After the second week of the crisis—for that is what it amounted to—Ike and Adams persuaded themselves that the problem would go away. The President told Hagerty to announce meaningfully that “the Governor is back at his desk at White House business.” In other words, Adams was staying.
Then came the Goldfine circus. When the House of Representatives voted August 13 to cite Adams’s friend for contempt, the governor was through. A vast army of editorial writers and cartoonists, led by those who had supported Eisenhower in his two presidential campaigns, was waging an all-out war on him, and as the summer waned it grew more intense. That was the noisiest threat to Adams. It was secondary, however. The heart of the problem was political.
Democratic indignation was almost ritualistic—“I am tired of pious preaching from Sherman Adams,” Adlai Stevenson said—but Republican censure came as a surprise to Eisenhower and Adams. It shouldn’t have. This was an election year. Knowland, fighting a desperate battle for the California governorship, suggested that the President “should carefully weigh as to whether Adams has so hurt his usefulness that it might be harmful.” Arthur Watkins of Utah was more blunt. “In the light of the record as measured by the high standards of ethics set by both the President and Mr. Adams,” he said, “there seems to be no other possible conclusion than that Mr. Adams’ usefulness is seriously impaired, if not completely destroyed.”
The first test at the polls in 1958 came on September 8, when Maine voted. The Democratic slogan there was “Payne of Maine is mainly on the wane.” If that was so, it was important; the results would be regarded as a measure of voter reaction to Goldfinian ethics. The Maine senator had never provided a convincing explanation of how he had acquired the $3,500 from Goldfine six years earlier, and his opponent, forty-four-year-old Governor Edmund S. Muskie, had made that the chief issue. The results made terrible reading in the White House. An incredible 20,000 registered Republicans had stayed home. Not only did Muskie become Maine’s first popularly elected Democratic senator; his plurality was twice as large as he had predicted. The GOP slate had gone down with Payne. The Democrats had captured the statehouse, two of Maine’s three congressional seats, and twelve seats in the state legislature. Senator Margaret Chase Smith said, “We took a shellacking.” Hagerty said, “The President views it as I do. We took a beating,” and Meade Alcorn, Republican national chairman, said that the results should “alert every Republican in the land to the urgency of an all-out effort on November 4.”
Mainly it inspired them to redouble their insistence that Eisenhower dismiss Adams. “As Maine goes, so goes Adams,” the Washington press corps prophesied. Alcorn’s phone rang constantly. Goldwater said he was afraid that “the harm has already been done.” Knowland, lagging now in the opinion polls, declared that Ike’s assistant should resign “immediately,” and New York’s Congressman Kenneth Keating, running for the Senate, added that “the good of the country” required it.
Adams was a marked man, and he knew it. The pressure became intolerable, and he took a few days off for a fishing trip in southeast Canada with Rachel and Jerry and Alice Persons. They were up there in the stark beauty of the Miramichi valley when the boom was lowered upon him.
Nixon had called upon Ike with a painful message from virtually all Republicans running for Congress; Adams, they felt, was a sea anchor dragging them down. The President had promised to reconsider the subject. Then Alcorn reported that the party’s big donors were keeping their checkbooks closed until “the Adams mess” had been cleaned up. The Republican National Committee was meeting in Chicago. Eisenhower asked Alcorn to make one more appraisal of party opinion. When the chairman returned shaken—Richard Simpson of Pennsylvania was threatening to lead a mutiny if Adams stayed another week—the President capitulated. He called it “the most hurtful, the hardest, the most heartbreaking decision” of his Presidency, and he refused to do the firing himself. He told Alcorn, “You’ve got to handle it. It’s your job, the dirtiest I can give you.”
Adams, meantime, was finding that not even the lonely Miramichi country was remote enough to hide him; Canadian reporters were asking him when he would resign. It seemed to be the only question people asked him any more. Then Gerry Morgan phoned from the White House and, according to Adams’s recollection, said “he thought I ought to come back to Washington because Nixon and Meade Alcorn… wanted to talk with me.” He knew why: “So I went.” At 8 A.M. the following day he was at his desk, ready for the blindfold and the last cigarette.
Nixon told him that most Republican candidates and political leaders would, as a matter of self-preservation, repudiate him, and that would make his position impossible. Alcorn spoke for an hour, mostly about GOP contributions drying up and the incipient revolt within the National Committee. Adams sat impassively in his great leather chair, his head thrown back, staring at the ceiling and nibbling a stem of his glasses. Then, with a weary nod, he agreed to go.
In Six Crises Nixon recalled how the 1958 election served “to virtually erase the public memory of my success in Caracas and put in its place an image of failure with which my name was associated.” Friends urged him to avoid the campaign, since a Republican defeat was inevitable; Dewey said, “You have done enough for Republican candidates.” But Eisenhower told him, “I would give a year of my salary if we could win either the House or the Senate.” The President, “by personal and political inclination,” did not want to become enmeshed in political battles which could destroy his ability to work constructively with Congress, Nixon wrote; therefore, “if anyone was to carry the major load for political cross-country campaigning, I was the one who had to do it.”
I could not stand aside and see my fellow Republicans go down to disastrous defeat. I had to risk my political prestige to avoid a disaster, if possible, knowing full well, as in 1954, we would probably lose, and I would be the big-name target for the defeat…. I ended up stumping more than 25,000 miles in twenty-five states.
What this account omits is the character of the Republican campaign and the zeal with which the President joined it in the last two weeks. Nixon’s line of attack was narrow and highly partisan. The Democratic party, he warned, was a haven for “socialism” and “left-wing extremists.” He accused the Democrats of “retreat and appeasement,” scorned “the Acheson foreign policy” that “resulted in war,” and rejoiced in the “military strength and diplomatic firmness” of the Republican administration. The President, appalled at first, told White House correspondents that he deplored “this kind of thing.” That stirred up conservative protests, which turned him around so completely that he publicly praised his bellicose Vice President: “No one can do this more effectively than you.” By the end of October Ike was sharing Nixon’s mood. He vowed that “there will be no appeasing Communist aggression while I am President,” declared that “the so-called missile gap is being rapidly filled,” and called the Democrats “political radicals” and “self-styled liberals” with “the irresistible impulse… to squander money—your money.”
On November 4 the roof fell in on the Republicans. They lost twelve seats in the Senate, forty-eight seats in the House, and thirteen of the twenty-one contests for governor. Knowland went down, and so, unexpectedly, did John Bricker in Ohio. Even rock-ribbed Republican Vermont was lost; for the first time in one hundred and six years a Democrat would represent it in Congress. Nixon summed up the nationwide results: “It was the worst defeat in history ever suffered by a party having control of the White House.”
Three races were of national interest. In Massachusetts John F. Kennedy’s margin was 874,608—the largest ever for a candidate for any office in the state, and the largest in any senatorial race in 1958. Barry Goldwater ran against the Democratic tide in Arizona and was reelected decisively. And Rockefeller, even more impressively, rolled up a landslide plurality of a half-million votes. A TV commentator observed, “The big winner in this election is Nelson Rockefeller; the big loser, Richard Nixon.” On November 9 New Y
ork’s Governor-elect flew south to rest on his Venezuelan estate. At Maiquetía Airport, where the Nixons’ baptism of Caracas spit had begun six months earlier, reporters asked him about Nixon. Rockefeller replied, “No tengo nada que ver con Nixon”—“I have nothing to do with Nixon.”
TWENTY-SIX
Tattoo for the General
H.L. Mencken once observed that journalism is an inexact science. The last years of the Eisenhower era were rich in proof of it.
Six weeks after the Democrats’ off-year sweep a special Arkansas legislative committee disclosed that it had “definitely proved that there was Communist influence” in the Little Rock integration dispute. The chairman, Representative Paul Van Dalsen, said that the committee’s three-day public hearing had alerted Arkansas to the threat of Communism, and a colleague of Van Dalsen confidently predicted that American Negroes would reject invitations to join any new demonstrations instigated by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and “backed by the Communist Party.” Racial peace, he said, lay dead ahead.
Clark Kerr, newly installed as the president of the University of California, took a close look at college students in 1959 and said, “The employers will love this generation…. They are going to be easy to handle. There aren’t going to be any riots.”
That November the Roman Catholic bishops of the United States, in opposing the use of federal money to promote artificial birth control at home and abroad, ridiculed the assertion that American Catholics would gradually come to accept contraception.
NBC, looking for a clean-cut young American to counterbalance Elvis Presley, chose Charles Van Doren, a $4,400-a-year Columbia University instructor who had just won $129,000 in fourteen spectacular weeks on the network’s biggest quiz show, Twenty-one. Hired at $50,000 a year as an NBC consultant and Today show commentator, he edited an inspirational anthology, Letters to Mothers. In his own mail, three of every four letters were from parents or teachers grateful to him for the shining example he was setting for the country’s youth. Late in 1958, when a New York County grand jury began looking into charges that quiz shows were rigged, reporters converged on his smart Greenwich Village home. He scorned the idea. “I never got any kind of hint or help,” he said, “and as far as I know, nobody else ever did on the program.” When they persisted he said sternly, “It is an insult to keep asking me these questions.”
Whereupon Negroes, college students, Catholics, and Charles Van Doren proceeded to surprise those who thought they knew them.
***
The hope that black militancy would go away died a sudden death on February 1, 1960, when four black students at the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College entered an F. W. Woolworth store on South Elm Street in nearby Greensboro, made several small purchases, took seats at the lunch counter, and ordered coffee. In conformity with the southern laws and tradition requiring segregation, the management ignored them. They stayed in silence until closing time, and the next morning they appeared at the counter again, this time with five black friends. They called it a sit-in. Each succeeding day there were more of them. Calm and well-behaved, ignoring catcalling white youths who dangled Confederate flags in front of them and flipped cigarette butts at them, the young blacks let it be known that they were going to stay until they got their coffee.
If it had been up to the store’s Greensboro employees, they would never have been served. But Woolworth is a nationwide chain, and that was what they were counting on. In North Carolina the movement spread to Durham, Winston-Salem, Charlotte, Raleigh, and High Point, and outside the state lunch counters were occupied in Nashville, Chattanooga, Tallahassee, Richmond, and Rock Hill, South Carolina. Over the next fortnight blacks staged Woolworth sit-ins in fifteen cities, and in Boston four hundred students from Harvard, Brandeis, Boston University, and MIT picketed twelve Woolworth stores. That pleased the Greensboro blacks. What happened next astonished them and the country. Demonstrators appeared at Walgreen, S. H. Kress, W. T. Grant, and Liggett lunch counters. Englewood, New Jersey, sympathizers took up a collection to back the demonstrators. Yale Divinity School students marched through downtown New Haven in support. Exasperated dime store managers raised their coffee prices to a dollar a cup for Negroes, unscrewed the seats, and threatened to close the lunch counters. Nothing worked; the demonstrators met them at every turn with new forms of passive resistance. Then the movement leaped from the stools to every segregated facility in society. There were sleep-ins in motel lobbies, play-ins in parks, read-ins in public libraries, watch-ins in movie theaters, bet-ins in bingo halls, sweat-ins in Turkish baths, and, when spring approached, swim-ins on restricted beaches.
On May 10 the blacks scored their first victory when lunch counters were desegregated in six Nashville stores, the first such general action in any southern state except Texas. All spring battles of attrition were fought throughout the South, with the color bar moving a foot here, a yard there, and pressure on the diehards mounting. On June 5 the blacks’ Southern Regional Council reported desegregated counters in nine scattered border cities; there had been no violence in any of them, and none of the merchants had been hurt by the threat of retaliatory boycotts by angry whites. Virginia felt the opening wedge on June 23, when its Hot Shoppes were opened to Negroes. Knoxville stores ended lunch counter segregation July 18. July 25 was a day of black jubilation; the Woolworth and Kress stores in Greensboro, where it had all started six months earlier, were integrated. That same day four Virginia stores in the Norfolk-Portsmouth area also ended discrimination. After that the going was rougher. The never-say-die Deep South was digging in. On October 19 Atlanta policemen arrested fifty-one sit-in demonstrators led by Martin Luther King. They refused to put up bail and were jailed. The great sit-in blitz of 1960 was over, and the blacks paused to consolidate their gains. But even the Arkansas legislature now knew that the respite would only be temporary. A Negro nation of 18,871,831 was stirring. American blacks were becoming visible at last.
***
The future was revealed to Clark Kerr on the cloudless afternoon of Friday, May 13, 1960. The House Committee on Un-American Activities, still tenaciously investigating California Communists after all these years, was holding hearings in San Francisco’s rococo city hall. Among those subpoenaed were several public schoolteachers and a Berkeley sophomore, all of them rumored to be active leftists. Several busloads of Berkeley students arrived to give them moral support. No demonstrations had been contemplated; in that innocent day few undergraduates knew how to demonstrate. They merely wanted seats in the hearing room. But the building was already crowded. Policemen barred the door at the top of the steps. Somebody started to push. One cop lost his footing; afterward it was said that he was beaten. Nightsticks appeared, and then hoses. At the end of a wild half-hour twelve people were casualties and fifty-two were on their way to jail. Jessica Mitford of Oakland reported in the Nation that “the current crop of students has gone far to shake the label of apathy and conformity that had stuck through the Fifties.” She predicted that in the coming decade they would be dedicated to “shaping the future of the world.” One beaten undergraduate told a reporter, “I was a political virgin, but I was raped on the steps of city hall.” To the country’s 3,610,000 students the message from Berkeley was a challenge. Impatient faculty members had long been goading them to make a political commitment. Now they knew how to do it.
***
During those same tumultuous months, as black pride and collegiate political awareness grew, the curtain was rising on another instrument of social change. On May 9, 1960, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that it had approved an oral contraceptive as safe.1 The Pill was Enovid, made by G. D. Searle & Company, Chicago, which said it had proved to be 100 percent effective in a four-year test by 1,500 women. Twenty pills a month, obtainable by prescription, would provide assurance against pregnancy at a cost of $10 to $11 a month. This chemical form of birth control, combined with the new intrauterine devices a
nd an increase in the acceptance of surgical birth control, offered women escape from the fear of pregnancy, the restraint that had inhibited their sexual activity since the beginning of time. Now, it seemed, they could go to bed as freely as men. Physicians and pharmaceutical houses were overwhelmed by the demand from millions of women for the Pill. Never had so many people taken a potent drug regularly for any purpose other than the control of a disease. And the Roman Catholic bishops were dismayed when Monsignor Irving A. LeBlanc, director of the National Catholic Family Life Bureau, reported that Catholic women were taking it as regularly as non-Catholics. As recently as November 1959 the bishops had reproved “some representatives of Christian bodies”—Protestant clergymen—for not practicing continence. Now even Catholic priests, and indeed some sisters in holy orders, were reappraising their vows in the light of the altered facts of life.
***
The clay figure of Charles Van Doren began to crumble in August 1958, when one Herbert M. Stempel, a CCNY student who had won $49,500 on Twenty-one before losing to Van Doren, took his troubled conscience to Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan and the New York World-Telegram and Sun. Stempel told them that the show was a fake. He said that contestants were given the answers in advance until their popularity began to wane; then they had to take a dive. He had been ordered to lose to Van Doren, who, like him, had been coached in facial expressions, lip-biting, brow-mopping, and stammering as he agonized over a question in the glass-walled isolation booth on camera. Rehearsed by the show’s producer, Van Doren had then amazed 25 million televiewers by such feats as naming the only three baseball players to have collected more than 3,500 hits (“Ty Cobb, Cap Anson and… Tris Speaker!”), identifying the singer of the aria “Sempre libera” in La Traviata (“She sings it right at the end of the party given by… What’s her name! Soprano. Her name is… Violetta!”), and spitting out the names of the Seven Dwarfs (“Sleepy, Sneezy, Dopey, Happy”—pause—“the grouchy one—ah, Grumpy—Doc—ah, the bashful one—Bashful!”).
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