The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972

by Manchester, William

  In Eufaula, Oklahoma, on September 25 he said: “We don’t want our American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys. We don’t want to get involved… and get tied down in a land war in Asia.”

  Then in Manchester, New Hampshire, on September 28: “I have not thought we were ready for American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys. What I have been trying to do, with the situation that I found, was to get the boys in Vietnam to do their own fighting with our advice and with our equipment…. Now we have lost 190 American lives…. I often wake up in the night and think about how many I could lose if I made a misstep…. It is not any problem to start a war…. I know some folks who think I could start one mighty easy. But it is a pretty difficult problem for us to prevent one, and that is what we are trying to do.”

  In Akron, Ohio, on October 21: “…we are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”

  And in Pittsburgh on October 27: “There can be and will be, as long as I am President, peace for all Americans.”

  In a bitter joke a year later a girl said, “I was told if I voted for Goldwater we would be at war in six months. I did—and we were.” Surely a voter whose sole motive was the preservation of peace, and who carefully followed accounts of speeches in the newspapers, would have voted for Johnson and against Goldwater in November 1964. Later he would feel betrayed, as many did. In El Paso during the campaign the President said, “I pledge you here today I will go to any remote corner of the world to meet anyone, any time, to promote freedom and peace,” but the fact was that as long as he believed that American forces could impose a military solution on the Communists he rejected all gestures, including some promising ones, from the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese. The issue during the campaign had seemed clear-cut. Goldwater recommended the dispatch of U.S. soldiers and aircraft to the support of South Vietnam, and Johnson accused him of reckless warmongering. The President appeared to be sincere. Yet it is difficult to think of any military proposal by Goldwater which Johnson had not taken, despite his vows to the contrary, by the following summer.

  On November 3 Lyndon Johnson won election to a full term in the White House. He and Hubert Humphrey carried forty-four states and the District of Columbia, with an aggregate of 486 electoral votes. Goldwater and Congressman William E. Miller took Arizona, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Georgia, with 52 electoral votes. The Democrats also swept the congressional races. They won 28 of the 35 senatorial seats, giving them 68 to the Republicans’ 32, and picked up 41 House seats. They now dominated the House by better than a two-thirds majority, 295 to 140. The Republicans did make a net gain of one statehouse, but they still had only 17 governors to 33 for the Democrats.

  GOLDWATER FOR HALLOWEEN jeered one campaign bumper sticker that had been popular in Washington. Not all the cars displaying it had been owned by Democrats. On election day this writer lunched with Earl Warren in his chambers. The most vivid memory of that occasion was the vehemence with which the Chief Justice expressed the hope that Goldwater would be beaten soundly. Like many another GOP moderate, Warren wanted to see a total rout of the Goldwater conservatives. When disaster befell them the Republicans confirmed a theory of long standing, that their feuds are far more savage than those among Democrats. The conservatives had not only lost an election; in many cases they found themselves being cut dead by members of their own party.

  Perhaps Richard Nixon best expressed the frustration and confusion among Republican regulars. Two days after the election he excoriated Nelson Rockefeller, charging that Rockefeller’s refusal to help the Goldwater campaign had cost it votes. He called the New York governor a “divider.” By the following Tuesday Nixon was having second thoughts. He urged his fellow Republicans to reject “right-wing extremism” while finding a place for all “responsible viewpoints,” from liberal to conservative. Yet Nixon’s observations were no longer compelling, even among his fellow Republicans. Unlike Rockefeller, he had campaigned tirelessly for the ticket, and apparently it had been a wasted effort. He had collected a lot of IOUs, but it was highly unlikely that they would ever prove valuable.

  These were quiet years for Nixon, and in many ways they were good ones. He was making a lot of money. He had time to read and reflect. Except when he was speaking he saw as much of his family as fathers in private life. On the Sunday of that week that the campaign opened, Checkers, the little black and white cocker spaniel that he had turned into a political asset in 1952, died at the age of twelve, and he was there to comfort his daughters. (In October, while he was campaigning in Iowa, he was given another cocker and urged to call it Checkers II, but he gave it away; there was only one Checkers.) Eight weeks after the election his daughter Tricia led the parade at the International Debutante Ball in New York. He escorted her. Next day, the last day but one in 1964, he put a headstone over the grave of Checkers. To many it seemed symbolic.

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  Until November 1964 Lyndon Johnson had presided in the shadow of President Kennedy, but now he had been elected President in his own right. The hold of the Kennedy legend on the American imagination was still powerful—two of the most charismatic men on Capitol Hill were Robert Kennedy, the new senator from New York, as he now was, and Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, who had been swept back into office by over 900,000 votes—but Johnson was now number one, and the city began to reflect it. Among the songs heard most frequently in bars were “The Eyes of Texas” and “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Middle-aged men wearing cowboy boots and five-gallon hats with their business suits milled around in the lobby of the Washington Hotel on Fifteenth Street, beside the Treasury Building. Washington began to remind visitors of a frontier town, but then, so did the country; the wide-open, anything-goes 1960s were under way.

  In 1964 Rudi Gernreich, the California designer, introduced the topless bathing suit, which led to all sorts of things. On a certain level of night club entertainment “topless” women employees became a feature attraction and then a commonplace; in the tawdry Washington cabarets down by the National Archives, as in other American metropolises, waitresses strode about with naked breasts swinging. Next Mary Quant created the miniskirt in London. Girls and many women wore skirts which shrank inch by tantalizing inch as the decade grew older, until, when the microskirt arrived, they had ceased to be tantalizing; all but the most handsome legs had lost their appeal.

  Nudity was becoming fashionable in the theater, and as the mid-1960s wore on, seminudity became chic in society. Transparent, or “see-through” dresses were the new thing. Yves Saint Laurent brought out gauze shifts with coy sequins guarding the nipples and the crotch. In Italy the couturier Forquet created a South Seas skirt slung precariously on the hips; for a blouse he substituted a string of beads. Timid women wore either a flesh-colored something called a body stocking underneath, or “fun-derwear”—flashy, gay-colored undergarments to be glimpsed through gauze—but the more daring (and better-endowed) flaunted the works. Naked midriffs reached higher and lower. When the Smithsonian Institution acquired some of the more fantastic new gowns, Republican Congressman H. R. Gross of Iowa rose in the House to protest.

  Both sexes in the rising generation insisted upon their right to say whatever they thought “relevant,” relevance, like commitment, being one of the new things. Berkeley witnessed the rise of the Free Speech Movement, or the FSM, as it was known in California. That in turn led to the first great student-administration confrontation of the 1960s. The FSM, a coalition formed in the late summer of 1964 by undergraduates, graduate students, and junior faculty, ran the gamut ideologically from Goldwaterism to Maoism. All were united against a university prohibition of on-campus solicitation for political or civil rights demonstrations to be mounted off campus. Mobilizing under the leadership of Mario Savio, a twenty-two-year-old philosophy major from New York, the FSM reached the remarkable conclusion that the university’s board of regents was trying to con
vert the campus into a concentration camp. The purpose of the conspiracy, as they saw it, was to make Berkeley a vast trade school turning out white-collar technicians useful to the establishment—industry, banks, publishing houses, the military, conservative labor unions. Savio cried, “The time has come to put our bodies on the machine and stop it!”

  On September 14, 1964, a week before the opening of fall classes, the disorders began, and neither Berkeley nor any other American university would ever be the same. Those who called the FSM Communistic missed the point. It was anarchic, and it scorned all dialectic. A research fellow who approved of the movement explained, “All the old labels are out; if there were any orthodox Communists here, they would be a moderating influence.” The movement’s contempt for rationalism was at times ludicrous. When police dragged Savio and eight hundred of his followers out of Sproul Hall, the epicenter of the revolt, he cried, “This is wonderful! We’ll bring the university to our terms!”

  One lazy day the following March a barefoot, long-haired youth paraded through the main gate of the Berkeley campus holding aloft a placard emblazoned in blue with a single four-letter word. He wasn’t a student. His name was John J. Thompson, and he was an unpublished poet, a member of Berkeley’s so-called “hidden community”—unknown writers and political militants who would be blamed for much of the unrest there later in the decade. The following day a dozen other youths appeared carrying signs with similar messages; one shouted his cherished word into a campus microphone; another read a passage from Lady Chatterley’s Lover aloud to an arresting officer. No one in the movement went bail for him and his friends. The campus newspaper deprecated this “filthy speech movement.” To use another phrase which was entering the language, they suspected the odd crusaders of putting them on.

  Yet both their demonstrations and the new uses of taboo words appear to have been aspects of a general revolt against constraints which characterized the 1960s. Thompson and his friends may have been pulling the FSM’s leg, but many serious writers were in earnest about their right to use language which until now had been proscribed. They believed that the Supreme Court agreed with them (they were right), and in the long run their impact on society may prove to be more lasting than Savio’s civil disobedience. Appearing in print, locker room language was next heard on the stage—for example, in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which after 664 performances on Broadway became a film in 1966—and then in mixed company, among the sophisticated at first, swiftly followed by the young. In what had once been called polite society one heard, frequently from the loveliest lips, short Anglo-Saxon words formerly limited to unmixed company. The effect on the inhibited older generation was often electrifying.

  Like the Pill and the new nudity, this reflected an evolving life-style and a new morality. To many in the older generation it seemed to be no morality at all, and they came to identify it with excessive hair and communes. But the forbidden fruit was just as tasty on the palate of Goldwater’s admirers in the Young Americans for Freedom. YAF members never marched in antiwar demonstrations or read Ramparts, but when the lights went out they were as active as the most erotic hippy. One survey of casual adulterers found that a majority were short-haired and politically conservative. A Los Angeles entrepreneur who dealt with a community of conservative hedonists told a reporter, “This is the America you don’t hear about. It’s clean-cut people who don’t wear sandals and beards—guys and girls living very normal lives. It’s almost blasphemous how American it is.”

  Colleges had long provided grounds suitable for pairing off, but until the mid-1960s finding a member of the opposite sex off campus who was attractive, agreeable, and prurient had been time-consuming and rather expensive. Now that, too, was changing. Two years before the Johnson-Goldwater race, Grossinger’s Hotel in the Catskills held its first weekend for singles only. It was the beginning, though no one knew it then, of another movement. In 1964 a lonesome ensign named Michael G. O’Harro, stationed in Arlington, Virginia, established the beginning of a fortune and a way of life by throwing a party for other young unmarried people—officers, professional men, airline stewardesses, teachers, models, secretaries, and career girls. Three years later O’Harro was back in civilian life and president of an organization called the Junior Officers and Professional Association, with thirty thousand members, twelve local chapters, and a staff of fifty. By then it was possible to vacation at resorts for singles only, take Bahaman cruises or European tours in groups which accepted only bachelors and unmarried girls, and read such singles-only magazines as O’Harro’s JOPA Niteletter. And O’Harro had competitors. In San Francisco the lonely could meet at Paoli’s; Chicago had The Store, Dallas the TGIF (Thank God It’s Friday), and Manhattan Mr. Laff’s and Friday’s.

  The logical consequence of all this was the construction of apartment complexes in which the unmarried could rent apartments and visit one another at all hours, and that was what happened. In part it was a reflection of the balkanizing of generations—the tendency of people in one age group to go off by themselves, thus engendering misunderstandings and what would soon be known as “gaps.” The first to do it were the elderly, not the young. The earliest “retirement town” was built by Del Webb in Arizona in 1960. Like O’Harro’s enterprise it was a tremendous success, inspiring imitators and, in 1965, the first singles community, the South Bay Club in the Los Angeles suburb of Torrance. South Bay’s 248 apartments were all rented while it was still going up. Ultimately the firm built thirteen such complexes, including one in Phoenix, with eight thousand tenants who could play bridge, engage in round-table discussions, attend barbecues, stage masked balls, participate in wine tastings, and cohabit without encountering anyone else’s husband or wife.

  Understandably, a popular topic in the singles-only round table discussions was birth control. Another was wedlock, often put as a proposition: “Marriage—Is It Defensible?” Matrimony was only one of many social institutions which were under attack in the mid-Sixties. Nothing was sacred any more; during Holy Week in 1966 Time asked on its cover, “Is God Dead?” thereby generating an intense theological debate and one memorable bumper sticker: GOD IS ALIVE AND HIDING IN ARGENTINA. People who read Time—or anything else—were belittled as old-fashioned and “linear” in Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964).

  The iconoclasm of the mid-Sixties did not always pay. Ralph Ginzburg published Eros in 1962; the post office ruled that it was smut and he was sentenced to five years in prison. In 1964 he brought out Fact; it contained material about Barry Goldwater which was not factual, and when Goldwater sued he was awarded $75,000. In 1967 Ginzburg issued Avant-Garde; it flopped. Another loser, though no one would have guessed it in the beginning, was Cassius Clay. After winning the world’s championship by knocking out Sonny Liston in one minute flat, the fastest kayo in heavyweight title history, Clay confused fight fans by becoming a Black Muslim, changing his name to Muhammad Ali, refusing induction into the Army on grounds of conscience, and then, like Ginzburg, going to jail.

  But anyone could stumble in this hazardous time. The Strategic Air Command, which as the guardian of the U.S. nuclear striking capacity was supposed to be discreet, scared the country, not to mention Europe, when one of its B-52s collided with a jet tanker and dumped four hydrogen bombs in Spanish waters. Norman Mailer was reputed to know something about the writing of fiction, yet in 1965 An American Dream, his first novel in ten years, was mercilessly panned by critics. Lyndon Johnson was said to be determined to suppress vulgarian tendencies in order to achieve presidential dignity, but after undergoing an operation he yanked out his shirt so news cameramen could photograph the scar. James Pike, Episcopal bishop of California, resigned when accused of heresy, took up spiritualism, wrote a book about it called The Other Side, got lost in the Judean desert, and was found dead in a kneeling position. Betty Grable and Harry James, after twenty-two years of being regarded as th
e happiest couple in Beverly Hills, were divorced in Las Vegas.

  Nothing, it appeared, was as it seemed. In a gubernatorial election Alabamans voted “for Lurleen” to “let George do it.” Black militants blamed black lawlessness on tension between the races, but in 1964 the toughest enforcers of the law in the Crown Heights area of Brooklyn were the members of an organization of middle-class Negro vigilantes. The belief that Americans go to college to make more money took its lumps when the Wall Street Journal complained that few Ivy League graduates were going into business; instead they were taking jobs in churches, labor unions, the Peace Corps, and civil rights organizations. Even the cold war wasn’t what it had been. In 1966 the United States and the Soviet Union introduced direct air service between Moscow and New York with one round trip each week by Pan American and Soviet Aeroflot.

  In 1964 Dr. Strangelove faded from the marquees, to be supplanted, in 1965, by Dr. Zhivago, which inspired fashion fads for huge fur hats, thigh-high boots, and coat hems that swept the ground. The skateboard became the successor to the hula hoop in 1965, when its manufacturers grossed a hundred million dollars; a skateboard meet at Anaheim, California, was televised by the three networks, and the circulation of the Skateboard Quarterly reached fifty thousand. Then the dippy boards faded as the next toy sensation, the super ball, bounced into view. Bicycles returned to what would be a more lasting popularity that same year, when six million were sold and the Long Island Railroad installed bike racks for commuters.