Pivotal Tuesdays
Page 13
In late February, venerated CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite appended a short, devastating commentary on the war at the end of a regular evening news broadcast. Pulling off his glasses and looking intently through the camera’s lens at his audience of millions, Cronkite grimly announced that his recent trip to Southeast Asia had convinced him that “it seems more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.” Cronkite’s words had “seismic” impact—not simply because a paragon of journalistic objectivity had decided to voice his opinion, but because he expressed the same thing so many of his viewers already were thinking.2
Figure 17. “War Comes to the Living Room,” 13 February 1968. Warren K. Leffler, photographer. Unlike earlier conflicts, the Vietnam War became a much more emotionally and visually immediate experience because of the medium of television, which beamed nightly reports of the war’s progress into American living rooms. This heightened during the Tet Offensive of early 1968, where the battle came in from the countryside and onto the streets of Saigon. Library of Congress.
The strain of all these events visibly weighed on the president that March evening, and he looked tired and old. The glare of the studio lights showed the deep lines etched in his forehead. He listed the steps the nation was taking to wind down the war, bring the troops home, and negotiate with the North Vietnamese—all things that, for years, had seemed inconceivable admissions of failure. At the end, he made an announcement. Because of the importance of resolving the Vietnam conflict, he said: “I do not believe that I should devote an hour or day of my time to any personal partisan causes. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”3
And that was it. Lyndon Johnson—the master of the Senate, the consummate politician, and the man who had been among the most powerful dealmakers and power brokers in postwar Washington—was not running for reelection in 1968.
Only a few years earlier, this scenario seemed impossible to imagine. In November 1964, Johnson had won a landslide victory over his Republican challenger for the White House, conservative Arizona senator Barry Goldwater. Goldwater was a Cold Warrior and fiscal conservative who believed in a strong defense but in limited government otherwise. He condemned the Democrats for being willing to negotiate with the Soviets, and darkly warned his supporters of Communism’s “unrelenting drive to conquer the world.” Such a drive could only be stopped, declared Goldwater, through “peace through preparedness”: a strong military, robust nuclear defense, and unflinching leadership.4
The Republican establishment in 1964 was similarly hawkish, but otherwise diverged from the uncompromising Goldwater in both style and substance. The party had a strong electoral base in the pro-business urban middle class of the Northeast and Midwest. Beyond the hot buttons of Cold War geopolitics (on which the Democrats could be as hardline as many Republicans), the mainstream GOP had changed little since the Hoover era. It remained strongly pro-business and pro-employer, often ideologically and substantively resistant to market regulation, while at the same time presiding over audacious expansions of government authority. Dwight Eisenhower was a case in point: while championing free markets and American-style capitalism, he presided over the building of the interstate highway system and big increases in defense spending. The influence of this on the domestic economy was so staggering that Eisenhower himself darkly warned of a growing “military-industrial complex” as he departed the Oval Office in 1961. Social issues rarely came on the radar screen of mainstream Republicanism. When they did, many in the party still retained some of its old progressive spirit and took positions on welfare and urban policy that now would be considered quite liberal. Embodying all these qualities and contradictions was New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller: staggeringly rich, handsome, intelligent, and the GOP establishment’s candidate of choice.5
Just as in 1912, deep-seated rifts in the seemingly smooth façade of the Republican Party spilled into the open in 1964. The explosive growth of the Sunbelt in the decades after World War II not only moved the Republican base southward and westward, but also contributed to the Republican base as a whole taking on a more conservative cast. These voters were staunchly anti-Communist, suspicious of big government, and resentful of public intervention into personal choices. Barry Goldwater spoke their language. Buoyed by passionate grassroots support and an increasingly powerful network of conservative political organizations, Goldwater shocked Rockefeller Republicans by winning the nomination and carrying his unflinching conservatism to the national stage.6
Figure 18. Barry Goldwater Supporters with Black Eyes, Montgomery, Alabama, 17 September 1964. “Us Goldwater people would rather fight than switch!” A group of young female supporters of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential bid played on a popular advertising campaign for Tareyton cigarettes as they attended a rally in support of the GOP nominee. Although Goldwater lost in a landslide, he drew enthusiastic participation from regions and constituencies that had not traditionally voted Republican, and that later became keys to victory for both Nixon and Reagan. Bettman/Corbis/AP Images.
Lyndon Johnson ran on a very different vision, backed by a different set of interests. The Democratic Party of 1964 was built by the New Deal and FDR, whose programs had created a strong working-class base for the party in the industrial cities and in rural farms and small towns. African Americans migrated to the Democratic column during the Roosevelt years, and Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 cemented this loyalty, as well as the support of white liberals. But it marked the disintegration of another critical Democratic bloc: racially conservative white Southerners. In the wake of federal action on civil rights, the Solid South that had been the key ingredient of past Democratic presidential victories began to unravel, as did the malodorous set of compromises that had kept both white segregationists and African Americans in the Democratic tent since the 1930s.7 Without assured support south of the Mason-Dixon line, Democrats had to work harder to keep the other pieces of the New Deal coalition in the fold as the decade progressed.
Rifts emerged in both parties in the 1964 election, but the Democrats did a better job of keeping their competing interests together. The spirit of the times helped. The New Deal ethos had evolved in the early Cold War years into a dominant liberal strain that leaders like Johnson epitomized. These politicians believed in the welfare state and an active federal government. They believed in strong defense and containment of the power of the Soviet Union. It was a sort of neo-Progressivism, believing that government by “enlightened” experts could win out over “backward” small government and states-rights advocates.
This brand of politics matched the temperament of the postwar era, when the United States experienced an extraordinary and unprecedented run of prosperity. It was prosperity built on big organizations and institutions: corporations, labor unions, and the federal government. It drove its energy and ideology from a high-stakes struggle with a big, dangerous enemy, the USSR. It was built on a foundation forged through the shared struggle of the Great Depression and World War II—that Americans should all be “in it together” and every citizen should be treated equally. It presumed that Americans shared a set of values and had a shared destiny. The engagement in Vietnam was itself a manifestation of this grand project, and reflected what Richard Hofstadter once identified as both parties’ “belief that we have an almost magical capacity to have our way in the world … at a relatively small price.”8
Johnson’s 1964 campaign delivered such a thumping defeat to the Goldwater effort because it embraced this bigness. It preyed on people’s fears that Barry Goldwater was playing to small prejudices rather than fighting for big, shared goals. “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” proclaimed Goldwater in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention. Extremism, Johnson reminded the American voters, was a step backward from the ethos of togetherness that had knit the nation together through depression and war and pea
cetime prosperity. Television advertising became the medium through which these increasingly combative messages flowed, the most notorious of these being Johnson’s “Daisy” ad, with its dark implications about Goldwater’s irresponsible eagerness to press the nuclear button. The commercial aired only once, yet became legendary for its boldness.
The 1964 election results seemed to prove that the rest of the country agreed Goldwater was not the right person to have his finger on the nuclear button. Johnson won forty-four states. The six that went for Goldwater, however, were bellwethers of things to come: his home state of Arizona, and five Deep South states that had gone for Democrats since the Civil War.
On the one hand, the tale of 1964 versus 1968 is a testament to how quickly things can turn in politics. On the other, the Johnson-Goldwater contest sent out many signals of the coming fracture of American politics—and American culture—that exploded in 1968. Republicans took Goldwater’s defeat as a definitive rejection by American voters of the kind of sharply conservative politics espoused by the Arizona senator. They were wrong; Americans may have rejected Goldwater the candidate, but his conservative ideas resonated more deeply and widely than the party elders appreciated. The New Deal coalition Franklin Roosevelt built in 1932 had endured and strengthened, turning the Democrats into the largest and most nationally dominant political party of the postwar years. Yet at the same time, a conservative wing of the Republican Party had been growing steadily stronger, building an alternative economic vision to Keynesian liberalism and arguing that the federal government’s growth was imperiling free markets and individual rights.9
Lyndon Johnson was too savvy and seasoned a politician to interpret his victory as a mandate. “I was just elected President by the biggest popular margin in the history of the country—16 million votes,” he told White House advisors in January 1965. “Just by the way people naturally think and because Barry Goldwater had simply scared hell out of them, I’ve already lost about three of those sixteen. 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.”10 With a fragile base of support and a breathtakingly ambitious legislative agenda, the Johnson administration had to move quickly. In the coming months, Johnson would push through a domestic policy agenda of the scope and scale never seen since FDR’s first hundred days in office. Some of these measures did not outlive the 1960s. Others—notably Medicare and Medicaid—continue to have a profound effect on the political landscape and the lives of ordinary citizens. While recognizing the political challenges, Johnson and his Democratic allies had faith that this collective enterprise could keep the New Deal coalition knit together, and assumed that domestic affairs would prove far more politically important than the conflict in Vietnam. They were wrong.
The election of 1968 became pivotal because it marked both the full-throated emergence of modern conservatism and the agonizing disintegration of the New Deal Democratic coalition. That both dramas played out, in color, on the small television screens in living rooms across America and across the world made these two political transformations on right and left so vivid, so visceral, and so profoundly influential.
The Breakdown
The first ripples of political revolution came in California, not surprising for a place that journalist Carey McWilliams forecast in 1949 as “a revolution within the states … tipping the scales of the nation’s interest and wealth and population to the West.”11 California’s Democratic governor, Pat Brown, was one of the most powerful and iconic liberal politicians of his generation. He was popular, and seemingly unbeatable. In 1962, Richard Nixon had run against him and lost. Coming on the heels of Nixon’s loss to John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election, the defeat seemed to be the end of Nixon’s political career. “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,” the former vice president scowled to reporters afterward.12
But in 1964 and 1965, things started to happen. At the University of California flagship campus in Berkeley, students walked out of classes and held mass demonstrations to protest the university’s restrictions of on-campus political activities. More students were attending college or university in the United States than ever before in the nation’s history, and once they got to these campuses many of these children of American postwar prosperity started to question the status quo and the men who created it. Taking cues from the civil rights movement and its tactics of organized, peaceful protest, the students at Berkeley voiced their displeasure through mass demonstration and continuous occupation. The expansive liberalism of Pat Brown had helped build the California system into the jewel in the crown of American public higher education; now the beneficiaries of this system were turning against it.
The following summer, another big crack appeared in the liberal consensus. Less than a week after Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, the black neighborhood of Watts in Los Angeles exploded into fiery violence. A brief struggle after the arrest of a young black man named Marquette Frye on drunk-driving charges set off six days of violent rebellion. After the fires died down, 34 people were dead, more than a thousand were injured, and the neighborhood lay devastated. The nightly news captured all of it, transmitting raw footage of angry looters and storefronts in flames to viewers sitting in comfortable suburban cul-de-sacs only a few miles away. The tragedy of Watts underscored the incomplete nature of the civil right revolution, which had brought about political rights but had done nothing to ameliorate black poverty.
Enter Ronald Reagan. The movie star had already morphed into a major power player in conservative political circles, and in the late days of the 1964 campaign had burst out onto the public stage with an eloquent televised speech in support of Barry Goldwater. Reagan said many of the same things as Goldwater, but communicated them in a telegenic, compelling, sympathetic way. Messages that seemed scary coming from the 1964 Republican nominee sounded more reasonable when they came from Reagan. Emboldened and encouraged, he ran for California governor in 1966. His campaign was devastatingly effective, painting Brown and his big-government vision as responsible for the chaos on college campuses and Los Angeles streets. Because of soft liberal policies, “this great university has been brought to its knees by a neurotic, dissident minority,” Reagan said. And when it came to Watts, the problem lay with “the Governor turning to these government programs as an answer to poverty.” Reagan defeated Brown, who had seemed so unassailable four years before. His big win was the first shot in the Reagan Revolution.13
Yet another funny thing happened on the way to the 1966 election in California. In the primaries, an antiwar candidate named Robert Scheer won 45 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary for California’s Seventh Congressional District. Scheer hailed from left-leaning Berkeley, where the peace movement certainly was the strongest, but his strong challenge to a Democratic incumbent and Johnson stalwart was a warning shot for the intraparty warfare to come.
Folder 19. Reagan Victory Party, Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles, 1966. Ronald Reagan ran for governor of California in 1966 on a law-and-order message with great appeal to voters made anxious and angry by civil disorders in Los Angeles and student protests in Berkeley. His victory over liberal incumbent Pat Brown was a critical sign of growing conservative momentum among voters. Courtesy Ronald Reagan Library.
What was the meaning of California? political pundits asked. Was America becoming more liberal, more conservative, or both? Only one thing was clear: the 1968 presidential race was not going to be as predictable as Democratic liberals and Rockefeller Republicans had hoped it might be.
The Great Society
Lyndon Johnson had used his 1964 electoral victory as leverage to advance an ambitious agenda designed to ensure that American prosperity was equally shared. He had unveiled this vision in a speech in the spring of 1964 at the University of Michigan that came to encapsulate the bold, optimistic thinking of postwar liberalism. “In your time,” he told the assembled students, “we hav
e the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.” Johnson continued:
This rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time…. The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.14
Government action, Johnson believed, was at the heart of what was needed to bring all these things about. His vision had broad resonance. One Republican legislator mused that Johnson “has not only taken the center, he’s taken most of the right and left as well.”15 After reelection, he set about putting the Great Society agenda into place. To appease the critics of ever-spiraling tax rates (the marginal tax on the rich was the highest it would be at any point in the twentieth century), he pushed through a massive tax cut. Confident that an ever-growing economy would provide the necessary revenue for new social programs, he and his legislative allies passed legislation establishing Medicare and Medicaid, the biggest domestic programs since Social Security.
Drawing inspiration from Franklin Roosevelt, he turned his attention to the people that the New Deal ultimately had failed to help: the poorest of the poor, long-term unemployed, and the young people of color trapped in grim urban ghettos. Johnson had begun his career as a schoolteacher in the hardscrabble Texas Hill Country, and the plight of the mostly Mexican immigrant children he taught had never left him. The result of LBJ’s efforts was a stunning set of legislative achievements during the 89th Congress of 1965–66, ranging from immigration reform to voting rights, education to housing, urban programs to child nutrition.16