by Joshua Zeitz
And then came the New Hampshire primary. That evening, Kennedy telephoned McCarthy’s headquarters to congratulate his colleague on a stunning upset. Goodwin, who answered the call, was elated by the returns but delivered an uncomfortable ultimatum: The hour had come to make a definitive decision. Bobby must enter the race or endorse McCarthy. Four days later, Kennedy announced his candidacy from the same Senate Caucus Room where JFK launched his own campaign in 1960. “We woke up after the New Hampshire primary, like it was Christmas day,” said a young McCarthy volunteer. “And when we went down to the tree, we found Bobby Kennedy had stolen our Christmas presents.” Though Goodwin immediately quit the campaign and joined Bobby’s team, most McCarthy staff members and foot soldiers were appalled by what they perceived as RFK’s ruthless and self-serving ambition. Over the next eight weeks, the two antiwar senators would hurl more fire at each other than at the president whom they had both grown to loathe and mistrust.
• • • • •
Six days after the New Hampshire primary, Harry McPherson outlined his understanding of the race in a lengthy memorandum to the president. Of the six likely candidates for president—Democrats Johnson, McCarthy, and Kennedy; Republicans Rockefeller and Nixon; and independent George Wallace—LBJ carried the most political baggage. The 1968 cycle would culminate in a change election, he argued, and as “the incumbent president you are (to some degree, at least) the natural defender of the status quo. You represent things as they are—the course we are following, the policies and programs we have chosen. Therefore, you are the most conservative of the six—the man who is not calling for change, but resisting it. This is a tough position today.” Consider, he said, the others: Wallace, the candidate of rage and backlash (McPherson dismissed his base of support as “unreachable by us”); Nixon, a “modified version of the Wallace change”; Rockefeller, the “Republican Kennedy”; McCarthy, the only proponent of an “all-out dove policy”; and Kennedy, who would pledge to “bridge the gap” between hawk and dove, black and white, business and labor, and who—as his brother had done to Nixon and Eisenhower eight years earlier—would position himself as the candidate of “vitality” against Johnson, the very image of “staleness and weariness.” He urged the president to break out of the pack by announcing a sharp change in tactics in Vietnam—with more focus on holding key cities and less emphasis on racking up body count—as the first step in a wider de-escalation. “It seems to me that we are not going to win a military victory, in the ordinary meaning of that term.” He further counseled an emergency summit of fifty big-city mayors to identify a wide range of measures to reduce tension within minority communities and to restore law and order. “You should try to be neither the toughest police chief in the country, nor sympathetic with rioters because of the conditions they live in.” In a nod to the depressing reality of recent years, McPherson assumed that there would be riots that summer and that these riots would assume political importance in the lead-up to the fall campaign. The president, he believed, should keep rhetoric to a minimum but demonstrate strong leadership by committing troops to restore order at the earliest instance of violence. Finally, he advocated a heavy travel schedule. Johnson could not run an Oval Office or front-porch race. He would inevitably have to “risk a lot of heckling and picketing. Otherwise the contrast with McCarthy, Kennedy, Rockefeller and Nixon will be obvious and damaging—they can speak to the American people, you cannot.” LBJ should arrange rallies and speeches in cities like Philadelphia, Charlotte, New Orleans, Albuquerque, Denver, Memphis, Rochester, St. Louis—anywhere there was not a “large activist campus or peace movement in town”—and “create the impression that you can go anywhere.”
The president’s other aides and advisers were equally restive. Jim Rowe warned that the president must take “dramatic and exciting” action immediately. The “dove” position had gained irreversible traction in recent weeks, and if Johnson did not transform himself from the “Win the War” candidate to the “Peace with Honor” candidate, he might lose the upcoming Wisconsin primary. The committee had canvassed 400 party officials nationwide, of whom 399 had committed to the president’s campaign. But a popular rejection at the polls would cause many of those leaders to reconsider their course.
Several weeks earlier, Clark Clifford replaced Robert McNamara as defense secretary. Increasingly despondent and certain that the war had been a tragic mistake, McNamara had left office an emotional wreck. His successor, a hardened veteran of Washington politics who had consistently supported LBJ’s war policy in his capacity as a private adviser, spent his first days at the Pentagon taking stock of the situation. He quickly determined that what the generals were requesting to “win” the war—an additional 206,000 combat troops and an additional $12 billion in budget (above and beyond the existing appropriation)—was politically untenable. The South Vietnamese government had proven itself unwilling to pull its weight. Regional allies in Asia were reluctant to enter the fight. McNamara had arrived at the right conclusion: the time had come to de-escalate. Johnson’s circle of security advisers and “wise men”—Omar Bradley, Walt Rostow, Dean Rusk, George Ball, Arthur Dean, McGeorge Bundy—all agreed. The only holdouts in the group were Abe Fortas and Maxwell Taylor, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The president assigned McPherson the task of preparing a dramatic, televised address in which he would announce a sharp curtailment of bombings and an offer to cease the bombings altogether and return to the peace table with North Vietnam. For one of the few times in his presidency, LBJ would also speak in complete candor to the American people about the financial costs of the war and the resultant need to pass a temporary tax surcharge and reduce nonmilitary expenditures in the coming year.
On Saturday, March 30, the president phoned Horace Busby to inform him of the pending announcement, which he planned to make during a televised speech the next evening. “I was jubilant,” Busby remembered. “Such a startling reversal of American policy must mean that Hanoi had already sent assurances that the proposal would be accepted.”
“No,” the president replied, “we have heard nothing from Hanoi, not a whisper, not a wink. . . . It’s only a roll of the dice. I’m shoving all my stack on this one.” Johnson asked his former aide to review McPherson’s draft. “I am going to send a driver out to your house for Sunday night,” he explained. “It’ll take him at least an hour to get there. While he’s on his way, I wish you would sit down and write out for me what you and I were talking about in January. Have the driver bring it back in here to me. I want to look it over, and I may consider using it.”
Busby remembered very well what he had discussed with the president in January.
Johnson understood what Harry McPherson did not: he could not engage in a hard-fought campaign to retain the White House while also attempting to negotiate peace in Vietnam. He certainly could not travel from city to city, where he would meet with enraged protesters, and govern a country that was on the cusp of yet another long, hot summer marred by urban violence. When Busby arrived at the White House on Sunday—a secretary had called him shortly after midnight with instructions to arrive early that morning—he found Johnson drained and weary but still undecided as to whether he would use the new, concluding paragraph. “The biggest reason to do it is just one thing,” he murmured. “I want out of this cage.”
LBJ had already telephoned Hubert Humphrey with news of his potential withdrawal from the race. The vice president doubted that he could take the nomination away from Bobby; this factor, too, weighed on Johnson’s mind. Without an office, Busby camped out in the Treaty Room, where he polished his proposed conclusion. Gradually, the president informed other staff members of what he was considering. “Are you for it?” Busby asked Marie Fehmer, one of Johnson’s senior secretaries. “I am not,” she replied “firmly and coolly.” Marvin Watson, too, was “visibly unhappy.” Early that evening, as Buzz sat outside Johnson’s bedroom door, Watson approached with a glower a
nd opened the door to the inner sanctum. “I see you have had a very good day,” he barked. “I knew what this meant,” recalled Busby. “Marvin Watson would express himself clearly and unmistakably, but also with faultless propriety. . . . Since morning, I had had more than my share of time alone with the president; Marvin Watson deserved time alone now. I made no move to follow.”
At 9:00 p.m., the president began his televised address. Forty minutes later, as he concluded, Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not seek or accept his party’s nomination for another term as president.
• • • • •
Throughout the spring, as Nixon solidified his delegate count and plotted a general election strategy, Kennedy and McCarthy battled it out in several hotly contested primaries. It would prove to be one of the bloodiest seasons in American political history. In early April, an assassin gunned down Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, where the civil rights leader had joined striking sanitation workers. His death sparked another wave of urban unrest, including riots in Washington, D.C., that were visible from the White House. Two months later, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, just moments after declaring victory in California’s hard-fought primary. “The world has never been more disorderly within memory of living man,” the journalist Walter Lippmann wrote that year.
By August, when the Democratic National Convention opened in Chicago, well over two-thirds of primary voters had supported either McCarthy or Kennedy, candidates who called for a negotiated settlement of the war in Southeast Asia. By contrast, only 2.2 percent of voters had supported Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s heir apparent, who reluctantly echoed the administration line on Vietnam and who had not competed in a single primary. Others had cast their votes for favorite-son candidates who could be expected to support the incumbent president or his chosen successor.
If the will of the voters determined the outcome, the Democrats would have nominated an antiwar liberal. But in 1968 only fifteen states chose their delegates by primary. Almost three-fifths of convention delegates were selected by county committeemen, state party apparatchiks, and elected officials. As early as June 2, even before Kennedy’s assassination, the vice president’s advisers had sewn up enough delegates to secure the nomination. Humphrey did not need grassroots support to win; he only needed the party bosses.
Given the sharp divisions within the party—hawks versus doves, young against old, blue-collar versus white-collar, McCarthy supporters against Kennedy supporters, McCarthy and Kennedy supporters against Humphrey’s machine—it was almost inevitable that the Democrats would fight and fracture, as indeed they did. Amid reports that various groups planned to disrupt the convention’s proceedings, Richard J. Daley, the legendary Chicago mayor and party fixer, mobilized twelve thousand city policemen, five thousand National Guardsmen, and six thousand federal troops to stand watch over the city. Ironically, Daley had gradually evolved from hawk to qualified dove. He no longer felt the war could be won, and he feared that the war might hurt down-ballot Democratic candidates in the fall election. But he was a party man through and through, and he would not brook disruption or dissent—not in his city and not on his watch.
It was true that several organized groups intended to demonstrate in Chicago. Under the direction of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, the “Yippies,” a motley band of agitators who combined New Left politics with street-theater tactics, had all sorts of wonders planned for the benefit of Humphrey’s supporters. Among their designs: having one thousand nudists stage a float-in in Lake Michigan, enlisting 230 “hyper-potent” men to seduce the wives and daughters of prominent delegates, injecting LSD into Chicago’s water supply, and sending hundreds of activists into the streets to throw handfuls of rice at passersby. Slightly less menacing—but only just—were members of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War (the MOBE), who had orchestrated the highly successful 1967 spring demonstration that drew hundreds of thousands of antiwar protesters into the streets nationwide. Finally, there were Gene McCarthy’s supporters, who were deeply embittered that the party was about to crown a man who had not competed in a single presidential primary.
The convention descended into chaos. Inside the hall, city policemen treated pro-McCarthy delegates brutally, refusing entrance to Lowenstein, who was not only a delegate from New York but also a Democratic nominee for Congress that fall, and roughing up Alex Rosenberg, a delegate who headed New York City’s most important Democratic reform club. “I wasn’t sentenced and sent here!” Rosenberg screamed as the police dragged him away. “I was elected!” When the CBS reporter Mike Wallace tried to cover the mayhem, a policeman punched him in the face.
The convention turned positively rancorous when Lyndon Johnson’s representatives managed to scuttle a compromise plank on Vietnam. As the New York Times noted, LBJ had “left Vice President Humphrey more tightly bound than ever to Administration policy and gave the doves the rallying cry that the Vietnam plank in the Democratic platform was directed by the White House.” And rally they did. Upon hearing of the adoption of a hard-line plank on Vietnam, several thousand MOBE protesters, Yippies, and McCarthy supporters began marching toward the convention hall, only to be violently blocked by Chicago police.
As Daley’s police force brutally attacked the young protesters, inside the liberal senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut took to the podium to denounce the “Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago.” Television viewers who had already been mesmerized by live feeds of the riot engulfing the city’s streets were then treated to an unusually vivid spectacle as Mayor Daley, seething with rage, pointed his right index finger in Ribicoff’s direction and bellowed out a string of inaudible expletives. Seasoned lip-readers had little trouble discerning his words: “Fuck you. You Jew son of a bitch!”
“How hard it is to accept the truth,” Ribicoff taunted in reply. “How hard it is.”
At the end of the week, Hubert Humphrey collected his prize. He would be the Democratic nominee in the November election. But he trailed Richard Nixon by twelve points in the polls, and his party lay in shambles.
• • • • •
At the White House, Johnson and his advisers quickly learned what life was like in a lame-duck administration. In June, some three months after LBJ shook the political establishment with his retirement announcement, Chief Justice Earl Warren—fearing that Richard Nixon, a fellow Californian whom he had long despised, might win the White House—conveyed to the president his decision to step down from the bench. “Johnson saw the Court as a means of perpetuating his social reform, particularly racial justice,” explained Joe Califano. “He also wanted the Court to uphold the compromise he had reached with Catholics on funds for parochial schools, as well as his consumer, health, and environmental legislation.” The president expected that all of these issues would “play out in the courts long after he left the White House, and he intended to win them as well after he had gone.”
The plan called for elevating Fortas to chief justice and filling the vacant seat with Homer Thornberry, an appellate court judge, former Texas congressman, and longtime Johnson ally, all before November. The president anticipated strong conservative opposition to Fortas on two counts: his liberalism, particularly on matters related to race, and his religion. It had been easy to place Fortas in the Court’s lone “Jewish seat” when LBJ had been at the height of his power. It would be another matter entirely for an outgoing president to appoint a liberal Jew to the chief justiceship, particularly in a climate less hospitable to Fortas’s liberal outlook. Clark Clifford warned him that he would never find the votes in the Senate.
From the start, everything went wrong. Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a former Klansman who filibustered the Civil Rights Act in 1964, pledged to do “everything in my power” to oppose the “leftist” Abe Fortas. Russell Long of Louisiana denounced the nominee as one of the “dirty five” who sought to expand
the rights of the accused. James Eastland of Mississippi, an ardent racist and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told the president that he had “never seen so much feeling against a man as against Fortas.” He might have been thinking in part of his colleague John McClellan of Arkansas, who ironically wanted that “SOB formally submitted to the Senate” so that he could take the fight public. Though Fortas had easily cleared the Senate confirmation process three years earlier to take his seat as an associate justice, he now served as a lightning rod for conservative Democrats and Republicans who channeled their resentment of Great Society liberalism into fervent opposition to his appointment as chief.
As a former member in good standing of the southern Democratic caucus, Johnson was firmly convinced that much of its opposition to Fortas stemmed from a toxic blend of anti-Semitism and racism. He urged the president of the American Bar Association to denounce the injection of religious bigotry into a Court nomination battle and instructed White House staff to enlist prominent rabbis to lobby senators from states with large Jewish constituencies. With prominent Republicans like Robert Griffin of Michigan also in the opposition camp, the White House activated key industrialists including Henry Ford II and Paul Austin, the president of Coca-Cola, to apply pressure where needed. Matters came to a head when Fortas appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee for his confirmation hearings. Though a skilled litigator and no stranger to bare-knuckle politics, he was unprepared for the force of opposition that his nomination met.
Committee members relentlessly attacked Fortas for his role in shaping key Court decisions that liberalized criminal rights and public obscenity laws—proxy issues in the broader political debate over race, poverty, and counterculture. They also hammered the sitting associate justice for mixing his roles as jurist and presidential adviser and thereby eroding the Court’s independence. Fortas anticipated this criticism and replied that “the history of this Republic is replete with shining examples of a close relationship between a president and a justice of the Supreme Court.” In particular, he cited John Jay, who “offered George Washington the benefit of his wisdom on a variety of political problems,” and Chief Justice Fred Vinson and the associate justice Sherman Minton, who the committee members knew very well had continued to serve Harry Truman as an informal adviser after each had ascended to the Court (indeed, some members had served in the House with Vinson or the Senate with Minton). To that list, Fortas might as well have added Felix Frankfurter, who, as virtually every senator understood, remained a close adviser to FDR after joining the Court, or William O. Douglas, who dabbled conspicuously with politics and even considered running for president from the bench. He also downplayed his current proximity to LBJ. Califano later admitted that “Fortas’s testimony was so misleading and deceptive that those of us who were aware of his relationship with Johnson winced with each news report of his appearance before the Senate committee.”