American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  “These alienated intellectuals,” exclaimed John Roche, now an LBJ aide, to Jimmy Breslin. “Mainly the New York artsy-crafty set. They’re in the Partisan Review and the New York Review and publications like that. The West Side jackal bins, I call them. They intend to launch a revolution from Riverside Drive.” He named names—Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Mailer …

  Anti-Vietnam protest reached a new peak in April 1967, when at least a quarter million people gathered at the sprawling Sheep Meadow in Central Park and marched to the United Nations to hear King, Spock, Carmichael, and other notables speak passionately against the war. Though dizzied by the size of the New York rally, SDS leaders and some of their older associates were becoming convinced that protest was not enough—they must move on to resistance. Once again the rank-and-file activists took the lead: a three-day takeover of the University of Chicago administration building—Harvard SDS activists surrounding McNamara’s car and heatedly interrogating him—“We Won’t Go” statements and signings of students on dozens of campuses—an intense but nonviolent effort to obstruct Dow Chemical recruiting at the University of Wisconsin, triggering a ferocious assault by riot-clad police—and in late October 1967, a march on the very center of the “military-industrial complex,” the Pentagon, that huge, squat, World War II rampart across the Potomac from Washington.

  The battle of the Pentagon was carefully planned as a rally for beginners, a “be-in” for hippies, an act of militant civil disobedience for the already committed, and as a “creative synthesis” of “Gandhi and guerrilla.” First an array of “witches, warlocks, holymen, seers, prophets, mystics, saints, sorcerers, shamans, troubadours, minstrels, bards, roadmen, and madmen,” led by the Diggers, a West Coast group of artists-organizers and “anarchists of the deed,” and by a rock band called the Fugs, invoked every bit of their magic to levitate the Pentagon and exorcise its demonic spirits. Unaccountably the Pentagon did not levitate. After an SDS vanguard and others broke through a cordon of MPs and National Guardsmen and seized high ground in the plaza before the building, several thousand more protesters pressed their way up against solid rows of rigid young soldiers carrying bayoneted M-14s. Through bullhorns and face to face the protesters conducted a teach-in to win over the troops.

  “Join us!” they shouted, and then more gently, “You are our brothers.” They pleaded with the soldiers, sang to them, placed flowers in their upraised gun barrels. The rigid lines hardly wavered, nor did their confronters. As night fell and cold set in, protesters built campfires from posters and debris and shared their marijuana joints. When someone yelled “Burn a draft card! Keep warm!” hundreds of little flames flickered in the darkness—the ultimate “burn-in.” When the television cameras were gone, a flying wedge of troops broke them up with clubs and rifle butts. The next day the remaining protesters, singing “This Land Is Your Land,” quietly offered themselves for jail.

  By this time, late 1967, the number of American troops in Vietnam was approaching a half million. Facing resistance in Vietnam and at home as strong as ever, Johnson struggled with his own ambivalence. He burned under the protesters’ caricature of him as a wild Texan aching to fire his six-shooters come high noon. Even in the White House he could hear the protesters, out on Pennsylvania Avenue, chanting, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?” More and more the war heightened the war within himself. He hated to escalate, while step by step he escalated. Close associates—George Ball, Bill Moyers, and more recently McNamara—had broken away from him largely because of Vietnam. To the Chiefs of Staff, especially anxious for even fewer restrictions on bombing, he grumbled, “Bomb, bomb, bomb, that’s all you know.” He would not provoke Peking or Moscow. “I’m not going to spit in China’s face,” he said. On the other hand, “We can’t hunker down like a jackass in a hailstorm.” LBJ was no longer exhibiting the kind of Rooseveltian leadership that he prized.

  It was now Hanoi, not Washington, that was preparing for a major escalation. Even more than Johnson, the communist leaders recognized an intensifying deadlock in the south. They detected worrisome signs. The party cadres seemed to be losing some of their revolutionary zeal after years of war. They were ignoring the doctrine “from the masses, to the masses,” losing touch with the villages, appearing even “passive and pessimistic.” It was time for bold revolutionary action, for the shock of violence. Hanoi carefully planned devastating attacks at over a hundred cities and towns, aimed at reinvigorating the military cadres, carrying the war for the first time from the countryside into urban areas, arousing the revolutionary potential among the South Vietnamese masses, and throwing both the Americans and the Saigon regime off balance. The attack would be launched at the start of Tet, the lunar new year holiday that by long custom had been observed with a cease-fire.

  The Tet offensive burst out in South Vietnam like an eruption of electrical storms. From the tip of the delta to the northern border the communists struck at five of the six major cities and most of the provincial capitals. Their most publicized feat was an invasion of the fortresslike United States embassy in Saigon, their most dramatic victory the temporary capture of Hué. No quarter was shown: the attackers executed hundreds of soldiers and civilians in Hué; the chief of South Vietnam’s national police shot a bound captive out of hand on the streets of Saigon in full view of cameramen. Taken by surprise, American and South Vietnamese forces rallied strongly enough to recapture all the lost centers, usually after savage combat.

  Blood-soaked bodies lying on the embassy lawn—the corpses of American dead piled on a personnel carrier—a Saigon official murdering a frightened and helpless captive—these pictures shocked the American public all the more after a series of optimistic statements by the commanding general in Vietnam, William Westmoreland. A serious military setback to Hanoi was converted by the press coverage into proof that the Administration had been lying about progress in Vietnam. Even the avuncular Walter Cronkite, who had flown to Vietnam for a firsthand look at Tet, was said to have demanded, “What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning the war! “ “It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate,” the CBS newscaster told his huge audience in a special report when he returned to New York.

  In vain LBJ insisted that once “the American people know the facts,” the communists would not “achieve a psychological victory.” This was what they had achieved. The public after a decade of Vietnam had had enough “facts.” It wanted the truth.

  And the truth was that the United States could win this war only at a price it would not pay. The Administration even now did not fully recognize this; intense debates broke out in the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon in response to the generals’ request for another 206,000 men—which would have required mobilization of the reserves—to launch a post-Tet counterattack. Even the Pentagon was at war with itself. Civilian advisers to McNamara’s successor, the noted Washington lawyer Clark Clifford, warned that further escalation would send shock waves through the nation. But the military pressed for more. Clifford, who himself had turned against the war, convened for Johnson’s benefit a meeting of the so-called Wise Men, pillars of the national security establishment like Dean Acheson, John McCloy, McGeorge Bundy, Cyrus Vance.

  It was a moment of truth for men brought up in a world when, time and again, American power had made the crucial difference in Europe, in the Pacific, in Korea. Now they told LBJ, like the gentlemen they were but in blunt language, that the war policy was bankrupt, the cost, political and financial, was too high. The key point, Vance said later, was that division in the country “was growing with such acuteness” as to threaten to “tear the United States apart.” Said LBJ: “The establishment bastards have bailed out.”

  Politics was already dividing the nation—this was election year 1968. Vietnam dominated the scene as the presidential primaries got underway. “The President is confronted with the resistance, open or passive, of
the whole military generation, their teachers, their friends, their families,” Walter Lippmann wrote. Public approval of Johnson’s handling of the war dropped to an all-time low of 26 percent after Tet—hard reading for a President who followed polls as closely as his blood pressure. Sensing LBJ’s weakness, Senator Eugene McCarthy entered the New Hampshire primary. A product, along with Humphrey and a dozen other national leaders, of Minnesota’s potent Democratic-Farmer-Labor school of doctrinal politics, McCarthy was committed to ending the Vietnam war. When he gained a remarkable 42 percent of the New Hampshire Democratic vote, he lost to the President but captured the nation’s headlines. For LBJ it was a political Tet—he had mobilized the most electoral power but lost the psychological battle.

  No leader was more confounded by the New Hampshire surprise than Robert Kennedy, Senator from New York since 1964. Tet had shocked him into making his most passionate speech against the war; it had also made McCarthy formidable. Yet a Gallup poll showed that 70 percent of the American people wanted to continue the bombing. All save Johnson assumed that LBJ would run again; no major party in the twentieth century had repudiated its man in the White House. Now, after New Hampshire, McCarthy might have LBJ on the run. For weeks Kennedy and his old political friends had agonized over the New York senator’s running. They divided over it too: Ted Kennedy and Ted Sorensen opposed the idea, while others saw no alternative. Robert Kennedy, as competitive as ever, could not allow this rival to preempt the Vietnam issue or indeed the whole anti-Johnson movement. In mid-March, Kennedy announced for the presidency in the caucus room of the old Senate office building, where John Kennedy had thrown his hat into the ring eight years earlier.

  During this month the White House had been undergoing its own agonizing over Vietnam. On March 31, Johnson took to the airwaves to announce a unilateral halt of all United States air and naval bombardment of most of the populated areas of the north. He called on Hanoi to join in negotiations. Then, as his listeners stared speechless at their television screens, the President said at the end of his talk, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.” He had had enough, he told Doris Kearns later. He was being stampeded from all directions—“rioting blacks, demonstrating students, marching welfare mothers, squawking professors, and hysterical reporters.” Then the thing he had feared most—Bobby Kennedy back in the fray, embodying the Kennedy heritage.

  April was the cruelest month. Martin Luther King’s dream came to an end, for him, on the balcony of the black-owned Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where he had been championing a strike by garbagemen. One shot from a sniper’s rifle flew across the motel’s courtyard, cut King’s spinal column, and crumpled him to the floor. Within hours blacks in cities and towns across the nation exploded in wrath and frustration against this ultimate racial crime. Over 2,000 fires were set, over 2,000 people arrested, over 20,000 injured. The nation’s capital suffered the worst devastation, with ten deaths and over 700 fires. A white man was dragged from his car and stabbed to death. William Manchester noted the bitter irony: the death of the greatest prophet of nonviolence touched oil the worst outburst of arson, looting, and crime in the nation’s history.

  Clearly the war issue had catalyzed black revolt and student unrest, not superseded them. The three issues collided and coalesced at Columbia University in the same tempestuous month of April. A few hundred student activists, after demonstrating against the university’s ties with a Pentagon think tank for war research, left the campus and descended into the hilly Harlem park—a buffer zone between the old university and the teeming ghetto below—where Columbia was building a gymnasium with a bottom level that would offer a “separate-but-equal” facility for Harlem. After tearing down a fence and denouncing “Gym Crow,” the students headed back to the campus, occupied the main undergraduate building, and “imprisoned” an acting dean. When black students who had joined the takeover asked the whites to leave so that the blacks could “go all the way,” the white activists surged toward the administration building, Low Library, heaved a board through a window, and made themselves at home in the suite of President Grayson Kirk.

  For several days the strike gathered momentum, as the blacks renamed their captive building Malcolm X Hall, the whites experimented with techniques of participatory democracy and communal living, and three more buildings were occupied. An arm’s-length alliance between black and white students kept the forces of law at bay while the administration negotiated with the occupiers through the faculty. The stickler was amnesty. Several tense days of deadlock followed—then a thousand cops smashed through the barricades and arrested 700, leaving 150 injured. A new strike ended classes for the year. In the end the gym was abandoned, so the children of Harlem lost; students never won amnesty; Kirk retired from the university.

  “Oh, God. When is this violence going to stop?” Robert Kennedy had cried out when he was told that King had been shot. His cry could as well have resounded in Europe, as 1968 became the “year of the barricades,” with eruptions of protest and reprisal in a long arc from art colleges in Britain to huge labor walkouts and street violence in France to university turbulence in Madrid to students marching in Belgrade and chanting “Free art, free theater” in Warsaw. By late June Kennedy was campaigning in the style his brother Jack had made famous. But people were sensing in him a compassion and desperate concern beyond anything Kennedys had before exhibited on the hustings. His blue eyes, Jack Newfield had noticed earlier, “were now sad rather than cold, haunted rather than hostile.” He spoke for the poor, the underclass that establishment and students alike had bypassed. The poor “are hidden in our society,” he would say. “No one sees them any more.” But he did.

  Liberals backing McCarthy were furious with him as a Johnny-come-lately and as a Kennedy. McCarthy himself, waging a campaign of issues, warned against presidential power and the Kennedy type of “personalization of the presidency” at the expense of the kind of leadership that “must exist in every man and every woman.” Such adversaries Kennedy could at least see and even respect. Out there somewhere were the haters and the killers. Early in June, on a Tuesday evening in Los Angeles, after hearing the California primary returns that gave him a clear win over McCarthy and a realistic chance for the presidency, and after giving a brief talk for the poor and against violence, he left the hotel ballroom by a “safer” route through the kitchen for his own appointment in Samarra.

  In a very real sense, David Broder wrote later, the Democratic party never recovered in 1968 from the shock of Robert Kennedy’s assassination. Certainly the suspense was gone, for Hubert Humphrey, inheriting the established labor-liberal leadership in the Democracy, was bound to win the convention endorsement in Mayor Daley’s Chicago. Others did keenly look forward to the convention—most notably the Youth International Party or “Yippies,” which aimed at shaping the youth culture into a revolutionary fighting force, using sensational media events instead of grass-roots organizing. They would nominate for President a live pig named “Pigasus.” While the Yippies helped turn the convention into the theater of the absurd, with others they made it a theater of conflict. Bathed in the eerie glare of TV lights, protesters and police fought it out in the heart of the city. In the convention hall Senator Abraham Ribicoff, in a dramatic nominating speech for Senator George McGovern, told Mayor Daley and the other delegates, “With George McGovern, we wouldn’t have Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago,” turning the mayor purple with rage.

  When Richard Nixon completed the first leg of his comeback from the bitter defeats of the 1960 presidential election and the 1962 California gubernatorial race by easily winning the Republican nomination over New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, the stage seemed set for a climactic and even historic collision between warring philosophies, programs, and politicians. No one provoked Democrats as readily as Nixon, who intended to keep the focus on Democratic failures rather than Republican proposals. President Johnson’s anoint
ment of Humphrey, however grudging, put the burden of defending the Democratic party record on the Vice President, however much he might want to strike out on his own. George Wallace’s entrance into the race challenged both parties but especially the Administration’s civil rights record. Eager to meet this challenge, black leaders stepped up their voter registration efforts. In a year already filled with tumult and bloodshed some observers anticipated a “real Donnybrook.”

  The campaign did indeed get underway amid suspense and excitement, as Humphrey sought to reach out to the peace forces without antagonizing the still powerful and still proud President in the White House, as Nixon tried to go on the attack without reviving memories of the red-baiting “Tricky Dick” of the 1940s and 1950s, and as Wallace made a direct populist pitch to segregationists, fundamentalists, and blue-collar labor in their own vernacular. Wallace enlivened matters by choosing as his running mate on the American Independent ticket retired general Curtis E. LeMay, former chief of the Strategic Air Command, who presented a caricature of the bomb-wielding militarist and appeared, in Marshall Frady’s words, as “politically graceful as an irate buffalo on a waxed waltz floor.”

  These political pyrotechnics were deceptive. The campaign became largely a battle of personalities rather than policies, mainly because Humphrey and Nixon hewed so closely to a centrist, consensual position on the issue of Vietnam that most voters saw little difference in their positions—and those voters who did see a distinction did not agree on which candidate was more hawk or more dove. Nixon was a “master of ambiguity” on Vietnam, a scholarly study concluded, and Humphrey “alternated between protestations of loyalty to current policy, and hints that he really disagreed with it.” Wallace, charging that there was not a “dime’s worth of difference” between the Tweedledum and Tweedledee candidates, appealed directly to the “forgotten Americans” and their sense of political alienation, powerlessness, estrangement from government, loss of freedom— and to their chauvinism, racism, and hatred of war resisters in the colleges.