Having dispatched—destroyed would not be too harsh a term—his Republican opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater, at the polls in November 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson had reason to celebrate. It was, at the time, the most lopsided presidential election in history. As he would later reveal, the Texan had felt ill-suited to follow the Harvard-educated, Boston-bred President John F. Kennedy prior to his landside victory. Before the assassination, there were even rumors among Washington’s social set that the Kennedys would drop Johnson from the ticket in 1964. Taking Kennedy’s place in those dark weeks after the events of Dallas had left LBJ feeling “illegitimate, a naked man with no presidential covering, a pretender to the throne, an illegal usurper.”
But now, that all changed. He had reinvented the moniker “Landslide Lyndon,” which Texas newspapermen derisively had called him after his paper-thin victory that marked the ignominious beginning of his senatorial career. President Johnson was now the choice of nearly forty-three million Americans to lead their country and serve as commander in chief, and he had every intention of doing so. The man was on a roll, having taken his slain predecessor’s domestic agenda—in particular, his stalled Civil Rights Act of 1964—and made its passage through a belligerent US Senate his number one priority, doing what no president had done before. Few had dreamed that any president would be able to do such a thing, much less a Southerner who had fought civil rights throughout his career. As Johnson told one civil rights leader who asked how and why he had converted to their cause, Johnson replied, “Well, to quote a friend of yours, ‘Free at least, free at least, thank God Almighty, I am free at last.’ ”
No longer having to appease the pro–Jim Crow vote in Texas, Johnson was preparing to put his own stamp on the nation, moving the country along the lines of his own political agenda: the Great Society. He had previewed this vision throughout the spring of 1964, including at the World’s Fair, both on opening day, when he was publicly chastised and ridiculed by college-aged activists, and upon his return to the Fair just a few weeks later on May 9 to greet a meeting of union workers. That same month, Johnson had spoken to a throng of University of Michigan students—receiving a far friendlier reaction than from the Queens College students who had gathered at the World’s Fair—where the president regaled them with his liberal vision of what America could be: “The Great Society . . . demands an end to poverty and racial injustice,” he declared. The America that he envisioned was “a place where every child can find the knowledge to enrich his mind and enlarge his talent . . . 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.”
Johnson was in his element pushing his ambitious domestic agenda, wanting to wage a “War on Poverty.” His task was made easier by the large Democratic majorities in the Senate and the House of Representatives. So confident was the newly elected President Johnson that, standing with his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, at his side, he proclaimed at the White House tree-lighting festivities a week before Christmas Day 1964 that “these are the most hopeful times since Christ was born in Jerusalem.”
There was just one nagging problem that clouded Johnson’s bold new vision to transform America into a far more egalitarian land: Vietnam. In fact, just two days before Christmas, two more American “military advisors” had been killed there. By the start of the new year, 267 Americans had been killed in Vietnam since 1959.
Had President Kennedy lived and received a second term, Vietnam would have been his problem to solve; now it had fallen to Johnson. The Asian country quickly became a top priority. As the world watched Kennedy’s burial on November 25, 1963, President Johnson issued a secret executive order insisting “all senior officers of the government” support the government’s policy—that is, his policy—in Vietnam. Johnson would not accept disloyalty or dissent in his administration. The next month, when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara returned from a fact-finding mission in Vietnam, he told reporters that all was going well, but then gave a completely different story to the commander in chief. It was only the end of 1963, and already McNamara had concluded that current American policy would lead to a stalemate at best; at worst, the Communists would seize control of the country.
More hawkish voices urged the president to step up the military’s involvement. “We are swatting flies, when we should be going after the manure pile,” declared Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay, the same man who had advocated a military showdown with the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis and called Kennedy’s diplomatic solution to the crisis “the greatest defeat in our nation’s history.”
By March 1964, when McNamara returned from another trip, he told Johnson that American prospects had “unquestionably been growing worse.” Seeking other opinions on the vexing matter, Johnson turned to his old mentor, Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia, who was as against having American troops in Vietnam as he was giving civil rights to black Americans. Johnson knew that Russell had a history with Vietnam: As anti-Communist as they came, and deeply conservative in foreign policy, Russell pleaded with his friend to get out of Vietnam and get out now. In 1954 both men had gone to President Eisenhower and argued against supporting France’s colonial wars in Indochina—“[I] said we’d never get out, be in there fifty years from now,” Russell reminded his president.
Then in May 1964, the same month that Johnson was unveiling his Great Society, Russell issued another warning to his old friend. Having just heard testimony from McNamara at a Senate hearing, the senator wondered if the defense secretary, despite his Ivy League education and impressive résumé, knew all the pertinent facts. “He’s a can-do fellow,” Russell admitted. “But I’m not too sure he understands the history and background of those people out there as fully as he should.” As much as he trusted his old friend’s instincts, however, Johnson refused to heed his advice.
Instead, his advisers drew up secret plans to increase military operations. But they needed an incident, a trigger to justify their actions. On August 4, 1964, the same day that the bodies of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner were dug out of the Mississippi earth, Johnson’s team got it. Since July 30, US warships had been in the Gulf of Tonkin, off the coast of Communist-controlled North Vietnam, assisting small boats from the pro-US “South” Vietnam as they attacked military stations. On August 2, North Vietnamese ships sped toward the USS Maddox, which opened fire while US planes attacked from above. Such cat-and-mouse operations continued until finally, on August 4, the Maddox reported that they were under attack by enemy torpedoes and opened fire. It was exactly the moment the Johnson administration had been waiting for, an attack on a peaceful US vessel, an act of war.
Back in the United States late at night on August 4, President Johnson broke into regularly scheduled television and radio programming to inform the American public that US ships had come under fire by enemy troops. In response, he ordered two bomber planes to attack North Vietnamese targets. Privately, Johnson had his doubts about what had happened. “Hell, those dumb stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish,” he snorted to a staffer.
Within days, President Johnson ushered through Congress the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution—which passed the House of Representatives without a single dissenting vote and the Senate by a margin of ninety-eight to two. The president now had congressional approval to “take all necessary measures to repel an armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.”
With his electoral victory that November, Johnson was now holding all the cards. He might have talked peace—he had said as much at the World’s Fair in April and May, and again and again throughout the 1964 campaign when painting his opponent Senator Goldwater as the warmonger—but now, having sold the American public on his peaceful intentions, it was Johnson who was setting the stage for one of the worst tragedies in the nation’s history. And he had plenty of support from the media,
Congress, and the American public. His advisers, led by McNamara, were urging him for more decisive action.
After the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in early August, Johnson’s assistant secretary of defense, John McNaughton, suggested ways that such actions could be justified. The American military should create “a series of provocative actions . . . similar to those leading up to the Gulf of Tonkin incident,” he wrote Johnson. If North Vietnam responded militarily—as they hoped it would—then the basis for further military action would be solidified and Johnson could escalate if he wished. After all, how could the greatest military power that the world has ever known lose to a ragtag bunch of Communist guerrillas from a Third World country?
After North Vietnamese fighters attacked an American air base in mid-January 1965, killing eight US troops and wounding more than a hundred, Johnson told his National Security Council, “I’ve had enough of this.” A month later, the president approved the beginning of Operation Rolling Thunder, the largest sustained bombing campaign in US history. From February 1965 until the end of the war a decade later, American bomber pilots blasted North Vietnam with three times as many bombs as were dropped in the entirety of the Second World War.
By the end of March 1965, just weeks before the World’s Fair opened its second season, McNaughton drafted another secret memo. This one was the most brutally honest answer to the question that millions of Americans would ask in the decades after the war ended: Why were we fighting in Vietnam? According to McNaughton, the answer broke down according to percentages: 70 percent of the reason why we were there was “to avoid a humiliating US defeat”; 20 percent of the reason why was to keep South Vietnam “from Chinese hands”; and the final 10 percent was to help the South Vietnamese “enjoy a freer way of life.”
Then, a few weeks later, General William Westmoreland, the top military commander in Vietnam, requested forty thousand American troops. The average age of such soldiers was nineteen years old. Instead of riding the eight-story Ferris wheel at the World’s Fair, sampling the waffles at the Belgian Village, being lifted by the “People Wall” in the IBM Pavilion, or enjoying the myriad light shows and fountain displays as dusk settled over the Fairgrounds, strolling the Fair’s paved walkways hand-in-hand with their sweethearts, many of these same nineteen-year-olds would draw their last breath in Southeast Asia. And the main reason they—and tens of thousands more like them—died so young, as McNaughton pointed out, was so the president, his cabinet, and his military advisers could save face.
31.
There is an amazing democracy about death.
—Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Since the racial violence of Birmingham in the spring of 1963, Americans had witnessed an astounding amount of brutality perpetuated against their countrymen at the hands of their fellow citizens. The mauling of Birmingham’s children by Bull Connor’s police force, with their fire hoses and attack dogs, had been followed by the September church bombing that killed four little girls in their Sunday best. Two months later came the fateful bullets ringing out in the Dallas daylight, killing the nation’s youthful president, and seven months after that, the cold-blooded murders of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner, the trio of civil rights workers left to decompose in the Mississippi mud for six weeks in the summer of 1964, a season that also saw bloody riots—some might say insurrections—in several Northern urban ghettos. Then, of course, there were the young Americans being sent home from Vietnam in body bags.
The early months of 1965 offered no respite. As Robert Moses waged war with his critics, leaving New Yorkers to wonder if the World’s Fair would even have a second season, crime in the city continued to rise. Following Fortune’s September 1964 cover story on the political and physical demise of New York—reissued and expanded into a 1965 book—the Herald Tribune launched a series of articles titled “A City in Crisis” detailing the myriad problems the crumbling metropolis and its citizens faced. With all the talk of civil rights for African Americans and other minorities in both the Southern Jim Crow states and the Northern cities, many non-minority Americans began to feel that they too needed new laws for protection. “We also need a great civil rights march in our city,” one New Yorker wrote to the Herald Tribune, “to insure to us the civil rights to live in our homes, to ride in our subways, to walk in our streets and parks at any hour without fear of being murdered, robbed and raped.”
Moses got a similar letter the same month the Herald Tribune launched its soul-searching series. Joseph A. Sweeney, age seventy-three, of Brooklyn wrote to the Master Builder, exhorting him not to feel bad if the World’s Fair didn’t open in 1965. It wasn’t his fault, Sweeney said, it was New York’s—“There are reasons for it, and it’s the times we are living in now,” he explained. Recalling how he and his wife used to attend the 1939–40 World’s Fair three or even four times a week, Sweeney said he had enjoyed the latest Flushing Meadow exhibition—finding it “instructively educational and entertaining”—but that they were too afraid to go out frequently. “Now the people are prisoners in their homes,” Sweeney wrote Moses. “Very few risk going out after dark with the muggings, rapings, robbery and pocket book snatching going on.” His wife was mugged one evening right in front of their Brooklyn apartment building, while Sweeney was robbed one early afternoon on Christmas Eve.
The violence touched everyone. For months, Malcolm X’s wife, Betty Shabazz, had been receiving death threats, a campaign of harassing phone calls carried out by her husband’s enemies. On Valentine’s Day 1965, shortly after their returning to New York from a trip to Detroit, the house where the couple lived with their five daughters was firebombed. Although the frightened family escaped unscathed, Malcolm had to know that the members of the Nation of Islam, who for months had been threatening to kill him, now meant what they said.
A week later, at one of his regular Sunday talks at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, just as Malcolm X began speaking, a ruckus erupted in the audience. A young black man stood up and shouted, “Nigger, get your hand out of my pockets!” As Malcolm’s bodyguards tried to restore order, three other young black men rushed the stage and shot the fiery orator to death in full view of four hundred people, including his wife, who rushed onstage to cradle her husband’s bullet-ridden body. In one bloody instant, one of the most powerful voices in the struggle for black freedom was silenced.
Despite the passage of the historic Civil Rights Act the year before and the overwhelming victory by Lyndon Johnson’s Democratic Party, there was plenty of work to be done to further the cause of freedom for America’s twenty-two million African Americans. The newest battleground was Selma, Alabama, a poor, rural area of the state whose leading politician had challenged President Johnson for the Democratic nomination.
Governor George C. Wallace might have talked like a folksy, country-bred good ol’ boy, but he was nobody’s fool. He was already preparing to ride the anti–civil rights resentment of the South all the way to the White House. And to achieve his goal, he would only have to tweak his message to capture the Northern “white backlash” vote—all those white, ethnic, working-class rank-and-file Democrats—in America’s crime-ridden big cities, the same ones who were now afraid to leave their homes or felt left out of Johnson’s “Great Society.” Wallace was every bit the Democrat that Johnson was; it was his party, too, and he planned on stealing it right from under Johnson’s bulbous Texan nose. But that would have to wait until the next presidential cycle in 1968; for now, Wallace was just biding his time.
Five days after Malcolm X’s murder, a peaceful civil rights protest in Marion, Alabama, turned deadly. On February 26, Jimmie Lee Walker, his mother, his eighty-two-year-old grandfather, and others marched to a local jail where a civil rights protester was being held. As they sang and prayed, they were set upon by a group of Alabama state troopers, who dispersed the crowd, swinging nightsticks and brandishing guns. Walker and his family ran inside a lo
cal restaurant and were followed by the police, who clubbed the elderly grandfather until he collapsed on the floor. When Walker’s mother tried to help, the state troopers turned on her. When Walker tried to shield his mother with his body, they pulled him away and shot him twice at point-blank range. He died shortly thereafter.*
* A grand jury refused to bring charges against his murderer, State Trooper James Bonard Fowler. Finally, in 2010—forty-five years after killing Jackson—a seventy-seven-year-old Fowler was sentenced to six months in jail.
In response, on March 7 Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis organized six hundred activists from their two organizations, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), at the Brown Chapel African Methodist-Episcopal Church in Selma, Alabama. Their plan was to march peacefully, walking the entire fifty miles from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital, to protest Walker’s death as well as the months of beatings and violence directed against local blacks who attempted to register to vote in Alabama.
As the marchers left Selma and walked across the steel arches of the Edmund Pettus Bridge—named for a Confederate general—and over the muddy banks of the Alabama River, they were confronted by state troopers. Also on hand was the sheriff of Dallas County, Jim Clark, who stood ready on horseback to use any means necessary to stop the protest. Sheriff Clark was every bit as unhinged and hate-filled as Connor, and known for his links to Ku Klux Klan groups.
Just one minute after instructing the protesters—men, women, children, and the elderly—to go home, the troopers rushed the crowd, tossing tear gas and swinging cattle prods, nightsticks, or makeshift weapons like a hose laced with barbed wire, attacking old and young alike. Some protesters ran, only to be chased down by one of Clark’s mounted henchman; others were attacked as they kneeled silently and prayed for God’s help.
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