According to a New York Times survey, the militant whites in campus riots at Columbia and elsewhere typically came from well-to-do homes in suburbia, had parents who were politically liberal, were students in the humanities rather than the sciences, were brilliant in class, and were predominantly Jewish. An example was Ted Gold, twenty-one, with Rudd a leader in the Columbia uprising and an SDS chairman. Gold said to reporters: “We are working, not just for a revolutionary Columbia, but for a revolutionary America.”
***
At some point in the 1960s a man who had never run a stop sign did it. He was careful, nothing was coming; it was a silly statute, he reasoned; only robots obeyed it. He ran another; in a month he was doing it without qualms, and in another month he was running red lights if they turned red just as he was approaching an intersection. Though he overlooked the connection, he was annoyed because the attendant at his favorite filling station no longer checked his oil and cleaned his windshield unless asked. He switched filling stations; it was the same there. At about the same time a door in his new car developed a hideous rattle; he dismantled it and found that some anonymous worker on a Detroit assembly line had left a Coke bottle in it.
These were little things, but there were others. One morning you found a notice in your milk box. No more milk; the company had stopped deliveries; you had to go to the store. The postal system was a disgrace. Everybody had his horror story about the mails. Waitresses brought you somebody else’s order. Cab drivers couldn’t find your destination. Your evening paper wasn’t delivered. The druggist filled the wrong prescription. The new washer-dryer was a lemon. Deliverymen double-parked and wouldn’t move. By the end of the Johnson years it was a national joke. People displayed little signs:
The building industry was disgraceful; you were lucky if the job was done six months after the date promised. Airliners were late taking off; because they didn’t reach your destination on time you had to wait, stacked over it, and when you did land you discovered that your baggage had gone on to another airport. This was so common that frequent travelers bought luggage expressly designed to fit under their seats. Bus and train timetables were fictive. Nearly everyone was dunned at one time or another for bills that were already paid. Nothing, it seemed, functioned any more. From the plumbing and the television to the F-111 swing-wing jet, all was snafu. A New York woman, billed for transatlantic telephone calls she hadn’t made, picked up her phone to protest and heard violins playing; a Muzak line had crossed hers. Rex Reed, the writer, tried to use a credit card and was arrested on the ground that Rex Reed was dead. Time reported a man who had emptied a pistol firing at a vending machine.
Repairmen and salesclerks were as bad, or worse. The fault was difficult to pin down, but it was everywhere. People didn’t seem to care whether things worked any more. The discipline that knits a society together was weakening and at some points giving way altogether. John Kenneth Galbraith attributed it to prosperity. Richard Nixon blamed it on permissiveness.
Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber likened the student demonstrators to General Giap in Vietnam, finding them different expressions of the same phenomenon. Clearly the war had something to do with it. Young men from the upper stratum of American society were evading the draft without guilt, encouraged by their parents and often with letters from physicians who lied about their health, also without guilt. Millions sympathized with the draft evaders and deserters making new lives in Toronto and Stockholm. Because the first four to arrive in Sweden had jumped ship from the aircraft carrier Intrepid, they were known as the “Intrepid Four.” No one there thought the name ambiguous. One member of the colony, a nineteen-year-old South Carolinian, said: “We fall into two categories. There are those who are convinced the United States will blow up the world. There are others who think the United States can be saved before this catastrophe happens.”
The war was only part of it. Not since Prohibition had so many people, concluding that some laws were senseless, proceeded to break them. Marijuana was an example. Unlike other drugs it was not habit-forming, unlike tobacco it was not harmful to the user, and unlike alcohol it was not dangerous to society. To the young it was often a matter of status; youths of the better families were known to be smoking it. For a time in 1969 police made a habit of “busting”—another new word—the sons and daughters of the famous.
Looters in the summer riots weren’t arrested; you could see them helping themselves on the television news programs; policemen watched them and did nothing. “It seems to me,” said Kenneth Clark, the Negro psychologist, “a high-policy decision was made to trade goods and appliances for human lives.” Certainly it appeared that an arrest was determined by the identity of the person and place as much as by the act. In mid-May Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King’s successor, set up a “Resurrection City,” which King had planned, on the hallowed ground between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. He led a thousand poor people on it, and the government not only failed to take any of them into custody; it gave them portable latrines, phone booths, power lines, showers, and even a zip number: 20013. Late in June, Alvin Johnson, the camp’s chief security officer, resigned in anger, saying, “There are rapes, robberies, and cuttings every day, and there is nothing we can do about it.” The National Capital Parks Police remained aloof.
In a previous generation Calvin Coolidge had won national recognition, and ultimately the Presidency, by breaking the Boston police strike of 1919. He said that there was “no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.” In 1937 Franklin Roosevelt had called a strike by civil servants “unthinkable and intolerable.” Since then the principle had been embodied in the Taft-Hartley Act and, in the states, by such laws as New York’s Condon-Wadlin Act. Nevertheless, on January 1, 1966, Mike Quill led his Transport Workers Union in a strike that paralyzed downtown Manhattan by depriving the city, in effect, of 165 miles of subways and 530 miles of bus routes. When Quill was served with a court order to lead them back, he tore it up in front of television cameras. The city was forced to accept mediation and compromise with him.
Walkouts against the public interest in 1968 included that of the Memphis sanitation workers which Martin Luther King endorsed in his final hours. Another that same year left New York littered with a hundred thousands tons of reeking garbage on the streets before Governor Rockefeller capitulated and granted the garbage workers a $425 pay raise which Mayor Lindsay had rejected earlier. Next, New York policemen picketed City Hall, shouting “Blue power!” They reported “sick” with imaginary ills or watched languidly while drivers left their cars parked at bus stops and in other no-parking zones. The head of the firemen’s union bargained by telling his men to ignore such routine tasks as inspecting buildings and fire hydrants. On three separate occasions in the autumn of 1968 a majority of New York’s 58,000 teachers walked out. Then air traffic controllers, alarmed at the dense stack-ups overhead, conspired in a deliberate slowdown.
The climax to defiance of public service came at the end of the decade, when over 200,000 of the country’s 750,000 postmen decided to stop delivering the mail for pay that started at $6,176 a year and reached $8,442 after twenty-one years. Despite the urging of their leaders, who reminded them that federal law threatened them with a $1,000 fine, a year in prison, the loss of pensions, and blacklisting from other government jobs, the 6,700 members of the Manhattan-Bronx local of the AFL-CIO National Association of Letter Carriers voted to walk out. Soon they were joined by the rest of greater New York’s mailmen. The strike spread to Akron, Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago, Denver, St. Paul, and San Francisco.
It was the first walkout in the history of the U.S. Postal Service, and it was devastating. On an average day New York’s post office moves about 25 million letters and packages; the national average is 270 million. Many firms had to suspend operations. New York banks couldn’t receive their daily average of 300 million dollars in deposits, 400,000 welfare clients couldn’t get their checks, and
brokerage firms had to hire armored trucks to move securities on Wall Street. On the sixth day the National Guard began handling the New York mail, and on the eighth day the mailmen resumed their appointed rounds. Like other civil servants who had struck, they profited from their illegal walkout. Congress voted them an 8 percent raise, retroactive to the month before, and established an independent U.S. Postal Service which, among other things, was meant to be more attentive to their grievances.
Among the things that went wrong in 1968 was the choosing of a new Supreme Court Chief Justice. Earl Warren still felt vigorous, but he decided to retire because of his age; he had turned seventy-seven on March 19. On the morning of June 19 he telephoned President Johnson and told him. It was a historic moment. No Court had played a greater role in determining the direction of its time. Under Warren’s leadership, the Court had led the way on school desegregation, school prayers, the rights of Communists, pornography, the arrest and conviction of defendants, and the “one man, one vote” ruling ordering legislative reapportionment. Warren had presided over fifteen Court terms. And now Lyndon Johnson, who wanted to do everything as President, could choose a new chief judge. He named Associate Justice Abe Fortas and picked Texas Congressman Homer Thornberry to take Fortas’s place.
Both men were old friends of the President. Fortas was as close to the President as any man; the President had put him on the Court three years earlier. Johnson, being Johnson, had to make the new selections complicated. He would not accept Warren’s resignation until the Senate had confirmed his choice of Fortas. Then, with Fortas securely in office, Thornberry could move into his old spot. But the Republicans, believing that they would capture the White House in November, were mulish. They called Fortas and Thornberry “lame duck” nominations and tarred Fortas as a “crony” of the President.
Senator Robert P. Griffin of Michigan emerged as the leader of seventeen hostile Republicans. In the beginning it seemed a lost cause. Everett Dirksen of Illinois, the minority leader in the Senate, called the “cronyism” and “lame duck” arguments “frivolous.” “You do not go out looking for an enemy to put him on the Court,” he said, and he remarked that Presidents Lincoln, Truman, and Kennedy had appointed friends. Rebuking Griffin, Dirksen said, “It’s about time we be a little more circumspect about the kind of language we use.” Even when the Senate Judiciary Committee decided to hold hearings—the first time for any nominee to the post of Chief Justice—Fortas seemed safe. The opening witness, Attorney General Ramsey Clark, pointed out that there was ample precedent for the President to keep Warren on the Court until Fortas’s confirmation; many lesser federal judges were chosen while their predecessors remained in office.
The problem now was Fortas himself. He spent four terrible days being grilled. Under the Constitution he could not discuss his decisions while on the stand; that would be an outright violation of the principle of separation of powers. Nevertheless, opposition senators spent much of the time reading aloud liberal decisions in which he had participated. Then they questioned him about certain aspects of his conduct as an associate justice. That too was a matter of the separation of powers, but here it hurt him. As a member of the Court he was supposed to remain aloof from the executive department, and he hadn’t been. He acknowledged that he had participated in White House meetings about the war and the ghetto riots, and that he had phoned Ralph Lazarus, the Columbus department store tycoon, to give him a tongue-lashing because of Lazarus’s statement that Vietnam was affecting the economy.1 Fortas protested that there was ample precedent for justices advising Presidents, but here, as always with Johnson, there was the nagging feeling that something shady was going on. One straw was needed to break the camel’s back now, and it came when the committee learned that Fortas had accepted $15,000 as the fee for teaching a series of summer groups, the money coming from businessmen who might figure in cases coming before the Court.
The judiciary committee approved the appointment 17 to 6, but the Republican and southern senators staged a filibuster. A two-thirds vote of the Senate was required to end it, and at that point Dirksen pulled the rug from under Fortas. He would not support the move to stop the filibuster, he said, and he wasn’t even sure he would vote for the nomination; a Court ruling overturning the death penalty for the killing of a Chicago policeman angered him. The vote on cloture was 45 yes and 43 no, far short of the two-thirds needed. Fortas asked Johnson to withdraw the nomination. The President agreed “with deep regret” and said he would make no appointment at all. The following May Life revealed that Fortas had accepted another, $20,000 fee from the family foundation of Louis Wolfsen, whose conviction for stock manipulation had come before the Court. Although he had returned the money, Washington was shocked, and when still other revelations loomed, he resigned. With Fortas and Goldberg gone, and with a Republican in the White House, clearly the future Court would be less liberal.
***
Americans have a way of anointing and consecrating their heroes, putting them on pedestals that are impossibly high, and then knocking them off. In the autumn of 1968 it was the turn of a heroine: Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, who wanted neither the adoration of the past nor the calumny of the present, but merely privacy. She was a woman of beauty and charm. For one terrible weekend in its history the United States needed a presidential widow with those gifts and something else: a histrionic talent. Eleanor Roosevelt was a greater First Lady, but she could not have done that. Jackie Kennedy had given the country’s grief dignity and nobility. No woman could have improved on it. But afterward she needed to be alone, and as long as she remained a widow that seemed to be impossible. In Washington tourist buses paused outside her home, and when she moved to New York cabbies recognized her and honked.
To avoid gossip she went out only with happily married public men. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Robert S. McNamara, and Leonard Bernstein were familiar escorts. Lord Harlech, who as David Ormsby-Gore had been the British ambassador to the United States during the Kennedy years, was now a widower. The press suggested him as a new husband. Movie magazines proposed an elderly Greek shipping magnate, and the fans laughed.
They stopped laughing on October 17, 1968, when Jackie’s mother announced: “My daughter, Mrs. John F. Kennedy, is planning to marry Mr. Aristotle Onassis”—the elderly shipping magnate. The son of a Smyrna tobacco merchant, Onassis had acquired a fortune which was estimated at 500 million dollars. Among other things he owned 100 ships, Olympic Airways, several corporations, a 325-foot yacht, the Christina, and the Greek island Skorpios. Those who believed the report—who weren’t convinced that either the bride’s mother was out of her mind or the announcement was a monstrous practical joke—speculated over what to give the couple. The New York Stock Exchange, the Taj Mahal, the Queen Elizabeth 2, and the De Beers diamond mines were among the suggestions.
JACKIE, HOW COULD YOU? asked the headline in the Stockholm Expressen. Onassis was two inches shorter and could have been her father—he was either twenty-three or twenty-nine years older, depending on which birth date you accepted. Onassis was divorced, which meant that Jackie could not hope for the church’s blessing. Worst of all was the groom’s total lack of a social conscience, the very heart of the Kennedy creed. He once said that his idea of the perfect home would be in a country without taxes. The taxes he did owe were outstanding in several different nations, including the United States. “She’s gone from Prince Charming to Caliban,” one former Kennedy appointee commented. Bob Hope said, “Nixon has a Greek running mate, and now everyone wants one.” It was widely remarked that she wouldn’t have done it if Bobby were alive.
The marriage was celebrated on October 20 in a tiny Chapel of the Little Virgin on Skorpios. Tulips had been airlifted from Holland by the tycoon’s private jet fleet. The bride wore a lace Valentino original. Her two children were pages. The groom’s children were witnesses. The Greek Orthodox ceremony took forty-five minutes; then the couple took communion from one chalice and were crowned with garlands
of lemon blossoms, a sign of fertility and purity. After kissing the New Testament they circled the altar in a ritualistic dance. Afterward there was a reception on the white-hulled yacht. The Greek navy and Onassis’s own patrol boats kept reporters off the island. His present to her was a ring with a huge ruby surrounded by big diamonds, with matching earrings—a gift worth 1.2 million dollars.
That was only the beginning. According to the veteran journalist Fred Sparks, the pair spent about twenty million dollars their first year together, and their expenditures then continued at the rate of about $384,000 a week. Onassis had given his new wife five million dollars in jewelry alone. And since he was making about fifty million dollars a year, he wasn’t even dipping into capital. Keeping out of the newspapers was another matter. Mrs. Kennedy, as she still was, had agreed to hold one press conference on the eve of the wedding. She said then, “We wish our wedding to be a private moment in the little chapel among the cypresses of Skorpios, with only members of the family and their little children. Understand that even though people may be well known, they still hold in their hearts the emotion of a simple person for the moments that are the most important we know on earth—birth, marriage, and death.”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 171
