Pivotal Tuesdays
Page 14
The high-spend, low-tax regime of the Great Society did not take into account the spiraling costs of Vietnam. In his 1966 State of the Union address Johnson acknowledged, “because of Vietnam we cannot do all that we should, or all that we would like to do,” but continued to argue that the bold domestic agenda must go forward.17 Some fellow Democrats disagreed. “Despite brave talk about having both ‘guns and butter,’” Arkansas senator William Fulbright declared, “the Vietnamese war has already had a destructive effect on the Great Society.”18
Over the course of 1966, the Vietnam War began to burst into the forefront of national consciousness as more and more young American men were conscripted into the military. Between 1960 and 1964, an average of 100,000 men had been drafted annually. In 1966, it peaked at more than 380,000. To avoid the uncertainties of conscription and increase the odds of securing jobs away from the front lines of combat, about four times that many enlisted voluntarily in the military, so that by 1968 a third of all American twenty-year-old men were in uniform.19
These soldiers were members of a new and politically challenging generation. The baby boom after World War II had produced a huge wave of young people who had grown up in an America more affluent, more educated, and more comfortable than any period before in its history. Time magazine named the under twenty-five generation (men and women) its “man of the year” in 1967. In flowery newsweekly prose, Time reporters wrote, “This is not just a new generation, but a new kind of generation…. He is the man who will land on the moon, cure cancer and the common cold, lay out blight-proof, smog-free cities, enrich the underdeveloped world, and no doubt, write finis to poverty and war.”20
However, the young people in the suburbs and on the college campuses were not thinking that they would solve the world’s problems on their parents’ terms. In fact, they thought society’s problems mostly came from things their parents’ generation had done in the first place. By the time they became “man of the year,” they were not as singularly focused on cancer cures and moon landings as their elders expected them to be. They were growing their hair long, dropping out, marching and striking, and condemning their political leaders for doing far too little to stop the carnage of Vietnam, address racial discrimination, and fix economic inequality.
The looming specter of the draft made the Vietnam crisis deeply personal for the under twenty-five generation. The proportion of eligible Americans who served in Vietnam ultimately was far smaller than in either World War II—when eight of ten eligible men had entered the military—or Korea, but the uncertainty of the draft, and the particular vulnerability of young, unmarried men to being called up, made it an ever-present worry. Anxiety escalated as Johnson called for more and more troops. Poor and minority men proved much more likely to be called up and see active duty.21 “It seems like every time you hear about a Chicago boy getting killed over there, it turns out to be a Negro,” one shopkeeper on Chicago’s Westside commented to a reporter. Civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., started to raise their voices in sharp criticism of the men Johnson had put in charge of running the war. “The bombs in Vietnam explode at home,” King told a Senate subcommittee in late 1966. “They destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America.”22
Many other voices joined the chorus. The nonviolent tactics King and others had used to mobilize broad-based support for civil rights had shown other Americans how these strategies could organize and mobilize other kinds of social protest. College students were among those most energized by these sorts of tactics, and the great spike in college attendance after World War II meant that more and more young people were on campus, talking about Vietnam, and ready to protest against it. In the summer of 1965, over 17,000 peace activists crowded into Madison Square Garden to protest the war; a few months later, more than 30,000 marched on Washington. In early 1966, leaders of the peace movement announced plans to mobilize support for antiwar Congressional candidates. The antiwar movement was growing.23
By 1967, it was abundantly clear that Vietnam had painted Johnson into a political corner and was eating away at all the other achievements he had made in his domestic agenda. Liberal Democratic activists started a “Dump Johnson” movement and busily started vetting various antiwar senators as potential primary challengers. Republicans condemned Johnson both for the conduct of the war and for the conduct of the war protesters. Venerable commentator Walter Lippmann concluded that Johnson had “gone off the deep end.”24
The venomous reaction people had against him personally was made all the more infuriating because Johnson had entered his presidency with many doubts about Vietnam. Speaking to his political mentor, Georgia senator Richard B. Russell, in a phone call in the spring of 1964, he had confessed that he kept asking himself “what the hell are we going to get out of it?” But withdrawing didn’t seem an option: “I don’t see any other way out,” he said, ruefully. Instead, he turned around and told his advisors that he was determined not to “lose Vietnam.” Besides, it wasn’t even a real war yet; the public had little inkling of the decisions being made and the rationale behind them. The next year, escalation began.25
Johnson became Target Number One for an under twenty-five generation anxious about the draft, outraged about racial prejudice and frustrated with society’s attempts to right the wrongs of poverty and injustice. The author of the Great Society, who considered himself a fighter for the poorest of the poor, was now vilified as a symbol of a heartless establishment. “I don’t understand these young people,” Johnson later told a biographer. “Don’t they realize I’m really one of them? … I’m not some conformist middle-class personality.”26
The tragedy of Vietnam caused Americans to lose faith in Johnson, and along with it they lost faith in the consensus liberalism and big politics he championed. Government no longer promised solutions; instead, it created problems. Both Democrats and Republicans started to break away from the vast moderate middle that had dominated politics from Roosevelt and Truman through Eisenhower and Kennedy. Other American voters, particularly younger ones, turned away from party politics altogether. They moved toward the left, and toward the right. As they did so, their ideas about the source of society’s problems—and the necessary solutions—started to diverge dramatically. Yet coming into the election season of 1968, there was general agreement on both ends that the Vietnam conflict had been grossly mismanaged, and that the men in the White House were to blame.
Another catalytic political shift was occurring in the civil rights movement. Johnson had magisterially presided over signing the Civil Rights Act into law in 1964, followed by the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Both were landmarks, remedying decades of political and legal injustice, but they had done little to help the deep economic inequality faced by communities of color. The civil rights movement had largely played out in the South, where Jim Crow segregation and overt racial bigotry and violence had horrified a nation and built support for federal intervention. Yet an increasingly large portion of black America lived in the ghettos of northern, urban industrial cities, and civil rights legislation had done nothing to alleviate their plight.
Many African American leaders felt that Johnson’s war on poverty agenda did not seem to do much either. Although the president talked a big game, the legislative results merely chipped away at social problems with big, systemic origins. “My major criticism,” testified the Urban League’s Whitney Young in a Senate hearing, “is that we are, in effect, using a slingshot for a job that calls for nuclear weapons.” People in the most affected communities agreed. On Chicago’s majority black South Side, “the residents in the community are becoming convinced that the whole program is a farce,” community activist Marie Brookter told a reporter.27
This frustration spilled out vividly and violently in poor black neighborhoods, beginning with small disturbances and escalating into much larger ones. After the devastating rioting in the Los Angeles Watts neighborhood in the summer of 1965, similar paroxysms of violence tore ap
art black neighborhoods across the country in the summers of 1966, 1967, and 1968. Whenever the weather heated up, mayhem followed. White liberals, who had marched for civil rights and shared Johnson’s Great Society idealism, began to recognize that bigger problems were not being addressed “The social dynamite created by poor, black central cities surrounded by comfortable white suburbs,” one man wrote to the New York Times, “may present a more serious challenge to our democracy than Communism in Vietnam.”28
The summer of 1967 saw two civil disorders unmatched in size and devastation—one in Newark, and another in Detroit a week and a half later. Afterward, President Johnson charged a federal commission with investigating the causes of these events, which grimly concluded, “white racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.” The people in Watts and Newark and Detroit had known that for years.29
Momentum shifted away from some civil rights leaders and toward others. Some in the new generation of African Americans began to be impatient with the nonviolent tactics of Martin Luther King, Jr., and his allies. They were frustrated by alliances with white liberals, who could sympathize with the cause of racial equity but never had to experience discrimination themselves. They saw both Vietnam and the War on Poverty as policies for which people of color paid the highest price. Stokely Carmichael, an activist who had participated in the Freedom Rides alongside white college students in the early 1960s, was one leader of a new Black Power movement that placed economic injustice front and center and took a more militant approach to the civil rights struggle. As Carmichael put it: “You can’t form a coalition with people who are economically secure. College students are economically secure; they already got their wealth; we are fighting to get ours. And for us to get it is going to mean tearing down their system, and they are not willing to work for their own destruction.”30
Carmichael was articulating a new sort of identity politics that was the antithesis of big politics of Cold War consensus liberalism. It wasn’t a vision where “we all are in this together,” where government insures universal welfare and equal rights. It was a vision of an America that was diverse, often unjust, and where different groups didn’t necessarily see eye to eye.
The New Year
The liberal effort to block Johnson from reelection and get an antiwar candidate before the voters bore fruit at the end of 1967. Minnesota senior senator Eugene McCarthy announced he would run for the Democratic nomination. Gene McCarthy was a fifty-year-old former college professor with a love for poetry and an impatience for petty legislative politics. One colleague said McCarthy was “the most intelligent man in Congress”—but he did not intend this to be a compliment. McCarthy had his first moment of national prominence in 1960, when he spoke in support of Adlai Stevenson’s candidacy for the Democratic nomination. The eventual nominee, Jack Kennedy, never forgave him for it, and the deep dislike between McCarthy and the Kennedys had grown ever since. Johnson had toyed with nominating McCarthy as his vice president in the 1964 race, but went with the other senator from Minnesota, Hubert Humphrey.31
By late 1967, McCarthy was bored with the Senate and deeply frustrated by the Johnson administration’s conduct in the Vietnam War. He was bitter that others had risen to higher office while he languished in the legislature. “I’m twice as liberal as Hubert Humphrey … and twice as Catholic as Jack Kennedy,” McCarthy once said, not entirely joking. The father of college-age children, he ultimately became convinced to throw his hat into the ring by his daughter Mary, a Radcliffe freshman. “The aging politician,” noted one election chronicler, “raised the flag for a children’s crusade.”32
However, the smart money was still on Lyndon Johnson. The first primary was in traditionally conservative New Hampshire, and polling data before the election indicated McCarthy was not going to make a serious dent. To seasoned political observers, the McCarthy campaign’s heavy reliance on student volunteers made it seem even more like amateur hour. Major national newspapers spent little time covering the candidate; when one supporter of McCarthy wrote the New York Times complaining of its inattention, the paper replied that the Minnesota senator was a “one-issue” candidate not deserving any more than cursory coverage.33
The polls, professionals, and papers were wrong. When the final tally came in, Johnson won the Democratic primary, but McCarthy came in only 7 percentage points behind. The “student power” McCarthy had employed turned out to be extraordinarily effective: more than ten thousand young people who came to New Hampshire full of passion and willing to do anything to see their candidate succeed. “Not since the civil rights march on Mississippi in the summer of 1964 had so many young Americans committed themselves so fervently to a major national cause,” Time magazine reported with some amazement. Their devotion extended to shaving off beards and cutting long hair in order to be “Neat and Clean for Gene,” as the campaign slogan proclaimed.34
New York senator Robert F. Kennedy was watching all this unfold. The loathing between Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson is legendary. In the flurry of back-room dealing that chose a running mate for John Kennedy in 1960, Bobby Kennedy had worked himself into all kinds of political contortions to prevent his brother from choosing Johnson, whom he considered imperious, crass, and racist. Johnson, in turn, considered the younger Kennedy brother an impertinent and amoral attack dog. During the Kennedy presidency, Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon Johnson continually butted heads. It got worse after JFK’s death. Kennedy once said of Johnson: “In every conversation I have with him, he lies.” Johnson, in turn, dismissed Kennedy as a “little snot-nosed son-of-a-bitch.”35
From the moment Johnson became president, people around Robert Kennedy kept floating the idea that he should run for the White House himself. History seemed to advise against RFK’s trying to do it in 1968. No incumbent president had ever failed to become his party’s nominee, and the seasoned advisors around Kennedy—as well as the man himself—concluded he should wait until 1972.
Yet as the years passed, Kennedy sensed the change in the country’s mood, and his politics were shifting as well. He traveled around the country relentlessly, and his visits to burned-out inner cities made him increasingly focused on the problems of racial injustice and poverty. Although he had been part of his brother’s inner circle as it made early, crucial decisions on Vietnam, he watched with horror as the conflict escalated. His experience in his brother’s administration had made him suspicious of what military and intelligence leaders said and did. Seeing Johnson sink farther into the Vietnam quagmire, he began to suspect that his old enemy was not merely loathsome, but actually insane.36
McCarthy’s victory in New Hampshire showed Kennedy that antiwar sentiment was strong enough to topple the president. An obscure senator from Minnesota might not be able to do it. But a Kennedy could. RFK had forcefully denied planning to run as recently as January, but no sooner were the New Hampshire results tallied that he said, “I am reassessing my position.” Four days later, with loving wife and ten children at his side, he held a press conference on Capitol Hill. He announced that he was running.
In making this move, RFK bucked both the Democratic Party establishment and the gentlemen’s agreements delineating acceptable political behavior. He was not only challenging a sitting president of his own party, but also trampling all over Eugene McCarthy’s attempt to become the candidate of the antiwar movement. “This is the cheapest sort of opportunism,” blasted the conservative Chicago Tribune. “Not since the days of Aaron Burr has the country been treated to such an example of unbridled personal ambition.” Liberal columnist Murray Kempton was even more harsh on Kennedy: “He has, in the naked display of his rage at Eugene McCarthy for having survived on the lonely road he dared not walk himself, done with a single great gesture something very few public men have ever been able to do: in one day he managed to confirm the worst things his enemies have ever said about him.”37
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Although the press might have howled, the entry of the charismatic Kennedy began to erode the candidacy of the sober, poetry-quoting Eugene McCarthy. The next big primary was Wisconsin, where the president was running far behind McCarthy in the polls. Johnson announced his withdrawal from the race two days before the Wisconsin vote, and it was a good thing he did. McCarthy won over 400,000 votes, edging out the president by more than 150,000. Robert Kennedy was not on the ballot, but got over 46,000 votes as a write-in.38
With Wisconsin, things became more complicated. Johnson was gone, but McCarthy was showing himself to be a serious opponent to Kennedy. The young people who had mobilized for McCarthy felt that he, not RFK, was the authentic antiwar candidate. Yet the liberal power brokers who had worked so hard behind the scenes to get a Johnson challenger were experiencing a bit of buyer’s remorse when it came to Gene McCarthy. An outsider and an iconoclast, and more conservative at heart than some of his bleeding-heart liberal allies liked, McCarthy was an imperfect candidate for an antiwar faction who wanted victory in November. For some of them, Kennedy had been their first choice. Now that Kennedy was officially in, their enthusiasm for McCarthy became several degrees cooler. Allard Lowenstein, chief architect of the “Dump Johnson” movement in 1967 and passionate Robert Kennedy loyalist, tried to broker a deal where Kennedy and McCarthy would agree to split the remaining candidates so the antiwar vote would not have to be shared between the two of them. Deeply irritated, McCarthy turned the deal down. On the stump, his jabs at Kennedy became personal. “He plays touch football,” scoffed McCarthy to one crowd. “I play football.”39