The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  Kennedy, it seems reasonable now to say, was assassinated because he sought an office of great authority and worldwide prestige and had declared his intention of continuing American friendship for and support of the State of Israel. To put it another way, he is dead today because the United States is a global power that perceives—or misperceives—a national interest in the outcome of conflicts in almost every part of the world. Thus, it becomes necessary for Americans to confront the fact that, given our ways of conducting our political affairs, our leaders are frequently at the mercy not only of the fanatics and maniacs we ourselves spawn in great profusion but also of haters and potential killers in almost every other country on earth. The mere existence of our power and of our alliances on every continent provides an almost infinite number of motivations for others to intervene in our affairs, as we are intervening in theirs. Some would no doubt argue that this is merely another way of establishing our collective guilt or our guilt as a nation. A case can certainly be made for connecting the capacity for destruction we have created for ourselves with a disposition to violence and a casual resort to it in conflicts among ourselves. But if the case against the young Jordanian is what it appears to be, he was motivated not by the malign exercise of our power but by our refusal to exercise it in behalf of the cause he espouses—or, more accurately, since we have sold arms to Jordan and other Arab countries, by our failure to equip his side with the quantity of power necessary for the total destruction of its enemy. A foreign policy looked upon as peaceful and benign by every American and by most of the world’s people would not lack fanatical enemies. An effective policy of global reconciliation and disarmament would no more appease the Sirhans of this world than the mixed bag of policies we now pursue.

  Since we are unlikely either to resolve our internal discords or to get out of the power business in the foreseeable future, the question raised by all the recent assassinations is whether we can go on choosing our political leaders by the means that are now generally regarded as traditional and are held by some to be essential to the maintenance of democracy. Senator Kennedy believed that there could be no such thing as democratic politics if candidates seeking the public favor could not freely move among the masses of the people wherever they might be encountered. This is the common view among politicians of both parties, and it has been frequently reasserted in the last few days—most strongly by Governor Rockefeller, who said, shortly after Robert Kennedy died, that he had no intention of avoiding crowds or of having any more protection than he has had in the past. It is an attractive as well as a courageous position to take, and it may be sound as political philosophy. It is certainly true that any politician who abandoned the practice of mingling at close quarters with his constituents, actual or potential, would be denying himself the enormous advantage of demonstrating his personal rapport with them and also the value of what he might learn from and about them in such encounters. In 1968, this has seemed particularly true. Senators Kennedy and McCarthy, on the Democratic side, and Governor Rockefeller, on the Republican side, mounted their respective campaigns as certifiable underdogs. It was essential to the strategy of each that he convince the ultimate nominators—the Convention delegates—that people in large numbers would welcome his presence and applaud his views. The surest, if not the only, known way of doing this is to hold open gatherings, to encourage the crowds to swell, and to allow the candidate to fraternize as much as possible with those who have troubled to join him. Moreover, when the dangers of this practice were pointed out to Senator Kennedy and others, they were able to reply that neither John F. Kennedy nor Martin Luther King had been killed while mingling with large numbers of people. Some politicians, one of them being President Johnson, have insisted that they are never safer—in the sense of immunity from assassination, if not in the sense of immunity from bruises and broken toes—than when they are in the midst of large crowds. And it can also be pointed out that Senator Kennedy was shot not while consorting with a crowd but—after several weeks of consorting with many and after having received the news that his techniques had prevailed in California—while he was seeking to avoid one.

  Yet the question is not really whether one kind of exposure is more dangerous than another; it is, rather, whether our leaders are serving us or their principles well by so frequently tempting death. It is true that John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King were shot by snipers, and that no increase in the number of bodyguards is likely to afford protection against a killer armed with a telescopic sight. But the late President would in all probability be alive today if the people on the Dallas streets had seen him through a bubbletop, and it might well have occurred to someone in the entourage of Martin Luther King, who ordinarily had more physical protection than most of our Presidential candidates, that it was imprudent for their leader to silhouette himself on a lighted motel balcony in the city of Memphis on the night of April 4th. In any case, whether or not democracy could survive the abandonment or radical reform of some of the present methods of seeking political support, it seems quite clear that it will have less hope of surviving if the acceptance of national leadership involves a high risk of death. Democracy is unquestionably diminished when there are restraints on the liberty of any citizen to go anywhere he chooses, either alone and unprotected or in the company of others. But it suffered some diminution in this country long ago; the historical fact is that nearly all our Presidents have accepted such restraints, as have most leaders of nations for as long as nations have existed. And it now seems incontestable that democracy was vastly more diminished by the death of Robert Kennedy than it would have been had he lived with more caution and more protection. He spoke for millions who are now, at least temporarily, voiceless.

  The idea that democracy requires the risks our leaders run seems peculiarly American. Few presidents and prime ministers in other countries feel called upon to take so many chances. Some of them might well feel that they could afford more exposure than their American counterparts, for in no other civilized country are lethal weapons so numerous or so easily come by as they are here. Still, foreign leaders less often feel compelled to be in close and dangerous proximity with crowds that may include individuals who wish them dead, and when the need to do so seems unavoidable they have tighter (though often less visible) security. When President Eisenhower went to meet Nikita Khrushchev in Geneva in 1955, the Swiss and other Europeans—including, of course, the Russians—professed to think that the Americans were ridiculously obsessed with security, and so it seemed when one observed six or seven Secret Service men jogging along beside the President’s car as it moved through the streets of Geneva. However, the Swiss and others could afford to regard this as excessive because they had already put into effect security measures of a severeness unknown in this country. The Russians had no joggers; they simply had an enormous delegation consisting largely of strong-arm men. When President de Gaulle played host to the heads of government of this country, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union in 1960—for the summit conference that never took place—his police took the precaution of rounding up hundreds of persons suspected of being capable of attempting assassination and providing them with a holiday in the South of France. No such procedure would be tolerated in this country, and even if it were, a Lee Harvey Oswald or a Sirhan Bishara Sirhan might escape the dragnet. But if we are to preserve civil liberties and at the same time preserve our leaders, either our leaders will have to change their ways or their followers will have to insist that they accept more security. There can be no certain protection against determined assassins, but a bubbletop on the Presidential limousine would have spared President Kennedy, and a bodyguard of seven or eight men might have spared Senator Kennedy.

  Addressing himself to this unpleasant subject a couple of nights ago, Senator Javits gave it as his opinion that the time may have come when we can no longer get along without a national police force. He was aware, he said, that the idea was abhorrent to most Americans and particularly to thos
e of a liberal cast of mind. But he observed that other countries had managed to maintain freedom while giving broad powers of enforcement to a national police, and he did not think that the only protection from tyranny was the preservation of our tradition of local police authority. It is difficult, for example, to see how our scandalous traffic in firearms could be stopped except by a national agency. Thanks to the exertions of the National Rifle Association, Congress is still reluctant to end this traffic, but if its mood changed tomorrow and the toughest possible bill were enacted, its provisions could not and would not be enforced by our constables, sheriffs, and local police; they would lack the means and, in many parts of the country, the will to deal with a problem that might be comparable to disarming a large and hostile military force. Our technology has burdened us with many other problems that seem insoluble by means of anything short of a national police agency. One we may shortly have to face is that of the manufacture of small and not so small nuclear weapons by non-governmental organizations, and even by individuals; to tackle it with any success would require keeping track of fissionable materials all over the country. In view of our failure, even with a national agency, to do much about the circulation of narcotics, the prospect is in any case appalling, but it would be quite hopeless—as perhaps it already is—to entrust it to police responsible to thousands of local authorities.

  There is an understandable tendency in this bitter and grieving city to say that there is no hope for the United States unless it quickly remakes itself in the ways that Robert Kennedy wished it to and unless it immediately equips itself with the foreign policies he urged upon it. Hope may lie where he said it lay. But the fullest and speediest realization of all his dreams would not greatly reduce the vulnerability of many of our finest spirits to the acts of deranged and desperate fanatics. If we are ever to be led to the New Jerusalem, we must do what we can to keep alive those who know the way.

  · · ·

  The moratorium on “politics” agreed to by all the leading candidates is not likely to endure for more than a few days. It is in no one’s interest that it should. A President must be chosen in November, and unless the contenders find some way of addressing themselves to the electorate at an early date, there will be little hope in either party of challenging the front-runners, or even of negotiating any sort of policy compromises with them. It may even now be too late for this. Most people here have for some time been persuaded that neither Humphrey nor Nixon could be denied nomination. Many think that Kennedy’s death has made their strength even greater than it was a week ago. In the view of a large number of Republicans, it was only the possibility of Kennedy’s nomination that gave Nelson Rockefeller any kind of appeal to Republican leaders, and a big part of Kennedy’s strength reflected the view of many Democratic politicians that he could run powerfully against Rockefeller. Among those who were drawn to Kennedy primarily because of his and their opposition to the war, there is a movement to transfer—or, in some cases, retransfer—their support to Senator McCarthy. But what, more than two months ago, made Kennedy seem a more hopeful candidate than McCarthy was his acceptability among such Party leaders as Jesse Unruh, of California, and Mayor Richard Daley, of Chicago. It now seems reasonable to assume that they would be more comfortable with Humphrey as the nominee than with McCarthy. The Kennedy supporters who now are moved to throw their support to McCarthy will be doing so with very little hope of wresting the nomination from Humphrey but with some expectation that anti-war sentiment could be mobilized to wring concessions on foreign policy and on Cabinet appointments. Kennedy and McCarthy, it is being pointed out, had a combined vote of 88 percent in California, and when any politician hears a figure like that he is likely to listen to reason. A similar aim is no doubt being sought by those Republicans who continue to support Rockefeller—though they, of course, can hardly lead from such strength.

  The first Convention—that of the Republicans, in Miami—will get under way just two months from now. In the past, at about this stage of the Presidential year, the handicappers have become very self-assured; in the past, they have, as a rule, had good reasons to. The primaries are over. Most delegations are committed. It is hardly conceivable that any new candidates would be so foolhardy as to declare this late in the proceedings. But in 1968, two months seems a very long time indeed, and very few people are confident enough to look even two days ahead. Most are now conditioned to expect the unexpected and to acknowledge the existence of many new impulses in American life—some of them terrifying, some of them heartening, nearly all of them incalculable as to force and meaning. Moreover, there is a widespread awareness—which the latest assassination will surely increase—that we are not and never again can be in full control of our destiny. We cannot determine the course of the war in Vietnam or the course of the talks in Paris; what the Convention delegates do in August and what the voters do in November may be governed by what armies in Asia and diplomats in Europe do or fail to do in the meanwhile. But on this melancholy weekend the strongest possibility that anyone can foresee is the nomination by the Democrats of the Vice-President and by the Republicans of the last Republican holder of that office.

  A NOTE BY EVAN OSNOS

  IN THE SUMMER of 1968, William Shawn, who gave interviews as rarely as possible, conceded to a reporter that the unruly state of the world was making it impossible for The New Yorker to remain as merrily detached as it had once intended to be. (Harold Ross used to say, “Let the other magazines be important.”) Shawn, speaking to Women’s Wear Daily, said, “There is no question that the magazine has come to have a greater social and political and moral awareness, and to feel a greater responsibility.”

  Since the mid-sixties, the magazine had been publishing searing reports on the growing morass in Vietnam. In December, 1965, Michael J. Arlen wrote that “we fight a ground war, but not, it would appear, in order to possess the ground.” Some readers urged The New Yorker to return its focus to the five boroughs, or, at least, to a posture of determined disinterest; in a letter from 1970, a resident of upper Fifth Avenue cautioned, “If you subscribe to the liberalism which has done so much harm to our country, you should at least not allow it to show so obviously.”

  When the writers of The New Yorker ventured abroad in the 1960s, they found a world unfastening itself from older dispositions. It was flush with fragile new freedoms but uneasy about the passage of power into unproven hands. If the forties had presented a planet starkly divided between allies and enemies, and the fifties took shape along the battle lines of the Cold War, the sixties provided only a muddled map, in which few familiar landmarks—empires, dictators, and mores—remained untouched.

  Emily Hahn, the magazine’s most inveterate wanderer, arrived in Lagos in late September, 1960, primed to witness a “mystic moment of changeover,” from British colony to independent nation. But when the moment arrived, at 12 A.M. on October 1st, the newly free Nigerians greeted it not with celebration but with exhaustion and a faint sense of uncertainty. “I listened expectantly for the whoops of joy,” Hahn wrote. “There were none.”

  In many places, writers found their subjects suspended somewhere between rival ideologies. Hans Koningsberger was born in Amsterdam and fought in the Dutch Resistance and for the British Army before reaching the United States, in 1951. He spent most of the sixties on an extended political safari, writing from the Soviet Union, China, South America, and Europe. He visited Cuba in 1961, two years after Castro’s ascendance, and found it rapidly, if not thoroughly, de-Americanized. “Most of the familiar signs are still there—Goodyear, Sears, Woolworth—but the subtitle ‘Nacionalizada’ gives them a darkly different accent,” he wrote. His dinner companions were ill at ease, not yet willing to place their faith in Socialism or, for that matter, in America.