The final electoral results were Nixon 301, Humphrey 191, and Wallace 45. The popular vote was 31,770,222 for Nixon (43.4 percent), 31,267,744 for Humphrey (42.7 percent), and 9,897,141 for Wallace (13.5 percent). The distance between the two leaders was less than .7 of one percentage point. Moreover, the Democrats had retained control of Congress. Nixon would be the first President in one hundred and twenty years to begin his administration with the opposition ruling both Houses on the Hill.
***
Campaigning in Ohio, Nixon had seen a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl holding a sign which read: “Bring Us Together.” That, he said in his moment of triumph, had “touched me most.” Did he mean it? With this complex man one could never be sure. “Watch what we do, not what we say,” John Mitchell, his attorney-general designate, told a group of thirty southern black leaders. Later, during the Watergate scandals, James Reston would write of Nixon that “There is scarcely a noble principle in the American Constitution that he hasn’t defended in theory or defied in practice.” But in the pause after his election his credit was strong. Most Americans wanted to believe him, to persuade themselves that he knew how to leave the swamps of the 1960s for higher ground. He had promised to extricate the troops from Vietnam. Since 1961 there had been 24,291 American deaths in the war; it was an immense relief to know that soon the dying would end. The country needed a rest. Now partisan politics could be shelved.
From his windows on the thirty-ninth floor of Manhattan’s Pierre Hotel, the President-elect could look out across the wooded sweep of Central Park and see America twinkling in the distance. Not since the pit of the Depression had the country been so torn. Between those whose bumper stickers said LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT and those who said CHANGE IT OR LOSE IT yawned a chasm so broad that no reconciliation was possible now; finding common ground would have to wait until outstanding issues had been resolved, the war being the first of them. In the matter of social questions as liberal a commentator as Eric Sevareid found himself drifting to the right. He looked at the long list of crimes for which Black Panthers had been convicted and was appalled. He watched on television as a Baltimore girl, the mother of seven illegitimate children, furiously blamed society for her plight, and shook his head; he watched black women hurrying to reach home before sunset and said: “I just don’t believe that ‘law and order’ are code words, except for a few. This issue is survival itself.”
To those on the left side of the divide, the aroused young ideologues, nothing seemed to be sacred: not the American flag, God, motherhood, knowledge, honor, modesty, chastity, or simple honesty. In 1968 insurance actuaries reportedly discovered that the group in society which failed most often to repay its debts was the young collegians who owed tuition loans; a college president wrote to one defaulter who had just graduated, and back came a photograph of the new alumnus naked and in a cave. It was almost possible to believe that for some middle-class youths the Boy Scout pledge which their fathers had recited had become inverted: they strove to be untrustworthy, disloyal, unhelpful, hostile, discourteous, unkind, disobedient, cheerless, wasteful, craven, dirty, and irreverent.
The campuses of venerable institutions of learning had often become disagreeable and even dangerous places. The one at Wesleyan, a little ivy college in Connecticut, had to be floodlit at night; crossing it was unsafe; there had been an epidemic of muggings there. Universities were confronted with a new disciplinary problem: how to cope with the undergraduate who was putting himself through college by peddling dope to fellow students who had become drug addicts. Crime became commonplace in peculiar places. One respected physician in New England entertained dinner party guests by telling how he and his wife had started shoplifting as children, still did it, and in fact had stolen the centerpiece on the table only three days ago. An assistant dean explained in great detail the information he had given, to a recent undergraduate drafted into the tank corps, on the best way to sabotage a tank. And a July 1967 issue of the New York Review of Books carried on its front page a large drawing showing how to make a Molotov cocktail, with a rag soaked in gasoline as the stopper, a fuse of clothesline rope, and instructions to use as fuel a mixture two-thirds gas and one-third soap powder and dirt.
The election of Richard Nixon to the Presidency was a reaction against all this, and a healthy one. The nation wanted no more visionaries for the present. What was needed was a genuine conservative administration, another Eisenhower era. Such a government would resist temptations to cut taxes and try, insofar as possible, to balance the budget, assuring a sound dollar and no inflation. Hostilities in Indochina would be ended as soon as possible, and all foreign policies would be evaluated solely in terms of the national interest of the United States. At home the role of the federal government would be sharply limited and congressional prerogatives restored, and ties would be strengthened between the generations, the races, the wealthy and the impoverished, the different regions in the country, and the religious faiths.
Nowhere was America’s exhaustion in 1968 more evident than in the ghettos, which were calmer that year than anyone had prophesied. “We will have a bad summer,” Lyndon Johnson had said in the spring. “We will have several bad summers before the deficiencies are erased.” Nixon foresaw “war in the streets.” The Justice Department had become so sophisticated on the subject of inner city disorders that it had established standards for a major riot. It had to be violent, had to have more than 300 participants, had to last at least twelve hours or more, and had to include gunfire, looting, arson, and vandalism. (A mere “serious disturbance” involved 150 people for three hours.) The Army had trained 15,000 men in seven task forces to cope with civil uprisings, and black leaders predicted that by spring they would be needed, that the biggest eruption ever lay ahead.
Certainly the leaders were setting an example. They taught courses in guerrilla warfare and house-to-house fighting. CORE joined SNCC and Martin Luther King’s SCLC in a militant shift to the left, advocating compulsive separation of the races. Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, a bestseller of 1968, described Cleaver as a “full-time revolutionary in the struggle for black liberation in America.” James Baldwin called the United States the “Fourth Reich,” and the disciples of Malcolm X observed the third anniversary of his death with a lack of restraint beyond anything he had advocated. Even black celebrities were taking a hard line. Black sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos obscured the glory of American victories at the Olympic games in Mexico City by bowing their heads during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” in honor of their victories and raising black-gloved clenched fists in a defiant gesture. When Cleveland blew in July, the general reaction was here-we-go-again. A tow truck, called to the scene of an accident, was fired upon by snipers. Policemen called to the scene became targets of the riflemen. Within thirty minutes three officers and four blacks were dead, and eight policemen were wounded. The National Guard was summoned, and losses from looting and burning were put at 1.5 million dollars. In the brick canyons of other ghettos police braced themselves for what seemed inevitable.
It didn’t come. There were half as many riots as expected and none of the other big cities experienced the havoc of the past three years. “In terms of racial conflict,” the AP reported, “it was the coolest summer in five years.” There were just nineteen deaths, shocking by pre-Watts standards but nothing like the eighty-seven of the year before. One reason was that the most inflammatory of the inciters weren’t in the streets any more. They were in jail, or fugitives. H. Rap Brown had been put away. Cleaver disappeared in late November when his parole was revoked. Huey P. Newton was tried in Oakland for killing a policeman; a jury with a black foreman found him guilty. “If Huey goes, the sky’s the limit,” said his black-jacketed followers, threatening to terrorize all whites, but when he was sent away for two to fifteen years for manslaughter, nothing happened.
Another reason for the comparative tranquillity was that blacks had realized they themselves were the chief victims of the rio
ts. Their stores were looted, their cars were destroyed, their homes burned, and their children endangered. Dr. Hiawatha Harris, a Watts psychiatrist, said that “the rioting phase, where we burn down businesses in our own areas, is over. The whole movement is in another direction—toward implementing black power and finding our dignity as a people.” Measured by education, wages, public service—“by every traditional index of progress,” Theodore H. White wrote—American blacks were already moving forward. The change was evident in little ways. The television screen was one. Integration had become a reality there. Almost every serial had a black player now. The neurosurgeon in Peyton Place was a Negro—and one black, “Julia,” was a heroine.
A new and more effective way to protest was put forward in Chicago by a Negro minister, Jesse Jackson, who forced white businessmen to hire blacks by telling his congregation to boycott their products. A & P made jobs for 970; Jewel Tea for 661. Operation Breadbasket, as Jackson called it, also persuaded businessmen to open accounts in two Negro banks, increasing their deposits from five million dollars to twenty-two million. Blacks had economic muscle to flex now. The Bureau of the Census later found that the number of Negro families making more than ten thousand dollars a year had risen in the 1960s from 11 percent to 28 percent. They were finally beginning to move into the middle class.
V
NIXON, AFTER ALL
1969–1972
THIRTY-FOUR
The Rise of the Silent Majority
Richard Nixon’s heroes included a Democratic President, Woodrow Wilson, and upon learning that President-elect Wilson had announced all his cabinet choices at once in 1913, the President-elect of 1968 decided to do the same thing, on television. The ceremony was held in the Palladium Room of Washington’s Shoreham Hotel on December 11, 1968. Nixon asked that each secretary-designate be accompanied by his wife; loyal helpmates, he explained, deserved to share in reflected glory—a condescension which was branded sexist by infuriated feminists. The wives of the new cabinet members seemed to enjoy the occasion, but the national audience was another matter. For viewers the thirty-minute production was flat—one critic rudely called it “a political What’s My Line?”—and many noted that the star kept repeating himself. Each of the twelve secretaries-designate was identified by Nixon as a man who understood not only his specialty but psychology as well. This was called an “extra dimension,” a phrase which the President-elect used no fewer than ten times.
In fact, the incoming cabinet was conspicuous for its lack of dimension. Its members were all affluent, white, male, middle-class, and Republican, and seven of them lived west of the Alleghenies, territory which had been the chief source of Republican votes. Nearly all were businessmen, with three—Walter Hickel (Interior), Winton Blount (postmaster general), and John Volpe (Transportation)—from the construction industry. The lack of breadth was not altogether Nixon’s fault. He had tried for more diversity. Earlier he had pledged the formation of “a government made up of Republicans, Democrats, and independents,” consisting of “the very best men and women I can find in the country, from government, from labor, from all the areas.” But the principal areas of Democratic strength had not responded to his overtures. Three blacks, for example, had bluntly turned him down: Whitney Young Jr., Senator Edward Brooke, and Mrs. Ersa Poston, president of the New York Civil Service Commission. So he had wound up with homogeneity instead of a cross section. The Nixon cabinet, a magazine writer commented, “seems to be constructed more of gray fieldstone than glinting steel and glass.” But so was its architect. “The men suggest cool competence rather than passion or brilliance,” Time said. Whatever their shortcomings, no one doubted their integrity.
The presence in the cabinet of such Nixon intimates as William Rogers (State), John Mitchell (Justice), and Robert Finch (HEW) was interpreted as evidence that the new President intended to give it more power than Johnson had; the demise of the kitchen cabinet as a presidential institution was predicted by columnists who did not yet know H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. To be sure, the President watchers granted, there would be exceptions. As presidential assistant for national security Henry Kissinger was already emerging as a key adviser. Rogers was reported to be reading Kissinger’s books. What no one then foresaw was that Nixon’s first Secretary of State would be keeping in touch with American foreign policy developments by reading transcripts of Kissinger’s press conferences.
***
Six months after entering the White House the new President received a tremendous psychological boost when NASA’s long voyage to the moon, begun eight years earlier on orders from John F. Kennedy, reached its destination. The mission was Apollo 11. It was the capstone of an extraordinary effort—20,000 contractors and 300,000 workers had contributed to it—and while men could argue endlessly over whether it had been worth the cost, its success was undeniably an American triumph. In a proclamation Richard Nixon noted that while exploration had been “a lonely enterprise” in the past, “today the miracles of space travel are matched by miracles of space communication; even across the vast lunar distance, television brings the moment of discovery into our homes and makes us all participants.” By “all” he meant more than Americans. The lunar landing was witnessed by the largest television audience ever, some 528 million people.
The possibility of failure was small. U.S. space science had come a long way since its first failures twelve years earlier. Between 1961 and 1966 the sixteen manned flights of the Mercury and Gemini series had demonstrated that man could live and function in space, and the Ranger, Lunar Orbiter, and Surveyor programs had sent back proof that the surface of the moon was safe for astronauts. There had been one dreadful setback. In January 1967 a flash fire in the Apollo 1 capsule had killed the three-man crew. After twenty-one months of delays manned Apollo command modules had gone up, however, and in late 1968 and early 1969 NASA had followed a rigid schedule, sending up an Apollo every two and a half months in hopes of meeting the Kennedy deadline of May 1961: to land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth “before this decade is out.”
Apollo 11, with its 36-story-high Saturn 5 rocket, was fired at Cape Kennedy’s launch complex 39A at 9:32 on the morning of July 16, 1969. Aboard were Neil A. Armstrong, the civilian commander, and two Air Force officers, Col. Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin Jr. and Lieutenant Colonel Michael Collins. The Saturn’s third stage put them into an orbit at a height of 118 miles. After a two-and-a-half-hour check of all instruments systems, they refired the third stage. This gave them a velocity of 24,245 mph, sufficient to throw them beyond the earth’s atmosphere and on their way to the moon, a quarter-million miles away.
At a distance of 50,000 miles from the earth Collins maneuvered the command vessel, which had been christened the Columbia, until it was nose to nose with the fragile lunar module, called the Eagle or simply the LM. Once the Columbia and the Eagle were hooked together, the Saturn’s third stage was jettisoned. On Thursday, the second day of the trip, the men switched on Columbia’s engine just long enough to put them in a trajectory which would pass within 69 miles of the back side of the moon on Saturday. Friday afternoon, Cape Kennedy time, Armstrong and Aldrin crept through a tunnel connecting the two vessels and into the Eagle, and at the end of that day the astronauts entered the moon’s field of gravity. They were now within 44,000 miles of it, and picking up speed.
Saturday afternoon they slowed to 3,736 mph and went into orbit around the moon. Mission Control, their radio link with NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, awoke them at 7:02 A.M. on Sunday, July 20, which was to be the day of the landing. In the Eagle Armstrong and Aldrin extended the four landing legs of the ungainly lunar module. “You’re ‘go’ for undocking,” Mission Control told them. Now the LM and the Columbia separated, and Armstrong said, “The Eagle has wings!” At 3:08 P.M. he fired the spacecraft’s engine, and down they went, toward the moon’s Sea of Tranquillity.
At a distance of 9.8 miles from the surface of the moon they we
nt into a low orbit, sailing over an awesome lunar scape of mountains and craters. At this point a Houston computer started flashing warning lights on their instruments. Rather than turn back this close to their goal, they went forward on instructions from a young guidance officer in Houston, with Armstrong at the controls and Buzz Aldrin calling out speed and altitude readings from the instruments. They had a bad moment during their final descent. The Eagle was less than 500 feet from the moon when Armstrong realized that they were about to land in the large, forbidding West Crater, so called because it was four miles west of their target. He flew beyond it, but this unexpected extension of the journey meant that he was rapidly running out of fuel; he had to decide immediately whether to turn about there or risk crashing. In that instant two lights on the panel in front of him glowed. They read LUNAR CONTACT. The Eagle had made it.
“Houston, Tranquillity Base here,” he said. “The Eagle has landed.” It was 4:17.42 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, Sunday, July 20, 1969.
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