—emerged from San Francisco bands, and they shifted the center of avant-garde rock from Britain to California.
Late in 1965 two benefit concerts were held in San Francisco, the first featuring the music of the Jefferson Airplane, with Allen Ginsberg leading three thousand in the chanting of mantras, and the second in the Fillmore Auditorium with the Grateful Dead. On the heels of these successes and at the urging of author Ken Kesey, came the seminal San Francisco “Trips Festival,” “a three-day mixed-media attempt to recreate an LSD experience without the LSD.” The Festival marked the beginning of the Haighl-Ashbury era with its psychedelia, mind-bending drugs, sandalwood, body painting, tribal Love-Ins and Human Be-ins.
San Francisco also produced Janis Joplin’s Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Country Joe and the Fish (originally called Country Mao and the Fish, after a saying of the Chairman’s, “Every fish in the sea is a potential convert”). The Dead challenged their audiences to fly on LSD, Joplin seduced hers, and Country Joe sang “ 1-2-3 What are we fightin’ for / Don’t ask me—I don’t give a damn / Next stop is Vietnam / And it’s 5-6-7 / Open up the pearly gates / Well, there ain’t no time to wonder why / Whoopee! / We’re all gonna die.”
Country Joe sang his “Fixin’ to Die Rag” at Woodstock, but that “first Eucharistic Congress” illustrated the tensions between the rock and counterculture and the New Left and antiwar movement. “Rock and Roll, Rock culture, hip, pop, and youth culture,” wrote radical Tom Smucker, “all spring out of middle-class reality, and spring out of capitalism, and all spring out of affluence.” While rock took overtly political forms and served up songs of social significance, typically it described freedom as the road to individual happiness, to personal self-fulfillment—a road that often had the contours of hedonism. Asked what was her “philosophy of life,” Janis Joplin replied, “Getting stoned, staying happy, and having a good time.” The point of drug use, wrote Todd Gitlin, was “to open a new space, an inner space, so that we could space out, live for the sheer exultant point of living.” Though the counterculture assumed that its hedonism was intrinsically anticapitalist, it reflected the established culture’s materialism, with, as William L. O’Neill noted, motorcycles, stereos, and electric guitars taking the place of big cars and ranch houses. Entrepreneurs trafficked in countercultural commodities, pushing strobe lights, Nehru jackets, surplus army clothes, incense, beads and bangles, posters, drugs, and, of course, records. By 1968 records were selling at a rate of nearly a billion dollars a year, and Forbes was counseling “Dad” not to dismiss rock as noise: “Try to dig it … it’s the sound of money.”
The counterculture’s political vision was of a Utopia from which politics was excluded, a pastoral Arcadia whose currency was amour. “All you need is love,” sang the Beatles. “Love is all you need.” The Jefferson Airplane urged, “Hey people now / Smile on your brother / Let me see you get together / Love one another right now.” SUPERZAP THEM ALL WITH THE LOVE, exhorted a sign in a Los Angeles commune. The counterculture was out to save America with a “cultural and spiritual revolution which the young themselves will lead,” but its approach to political action was antipolitical: the young were not to engage the established society but to disengage themselves from it, to drop out, to do their own thing. Social change was to be the outcome of individual self-realization. “We want the world and we want it now!” Jim Morrison snarled, but his vehicle of revolution was what he called “sexual politics.” At a Doors concert, he said, “The sex starts with me, then moves out to include the charmed circle of musicians on stage,” and then the audience. The audience went home, interacted “with the rest of reality, then I get it all back by interacting with that reality, so the whole sex thing works out to be one big ball of fire.” “The idea of leadership is a false god,” said Beatle John Lennon. “Following is not what it’s all about, but leaving messages of ‘This is what’s happening to us. Hey, what’s happening to you?’” The Vietnam war was over, he sang, when you wanted it to be.
This was a sea, Andrew Kopkind noted, in which political radicals found it difficult to swim. Though much of the New Left was “hippyized”— borrowing clothes, long hair, language, sexual and drug practices from the rock culture—that culture, in radical eyes, had evolved too little from its origins as an immature teen rebellion against “adults.” Gitlin, an SDS leader, worried that love should feel ashamed “when it was founded on privilege.”
Tom Smucker of the Movement for a Democratic Society wondered whether it was politically correct even to participate at Woodstock. When he heard that Abbie Hoffman had wrested from the weekend’s promoters space for a “Movement City,” he decided to go as a “test to see if the Movement could relate to something hip.” But how best to approach the hippies? Various suggestions were made, including: “Point out to people that what they were doing isn’t real. Bread and Circuses, Co-optation, The Plastic Straitjacket, that it was happening under Capitalism and therefore phony.” The MDS set up its booth in Movement City with a small printing press and heaps of literature. But in the City they were far from the center of action—where the “plain old campers” were—and soon they themselves abandoned the booth. “Leaflets blowing through a field, a printing press in the rain that was never used” were the “symbol of all our political activity.” Radicals failed to understand, he concluded, that Woodstock was not a political event but “another Rock and Roll adventure,” another example of “how you survive in affluent middle-class adolescence, and beyond. You take the good things, which are lying here or there, and turn them into something you can dig or turn yourself into someone who can dig them. You ignore the rest.
“We didn’t build the city, that’s for sure.”
Perhaps better even than Woodstock, an earlier incident at a Berkeley student strike illustrated the decade’s troubled connection between music and politics. To the audience an organizer shouted, “Let’s sing ‘Solidarity Forever.’” But no one seemed to know the words of that epic anthem of working-class revolt and there was an uncomfortable silence, until someone in the back started harmonizing the words of the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine.” These innocuous if familiar lyrics were immediately and enthusiastically taken up by the thousands assembled.