CHAPTER 37

BACKLASH

SHORTLY AFTER THESIXDAYWAR, THEKREMLIN ANnounced that Premier Kosygin would travel to New York to address the United Nations. Friends and foes alike urged the president to meet with his Russian counterpart. Despite their vast differences over Vietnam, Lippmann, Fulbright, and Johnson were in fundamental agreement about the need for détente with the Soviet Union.¹They felt it important to stand up against the kind of mindless anticommunism that had produced McCarthyism and the ultra movement of the early 1960s.

At the time, the Johnson administration was actively pursuing a Soviet-American agreement on the issues of nuclear nonproliferation and strategic weapons limitations. At lunch at his house in April with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, McNamara assured the Russian that the administration had no intention of proceeding with an antiballistic missile system. This would only upset the balance of power, causing the Soviet Union to expand its offensive capability. Both nations would suffer financially and wind up being less secure. America could be safe only “if it were assured of having a force so strong as to be able to absorb a surprise attack and survive with sufficient power to inflict unacceptable damage on the nations of the [Warsaw] Pact. We believe the Soviets’ requirement for a deterrent is the same as ours. We believe they have that deterrent today.” Why not agree to a freeze on the development of new systems and focus on preventing the spread of nuclear weapons into the hands of third parties?²

Then there was the conflict in Southeast Asia. From Moscow, Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson advised that Kosygin spoke for the advocates of détente within the Politburo and that there was still a good chance he would be willing to act as intermediary with the North Vietnamese to effect a mutual de-escalation. LBJ could not be perceived to be less enthusiastic for peace than Kosygin. A summit would perhaps take some of the air out of the anti-Vietnam war movement.

Some initial sparring occurred over location. LBJ could not be perceived to be coming to the Russians; besides, Manhattan was likely to be packed with antiwar demonstrators. If, on the other hand, Kosygin came to Washington, the world headquarters of the capitalists-imperialists, the Red Chinese would make a laughingstock of him. In the end, the State Department and Soviet Foreign Ministry settled on the campus of Glassboro State College in Glassboro, New Jersey, approximately halfway between Washington and New York and much less accessible to antiwar protestors.³

Johnson and Kosygin met on Saturday, June 23, and then again on Sunday morning. LBJ and his party arrived first by helicopter at the baseball field. An hour later, the Russians made their entry by motorcade. Hollybush, the home of Glassboro State President and Mrs. Thomas Robinson, had been selected to house the conference. When Kosygin arrived, Johnson came out on the porch to meet him. The two exchanged pleasantries and posed for photographs before shaking hands and entering. They met with interpreters only, LBJ seated in a padded rocker and Kosygin in an easy chair drawn up alongside. Each scribbled notes as they talked.⁴The conversations, civil but frank, roamed across the Middle East, Vietnam, and arms control. Johnson observed that the two powers should act the role of “older brothers” to the inhabitants of the Middle East. Kosygin noted that Moscow had been successful in restraining the Arabs, but the United States had failed with the Israelis. There could be no peace in the area unless and until Israel agreed to give up the lands it had conquered. If there were no compromise, there would surely be war, Kosygin asserted, or, as he put it, “They would be sure to resume the fight sooner or later. If they had weapons, they would use them. If they did not have them, they would fight with their bare hands or buy weapons and surely someone would be found to sell them these weapons.” At this point, LBJ leaned forward and said very quietly, very slowly, “Let us understand one another. I hope there will be no war. If there is a war, I hope it will not be a big war. If they fight, I hope they fight with fists and not with guns. I hope you and we will keep out of this matter because if we do get into it, it will be a ‘most serious’ matter.”⁵

In a gracious toast to Kosygin at lunch, LBJ declared, “We both have special responsibilities for the security of our families, and over and beyond all our families is the security of the entire human family inhabiting this earth. We must never forget that there are many peoples in this world, many different nations each with its own history and ambitions.” Because of Russia’s and America’s strength and resources, “relations between our two countries [must] be as reasonable and as constructive as we know how to make them.”⁶Following the meal, the two leaders discussed arms control but were not able to get beyond generalities.

On Vietnam, Johnson showed some interest when Kosygin remarked that if the United States halted the bombing of the North, peace talks could begin at once. Kosygin went on to say that Vietnam was spoiling relations between the two nations, allowing China “a chance to raise its head with consequent great danger for the peace of the entire world.”⁷At the close of the summit, Kosygin and his party got in their cars and began to drive away, but stopped when a knot of onlookers began cheering. They set up a chant: “We want Kosygin!” The Soviet leader got out, stood atop a small embankment, and spoke briefly. “I want friendship with the American people,” he said. “I can assure you we want nothing but peace with the American people.”⁸

Later, in an interview with Bob Thompson of Hearst Newspapers, Johnson remarked, “He came over here to try to get some of the polecat smell off of him. His policies in the Middle East have been a flop and a failure.” The Soviets seemed terribly worried about China, he remarked.⁹One thing was certain: the Soviet Union’s failure in the Middle East would make it less willing to act the honest broker in Southeast Asia. Beijing was actually making a bid to wean Syria away from the Soviet orbit. The wars of national liberation desperately needed a winner, and North Vietnam looked like the best bet as the summer of 1967 gave way to fall. Johnson was right. “The Russians have given up any attempt to try to influence Hanoi,” Rusk reported to the president the first week in October.¹⁰

 

SHORTLY BEFORELBJHAD DEPARTED for Glassboro on June 21, he had been awakened by a telephone call from Austin. Luci had given birth to her first child, a son, Patrick Lyndon. “A boy,” said the president, pleased. “That’s fine.” Lynda was then in the last stages of her relationship with George Hamilton. Shortly thereafter, she went on a trip to London without him and then began dating Charles Robb, a marine corps captain who had commanded the White House Color Guard. Less than a month later, on August 10, she burst into her parents’ bedroom and informed them that she and Charles intended to get married. The match, despite the suddenness of the courtship, seemed to please both Lyndon and Lady Bird. Robb, a 1961 graduate of Wisconsin and two years later of the University of Virginia Law School, seemed the all-American boy.¹¹

 

THERE HAD ALWAYS BEEN A COMPLICATEDbut crucial connection between the civil rights movement in the United States and the war in Vietnam. The moral imperative that Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, and others had invoked to persuade white, middle-class America to support the drive for racial equality had reinforced and been reinforced by the liberal internationalist notion that the United States had an obligation to help the nonwhite peoples of the third world resist communist domination. Johnson’s talk of internationalizing the Great Society and of transforming the Mekong Delta into another TVA had woven the connecting fabric tighter and tighter. But as the Black Power advocates co-opted the civil rights movement and intimidated white liberals, and as a new wave of urban rioting swept the nation’s cities, a white backlash had erupted that threatened not only the Great Society and the Second Reconstruction, but the war in Vietnam as well. Liberals who surrendered to the New Left and who joined with Tom Hayden and Stokely Carmichael in indicting American institutions and political processes played their part in eroding the Vietnam consensus, but it was the growing doubts among the average American that the Judeo-Christian ethic could or should be applied to social problems at home and abroad that did the real damage.

Harry McPherson persuaded LBJ to take advantage of Lincoln’s birthday anniversary on February 12 to speak out on race, to affirm the administration’s continuing commitment to equal opportunity and equality under the law both at home and abroad.¹²Standing before the majestic Lincoln Memorial, LBJ gestured to the statue designed by Daniel Chester French and called the crowd’s attention to an aura “of brooding compassion, of love for humanity; a love which was, if anything, strengthened and deepened by the agony that drove lesser men to the protective shelter of callous indifference.” Speaking for himself as well as the Great Emancipator, LBJ said, “Lincoln did not come to the Presidency with any set of full-blown theories, but rather with a mystical dedication to this Union—and an unyielding determination to always preserve the integrity of the Republic.” Then the link between civil rights and internationalism: “Today, racial suspicions, racial hatreds and racial violence plague men in almost every part of the earth … The true liberators of mankind have always been those who showed men another way to live—than by hating their brothers.”¹³

What Johnson and McPherson were trying to do, of course, was to persuade black Americans to acknowledge a positive connection between the Second Reconstruction and the war in Vietnam: both were struggles for self-determination, campaigns to spread the blessings of freedom and democracy to nonwhite peoples. Instead, the Black Power movement, the SDS, SNCC, and the leadership of the SCLC, including Martin Luther King, were joining hands to portray the war in Southeast Asia as just another attempt by the white power structure in the United States to exploit and oppress colored people everywhere. There was a link, but black soldiers ought to be fighting with the Vietcong against American imperialism rather than with the Armed Forces of the United States. Only the most radical went that far, of course, but increasingly black revolutionaries like Floyd McKissick and New Left leaders like Tom Hayden were joining with evangelical civil rights activists like King in calling for an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam in order to free up funds for the antipoverty program and other aspects of the Great Society.

The SDS and SNCC had begun collaborating as early as 1966, but King did not emerge as a prominent antiwar figure until February 26, 1967, when in Los Angeles he called on the country’s “creative dissenters” to “combine the fervor for the civil rights movement with the peace movement … until the very foundations of our nation are shaken.”¹⁴A month later, he and Dr. Benjamin Spock, a prominent pediatrician and anti-war leader, led a Holy Saturday procession of eighty-five hundred people down State Street to the Chicago Coliseum. But his most memorable antiwar statement came at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4. The nation’s soul was once again in peril, King proclaimed. The war in Vietnam was “a symptom of a far deeper malady” that throughout history had prompted the United States to oppose revolutions in behalf of social justice and self-determination by the nonwhite peoples of the third world.¹⁵King’s public prominence, his receipt of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, and his organizational connections made him an immediate focal point of the antiwar movement, but it was his stature as a spiritual leader that would be most telling. The Judeo-Christian ethic he had wielded so effectively to mobilize the black masses and shame the white middle class would now be enlisted in the aid of the anti?Vietnam War crusade.

Actually, King’s position on the war was moderate: bombing halt, cease-fire, negotiations, and implementation of the 1954 Geneva Accords. But the White House, recognizing the significance of his rhetoric, came to see him as “the crown prince of the Vietniks,” as Harry McPherson put it. LBJ and his advisers believed that by blaming the war in Vietnam for society’s ills, King was undercutting their efforts to bring the Second Reconstruction to fruition. Conservatives were aching for a justification to starve the Great Society of funds. While the administration argued for guns and butter, leaders of the conservative coalition could cite the “dubious loyalty” of figures like King to block further appropriations.¹⁶

Not surprisingly, the administration did everything in its power to mobilize and highlight black supporters of the war. And there were supporters, although most were unenthusiastic. A. Philip Randolph, Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, and even James Farmer had varying reservations about the conflict in Southeast Asia. They worried that it would divert attention and funding away from antipoverty and other programs vital to African Americans, but they kept these sentiments to themselves. “I felt that the civil rights movement should not get involved in this,” Farmer later recalled. “I felt it would simply confuse the issue.”¹⁷Wilkins and Young recognized the idealism, misguided though it may have been, that was responsible for America’s decision to go to war. The White House encouraged Young to make a trip to Vietnam and applauded when he subsequently reported to the Saigon press corps that black soldiers seemed to be faring no better or worse than their white counterparts, that they generally supported the war, and that, for the most part, they saw service in the military as a way to get ahead in the world.¹⁸The Board of the NAACP voted on April 10, 1967, that any attempt to merge the civil rights and peace movements would be “a serious tactical mistake.”¹⁹At the prompting of the White House, General Hershey and the Selective Service Board made a concerted effort to get blacks on local draft and appeal boards in the South. In response, between December 1966 and June 1967, the number of blacks on local boards increased from 267 to 413, including Florida with five and Louisiana with eight. The White House ordered a study to determine if African Americans were fighting and dying in Vietnam in a higher proportion than their percentage of the general service population. (The study found that blacks were serving in disproportionately high numbers in combat, but those in combat were dying at the same rate as whites.)²⁰

Ironically, LBJ’s staying the course in Vietnam won him scant credit with the ultranationalist white South. While most whites approved of the war, they continued to disapprove of him. A September 1966 poll in Louisiana showed the president’s job rating at 31 percent favorable and 69 percent unfavorable. When divided by race, the numbers stood at 16 percent to 84 percent among whites and 94 percent to 6 percent among blacks.²¹As hawkish South Carolina Congressman Mendell Rivers told White House aide Henry Wilson, his constituents loved the bombing but hated the federal registrars.²²

 

JOHNSON DID NOT BELIEVE IN TOKENS,but he believed in symbols. Early in his administration he had brought Clifford Alexander, a black Harvard graduate, into the White House to advise him on appointments. Alexander, who knew nearly everybody in the black elite and who would eventually head the Equal Opportunity Commission, was a fanatic on the appointment of African Americans to mid- and high-level federal positions. He tattled on recalcitrant agencies and put forward a steady stream of black talent for the president’s perusal. He had been relentless in pushing Bob Weaver for HUD, and he badgered LBJ about appointing a black to the U.S. Supreme Court. The logical candidate was Thurgood Marshall, the pioneering NAACP lawyer whom Kennedy had appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals.

In July 1965, LBJ had nominated Marshall to be solicitor general. When the first vacancy on the Court came up, Johnson felt duty-bound to offer it to Abe Fortas. But he was as enthusiastic as Alexander about having a black on the Supreme Court. He wanted “every little Negro boy in the country,” he told a journalist, to wake up knowing that he had as much chance to occupy a cabinet position or sit on the Supreme Court as anyone else. There were other reasons. The threatened takeover of the civil rights movement by Black Power advocates and the promise of more urban rioting was cutting the moral ground out from beneath the Second Reconstruction. Its other pillar, the law, was also being threatened and needed affirmation. Marshall was perfect. The fifty-eight-year-old African American was a seasoned jurist with a stellar record as an attorney and a judge. Johnson found it gratifying that he had risen from humble origins, although, given the range of black experience, being the son of a Pullman car steward and kindergarten teacher could hardly be called humble. “This is a man who understands people, understands what they’re about,” he would tell Clifford Alexander. What he meant, Alexander later mused, was that “he’s like me.”²³

Marshall had grown up in racially segregated Baltimore. He confronted segregation with dignity and determination. Denied admission to the University of Maryland Law School, he graduated first in his class from Howard in 1933. As a disciple of pioneering civil rights lawyer Charles H. Houston and later director of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, Marshall stood for a philosophy of activism within the system, for using constitutional guarantees and the legal process to redress grievances. Among segregationists, no laborer in the vineyard of civil rights other than King was more hated. During Marshall’s confirmation hearings for the Court of Appeals, Jim Eastland had stalled for nearly a year, finally telling JFK that he would “give him the nigger” if Kennedy would nominate the racist Mississippi judge, Harold Costo, to a district court seat.²⁴

First, however, there had to be an open seat. In February, LBJ had maneuvered to have Tom Clark retire from the high court to make way for his son, Ramsey’s, appointment as attorney general. Joe Califano recalled that during one of the early morning staff meetings in the president’s bedroom, LBJ mentioned that Clark would be officially stepping down on June 13 and asked for suggestions for a replacement. They bandied about some names, and then LBJ said he was thinking of appointing a woman. Lady Bird encouraged him. You have already done so much for blacks; why not choose a woman, she said. Several were mentioned, including Shirley Huffstedler, then a judge in California. But more than likely Johnson had long ago settled on Marshall. (He would later appoint Huffstedler to the Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.) A couple of weeks later, Johnson was talking with Connally aide Larry Temple, who would soon join the White House staff. He was thinking about the Supreme Court vacancy and was considering a Negro, the president said. Any suggestions? Temple mentioned Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, a Johnson appointee to the Federal District Court for Eastern Pennsylvania. Temple recalled that LBJ leaned forward, fixing him with his unforgettable gaze. “Larry,” he said, “the only two people who ever heard of Judge Higginbotham are you and his momma. When I appoint a nigger to the bench, I want everyone to know he’s a nigger.”²⁵

Typically, before announcing the appointment, the president tried to put doubt in everyone’s mind. Marshall “wasn’t worth a damn as an administrator,” LBJ told Louis Martin, a prominent black newspaper publisher and Johnson’s emissary to the black press.²⁶But nominate Marshall he did. There was the predictable southern opposition from Ervin, Russell, and particularly John McClellan. Tellingly, however, they did not oppose him on racial grounds or even on qualification, but rather on philosophy. He was too much of an activist, too likely to be easy on the criminal element. Marshall was confirmed on August 30 by a vote of sixty-nine to eleven.²⁷

 

JOHNSON,MCPHERSON,CALIFANO,and Ramsey Clark, who had been serving as acting attorney general, were anticipating another summer of unrest in the nation’s inner cities. During late 1966 and early 1967, they had continued to struggle with causes and remedies. Moynihan’s focus on the dysfunctional black family seemed logical, but what to do about it, especially in the long run? To make matters worse, the Moynihan report was being denounced daily by Black Power spokesmen as just another racial slur.²⁸More parks, more summer camps, more job training, more subsidized housing, and better educational opportunities were needed.²⁹

On February 15, LBJ delivered a special message to Congress on equal justice. He called on lawmakers to enact a fair housing law, provide specific punishments for those interfering with existing federal rights, approve a measure that outlawed discrimination in jury selection, and extend the lives of both the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.³⁰LBJ was most specific about fair housing. Under his plan, a flat ban on discrimination would go into effect for large apartment houses and real estate developments in 1968 and for all housing in 1969. “I am proposing fair-housing legislation again this year,” he said, “because it is decent and right.” And there was an effort to mobilize sentiment, if not for the war in Vietnam, for the soldiers fighting there in behalf of civil rights. “The bullets of our enemies do not discriminate between Negro marines and white marines.” And he recalled the promise of the Howard speech. “Freedom,” he declared, “is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, do as you desire.”³¹for those interfering with existing federal rights, approve a measure that outlawed discrimination in jury selection, and extend the lives of both the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.³⁰LBJ was most specific about fair housing. Under his plan, a flat ban on discrimination would go into effect for large apartment houses and real estate developments in 1968 and for all housing in 1969. “I am proposing fair-housing legislation again this year,” he said, “because it is decent and right.” And there was an effort to mobilize sentiment, if not for the war in Vietnam, for the soldiers fighting there in behalf of civil rights. “The bullets of our enemies do not discriminate between Negro marines and white marines.” And he recalled the promise of the Howard speech. “Freedom,” he declared, “is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, do as you desire.”³¹

Marshall’s nomination and Johnson’s message to Congress may have swelled the hearts of the vast majority of African Americans, but it did not do a thing for urban ghetto dwellers confronted with a landscape of unremitting hopelessness. Moreover, unlike their rural brethren, they were in a position to vent their anger. The second week in July, violence erupted in Newark, New Jersey, when police arrested a black cab driver on traffic charges and scuffled with him outside a station house. A glowering crowd from an adjacent housing project gathered, shouted insults, then rocks and bricks from the knot of angry blacks and finally a Molotov cocktail were hurled at police. Ghetto dwellers by the hundreds poured out onto the street, setting fires and looting. Police and firefighters who responded to calls were stoned and eventually fired on by snipers. Rioters dragged passing whites out of their cars, mauled a Good Humor ice cream vendor, and overturned and set fire to his truck. “We’re getting bombed out here,” one cop radioed. “What should we do?” “Leave,” said his dispatcher. Six days of rioting took twenty-six lives, injured fifteen hundred, and left much of the inner city a burned-out shell.³²State and local police responded with a vengeance.

LBJ wanted to avoid a federal presence in Newark. Whatever the administration did, conservatives who would say it wasn’t doing enough and liberals who were saying it was doing too much would whipsaw U.S. marshals and troops. As luck would have it, New Jersey Democratic Governor Richard Hughes was one of Johnson’s strongest supporters. The president offered aid, but to his great relief, Hughes replied that state and local authorities could handle matters. On Saturday afternoon, July 15, UPI reported that Vice President Humphrey had called the governor and offered “federal aid.” Johnson was furious. He ordered Califano to rein in the vice president: “He has no authority, spell it out, N-O-N-E, to provide any federal aid to Newark or any other city, town or county in America.”³³Humphrey subsequently denied to Califano that he had made any such promise, but LBJ remained unconvinced. In truth, Johnson was taking his anger at white liberals out on Humphrey. All the while, Congress was whittling away at his Great Society programs, Kennedy, Ribicoff, and Clark were blasting the administration for abandoning the nation’s cities.

Congress found itself in the grip of a Newark backlash almost immediately. In a special message to the House and Senate earlier in the year on urban and rural poverty, LBJ had proposed the Rat Extermination Act to provide federal funding to control and exterminate the millions of rats that bred in collapsed buildings and bit terrified children. The measure had breezed through the Senate, and the administration expected quick passage in the House. But three days after Newark, a coalition of southern Democrats and Republicans by a vote of 207 to 176 blocked the measure. They derided it as a “civil rats” bill and suggested that the president allocate funds to hire an army of cats.³⁴Johnson was appropriately appalled. He issued a scathing statement the afternoon of the defeat, calling the House action a “cruel blow to the poor children of America … We are spending Federal funds to protect our livestock from rodents and predatory animals. The least we can do is give our children the same protection we give our livestock.”³⁵Following a massive lobbying effort by the White House, the House reversed itself and added a rat extermination provision to the Partnership for Health Act, which the president signed on December 4, 1967.³⁶

At 4A.M. on Sunday, July 26, Detroit police staged a raid on a “blind pig,” an after-hours drinking club on the city’s west side in the heart of the ghetto. As the officers herded some eighty patrons down the stairs of the club, knots of angry blacks gathered in the muggy streets. Soon a crowd had surrounded the police and began hurling rocks and then bricks at them and their cruisers. The besieged officers defended themselves but did nothing to disperse the crowds. Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh had been elected by black votes and had implemented a walk softly approach to police-minority relations. Encouraged by the cops’ passivity, the crowd emptied garbage into the streets and set it afire. Then the looting began. Bricks crashed through shop windows, and roaming gangs set fire to what they did not take. There would be more than fifteen hundred blazes in the days to come. Cavanaugh and Michigan Governor George Romney huddled and decided to call in seventy-three hundred national guardsmen to reinforce the city’s four thousand police. The guardsmen turned out to be, inNewsweek’ s words, “a ragged, jittery, hair-triggered lot, ill-trained in riot control.” Said one young citizen-soldier, “I’m gonna shoot anything that moves and is black.” By midmorning, Detroit was paralyzed. A pall of smoke hung over the entire city as intermittent sniper fire crackled in the air.³⁷

Just before 3A.M. on Monday morning, Romney made the first of a series of calls to Ramsey Clark. Romney, “a Republican with a conscience,” was positioning himself for a run at the 1968 GOP presidential nomination. Attractive, articulate, moderate, he was to LBJ’s mind a more formidable adversary than Richard Nixon. Under the 1795 law that governed the federal government’s response to civil unrest, the president was authorized to send in troops at the “request” of a governor to put down an “insurrection.” In his conversations with Clark, Romney stated that he would probably have to “recommend” that troops be sent in. Each of these conversations was reported to LBJ. Abe Fortas warned that Romney was going to try to draw the administration into the peacekeeping effort in Detroit and then scream federal intervention. From then on, Johnson’s antennae were up. Throughout the morning Clark and Romney sparred.³⁸The governor would have to formally request the troops before they could be sent, Clark said. After Romney agreed, the attorney general insisted that his message to LBJ also use the word “insurrection.” The governor angrily pointed out that insurance companies did not pay for damages caused by insurrections and slammed the phone down. He then told the press that he had requested troops, the president had agreed to send them, but that he had then withdrawn his request out of the conviction that federal forces would be needed to put down disturbances in other U.S. cities. The implication was that the government was losing control of the country. In fact, Congressman Gerald Ford, also of Michigan, had been touting this line, and that very day the Republican Coordinating Committee had issued a statement charging that “widespread rioting and violent civil righters have grown to a national crisis since the present Administration took office.”³⁹

At 10:46 Romney cabled a formal request for federal troops. Meanwhile, Cyrus Vance, whom LBJ had dispatched to the riot scene to represent him, reported that the situation was worsening: more fires, more sniper fire, more shootings by guardsmen. Johnson ordered McNamara to assemble a contingent of troops at Self-ridge Air Force Base some thirty miles from Detroit. To no one in particular, LBJ remarked despondently, “Well, I guess it is just a matter of minutes before federal troops start shooting women and children.”⁴⁰He then told Vance to get on the radio, or loudspeakers, or whatever was available and issue a call for peace and quiet before troops were sent in. There wasn’t time, Hoover interjected: “They have lost all control in Detroit. Harlem will break loose within thirty minutes. They plan to tear it to pieces.”⁴¹Finally, at 11:22, an exhausted Johnson signed the executive order dispatching federal troops to Detroit. Fortas helped draft a statement for him to read over television. The address was a disaster. The seven-minute statement mentioned Romney fourteen times, spelled out to the minute when the president received the governor’s wire and when he responded, and emphasized the “undisputed evidence that Governor Romney of Michigan and the local officials in Detroit have been unable to bring the situation under control.”⁴²CBS President Frank Stanton, a friend of LBJ’s, later observed to Joe Califano that the statement was transparently political and beneath the president at such a time.⁴³

The violence in Detroit continued for three more days. When peace was finally restored, forty people lay dead, another 2,250 were injured. Police had arrested more than four thousand citizens, and property damage was estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars.Newsweek described the scene and summed up the national mood: “Whole streets lay ravaged by looters, while blocks were immolated in flames. Federal troops—the first sent into racial battle outside the South in a quarter century—occupied American streets at bayonet point. Patton tanks—machine guns ablaze—and Huey helicopters patrolled a cityscape of blackened brick chimneys poking out of gutted basements. And suddenly Harlem 1964 and Watts 1965 and Newark only three weeks ago fell back into the shadows of memory. Detroit was the new benchmark, its rubble a monument to the most devastating race riot in U.S. history—and a symbol of a domestic crisis grown graver than any since the Civil War.”⁴⁴

Even before the ashes of Detroit had cooled, the conservative coalition had moved to portray the rioting as part of a well-orchestrated communist conspiracy to rip apart the fabric of American society. Figures on the right from Gerald Ford to Richard Russell, aided and abetted by J. Edgar Hoover, saw an opportunity to simultaneously generate support for the war in Vietnam and cut the ground out from under the Second Reconstruction and the Great Society. The ghetto uprising, Black Power rhetoric, and King’s antiwar speeches were proof positive that the war in Vietnam and the drive for social justice in the United States were not part of the same struggle but antithetical to each other. What African Americans needed was law and order, discipline, not more costly programs. Head Start and the antipoverty program were indirectly subsiding anarchism and riots, and playing into the hands of Hanoi, Moscow, and Beijing.

To the delight of conservatives, in the wake of Newark and Detroit, Stokely Carmichael flew to Castro’s Cuba to address the Organization for Latin American Solidarity. The gathering of Marxists-Leninists from throughout the Western Hemisphere was held in the Hotel Havana Libra, whose three-storey lobby featured an enormous derrick replete with machine guns, automatic rifles, Molotov cocktails, and banners proclaiming the OLAS motto: “The duty of every revolutionary is to make revolution!” Carmichael was appropriately radical. “Yankee imperialism has existed too long,” he declared. “We are ready to destroy it from the inside. We hope you are ready to destroy it from the outside.”⁴⁵His remarks made front-page news in papers across the United States. At the same time, SNCC’s new national chairman, H. Rap Brown, proclaimed that the organization would thereafter celebrate August 18, the anniversary of the 1965 Watts riot, as Independence Day instead of July 4. One GOP congressman declared that by preaching resistance to the draft and the use of violence to achieve the goals of the civil rights movement, Carmichael had violated the treason laws of the United States. He must be arrested and severely punished. If the president did not take action, the nation could and probably would descend into chaos.⁴⁶

For months, Hoover had been deluging LBJ with “proof ” that the riots were communist-inspired and probably communist-run. King’s support for the anti-war movement was further evidence that he was nothing more or less than the dupe of his red handlers, Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levinson. LBJ was tempted to buy into the theory. The Black Power movement, with its apocalyptic anti-administration rhetoric and advocacy of violence in the nation’s inner cities, continued to distress him. How could blacks, for whom he had done so much, be so ungrateful? But if the GOP’s plans to derail domestic reform were to be thwarted, the riots and Black Power movement must be portrayed as an indigenous aberration, the acts of a misguided, but tiny, minority. Besides, the CIA, which was in a much better position than the FBI to judge what role if any was played by Sino-Soviet agents provocateurs, found that there was no connection between the riots and the forces of international communism.⁴⁷

While Kennedy, Ribicoff, and King assailed the administration from the left, accusing it of doing too little, too late on behalf of the nation’s cities and implying that the war in Vietnam was draining away funds from the Great Society programs, Ford, Dirksen, and the Republican Coordinating Committee attacked from the right. The GOP issued a statement, endorsed by former President Eisenhower, flailing LBJ for having “totally failed to recognize the problem” of the American city on the same day its authors appealed to the president to cut back federal spending for the antipoverty program and Model Cities. It insisted that the administration “must accept its national responsibility” for the rioting. It was unclear whether the Republicans regarded Johnson’s $10 billion request for urban areas, a 250 percent increase over seven years, as a plus or a minus. There was no choice, LBJ told his aides and members of the cabinet, but to keep plugging away on behalf of housing, education, jobs, and health.⁴⁸

At Harry McPherson’s suggestion, LBJ met with his informal black cabinet, Randolph, Young, Wilkins, et al. “To the Black Power crowd, these people are Uncle Toms,” McPherson admitted. “[But] I don’t think we should let the Carmichael crowd deter us by their scorn of men like these.”⁴⁹LBJ and his staff found the group discouraged, even despondent, with nothing to offer but the same old remedies. Do not punish the 97 percent of the law-abiding citizens because of the 3 percent who riot. Get more housing; reconsider Young’s Marshall Plan for the ghettoes.⁵⁰They seemed to LBJ to be out of touch with the currents that were then shifting in both the ghettoes and Congress. Columnist Emmet Hughes observed that the “movement” had recently come “to suffer the baleful prominence of two men supremely skilled in the art of alienating—the smirking Adam Clayton Powell and the snarling Stokely Carmichael.”⁵¹

On July 27, LBJ went on national television to appeal for peace and calm. He designated the following Sunday a national day of prayer and announced that he was establishing the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. LBJ wanted a blue ribbon commission whose report would sensitize white America to the plight of ghetto dwellers, and he wanted to head off congressional investigations of the riots that would no doubt assail him from both the right and the left. To this end, he planned to stack it with white liberals and black conservatives. For chair he chose Illinois Governor Otto Kerner, a Democrat, and for vice chair John Lindsay, the Republican governor of New York. Both Roy Wilkins and Republican Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, an African American, were included. In his speech, LBJ condemned the rioters and promised that they would be punished, but he warned, “It would compound the tragedy … if we should settle for order that is imposed by the muzzle of a gun … The only genuine, long-range solution for what has happened lies in an attack—mounted at every level—upon the conditions that breed despair and violence.”⁵²

The president dispatched his aides to St. Louis, New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., and other breeding grounds for urban rioting. Cliff Alexander, Louis Martin, and Harry McPherson went to Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. McPherson’s report was chilling: “It is awful in most parts of Harlem. In one block we saw four separate empty lots … that were piled high with rubbish and filth, and that were no doubt breeding rats by the thousands. Harlem looks like Calcutta: filthy streets, broken doorways (affording no security for those who live there), trash in the halls, condemned buildings where junkies sleep overnight and sometimes start fires that threaten the whole neighborhood.” And Harlem was Shangrila compared with Bed-Sty. In their effort to quell discontent before it erupted into violence, Mayor Lindsay and local black leaders sometimes found themselves forming unusual alliances. “We heard of a conversation between Rap Brown and a man named Bumpy Johnson—allegedly the top Negro in the Mafia rackets,” McPherson told the president. “After Brown spoke, Johnson told him, ‘I agree with a lot of what you said. Except I don’t want any riots. I got to raise $60,000 to buy off some people downtown on a narcotics rap. I can’t do that if there’s a riot. You start a riot and I’ll kill you.’ Brown is said to have left town the next day.”⁵³

Predictably, Detroit and Newark hardened racial stereotyping among many whites. Blacks were lazy, immoral, less intelligent—people who wanted something for nothing. White America had extended its hand, and look what happened. Public opinion polls taken in the wake of the rioting showed that whites believed by 71 percent that the uprisings were organized and by 45 percent that the organizing was done by outside agitators.⁵⁴White blacklash, red-baiters, demagogues, and political opportunists aside, there was a growing feeling among well-intentioned Americans that nothing really could be done about the residents of the third world, whether they lived in inner-city Philadelphia or the rice paddies of South Vietnam. “This kind of world outbreak, the failure to follow law and order and accepted procedures,” Orville Freeman confided to his diary, “might very well lead us to what is the big problem in most of the less developed countries around the world that they simply can’t get together, work together, and cooperate to get anything done.”⁵⁵In the wake of the rioting LBJ’s approval rating fell to an all-time low of 39 percent.⁵⁶

 

BY1967 LBJ had become convinced, very reluctantly, that he could not continue to have guns and butter without a tax increase. He knew how Americans hated taxes; he knew that “higher taxes and federal spending” were the issues that conservatives could always make political hay with, but the budget had soared to $126.7 billion for FY 1967 and was projected to reach $135 billion for FY 1968. The administration had estimated that around $12 billion would be needed for Vietnam; the figure turned out instead to be $21.9 billion. The Johnson budget called for only $1.9 billion more for Great Society programs—just $280 million over FY 1967 for the War on Poverty—but the president refused to abandon other programs he regarded as essential. The Council of Economic Advisers predicted a budget deficit of $10 to $12 billion. Johnson declared that the country could afford—financially, politically, socially—no more than $2 billion. To pay for guns and butter, LBJ asked Congress to consider enacting a 6 percent surcharge (a tax on a tax) on corporate and individual incomes.⁵⁷

For six months, the administration’s surtax proposal lay dead in the water. Members of the conservative coalition did not want to give the administration additional funds because they opposed most aspects of the Great Society program; liberals did not want to give the administration more money because they opposed the war in Vietnam and wanted to make LBJ choose between domestic programs and the conflict in Southeast Asia. The first week in June, LBJ met with his economic advisers; they presented him with devastating news. The projected cost of the war was continuing to increase, as was the cost of Medicare, Social Security, and other domestic programs. The administration was looking at a projected deficit for FY 1968 of from $23 to $28 billion.⁵⁸Several days later, he presided over a cabinet meeting. “The country could not tolerate a deficit of from $25 to $30 billion,” Johnson said. Either there would be new taxes or programs would be cut. Each cabinet officer, each agency head must cultivate every representative and senator they could gain access to. While they were applying a thick coat of butter to the solons, he would be “tailing em up.” He explained that in Texas, when there was a drought or bad weather and the cows became very weak and could not eat and refused to get up, the cowboys would go out and grasp the cow’s tail, twisting it around and around until the animal became so uncomfortable that it got up on its feet and began to eat.⁵⁹

On July 26, LBJ had Wilbur Mills to the White House. Why did the economy need a tax cut in 1964 but now need a tax increase? Mills inquired. Times and conditions were different, Johnson replied. Mills helped draft a new tax request message to Congress, but made it clear that he would not come onboard until there were dramatic cuts in domestic programs.⁶⁰On August 3, the president sent his message to Congress, asking this time not for a 6 percent but for a 10 percent surcharge on personal and corporate income taxes. Congress’s response was to threaten virtually every component of the Great Society program, from education to Medicare to Social Security to rent supplements to public broadcasting. All right, if they want cuts, LBJ responded, we’ll give them cuts. He contemplated telling Congress that if it did not enact a tax increase, he would request the House and Senate to cut all appropriations by 10 percent. “Including defense,” McNamara interjected. “I’d stick it to Mills,” he said, implying that he was leading a congressional charge that would not only undermine existing domestic programs but threaten the war in Vietnam.⁶¹All the while, Johnson continued to lash his cabinet officers, telling them that if they did not lobby the hell out of Congress, he would sacrifice their budgets first. In a spate of interviews with journalists, LBJ laid out the situation and placed the blame at Congress’s door. Wilbur Mills, he told columnist Joe Kraft, was the “chief Blackmailer.”⁶²

In mid-November LBJ held a spirited press conference on the economic situation. He abandoned his podium and teleprompter, instead walking among reporters with lavalier microphone pinned to his lapel, speaking extemporaneously: “One of the great mistakes that the Congress will make is that Mr. Ford and Mr. Mills have taken the position that they cannot have any tax bill now. They will live to rue the day when they made that decision … I know it doesn’t add to your … popularity to say we have to have additional taxes to fight this war abroad and fight the problems in our cities at home. But we can do it with the gross national product we have. Who should do it [if we don’t]?”⁶³

The day following, the British devalued the pound for the first time since 1949 and raised interest rates. To protect the dollar, the Fed, followed by commercial banks, raised the prime lending rate. Johnson attempted to seize the crisis to push his tax bill and to eliminate congressional addons to his budget. But Mills was still not moved. To Johnson’s consternation, the chairman added a freeze on welfare payments for dependent children to the administration’s Social Security bill, an amendment that, if enacted, would keep another 1.3 million Americans from rising above the poverty line. In a last-ditch effort to get the Arkansan to back down, LBJ met with him in the Oval Office. The freeze was unfair, LBJ protested. “Mr. President,” Mills said, “across town from my mother in Arkansas a Negro woman has a baby every year. Every time I go home, my mother complains. That Negro woman’s now got eleven children. My proposal will stop this.” Moreover, he declared, there would be no tax bill until there were more and deeper cuts in domestic programs.⁶⁴