Landslide

by Jonathan Darman

  “And so it went,” the Newsweek story continued, “with astonishing variety and numbing repetition—across the U.S. in midsummer.” Moving on from the poor little boy in Worcester, the magazine provided a ghastly roll of crime victims across the country. Suellen Evans, on her way home from summer school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, who’d “encountered a swarthy man who attempted rape and stabbed her fatally in the neck and heart.” Mary Ellen Bay, twenty-seven, stabbed to death with a screwdriver by a nineteen-year-old rice mill worker. Two “pretty … University of Texas coeds” found dead, their bodies “blackened” and only “partly clad.” These attacks and others like them, said Newsweek, left “an impression of U.S. society slipping into a condition of epidemic criminality.”

  Never mind that, as the magazine noted briskly, “many observers believe [the impression] is distorted.” What mattered wasn’t the reality of violent crime—“a malignant enemy in America’s midst,” said President Johnson—but its effect on the nation’s imagination. “As the malignancy spread,” Newsweek observed, “it was inevitably outdistanced by anxiety and apprehension.” Most Americans were at no greater risk of falling victim to gruesome violence than they had been the year before or the year before that. But they believed they were. They grew afraid of something unknown but awful, lurking just out of sight.

  Feeding the fear was now a chief pastime in the culture. That summer, The New Yorker had plans for a four-part excerpt of a new work of nonfiction by Truman Capote. The book, In Cold Blood, described the terrible fate of the Clutter family of Holcombe, Kansas. Herbert and Bonnie Clutter and their two teenage children had been murdered, one by one, by two paroled convicts who’d come to their isolated farmhouse for a hoard of cash they’d heard was in the Clutters’ safe. Capote’s tale, published in book form the following January, would become a classic for its deep reportage from inside the minds of the Clutters’ killers. But it grabbed readers in the 1960s with its terrible premise: a normal family, living in their unremarkable home, unaware of the evil agents on the highway getting closer by the second. “I’ve been staggered by the letters I’ve received,” Capote would say after the book’s publication. “About 70 percent … think of the book as a reflection on American life, this collision between the desperate, ruthless, wandering, savage part of American life, and the other, which is insular and safe, more or less.” The tale of the poor Clutters spoke to people because “there is something so awfully inevitable about what is going to happen: the people in the book are completely beyond their own control.”

  So much of life, it seemed, was like that—slipping beyond control. No one knew what to make of what was happening to the nation’s youth, who seemed to be turning toward coarse and dangerous pursuits. In July, Time reported that “resort towns” all over the nation had been besieged by mobs of young people who had celebrated the Independence Day holiday in rollicking, disorderly fashion. The crowds were “college students from middle-class families with middle-level incomes” who had nonetheless dissolved into angry riots, shouting things like “We want booze!” and “We want beer!” prompting a rebuke from police and, in more than one case, the National Guard. “The state with the most trouble was Ohio,” Time said,

  where 590 National Guardsmen were mobilized to restore peace to two different towns—Russells Point and Geneva-on-the-Lake. Before they did, 1,500 youths at Russells Point had broken the glass of every store front in town, set fire to homes and businesses, driven firemen away with rocks. At Geneva-on-the-Lake, some 8,000 students rioted for three hours, mauling three police cruisers, smashing shop windows, and keeping residents awake with blasts from three-foot-long plastic horns.

  Of course, most of the nation’s youth had more serious concerns than the absence of beer. Most American colleges in 1965 were not yet the hotbeds of civil disobedience they would become by decade’s end. But a few campuses were on the leading edge. At the University of California, Berkeley, in the fall of 1964, students in the “Free Speech Movement” had launched a series of protests against university policies that banned political activity on campus. That December, when some four thousand students staged a sit-in at the university’s Sproul Hall, hundreds were arrested in the early morning hours under the authority of California’s governor, Pat Brown. In the spring, the protesters were reorganized, with an agenda that extended beyond California—protesting, in particular, American policy in Vietnam.

  Everyone was worried that summer would mean more unrest in the nation’s cities. In New York, home to the worst rioting in the previous summer, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., warned that the city was facing another “summer of discontent.” The first weeks went by without incident, but apprehension rose with the temperature. “The fuel of unrest and injustice is still here,” said an unnamed Harlem political leader in The New York Times. “There’s been improvement but the fuse can be lit by any random spark.”

  Detroit authorities, concerned that rioters would barricade bridges, made plans to deploy amphibious landing craft for crossing the Detroit River when an emergency struck. In Chicago, civil rights activists protesting the city’s housing laws came into bitter conflict with Mayor Daley, who arrested 252 protesters in June. The arrests left the black community inflamed. “We’re going to see to it that it will be a long, hot summer for Daley,” said one protester. “Every Negro who cannot march will be asked to turn on all his faucets and drain the water.” City officials across the country urged calm, arguing that fear of unrest could be self-fulfilling. In Rochester, New York, where hundreds had been injured in riots the prior summer, the departing city manager, Porter W. Homer, decried the periodic rumors sweeping the city that “this or that date is to be the time for another outbreak of violence.” Rochester, he observed, was “tragically close to talking itself into another riot.”

  “Positive hope,” the Times declared in June, “seems to be the key to the coming summer. Where it exists, there is less talk of the possibility of riots. Where it does not exist, predictions about long, hot summers are heard with increasing frequency.” By that standard, vast expanses of the American north could expect fire in the sky by summer’s end. Following the cues of civil rights leaders, the national press was now opening its eyes to the fact that the “negro problem” extended beyond the segregated South to Northern cities where abysmal housing, mass unemployment, and lax law enforcement made a mockery of the term “equality.”

  This new awakening posed a serious threat to the Johnson story. The Johnson vision for liberal reform, like much of postwar liberalism itself, had taken for granted that America could afford to solve the problems of its worst off because things in the country were better than they had been before. The nation’s problems were solvable, and would be solved soon. In June 1965, Johnson had set out even grander aims for solving those problems in an ambitious speech at Howard University. Noting that true equality of the races would be fulfilled only when African American families could achieve “not just legal equity but human ability—not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result,” he’d pledged to bring together leading experts to devise a series of programs that would transform black family life in the country.

  A year before, when willing away anxiety had been a national project, this would have seemed a laudable goal and a reasonable one. But as the troubles mounted in the summer of 1965, Johnson’s confidence began to look strange. Did he really think it would be as simple as bringing together the best minds to solve the problem? Besides, the best minds had already spent a good deal of time thinking about the problems of the poor and the black in America. When would their attention turn to the problems of everyone else?

  The Johnson story was further undermined by leaks in the press that summer of a provocative forthcoming report from the Department of Labor entitled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” Its author, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was a leading liberal intellectual from the Kennedy circle, but the report nonethe
less challenged the basic assumptions of contemporary progressive thought. While noting the great advancement in the rights of black people in the 1960s, Moynihan predicted that blacks would be inhibited from making further gains by limitations in their own education and skills. “We have been in the business of breaking down job barriers to Negroes for four years now,” Moynihan wrote in a confidential memo to Johnson in March 1965. “We can no longer deny that our hardest task is not to create openings, but to fill them.”

  Moynihan believed the lack of black advancement could be explained by deep-seated problems in American black culture. “We feel,” he wrote to Johnson, “that the master problem is that the Negro family structure is crumbling.” Noting that “the richest inheritance any child can have is a stable, loving, disciplined family life,” he compared the 43 percent illegitimacy rate in Harlem with the 3 percent of whites nationwide born out of wedlock. He believed the disparity was a consequence of a crisis in black manhood. Too many adult males were out of work and unable to provide for a family. That itself was a consequence of slavery and segregation, but it now exercised its own insidious, independent effect on the black community.

  And, pointedly, Moynihan told Johnson that government aid programs, like the ones in the Great Society, weren’t helping; in fact, they might be part of the problem. “Most of the welfare assistance,” he wrote, “the special education efforts, the community action programs which we are now doubling and redoubling are essentially the provision of surrogate family services. Society is trying to do for these young persons what in normal circumstances parents do for their children.… We can go on providing this kind of welfare assistance forever. The evidence is it does not change anything.”

  The implications of this assessment for the Great Society were immediate and profound. In a letter to Johnson enclosing Moynihan’s memo, Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz was succinct: “The attached Memorandum is nine pages of dynamite about the Negro situation.” Initially, Johnson was intrigued by Moynihan’s findings—they helped to form his Howard University speech. But, clinging to his optimistic vision, Johnson excised from his speech Moynihan’s gloom about the efficacy of government programs to solve the problems of the black family. Rather, it took for granted that, under his leadership, the centuries-old problems of inequity could be dealt with once and for all.

  To Americans, that seemed an increasingly dubious and improbable prospect. But most were willing to give Johnson a bit more time to bring his grand promises to pass. They waited to judge, but they waited anxiously. As the summer reached its midway point, none of the many trouble spots on the American scene had fulfilled their terrible promise. The Saigon government hung on, the fire in the cities did not light, the evil intruders did not burst through the door. So the country went on waiting for what was awful and inevitable, the thing they could not yet see.

  IF YOU WERE looking for a real, visible sign that something had changed in America that summer, there was one place you could find it: the White House. The signs of trouble were now unmistakable in the president’s face. In early July, Time described a “brooding” President Johnson who “sat glumly in the Cabinet Room, his chin on his fist.” The president was “mercurial” and “given to periods of great ebullience and monumental gloom.” Johnson was now “more somber, subdued and preoccupied than at almost any time” since Kennedy’s death. He’d taken to calling the White House “Lonely Acres.”

  The president’s portrait in the press had changed, as if overnight. Johnson’s “stock on the gossip market in chronically tattletale Washington,” Newsweek observed in early July, “was near an all-time low.” The nastiness, said the magazine, “skittered from lawn party to luncheon, and finally into the press. LBJ … had turned moody and depressed under the pressure of his high office. He was given to frightening temper tantrums.… He took credit for other people’s triumphs, blamed others for his own mistakes.” The magazine related a favorite new joke about a police officer who’d pulled over a Lincoln Continental for speeding. When the officer realized his offending driver was the president of the United States, he exclaimed, “Oh my God!” The driver’s curt reply: “Yes, and don’t you forget it again!”

  This new Lyndon Johnson—arrogant, abrasive, sensitive to the smallest slight, prone to the darkest depression—was of course not new at all. It was the same Lyndon Johnson who had been in the White House since November 22, 1963, and the same Lyndon Johnson who’d been in Washington for thirty years. But the Lyndon Johnson who’d been a character in the press for months on end was the Man-in-Motion Johnson, the legislative wunderkind, the coolheaded “let us reason together” dealmaker, the strong and prudent commander in chief. For the first year and a half of his presidency, he’d been a winner in the eyes of the public. And the wise press corps, always careful not to get too far in front of public opinion, had written about him as a man who didn’t—indeed, couldn’t—lose.

  But Johnson wasn’t untouchable anymore. Now Americans seemed to be tiring of his gooey, hopeful speeches. Now the country seemed to be facing a tangle of emerging, intractable problems—Vietnam, ongoing racial conflict in the South, the tinderbox cities of the North—that could bring Johnson down. And so the press quickly reversed its assessment of him. Tom Wicker, writing in The New York Times, was straightforward in describing the abrupt shift:

  While he had so much going for him for so long, Mr. Johnson also built up without difficulty an “image”—a word heard often in the White House—of a sort of super-Lyndon, wise, experienced, responsible, a wizard in politics and with Congress, a veritable maestro of the Presidency. Now that the triumphs have slacked off and the toughest problems persist, super-Lyndon has disappeared like stage scenery and there stands plain old Lyndon—the hard-driving, explosive difficult man he always was.

  Most other reporters, following the custom of their trade, offered no explanation of how they’d gotten it wrong in the months before. Many, in fact, told their readers that really, they’d seen the problems with this Johnson fellow all along. Twenty months’ worth of unused anecdotes and unflattering adjectives suddenly found their way into print. “It is said,” the Newsweek columnist Kenneth Crawford wrote of Johnson, “that he is a hard, even harsh taskmaster to his subordinates: that he is secretive to the point of obsession; that he is hypersensitive to criticism; that he is petty in his attitude toward rivals, or fancied rivals, for power.”

  Joe Alsop was one of the earliest and harshest Johnson critics. In February, he had complained about the president’s obsession with message control. Johnson was a man with an “irrepressible longing to have every story in every newspaper in the United States written exactly as he would write it. The amount of the President’s time that is thus devoted to what is now called the President’s ‘image’ is almost alarming to contemplate.” By summer, the Johnson in Alsop’s columns had started to sound like a dangerous, mad king. “To those beyond the limits of the ingrowing American political community, it will surely come as a shock that there are serious reasons to worry about Lyndon Johnson’s frame of mind.”

  To loyalists in the Johnson White House, it was fitting that Alsop—a Kennedy courtier—would be leading the charge against them. As the press turned, Johnson staffers closely tracked Kennedy contacts with prominent members of the press corps and reported them to the president, who lapped up the intelligence.

  That summer, Life and Look magazines published dueling excerpts from two forthcoming books on President Kennedy, one by Arthur Schlesinger and the other by Theodore Sorensen. Both men had secured large advances for their accounts, and their imminent publication titillated the incestuous circles of politics, publishing, and the press. (“The major industry in New York this summer,” said columnist Jimmy Breslin, “is handling words about John F. Kennedy.”) Sorensen’s was a Kennedy-family-approved venture. He had written the book in a small cottage in Hyannis Port and Jackie Kennedy was a close editor of his manuscript, providing handwritten comments on yellow lined paper. In
her notes, she displayed the same vigilance over her family’s image that she had exerted toward Teddy White’s “Camelot” draft a week after her husband’s death:

  “He thought The New York Times was the greatest newspaper in the world”—Are you sure? He had a great deal of disillusionment about them … just don’t give them that much of a plug—perhaps ‘one of the greatest newspapers’ (he liked Le Monde).

  “John-John, as his father called him.” His father never called him John-John—only John. That nickname now plagues the little boy—who may be stuck with it all his life.

  Not vodka and tomato juice in the afternoon … On vacations he had a drink before lunch—otherwise never—just one before dinner …

  You are wrong—he read poetry a lot—at least with me.

  Sorensen would say four decades later that Jackie had also asked him “to tone down my references to JFK’s praise of LBJ.” As Sorensen himself was hardly inclined to write anything admiring of Lyndon Johnson, Jackie’s standard of “praise” must have been very low indeed. In the end, little Kennedy affection for Johnson graced Sorensen’s pages. Self-consciously, Sorensen sought to rebut the notion that Kennedy’s presidency had lacked substance, that compared with Johnson’s emerging record as a progressive reformer Kennedy lacked liberal greatness. “Most insidious,” Sorensen at one point told a reporter, “is the myth that Kennedy’s cool, analytical manner meant that he had no heart, that he didn’t commit his heart, that he didn’t feel passionately about issues. This just wasn’t true.”

  Schlesinger produced the better book. He understood that the case for Kennedy’s greatness would be found in his more human moments, not the ones where he’d resembled a marble god (though Newsweek clucked over the “mawkish, tasteless” ending to the Bay of Pigs section in which Kennedy, “distraught over the defeat in Cuba, went into the bedroom with Jacqueline, ‘put his head into his hands, almost sobbed and then took her in his arms’ ”). But the ultimate project was the same as Sorensen and Jackie’s. The book recalled the Kennedy presidency as a golden age of mythic promise, cut tragically short after just 1,036 days in office, an age followed by days less vital, graceful, and true. The image was cemented by the book’s mystical title, featured on the cover of Life that July above a portrait of the smiling, living Kennedy: A Thousand Days.