by Joshua Zeitz
This last point was an understatement. Bobby had haughtily insisted that the leak came from “your State Department,” to which the president exploded, “It’s not my State Department, goddamnit. It’s your State Department. . . . I’ll destroy you and every one of your dove friends. You’ll be dead politically in six months.” When Bobby urged Johnson to halt the bombings during Tet, the Vietnamese New Year celebration, LBJ accused his antagonist of providing the impression that the American government was buckling and thereby encouraging Hanoi and its NLF allies to continue inflicting harm on U.S. servicemen. “Look, I don’t have to take this from you,” Bobby retorted. The meeting ended with a tense agreement that Kennedy would deny ever having received a backdoor overture from the North Vietnamese. “We never receive any peace feelers at all,” Johnson barked. “Isn’t that right?” Stranded in a corner by his own action, RFK sullenly walked into the West Lobby and assured awaiting reporters that the news stories had been exaggerated.
The country remained doggedly supportive of the mission despite over thirty thousand casualties—including those dead, wounded, or missing in action. Only 31 percent of respondents to a Gallup poll believed that it had been a “mistake” to commit ground troops, and not until the end of the summer of 1968 did a majority of respondents come to view the ground war as a blunder. It was little wonder that pollsters dubbed 1967 “the year of the hawk,” with one-quarter of Americans even registering support for a nuclear attack on North Vietnam to speed the end of the conflict. But the war was already limiting the administration’s range of action domestically, even as other forces combined to challenge the continued expansion of the Great Society.
CHAPTER 11
Backlash
On the evening of August 11, 1965—just five days after Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law—a white California highway patrolman cruising the South Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts pulled over two brothers, both African Americans, under suspicion of drunk driving. An altercation ensued when several bystanders rushed to the men’s assistance. More white police officers arrived. When one of the uniformed lawmen struck a black woman to the ground and kicked her in the stomach, the neighborhood erupted in rage. The riot proper began the next evening as black city residents shattered white-owned shopwindows, burned cars and buildings, looted, and engaged in urban warfare with heavily armed state and local police officers. Though comparably less disadvantaged than other big-city ghettos, Watts—its neat, tree-lined streets and tidy bungalow houses notwithstanding—bore many of the same scars: residential segregation that created population density four times the city average, employment discrimination that left deep pockets of economic privation, persistent law enforcement brutality that fostered a culture of animosity and distrust between the police and the citizenry, and a growing sense that America’s prosperity and promise had bypassed the city’s black residents. Jarring footage shot from helicopters showed blocks of burning buildings and giant smoke plumes, a bitter repudiation of the racial harmony that LBJ heralded in his many speeches favoring civil rights.
Watching the news from his ranch, LBJ was uncharacteristically paralyzed by the violence. He authorized Moyers to inform the press that he found the riots “tragic and shocking” but for two days refused to accept calls from his domestic policy chief, Joe Califano. As the president blocked out reality by strolling around his property and entertaining guests, Califano fielded a frantic plea from California’s lieutenant governor, Glenn Anderson, standing in for Governor Pat Brown, who remained abroad on an extended European holiday. After consulting with Katzenbach and McNamara, both of whom were vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard, Califano took the unusual step of authorizing the army to supply the California National Guard with food, trucks, tear gas, and ammunition. It required almost fourteen thousand guardsmen to end the riot, which resulted in thirty-four deaths, a thousand injuries, four thousand arrests, and $35 million in property damage (equivalent to over $250 million in 2016 dollars). Valenti was immediately alarmed when he learned of Califano’s approval of federal military assistance.
“I had more authority to deal with civil disturbances when I was in the Pentagon,” Califano protested.
“The stakes were lower there,” replied Valenti. “Here, when you act, you’re acting for the President.”
When LBJ finally returned Califano’s many telephone calls, he sounded “more sorrowful than angry. . . . He feared that the riots would make it more difficult to pass Great Society legislation and threaten the gains we’d already made.” He instructed Califano to set Dick Goodwin about the task of writing a brief presidential statement. When, thirty minutes later, he called to inquire about the draft, Califano “told him the Coast Guard was searching for Goodwin, who was also sailing in the waters off Martha’s Vineyard. ‘We ought to blow up that Goddamned island,’ Johnson said.”
If smaller disturbances in Harlem and Philadelphia had been the warning shot, Watts let loose the volley. The following year, 1966, witnessed thirty-eight urban riots, including deadly disturbances in Chicago, Cleveland, and San Francisco. In 1967, violence broke out in dozens of cities, most notably in Newark and Detroit, where police officers unleashed a fury of extralegal violence against innocent black bystanders, while rioters themselves looted and burned thousands of buildings. By the summer’s end, entire city blocks lay smoldering in ruins. Jerome Cavanagh, the mayor of Detroit, surveyed what was left of his city and saw only “Berlin in 1945.”
The ghetto conditions that turned cities into tinderboxes were not accidental creations. They were the result of a toxic combination of decades of public-sector and private-sector discrimination that created dangerously impoverished, dense, and segregated urban neighborhoods. Though the U.S. Supreme Court declared restrictive housing covenants to be nonbinding in 1948, resistance at the grassroots level among homeowners and property agents effectively restricted African Americans to a handful of neighborhoods in most cities and barred them from all but the worst rental properties. Federal mortgage policies made matters worse. Beginning in the 1930s, most mortgages were underwritten by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), a government agency that insured banks against losses from homeowners who defaulted on their loans. The FHA insured these mortgages in return for securing the banks’ pledge to provide home loans at low interest rates and to spread interest payments over the term of the mortgage, to require only a small down payment for the purchase of a home, and, finally, to allow homeowners at least fifteen and as many as thirty years to pay back their loans. At minimal expense to the federal government and with only the pledge of default insurance, the FHA freed up unprecedented levels of capital and helped create a postwar social order in which 60 percent of American families owned and accumulated wealth in their own homes. In deciding whether or not to insure mortgages, the FHA rated every census tract in the country. Assuming that houses lost value in neighborhoods that were racially mixed or primarily populated by African Americans and Latinos, the FHA assigned such areas lower scores or “redlined” them altogether, refusing to insure mortgages in these neighborhoods or insuring them on unfavorable terms. This meant that most black Americans could not secure mortgages, because their mere presence in a neighborhood would choke off affordable credit.
The FHA could claim that it was simply following the logic of the free market. When African Americans moved into a neighborhood, white homeowners tended to flee en masse, thus glutting the local real estate market and collectively driving down the prices of their homes. In this sense, it was grassroots white racism, not government policy, that was to blame. But this logic was circular. White homeowners understood on some level that when black families moved into their neighborhoods, home prices dropped. Prices dropped in part because the FHA stopped insuring mortgages for prospective buyers in these newly heterogeneous neighborhoods, thus making loans more expensive and driving down the amount of money that buyers could reasonably offer. It was a vicious cycle,
and one that kept the majority of black Americans trapped in a rapidly depleting and deteriorating universe of old housing stock, in majority-minority neighborhoods. These inner-city neighborhoods became dangerously overcrowded and received inadequate public services like sanitation and road repair. In a perverse twist, black residents had little recourse but to rent cramped, subdivided apartments in buildings whose white landlords often neglected repairs and upkeep, but the physical decay of their homes fed white Americans’ suspicions that black residents chose to live in squalor. “I would just like to say that when these houses were built they did not come furnished with roaches,” the Democratic congressman Wayne Hays of Ohio—normally a reliable administration supporter—said of the black ghetto neighborhoods of Cleveland. “What are we to do now? Go out and clean houses for these people?”
It was not just a matter of housing. Discrimination by employers and nepotism within trade unions had long excluded black workers from well-paying, blue-collar industries that gave rise to the postwar middle class. As George Meany, the president of the AFL-CIO, crassly admitted, “When I was a plumber, it never [occurred] to me to have niggers in the union!” Even in liberal bastions like New York City, African Americans in the postwar period constituted less than 5 percent of all dockworkers, skilled machinists, electricians, or unionized carpenters. The black unemployment rate was double that of the city’s unemployment rate. And New York was better than most places. In Chicago, 17 percent of black adults were unemployed. In Cleveland, 20 percent. In Detroit, 39 percent.
The stark poverty and inequality that marred ghetto neighborhoods stood in sharp contrast to America’s self-image as a prosperous society and influenced the way in which violence unfolded and was reported. Sociologists soon drew distinctions between the “commodity riots” of the mid-1960s and the “community riots” that preceded them. Unlike earlier racial disturbances, which saw white residents and law enforcement officers target African Americans (and African Americans attempt to defend themselves, in turn), commodity riots saw black urbanites destroy and plunder white-owned institutions in their own communities. To the average white television viewer, this inner-directed arson seemed self-defeating at best and dangerously criminal at worst. Members of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders—also known as the Kerner Commission, after its chairman, Illinois’s governor, Otto Kerner—later concluded that many black Americans, no less than their white neighbors, had internalized ubiquitous imagery linking the culture of postwar prosperity to citizenship. What they could not own, they were determined to loot or destroy in protest. As one young looter told the commission, “They tell us about pie in the sky but that pie in the sky is too damn high.” In the aftermath of the Newark riots of 1967, the black arts poet Amiri Baraka told a state investigative commission that the “poorest black man in Newark, in America, knows how white people live. We have television sets; we see movies. We see the fantasy and the reality of white America every day.”
Though liberals, including Lyndon Johnson, were sympathetic to the structural causes behind urban riots, many middle-class and working-class white voters reacted with fear and anger. They saw minority neighborhoods swelling to accommodate four million African Americans who made the great postwar migration from the Deep South to the urban North and Midwest, and as those neighborhoods pushed up against their own, they focused on the symptoms rather than the causes of urban blight. “The neighborhood was totally destroyed as soon as the blacks moved in,” a typical white resident of a transitional Brooklyn neighborhood observed several years later. “Buildings started burning down, and we had more crime. My sister and two of my little cousins went trick or treating one night, and about six or seven niggers ripped them off. . . . I’m not saying it’s all blacks. It’s just that people have blacks living right next to them, and sure, they’re nice people. In my old neighborhood we used to have blacks who were nice people and we were friends and everything.” A homeowner explained that “it’s the minority’s right to move where they want. I wouldn’t mind if a colored family moved next door if they were upstanding and fine like me. Educated and intelligent blacks, why not? They are people. Color shouldn’t have any place there. But I don’t want trash who will frighten me. My problem is walking in the streets and seeing people who I don’t know whether they are going to bother me. There is no reason to walk in fear.”
Many white Americans wore blinders when they commingled concerns about integration with fear of crime. But lawlessness was a real and growing problem. Between 1960 and 1970, the national crime rate increased by 176 percent, a trend that continued unabated into the 1970s. Whereas the annual murder rate held steady throughout the 1940s and 1950s, between 1963 and 1975 it nearly doubled. The decade also saw a pronounced increase in narcotics distribution and use. These trends were well in evidence by the time of the Watts riot. Ordinary people could feel them, if they could not yet quantify them, and it became all too easy to attribute them to the growth of black urban ghettos.
Even as crime rates and drug use were soaring, the judiciary was becoming ever more solicitous of the rights of the accused. In the 1960s the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that defendants must be informed of their constitutional rights upon arrest and could not stand trial without counsel. Other rulings made it more difficult for police officers to conduct searches and seizures without proper warrants. In some cases, the courts went so far as to assume control of entire state penal systems, many of which held prisoners in dangerous, inhumane conditions. However constitutionally sound these decisions might have been, they sat poorly with many Middle Americans who saw the courts as weighing in on the side of criminals rather than on that of law-abiding taxpayers. Further contributing to popular frustration, many legal authorities in the late 1960s embraced the work of liberal criminologists and sociologists who claimed that America suffered a “crisis of over-criminalization.” Many judges meted out softer sentences, while some states began liberalizing their juvenile justice systems to mainstream thousands of young offenders.
Also vexing to growing numbers of white middle-class and working-class voters was the explosion of America’s welfare burden, particularly the sharp rise in the number of people benefiting from Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Part of the Social Security Act of 1935, the program originally intended to provide support to single mothers whose husbands had died of work-related injuries or unforeseen health problems. But by 1957 roughly 57 percent of recipients were divorced or abandoned mothers and their children. Between 1960 and 1968, the AFDC rolls almost doubled from 3.1 million recipients to 6.1 million. Roughly 46 percent of these recipients were black Americans. This upsurge in welfare caseloads owed partly to a steady rise in divorce and out-of-wedlock births, but it was also the result of a deliberate initiative on the part of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO)—a group with 100,000 members—to encourage eligible adults, most of them single mothers, to enroll in the program and demand their full benefits. Some NWRO activists genuinely intended to overburden the system; they wanted it to collapse under its own weight in the somewhat naive hope that a more comprehensive system of income support might emerge in its place. But the organization’s clients were legally entitled to collect benefits, and increasingly they did. A legacy program from the New Deal era, AFDC hardly afforded recipients extravagant support; average monthly assistance in 1960 was just $108, leaving welfare beneficiaries well below the official poverty level. But as the cost to taxpayers increased—from $3.8 billion in 1960 to $9.8 billion in 1968—so did the antipathy of many white voters who bundled welfare, crime, and civil unrest together in a nebulous but powerful rejection of liberal social and economic policies.
As the public increasingly came to associate the Johnson administration with its signature commitment to civil rights, many voters found it difficult to decouple the Great Society from the struggle for black equality. Programs that aided poor people seemed specially manufactured to transfer hard-earned
tax dollars from thrifty white workers to shiftless welfare recipients in the black ghetto. It mattered little that most welfare recipients were white or that the primary drivers of black poverty were employment and housing discrimination. Perception became the new reality in politics. Many white northerners who supported civil rights when that commitment was confined to the desegregation of schools, public accommodations, and voting booths in the South instantly revolted against the Great Society when that struggle came to their schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods. The backlash that LBJ’s team had feared in 1964 finally seemed primed to materialize, and in 1966 it crystallized around the issue of open housing.
The idea for an open housing bill had been in the works for over a year. “We’ve got to end this Goddamn discrimination against Negroes,” the president barked at Joe Califano as the two men took a late afternoon swim at the LBJ Ranch during the summer of 1965. LBJ, who was tall enough to stand in the deep end, jabbed repeatedly at the shoulders of his young aide, who was paddling furiously in an effort to stay afloat. “Until people whether they’re purple, brown, black, yellow, red, green, or whatever live together, they’ll never know they have the same hopes for their children, the same fears, troubles, woes, ambitions. I want a bill that makes it possible for anybody to buy a house anywhere they can afford to. Now, can you do that? Can you do all these things?” Califano replied that he could. The legislation was ready by the time Johnson delivered his State of the Union address in January 1966, when he asked Congress to pass his new bill. Known eventually as the Civil Rights Act of 1966, the proposed measure was for the most part uncontroversial: it included certain items left uncovered by the 1964 civil rights bill, including a ban on racial discrimination in jury selection, and strengthened preexisting measures by granting the Department of Justice broader authority to bring desegregation lawsuits—steps that most moderates could support. But Title IV, an “open housing” provision that barred racial discrimination in the sale and rental of housing, proved explosive.