by Jill Lepore
Lumbering Lyndon Johnson, flushed with victory, decided to use his sixteen-million-vote margin to shoot for the moon. He had a big Democratic majority in the House, what’s known as a fat Congress. He knew his mandate wouldn’t last. “Just by the way people naturally think and because Barry Goldwater has simply scared the hell out of them, I’ve already lost about three of those sixteen,” he told his staff in January 1965. “After a fight with Congress or something else, I’ll lose another couple of million. I could be down to eight million in a couple of months.”67
Johnson headed what political scientists call a unified government, in which the executive and legislative branches are controlled by the same party, as opposed to a divided government, in which one party controls the White House and the other Congress. Unified governments and divided governments have legislative agendas of roughly the same size, but unified governments, unsurprisingly, are more productive than divided governments: they get more of their bills passed. Still, no unified government in American history was as productive as LBJ’s.68
Johnson, who’d begun his career in Washington in 1937, understood the nature of political power better than nearly every other American president. He met with leaders of Congress every week for breakfast. He called senators in the middle of the night. He cajoled and he threatened and he made trades and he made deals. He got Congress to pass an education act, providing millions of dollars to support low-income elementary and high school students. He convinced Congress to amend the Social Security Act to establish Medicare, health insurance for the elderly, and Medicaid, health coverage for the poor—“care for the sick and serenity for the fearful”—and he then flew to Independence, Missouri, so that Truman could witness the signing. “You have made me a very, very happy man,” said a deeply moved Truman.69
Johnson applied “The Treatment” to Abe Fortas in July 1965, the month before Fortas took a seat on the Supreme Court. The flurry of bills was hardly limited to social reform. Johnson also persuaded Congress to pass a tax bill, a tax cut that had been introduced into Congress before Kennedy’s assassination, the largest tax cut in American history. He hoped it would relieve unemployment. Instead, it undermined his reform programs. It was as if he’d cut off one of his own feet.
“I want to turn the poor from tax eaters to taxpayers,” Johnson said, selling his tax cut to Congress. In this formulation, recipients of social programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), created in 1935, and Medicaid, created in 1965, were the tax eaters. Recipients of other kinds of federal assistance (Medicare, veterans’ benefits, farm subsidies) were the taxpayers. By making this distinction, 1960s liberals crippled liberalism. The architects of the War on Poverty, like the New Dealers before them, never defended a broad-based progressive income tax as a public good, in everyone’s interest; nor could they separate it from issues of race. They also never referred to Social Security, health care, and unemployment insurance as “welfare.” Johnson’s Council of Economic Advisers told him that when explaining how the government might fight poverty, he ought to “avoid completely the use of the term ‘inequality’ or the term ‘redistribution.’” The poor were to be referred to as “targets of opportunity.”70
At first, the tax cut worked: people used the money they once used to pay taxes to buy goods. In 1965, Time put Keynes on the cover and announced, “We Are All Keynesians Now.”71 But, as with everything Johnson did, his economic reforms were demolished by his escalation of the war in Vietnam.
When Kennedy died, Robert Kennedy had pressed Johnson not to abandon Vietnam, which had been Johnson’s inclination. By the spring of 1965, Johnson had come to understand that he couldn’t withdraw without losing, and he didn’t want to lose. “I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went,” he said. In March 1965, the United States began to bomb North Vietnam; that spring Johnson committed to ground forces. But because he didn’t want to abandon his domestic agenda, he decided to conceal the escalation. He lied about American involvement, and his administration lied about the war itself. By the end of the year, there were 184,000 troops in Vietnam. College students managed to avoid the draft. Disproportionately, American troops in Vietnam were poor whites and blacks. Johnson deliberately hid the cost of the war. Eventually, paying for the war would require raising taxes. To postpone that inevitability for as long as possible, he cut funding for his social programs. “That bitch of a war,” he later said, “killed the lady I really loved—the Great Society.” Even as the president insisted that “this is not Johnson’s war, this is America’s war,” protesters chanted, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”72
Johnson, elected in a landslide in 1964, would be so unpopular by 1968 that he’d decide not to run for a second term. And liberalism would be so shattered by Johnson’s compromises, by the rise of the New Left, by race riots, by the antiwar movement, by white backlash, and by the Right’s calls for law and order, that Nixon would gain the prize he’d been eyeing since his days on the high school debate team in Whittier, California: the White House.
Americans watched the war in Vietnam from their living rooms. IV.
“THERE ARE MORE NEGROES IN JAIL WITH ME THAN THERE ARE ON THE VOTING ROLLS,” read an ad placed in the New York Times by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference while Martin Luther King was in prison in Selma, Alabama. Civil rights workers had been trying to register voters in the Deep South for years, without much success. Still, the spirit of protest had spread.
In 1964, Mario Savio, a twenty-one-year-old University of California philosophy major, spent the summer—the Freedom Summer—registering black voters in Mississippi. When he got back to Berkeley that fall, he led a fight against a policy that prohibited political speech on campus by arguing that a public university should be as open for political debate and assembly as a public square. The same right was at stake in both Mississippi and Berkeley, Savio said: “the right to participate as citizens in a democratic society.”73 After police arrested nearly eight hundred protestors during a sit-in, the university acceded to the students’ demands. The principle of allowing political speech on campus was afterward extended from public universities to private ones. Without this principle, students wouldn’t have been able to rally on campus for civil rights or against the war in Vietnam, or for or against anything else, then or since.
But the fight for a democratic society divided the Left. When the civil rights movement turned its attention from desegregation to voting rights, it splintered. The fight for voting rights also hit a wall with the Democratic Party. Contesting the Democratic Party’s all-white delegation to the party’s nominating convention, SNCC set up an alternative party, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Ella Baker ran its Washington office and delivered the keynote speech at its state nominating convention in Jackson. At the Democratic Party’s August 1964 convention in Atlantic City, party leaders refused to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation. Stokely Carmichael decided to give up on party politics. Carmichael, who’d been a Freedom Rider in 1961, graduated from Howard University in 1964 with a degree in philosophy and was nominated for a Senior Class Humanity Award for his work registering voters in Mississippi; he’d been arrested half a dozen times. “The liberal Democrats are just as racist as Goldwater,” he concluded. Borrowing the word “black” from Malcolm X, Carmichael urged a new militancy. “If we can’t sit at the table,” said one leader of SNCC, “let’s knock the fucking legs off.” King, and the SCLC, still favored working with white liberals; SNCC, increasingly, favored black consciousness and black power. Selma would be their last stand together.74
In January 1965, one hundred years after Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment, Johnson delivered his inaugural address in Washington, and King went to Selma, where demonstrators had pledged to march all the way to Montgomery, a fifty-five-mile journey that would take them through a county whose population was more than 70 percent black but where hardly any African
Americans had so much as attempted to vote since the rise of Jim Crow. On March 7, 1965, they met five hundred Alabama state troopers stationed on the far side of the Pettus Bridge, ordered by George Wallace to arrest anyone who tried to cross.
Malcolm X, who had by now been denounced by the Nation of Islam, flew to Selma. Though SCLC leaders worried that he’d incite violence, he spoke in support of the protesters. Only weeks later, his house was firebombed in New York, and, on February 21, he was assassinated in Manhattan by three men from the Nation of Islam armed with pistols and shotguns. He was shot ten times, once in the ankle, twice in the leg, and seven times in the chest.75 “I disagreed with him,” James Baldwin said, deeply shaken. “But when he talked to the people in the streets,” he went on, “if one ignored his conclusions, he was the only person who was describing, making vivid, making a catalog, of the actual situation of the American Negro.”76
Johnson, pressured by the televised spectacle of Alabama state troopers cracking the skulls of civil rights marchers in Selma as they repeatedly tried to cross the bridge, addressed Congress on March 15. “At times, history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom,” he said. “So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.” Calling on Congress to pass a Voting Rights Act, he closed, with his trademark Texas twang: “And we shall overcome.” King, watching in Alabama, fell to weeping.77
The week before Johnson sent Congress the Voting Rights Act, he’d sent Congress the Law Enforcement Assistance Act, saying he wanted 1965 to be remembered as “the year when this country began a thorough, intelligent, and effective war against crime.” The creation of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, which funded eighty thousand crime control projects, vastly expanded the police powers of the federal government. “For some time, it has been my feeling that the task of law enforcement agencies is really not much different from military forces; namely, to deter crime before it occurs, just as our military objective is deterrence of aggression,” the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee had said during hearings over the bill. After Johnson signed the act into law, his administration opened a “war on crime,” a war in which the police were empowered to act like a military force, using helicopters to patrol city neighborhoods and computer simulations to anticipate crime. Money that had gone to cities for antipoverty measures was used to fight crime. After-school programs and teen centers, instituted as elements of the war on poverty under Johnson, would come, under Nixon, beginning in 1969, to be run by police, elements of the war on crime. More Americans would be sent to prison in the twenty years after LBJ launched his war on crime than went to prison in the entire century before. Blacks and Latinos, 25 percent of the U.S. population, would make up 59 percent of the prison population, in a nation whose incarceration rate would rise to five times that of any other industrial nation. Dismantling the parts of Johnson’s program that were aimed to provide services to children and teenagers, Nixon would leave intact only the parts of the program that were aimed to punish them. Running the Great Society became the work of police. Block grants for urban renewal were used, instead, to build prisons. James Baldwin said urban renewal ought to be called “Negro removal.”78
On August 6, 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law. But the quiet that Johnson had anticipated did not come. The next day, the House Committee on Education and Labor held hearings in Los Angeles’s Will Rogers Park Auditorium to find out why the city had failed to implement federal antipoverty programs. A thousand people came; the hearings turned into a rally. Four days later, riots broke out in South Central Los Angeles, in Watts, the first in a series of riots that would shock the nation over four long, hot summers.
King flew to Los Angeles and preached nonviolence; no one really listened. The population density in the city of Los Angeles, outside of Watts, was 5,900 per square mile; in Watts, it was 16,400. The uprising lasted for six days and nights and involved more than 35,000 people. Thirty-four people were killed and nearly a thousand injured as the streets burned. Army tanks and helicopters turned an American city into a war zone. L.A. police chief William Parker said that fighting the people of Watts was “very much like fighting the Viet Cong.”79 Johnson asked, “Is the world topsy-turvy?”80
Watts, a neighborhood twice the size of Manhattan, had not a single hospital. An affluent society? Watts was an indigent society. From the outside, it looked as if rights had been answered with riots, as if the entire project of liberalism were collapsing in on itself.
Each riot over those four summers stood alone, but each began with police violence, in a segregated neighborhood in a northern city, where there were hardly any jobs, where the houses were falling down, where the right to vote hadn’t ended anyone’s misery. In Newark, the biggest city in New Jersey, where the population was 65 percent black, eighteen babies died at the City Hospital in a single year—of diarrhea—in a hospital infested by bats. And yet arguments that the federal government had failed cities like Newark were met with objections: the federal government had spent more on antipoverty programs per capita in Newark than in any other northern city.81
Violence begat violence. In the riots that began in Newark in the summer of 1967, police brutality led to protest, which led to looting, which led to shooting. A 4,000-strong force of National Guard sealed off fourteen square miles of the city with roadblocks. In the scenes broadcast on television screens across the country, Newark looked to some American viewers like Vietnam, a mayhem of snipers, of civilians slaughtered. A week and a half later, in riots in Detroit, more than 7,000 people were arrested and more than 2,000 buildings destroyed before order was enforced by 9,600 paratroopers from the 101st and Eighty-Second Airborne Divisions.82 That summer, a headline on page one of U.S. News & World Report read: IS THE U.S. ABLE TO GOVERN ITSELF?83
Conservatives had an answer: they could govern with a will of iron. Ronald Reagan, fifty-five and running for governor of California, declared the riots the result of the “philosophy that in any situation the public should turn to government for the answer.” Liberalism caused the riots, Reagan suggested, and only conservatism could end them.
Reagan, a man of charm and grace, as dapper as a groom, grew up in Illinois, the son of a shoe salesman who supported his family during the Depression through the largesse of the New Deal. Young Reagan, an ardent Democrat, memorized FDR’s speeches, those intimate, confident fireside chats. After graduating from a Christian college, Reagan began working as a radio broadcaster and sports announcer. He turned to film in 1937. During the war, he made films for the Office of War Information. A reliable B-movie actor, widely trusted, in 1947 he was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild, where he was an anticommunist crusader. In 1952, he began supporting Republican candidates. He registered as a Republican in 1962, and by 1964, supporting Goldwater, he’d become a Sun Belt conservative, convert to a new cause.
Other politicians railed; Reagan wooed. In a half-hour televised endorsement for Goldwater, a speech called “A Time for Choosing,” Reagan’s promise as a politician all but oozes out of the screen. For Reagan, the issue in the 1964 election, as in every election afterward, was a recasting of Alexander Hamilton’s question in Federalist 1 in 1787. Reagan asked not whether a people can rule themselves by reason and choice instead of accident and force but “whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”84 Not reason versus force, but the people versus the government.
Conservative and moderate Republicans didn’t agree on much, but they did agree that liberalism was to blame for the violence. King had cried, at the end of the march from Selma to Alabama, “How long? Not long. Because no lie can live forever.” In 1966, former college football star Gerald Ford, then the House Republican leader
, turned that “how long” around, asking, “How long are we going to abdicate law and order—the backbone of our civilization—in favor of a soft social theory that the man who heaves a brick through your window or tosses a fire bomb into your car is simply the misunderstood and underprivileged product of a broken home?” Reagan went further. “Working men and women should not be asked to carry the additional burden of a segment of society capable of caring for itself but which prefers making welfare a way of life, freeloading at the expense of more conscientious citizens,” he said, inciting a racial animosity that came to be known as not backlash but “whitelash.”85
To run his 1966 gubernatorial campaign, Reagan had hired the California political consulting firm of Spencer-Roberts. The heyday of Whitaker and Baxter had ended; Whitaker died in 1961. But Spencer-Roberts used the Whitaker and Baxter rulebook. “You know something, Stu?” Reagan said to Stuart Spencer. “Politics is just like show business. . . . You begin with a hell of an opening, you coast for a while, and you end with a hell of a closing.”86
On the stump, Reagan found a new target: college students. He complained about undergraduate “malcontents,” and, as Election Day neared, he made a point of publicly denouncing invitations issued by students at the University of California, Berkeley, to two speakers: Robert Kennedy, who was slated to talk about civil rights, and Stokely Carmichael, who had been asked by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to deliver the keynote address at a conference on Black Power. “We cannot have the university campus used as a base from which to foment riots,” Reagan warned. He sent a telegram to Carmichael, urging him to decline the invitation, suggesting that the appearance in Berkeley of the head of SNCC would “stir strong emotions,” a clever way to guarantee that Carmichael would come.87