by Jill Lepore
The FBI, which had been conducting illegal surveillance on and waging campaigns of harassment against hundreds of civil rights activists, including Martin Luther King, had opened a file on Carmichael in 1964, accelerating its collection in 1966, when he started talking about Black Power and police brutality and urging forms of protest later adopted by the Black Lives Matter movement. The month before Carmichael was scheduled to speak at Berkeley, a white police officer in Atlanta shot and killed a black man. Carmichael organized a protest and spoke at a rally that led to two days of unrest. An FBI informant in Atlanta sent an encrypted telegram to J. Edgar Hoover: “CARMICHAEL BELIEVED NEGROES SHOULD FORM VIGILANTE GROUPS TO OBSERVE POLICE AND SHOULD ANY ACTS OF POLICE BRUTALITY BE OBSERVED, A COMMITTEE SHOULD BE FORMED AMONG THE NEGRO ELEMENT TO PRESS SUCH MATTERS.” Carmichael was charged with inciting a riot. Hoover stepped up surveillance of what he described as “black nationalist hate-type groups.”88 Released on bail and challenged by Reagan—baited by Reagan—Carmichael headed to California.
Reagan had by now made his opposition to the free speech movement the centerpiece of his gubernatorial campaign, promising to crack down on Berkeley’s “noisy, dissident minority.” Urged on by UC regent H. R. Haldeman, Reagan talked about student unrest day after day, much to the dismay of his campaign manager, who told him that the issue hadn’t left a trace in the polls. “It’s going to,” Reagan promised.89 Three weeks before the election, Reagan’s campaign advised him that his prospects would improve “if the disorders boil into public prominence again.” Carmichael’s proposed visit offered Reagan the opportunity to tie his campaign against student protesters to his denunciation of black militancy. After Reagan issued a public call to Carmichael not to come to California and asked his opponent, the incumbent governor Pat Brown, to join him, knowing that Brown would refuse. Carmichael played right into Reagan’s hands.90
“This is a student conference, as it should be, held on a campus,” Carmichael, twenty-five, lean and grave, told a crowd of ten thousand Berkeley students. Echoing Frederick Douglass’s 1860 “Plea for Free Speech,” Carmichael said that the regulation of speech amounted to a struggle over “whether or not black people will have the right to use the words they want to use without white people giving their sanction.” With Carmichael and the New Left, the civil rights movement changed course. “We been saying freedom for six years, and we ain’t got nothing,’” Carmichael said in Berkeley. “What we gonna start saying now is Black Power.” SNCC’s H. Rap Brown, who called LBJ a “white honky cracker,” said, “John Brown was the only white man I could respect and he is dead. The Black Movement has no use for white liberals. We need revolutionaries. Revolutions need revolutionaries.” Huey Newton, a founder of the Black Panthers, cited Chairman Mao: “Political Power comes through the Barrel of a Gun.”91
Reagan won in a landslide and, in the congressional midterm elections, twenty-seven of the forty-eight Democrats who’d been swept into office with LBJ in 1964 failed to win reelection. Republicans won nine out of ten new governorships and gained control of statehouses across the country. But the 1966 election wasn’t so much a victory of Republicans over Democrats, it was a victory of conservatives over liberals.
Goldwater’s star fell; Reagan’s rose. The conservative standard-bearer, Reagan was the first national figure to bring the intensity of the Cold War to domestic politics. He served two terms as governor, held on to his conservative convictions, and bided his time while his party moved rightward. He set as his agenda nothing short of dismantling the New Deal.
From the California governor’s office, Reagan didn’t let up on either the rhetoric of law and order or his denunciation of free speech on college campuses. In May 1967, when the California legislature was debating a gun control measure, thirty Black Panthers, led by Bobby Seale, walked into the California State House, armed with a Magnum, shotguns, and pistols. “Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned, demonstrated, and everything else to get the racist power structure of America to right the wrongs which have historically been perpetuated against black people,” Seale said. “The time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.” Reagan, who went on to sign the law, told the press he saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.”92
Johnson called for a National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to investigate the riots. Chaired by Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois, the Kerner Commission issued a 426-page report calling for $30 billion in urban spending and, as conservatives read it, essentially blaming whites for the violence in black neighborhoods. The commission recommended spending more money on public housing, instituting a massive jobs programs, and committing to desegregation of public education. Kerner and his colleagues warned that failing to change course “could quite conceivably lead to a kind of urban apartheid with semimartial law in many major cities, enforced residence of Negroes in segregated areas, and a drastic reduction in personal freedom for all Americans, particularly Negroes.” Except for a recommendation about expanding urban policing, Johnson ignored it.93
With every instance of racial unrest, with each new form of public protest, Reagan’s political capital grew. “Free speech does not require furnishing a podium for the speaker,” he said in 1967. “I don’t think you should lend these people the prestige of our university campuses for the presentation of their views.”94 Later that year, black students at San Jose College, led by a dashiki-wearing sociology professor and former discus thrower named Harry Edwards, filed a protest against racism on campus and threatened to disrupt the opening day football game. Fearing a riot, the college president called off the game—“the first time a football contest in America had been cancelled because of racial unrest,” the Times reported. Reagan called the cancellation of the game an “appeasement of lawbreakers,” declared Edwards unfit to teach, and called for him to be fired. Edwards called Reagan “unfit to govern,” and two months later began organizing a nationwide campaign for black athletes to boycott the 1968 Olympics—beginning with an article in the Saturday Evening Post called “Why Negroes Should Boycott Whitey’s Olympics”—which led to the clenched-fisted Black Power protest of two medal winners (the inspiration, decades later, for NFL protesters who kneeled during the playing of the national anthem).95
Meanwhile, outcry against the escalating war in Vietnam galvanized the New Left, and gave a sprawling and mostly disorganized movement both focus and intensity by bringing together the free speech and civil rights movements. In 1966, John Lewis announced SNCC’s opposition to the war in Vietnam, and its support for draft dodgers, described by Lewis as “the men in this country who are unwilling to respond to a military draft which would compel them to contribute their lives to United States aggression in Vietnam in the name of the ‘freedom’ we find so false in this country.” At Berkeley, Stokely Carmichael had called on students to burn their draft cards. World champion heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali refused to fight in Vietnam, asking, “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs?” And the argument against the war grew both broader and deeper when Martin Luther King joined it in 1967, severing his alliance with Johnson by declaring, “We are fighting an immoral war.”96
Johnson lost himself in the war. Foreign policy had never been his strength. And he found out far too late that The Treatment didn’t work on Ho Chi Minh. By 1967, nearly half a million American combat troops were in Vietnam. That year alone, nine thousand Americans died in Vietnam, and the war consumed $25 billion of the federal budget. To pay for it, Johnson, refusing to raise taxes, having only just convinced Congress to push through a tax cut, starved the Great Society. By the time he was finally willing to ask for a tax increase, he was only able to get it by agreeing to still more spending cuts to his antipoverty programs. And by then, inflation had begun to surge, giving
credence to economic theories endorsed by conservatives. By 1968, Robert McNamara, Johnson’s secretary of defense, and an architect of Johnson’s war, no longer willing to continue, resigned.97
In January 1968, during Tet, the Vietnamese new year, the North Vietnamese conducted raids all over South Vietnam, including on the U.S. embassy in Saigon. Johnson had claimed that the North Vietnamese were weak and that the war was nearly won. The Tet Offensive exposed the depth of that lie. In March, New York Times columnist James Reston declared, “The main crisis is not Vietnam itself, or in the cities, but in the feeling that the political system for dealing with these things has broken down.”98
While Americans reeled from news reports from Vietnam, the presidential primary season began. LBJ won the Democratic primary in New Hampshire with only 49 percent of the vote. An antiwar candidate, Minnesota congressman Eugene McCarthy had pulled 42 percent. Emboldened by Johnson’s narrow win, Robert Kennedy entered the race. Having urged Johnson in 1963 not to withdraw from Vietnam, Kennedy now ran against it as “Johnson’s war.” George Wallace entered the race, too. Johnson was being squeezed from the left and from the right, both for what was going on in American cities and for what was going on in Vietnam. Nor were the two often considered separately. In 1966, Wallace had been unable to run for reelection as governor of Alabama because of a law of succession, and had his wife, Lurleen, run in his stead (she won by a margin of two to one). In 1968, when George Wallace decided to campaign for the Democratic nomination, Stokely Carmichael, speaking in Birmingham, said that if the army gives a black soldier a gun and “tells him to shoot his enemy . . . if he don’t shoot Lurleen and George and little junior, he’s a fool.”99 Johnson was even left to campaign against the ghost of Barry Goldwater. A billboard in Chicago that in 1964 had read, “In Your Heart, You Know He’s Right” read four years later, “Now You Know He Was Right.”100
Disgusted and discouraged, Johnson announced on March 31 that he would not run for reelection. He had decided to dedicate himself to ending the war. “With our hopes and the world’s hope for peace in the balance every day,” he said in a televised address, “I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes.” The stunned New York Times ran a can-you-believe-it, three-tier headline:
JOHNSON SAYS HE WON’T RUN;
HALTS NORTH VIETNAM RAIDS;
BIDS HANOI JOIN PEACE MOVES.101
But peace would not come; nor would moderation abide. Four days later, on the balcony of a hotel in Memphis, Martin Luther King was shot by a white ex-convict. As word spread, riots broke out in 130 cities. From California, Reagan, granting barely a moment for mourning, declared that King’s assassination was part of the “great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they’d break.” Stokely Carmichael announced that “white America killed Dr. King” and in the doing had “declared war on black America.” He told a crowd in Washington to “go home and get your guns.”102
A stricken Robert Kennedy spoke from the back of a flatbed truck in Indianapolis. “What we need in the United States is not division,” he said, nervously grasping at the slip of paper on which he’d hastily scrawled some notes. “What we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but love and wisdom and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.” Two months later, after winning the California primary, Kennedy was shot while leaving the ballroom of a hotel in Los Angeles.103
Young men in Central Park, New York, mourned Martin Luther King Jr. following his assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968. The nation mourned as Job in the desert, fallen to his knees. What more?
V.
RICHARD NIXON’S MOMENT had come. He would repurpose his anticommunism in the form of a new political rhetoric: antiliberalism. As Reagan had done in the California governor’s race two years before, he would stake his campaign for the Republican nomination, and for the presidency, on a pledge to restore law and order. “We have been amply warned that we face the prospect of a war in the making in our own society,” he said in a radio address on March 7, 1968, days before the New Hampshire primary. “We have seen the gathering hate, we have heard the threats to burn and destroy. In Watts and Harlem and Detroit and Newark, we have had a foretaste of what the organizations of insurrection are planning for the summer ahead.” He promised that, if elected, he would not cower before those threats. In New Hampshire, he received 79 percent of the Republican vote.104
Nixon knew that the more violent the riots, and the worse the news from Vietnam, the better his chances. Deciding that peace would bar his road to the White House, he arranged for Anna Chennault, born in China and the widow of a U.S. general, to act as a conduit to promise South Vietnam that it would get better peace terms if it waited until after the election, and a Nixon victory. Johnson heard rumors about the arrangement, called Nixon, and confronted him. Nixon, lying, denied it. Johnson failed to negotiate a peace; the fighting would last for five more years, at a cost of countless lives. By the time the bombing ended, in 1973, the United States dropped on Vietnam and its neighbors, Laos and Cambodia, more than seven and a half-million tons of bombs, equal to one hundred atom bombs, and three times all the explosives deployed in the Second World War.105
Where King and Kennedy had called for love, Nixon, like Carmichael, knew the power of hate. His young political strategist, a number cruncher named Kevin Phillips, explained that understanding politics was all about understanding who hates whom: “That is the secret.” Phillips’s advice to Nixon was known as the “southern strategy,” and it meant winning southern Democrats and giving up on African Americans, by abandoning civil rights for law and order. As Nixon prepared for the Republican National Convention, meeting in Miami in August, he listened to Phillips, who explained that the election would be won or lost on the “law and order/Negro socio-economic revolution syndrome,” but that there was no need to talk like George Wallace. This could all be done so much more subtly. In his acceptance speech in Miami, Nixon invoked an apocalypse. “As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame,” he said. “We hear sirens in the night.” But there was another sound, a quieter sound, a quieter voice—a silenced voice—to which Americans ought to listen. “It is the quiet voice in the tumult and the shouting. It is the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans—the non-shouters; the non-demonstrators. They are not racists or sick; they are not guilty of the crime that plagues the land. . . . They are good people, they are decent people; they work, and they save, and they pay their taxes, and they care.”106
The GOP adopted a platform plank that billed itself as anticrime (and anti–Kerner Commission): “We must re-establish the principle that men are accountable for what they do, that criminals are responsible for their crimes, that while the youth’s environment may help to explain the man’s crime, it does not excuse that crime.” But as Nixon adviser John Dean later said, “I was cranking out that bullshit on Nixon’s crime policy before he was elected. And it was bullshit, too. We knew it. The Nixon campaign didn’t call for anything about crime problems that Ramsey Clark [Johnson’s attorney general] wasn’t already doing under LBJ. We just made more noise.”107
Two weeks after the Republicans met in Miami, the Democratic National Convention met in Chicago. Antiwar protesters arrived in Chicago, too, along with Students for a Democratic Society, Yippies, anarchists, and hangers-on. They were met with a military police force of an occupying army: some 12,000 Chicago police, 6,000 National Guardsmen, 6,000 army troops, and 1,000 undercover intelligence agents. Richard Daley, the city’s mayor, insisted that law and order would prevail.108 There were armed police, even, in the convention hall. The party had no leader: Johnson had stepped down, Robert Kennedy had been shot. Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, who had not
entered a single primary, won the nomination, defeating Eugene McCarthy and arousing the ire of the party’s left flank.
In November, Nixon beat Humphrey by winning those Americans who believed that he was speaking for them, the “Silent Majority.” The parties were being sorted by ideology. And they were being sorted by race. In 1960, about three out of every five blue-collar workers had voted Democrat; in 1968, only one in three did. In 1960, one in three African Americans had voted for Nixon over John F. Kennedy; by 1972, only one in ten would vote for Nixon over the Democratic nominee, South Dakota senator George McGovern.109
A midcentury era of political consensus had come to an almost unfathomably violent end. After 1968, American politics would be driven once again by division, resentment, and malice. Even Leone Baxter began to have her regrets. Interviewed in the 1960s, she warned that political consulting must be kept “in the hands of the most ethical, principled people. People with real concern for the world around them, for people around them or else it will erode into the hands of people who have no regard for the world around them. It could be a very, very destructive thing.”110
Poet and boxer Rodolfo Gonzales, a leader of the Chicano movement, spoke at a rally in Denver in 1970. And what of the American past? Was the schoolbook version of American history a lie? The civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam called attention to aspects of American history that had been left out of American history textbooks from the very start. The American Indian Movement, founded in 1968, challenged the story of the nation’s origins—the goal of AIM’s occupation of an abandoned prison on the island of Alcatraz, an occupation that lasted from the end of 1969 through the middle of 1971, was for the island to become a Native American Studies center. The Black Power movement, the Chicano movement, and a growing Asian American movement made similar demands. In Denver in 1969, Chicano activist Rodolfo Gonzales, who’d founded the Crusade for Justice, led a walkout of Mexican American students in protest over the American history curriculum, insisting that it be revised to “enforce the inclusion in all schools of this city the history of our people, our culture, language, and our contributions to this country.”111 Black studies departments were founded at colleges—the first in 1969, at San Francisco State—followed by Chicano studies and women’s studies departments—the first founded at San Diego State in 1970—and sexuality and gender studies. A revolution on the streets produced a revolution in scholarship: a new American past.