by Jon Meacham
IN THE TEXT OF A SPEECH Halberstam, Fifties, 251.
TALKED OUT OF IT BY POLITICAL ADVISERS Nichols, Ike and McCarthy, 4–5.
EISENHOWER ALWAYS REGRETTED Ibid., 6.
(“IT TURNED MY STOMACH”) Halberstam, Fifties, 251.
“NOTHING WILL BE” Nichols, Ike and McCarthy, 10.
“I HAD MADE UP MY MIND” Oshinsky, Conspiracy So Immense, 259.
“GETTING IN THE GUTTER” Nichols, Ike and McCarthy, 30.
“I WOULD NOT” Oshinsky, Conspiracy So Immense, 259.
IN 1953, MCCARTHY DEPLORED Ibid., 277–79.
AMONG OTHER TITLES Nicholas von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn (New York, 1988), 153. See also Oshinsky, Conspiracy So Immense, 277.
THE WRITER DASHIELL HAMMETT Sally Cline, Dashiell Hammett: Man of Mystery (New York, 2014), 174–75, 182–88; Robert L. Gale, A Dashiell Hammett Companion (Westport, Conn., 2000), 42–43.
THEY ALSO COMPLAINED Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 153.
“WHAT IS AMERICA” Ibid., 171.
“DON’T JOIN THE” Nichols, Ike and McCarthy, 40.
AT TEN-THIRTY Joseph Wershba, “Murrow vs. McCarthy: See It Now,” NYT, March 4, 1979.
“WE MUST NOT CONFUSE” Edward R. Murrow, “A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy,” See It Now, March 9, 1954, CBS-TV, http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/murrowmccarthy.html.
“THE ACTIONS OF” Ibid.
THE BROADCAST ROOM “North Hall,” White House Museum, http://www.whitehousemuseum.org/floor0/north-hall.htm.
HE HAD DECIDED Nichols, Ike and McCarthy, 221–22. See also Jack Gould, “Television in Review: New ‘Format’ Brings Out the President’s Warmth and Charm Before Cameras,” NYT, April 6, 1954.
THERE WOULD BE CUE CARDS Gould, “Television in Review.” See also “Robert Montgomery Presents: President as a Pro,” Life, April 19, 1954, 28–29.
THE FIRST DATES FROM Carlos D’Este, Eisenhower: A Soldier’s Life (New York, 2002), 527.
HIS JANUARY 1961 FAREWELL ADDRESS Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Farewell Radio and Television Address to the American People,” January 17, 1961, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=12086.
HIS APRIL 1954 SPEECH ABOUT FEAR Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Radio and Television Address to the American People on the State of the Nation,” April 5, 1954, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=10201.
BEHIND THE SCENES Nichols, Ike and McCarthy, 113–15; 121–24; 161–96; 199–216; 233; 287–88; 296–97. See also William Bragg Ewald, Who Killed Joe McCarthy? (New York, 1984).
TO SECURE FAVORS Oshinsky, Conspiracy So Immense, 400–401; 416.
ITS IMPLICATION OF AN ILLICIT RELATIONSHIP Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 188–90; 202; 226; 230–31.
ALWAYS DENIED BY COHN Zion, Autobiography of Roy Cohn, 245–46.
MCCARTHY PERFORMED POORLY Cohn, McCarthy, 207–11.
IN AN ICONIC MOMENT Oshinsky, Conspiracy So Immense, 461–64.
MCCARTHY BLUNDERED FORWARD Nichols, Ike and McCarthy, 281.
GALLUP FOUND THAT…34 PERCENT Oshinsky, Conspiracy So Immense, 464. See also Zion, Autobiography of Roy Cohn, 150.
“UNLESS WE CAN” Zion, Autobiography of Roy Cohn, 150.
THE REPUBLICANS, COHN BELIEVED Ibid., 150–51.
A “RIGHT-WING THIRD PARTY TICKET” Ibid..
THE SENATE CENSURED MCCARTHY Oshinsky, Conspiracy So Immense, 472–94.
SENATOR RALPH FLANDERS Ibid., 475.
THE SENIOR SENATOR FROM CONNECTICUT “Resolution of Censure, Remarks of Senator Prescott Bush,” December 1, 1954, 83rd Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record 100, pt. 12: 16268. See also my Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush (New York, 2015), 108. His son George H. W. Bush, then in the oil business in Texas, watched from afar as anti-McCarthy senators were attacked by the far right. “I realize that anybody who takes a stand against McCarthy is apt to be subjected through the lunatic fringe to all sorts of abuse,” the future president wrote at the time. George H. W. Bush to Senator William Fulbright, September 3, 1954, Jean Becker, “All the Best, George Bush” File, Post-Presidential Materials, George Bush Presidential Library and Museum, College Station, Texas.
TWO YEARS EARLIER Mickey Herskowitz, Duty, Honor, Country: The Life and Legacy of Prescott Bush (Nashville, 2003), 128; Meacham, Destiny and Power, 95–96. One could approve of anti-Communism, Bush had said at Bridgeport, without endorsing McCarthy’s means. “But, I must say in all candor,” Bush said, “that some of us, while we admire his objectives in his fight against Communism, we have very considerable reservations concerning the methods which he sometimes employs.” Ibid.
“HAS CAUSED DANGEROUS” “Resolution of Censure, Remarks of Senator Prescott Bush,” December 1, 1954, 83rd Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record 100, pt. 12: 16268.
OF ACUTE HEPATITIS—HIS LIVER WAS Oshinsky, Conspiracy So Immense, 505. “The official cause of death was listed as acute hepatitis—or inflammation of the liver,” Oshinsky wrote. “There was no mention of cirrhosis or delirium tremens, though the press hinted, correctly, that he drank himself to death.” Ibid. See also Nichols, Ike and McCarthy, 296.
“UNDOUBTEDLY THE HEARINGS” Cohn, McCarthy, 211.
“HUMAN NATURE BEING” Ibid.
“I WAS FULLY AWARE” Ibid., 275.
“HE WAS SELLING” Ibid., 275–76.
“MODERN AMERICAN CONSERVATISM” Geoffrey Kabaservice, Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party (New York, 2012), 13–14.
WRITING IN THE INAUGURAL ISSUE National Review, November 19, 1955.
IN JANUARY 1961, DURING A MEETING William F. Buckley, Jr., “Goldwater, the John Birch Society, and Me,” Commentary, March 1, 2008.
RICHARD HOFSTADTER DELIVERED Hofstadter, Paranoid Style in America Politics, 41–42.
WHO IS THE PSEUDO-CONSERVATIVE Ibid., 44–45.
POLITICAL LIFE IS NOT Ibid., 52–53.
WHEN JOE MCCARTHY DIED NYT, May 3, 1957.
“YEARS WILL PASS” Ibid.
“THE HARMFUL INFLUENCE” Ibid., May 4, 1957.
THERE IS AN ELEMENT Ibid.
AT A REQUIEM MASS Ibid., May 7, 1957.
MCCARTHY’S CASKET WAS Ibid.
“I DON’T WANT” Marie Brenner, “How Donald Trump and Roy Cohn’s Ruthless Symbiosis Changed America,” Vanity Fair, August 2017.
ONE OF HIS MORE CELEBRATED CLIENTS Ibid. See also Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 378–80.
SEVEN · What the Hell Is the Presidency For?
NIGGUHS HATE WHITES Marshall Frady, Wallace (New York, 1968), 14.
AT THE MOMENT Author interview.
“VERY FRANKLY, MR. SPEAKER” Michael Beschloss, ed. Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes 1963–1964 (New York, 1997), 26.
“LYNDON ACTS AS IF” Manchester, Glory and the Dream, 1010.
ON THIS LONG FRIDAY EVENING Merle Miller, Lyndon, an Oral Biography (New York, 1980), 397–98. See also Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power, vol. 4, The Years of Lyndon Johnson (New York, 2012), 371–72.
“LYNDON,” LADY BIRD REMARKED Nick Kotz, Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws That Changed America (New York, 2005), 11.
“WELL, I’M GOING” Ibid., 16.
“OH, DADDY,” SHE SAID Ibid., 9.
“WE’RE STILL A TEN-DAY NATION” Ibid., 18.
“WELL, WHAT THE HELL” Miller, Lyndon, 411. See also Caro, Passage of Power, xiv–xv.
HAD HARDLY BEEN For an overview of Johnson’s evolution on civil rights, see, for instance, Kotz, Judgment Days, 59–64.
THOUGH HE HAD DECLINED Kotz, Judgment Days, 45; 38.
/> (THOUGH HE WOULD POINT OUT) Richard N. Goodwin, Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties (Boston, 1988), 316.
“I’VE NEVER FELT” Kotz, Judgment Days, 88.
“I WASN’T A CRUSADER” Goodwin, Remembering America, 316.
“NOW I REPRESENT” Ibid.
“LET ME MAKE” Beschloss, Taking Charge, 29–30.
RIGHT-WING DEMONSTRATORS Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis, Dallas 1963 (New York, 2013), 66.
TEXAS TRAITOR Ibid., 64–65.
IN OCTOBER 1963 A SIMILAR CROWD Ibid., 243–47.
ONE PROTESTOR SHOUTED Ibid., 244.
PULLING AWAY FROM Ibid., 247.
“JOHN KENNEDY’S DEATH” Lyndon B. Johnson, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress,” November 27, 1963, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=25988. The “bloodstream” imagery was prevalent in Washington. On the Sunday after the assassination, Chief Justice Earl Warren, speaking in the Rotunda, said, “What moved some misguided wretch to do this horrible deed may never be known to us, but we do know that such acts are commonly stimulated by forces of hatred and malevolence, such as today are eating their way into the bloodstream of American life. What a price we pay for such fanaticism!” Beschloss, Taking Charge, 64.
“WE KNOW THAT” Jon Meacham, ed., Voices in Our Blood: America’s Best on the Civil Rights Movement (New York, 2001), 19.
HAD NOTHING ELSE Ibid., 20. “Sometimes, fleetingly, like a rainbow that comes and vanishes in its coming,” Wright wrote, “the wan faces of the poor whites make us think that perhaps we can join our hands with them and lift the weight of the Lords of the Land off our backs. But, before new meanings can bridge the chasm that has been long created between us, the poor whites are warned by the Lords of the Land that they must cast their destiny with their own color, that to make common cause with us is to threaten the foundations of civilization.” Ibid.
“GET OUT OF THE SHADOW” Hubert H. Humphrey, The Education of a Public Man: My Life and Politics (New York, 1976), 112.
WORRIED ABOUT COMMUNISTS AND CIVIL RIGHTS Coski, Confederate Battle Flag, 98–109.
IMPEACH EARL WARREN SIGNS Alden Whitman, “Earl Warren, 83, Who Led High Court in Time of Vast Social Change, Is Dead,” NYT, July 10, 1974. The signs were driven by the integration decisions, the court’s opposition to internal-security measures such as the McCarran Act, and an overall fear of centralized power; the right-wing John Birch Society was a prime mover behind the billboards. “It was kind of an honor to be accused by the John Birch Society,” Warren said. “It was a little rough on my wife, but it never bothered me.” Ibid.
GEORGIA INCORPORATED THE “State Flags of Georgia,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/government-politics/state-flags-georgia.
SOUTH CAROLINA HOISTED Sidney Blumenthal, “The Star-Spangled Banner in South Carolina,” The Atlantic, June 24, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/confederate-flag-south-carolina-history/396695/.
AND GEORGE WALLACE ORDERED Coski, Confederate Battle Flag, 152–53.
SHE AND HER BROTHER Meacham, Voices in Our Blood, 63.
HEARING THE HOOFBEATS Ibid., 68–69.
LISTENING FROM THE SIDE Ibid., 69.
“IF ON JUDGMENT DAY” Ibid.
ACCEPTED AN ASSIGNMENT FROM LIFE Ibid., 107.
ENRAGED WHITE SOUTHERNERS Ibid., 113. The detail is from a column of Murray Kempton’s, filed from Nashville and published on September 10, 1957, under the headline “Upon Such a Day.” Ibid.
“I’M GLAD IT’S YOU” Ibid., 167.
“THE AWFUL RESPONSIBILITY” Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men (New York, 1981), 546.
A 1930 ESSAY HE NOW REPUDIATED Woodward, Burden of Southern History, 287.
SUSPICION OF “THE NEW YORK PRESS” Meacham, Voices in Our Blood, 173.
“WELL, BY GOD” Ibid.
“YOU HEAR SOME WHITE MEN” Ibid., 174–75.
“LORD, THAT MAN’S” Ibid., 177.
THE GREAT ALIBI “EXPLAINS” Warren, Legacy of the Civil War, 54.
“EVEN NOW, ANY COMMON LYNCHER” Ibid.
DID THE SOUTHERN “MAN WHO” Ibid., 57–58.
“THE TREASURY OF VIRTUE” Ibid., 59.
“IN THE HAPPY CONTEMPLATION” Ibid., 61–63. He quoted the clergyman and abolitionist James T. Ayers, who worried that emancipated blacks would move north and soon “the Bucks will be wanting to galant our Daughters Round.” Ibid., 63.
“THE CRUSADERS THEMSELVES” Ibid., 64–65.
“WE HAVE TO DEAL” Meacham, Voices in Our Blood, 202. This remark came in a self-interview Warren conducted as he worked out his own conclusions. He added, “If the South is really able to face up to itself and its situation, it may achieve identity, moral identity. Then in a country where moral identity is hard to come by, the South, because it has had to deal concretely with a moral problem, may offer some leadership. And we need any we can get. If we are to break out of the national rhythm, the rhythm between complacency and panic.” Ibid.
“NIGGUHS HATE WHITES” Frady, Wallace, 14.
“YOU KNOW, WE JUST CAN’T” Ibid., 141.
IN 1948 HE SOUGHT ELECTION Stephan Lesher, George Wallace: American Populist (New York, 1994), 79.
YET IN 1958 Ibid., 125–26.
“JOHN PATTERSON OUT-NIGGUHED” Frady, Wallace, 127.
(WALLACE DENIED THIS OFT-REPEATED) Lesher, George Wallace, 128–29.
“HE USED TO BE” Frady, Wallace, 141.
WALLACE WAS INAUGURATED For video of the address, see “George Wallace 1963 Inauguration Address,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RC0EjsUbDU.
“THIS CRADLE OF THE CONFEDERACY” “Inaugural Address of Governor George Wallace,” Alabama Department of Archives and History, http://digital.archives.alabama.gov/cdm/ref/collection/voices/id/2952.
THE CROWD ERUPTED “George Wallace 1963 Inauguration Address,” YouTube. “This nation was never meant to be a unit of one,” Wallace said, “but a united of the many….
And so it was meant in our racial lives. Each race, within its own framework has the freedom to teach, to instruct, to develop, to ask for and receive deserved help from others of separate racial stations. This is the great freedom of our American founding fathers. But if we amalgamate into the one unit as advocated by the communist philosophers, then the enrichment of our lives, the freedom for our development, is gone forever. We become, therefore, a mongrel unit of one under a single all powerful government and we stand for everything, and for nothing. “Inaugural Address of Governor George Wallace.”
“I’M GONNA MAKE RACE” Frady, Wallace, 140.
(HE PRIVATELY ADMIRED) Ibid., 243. “He asked a reporter once, in a low, earnest voice, ‘How come you reckon Bobby Kennedy wants to wear all that hair? I mean, I been wondering about it. You reckon that’s why he’s so big with all these college kids?’ And unconsciously, he touched his own limp, oil-combed streaks with the heel of his hand, as if he were fleetingly considering whether he himself could muster a mane.” Ibid.
“SIMPLY MORE ALIVE” Ibid., 5–6.
EDUCATED PEOPLE IN ALABAMA Ibid., 212.
ONE WOMAN WHOM FRADY DESCRIBED Ibid.
A FEDERAL COURT ORDERED Branch, Parting the Waters, 821–22.
“WHOSE GRAY HEAD” Frady, Wallace, 149. “Wallace seemed to regard his career as governor merely as an invocation and projection of the old aboriginal glory and valor,” Frady wrote. “It was all still happening to him. In fact, one got the feeling that, for him, what was happening was not quite as real as the great primeval conflict.” Ibid.
“TODAY,” THE PRESIDENT SAID John F. Kennedy, “Radio and Television Report to the American Peo
ple on Civil Rights,” June 11, 1963, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9271.
“THIS IS NOT” Ibid.
“IF AN AMERICAN” Ibid.
WALLACE WAS FORCED Frady, Wallace, 170–71.
TITLE II OF THE PROPOSED BILL Miller, Lyndon, 366–67.
ON THE EVENING OF KENNEDY’S FUNERAL Kotz, Judgment Days, 19.
“PRESIDENT JOHNSON WILL” Ibid., 18.
“WE KNOW WHAT” Beschloss, Taking Charge, 37.
HE WAS CALLED Branch, Parting the Waters, 111.
WHEN ROSA PARKS Ibid., 132–33. King was elected leader of the boycott less because of his evident skill—though he would prove more than worthy of the assignment—than for his relative newness to town. “Idealists would say afterward that King’s gifts made him the obvious choice,” Branch wrote. “Realists would scoff at this, saying that King was not very well known, and that his chief asset was lack of debts or enemies. Cynics would say that the established preachers stepped back for King only because they saw more blame and danger ahead than glory.” Ibid., 137.
ON THE NIGHT HE FIRST SPOKE Ibid., 138.
“THIS,” KING REMARKED TO A FRIEND Ibid.
“WE ARE HERE THIS EVENING” Ibid., 139–40.
“AND WE ARE DETERMINED” Ibid., 141.
HIS HOUSE IN MONTGOMERY Kotz, Judgment Days, 47.
“LORD, I’M DOWN HERE” Ibid., 48.
“I COULD HEAR” Ibid.
KING’S ADDRESS TO THE MARCH The following section is a lightly edited version of my essay “Martin Luther King Jr.: Architect of the 21st Century,” Time, August 26, 2013. I also owe much to Branch, Parting the Waters, 875–83.
A TEXT THAT HAD BEEN DRAFTED Clarence B. Jones and Stuart Connelly, Behind the Dream: The Making of the Speech That Transformed a Nation (New York, 2011), especially 54–62.
“AND SO TODAY” Branch, Parting the Waters, 882.