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

by Manchester, William

  For a time Carmichael took a conciliatory line, redefining black power as “black people coming together to form a political force and either electing representatives or forcing their representatives to speak their needs…. saying, ‘Look, buddy, we’re not laying a vote on you unless you lay so many schools, hospitals, playgrounds and jobs on us.’” It didn’t last. Soon he was telling audiences that “If we don’t get justice we’re going to tear this country apart,” and calling on Negroes to “fight for liberation by any means necessary.” In Prattville, Alabama, he said, “We came here to tear this town up and we’re going to tear it up.” He called President Johnson a “hunky,” a “buffoon,” and a “liar.” Increasingly he identified himself with the Panthers, whose “Power to the People” slogan meant power to black people and no one else. Then, like Danton being succeeded by Robespierre, Carmichael was replaced as SNCC’s chairman by an even more violent racist, H. Rap Brown. When much of downtown Cincinnati went up in flames during five terrible days and nights of Molotov cocktails, Brown told reporters that there would be no peace “until the honky cops get out.” Then he said: “SNCC has declared war.”

  The backlash vote in the 1966 elections was one response to the call for black power. Another was a shift in position by such sensitive politicians as Senator Everett Dirksen. Dirksen had supported civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965 as “an idea whose time has come,” but he scorned the 1966 bill, with Title IV, the “open housing” clause, as “a package of mischief,” and that killed it. Curiously, it was a British periodical, the Economist of London, which took the most critical view of the new militants. “Many of these ‘leaders’ are of a lurid fascist type,” said the Economist. It derided “liberal intellectuals” who “insultingly tell one another that the general anti-white mood among black Americans is similar to the anti-German mood among the French in 1943,” observed that “robberies and assaults on white women” were being interpreted by some activists as “almost a noble act of black revolution,” and predicted that “a temporary and rather extraordinary toleration by the American people of flamboyant violence is almost certainly about to turn to a harsh white intolerance of it.”

  Meantime the black racists were flourishing. The Panthers were acquiring what Tom Wolfe pungently called “radical chic” among some affluent urban liberals, and criminals whose notoriety would once have been limited to the police blotter were being seriously discussed as observers with fresh insight into the human dilemma. All were creatures of the ghettos, and the rise of some could be traced directly to the recent riots. Ron Karenga came from the depths of Watts; although he denied that members of US, his black nationalist organization, had engaged in riot activity, four of them had been so charged. Karenga’s celebrity was a consequence of the Watts upheaval. The full bill for that convulsion, it was becoming clear, was incalculable. Some of the highest costs would be hidden for years. One item in the legacy of violence was a snub-nosed, eight-shot 22-caliber Iver-Johnson revolver, model 55SA, bought for protection by a frightened Angeleno for $31.95 late in August 1965 in the wake of the disorders. Later he gave it to his daughter, who passed it on to a Pasadena neighbor, who sold it to an employee in Nash’s Department Store named Munir “Joe” Sirhan. Eventually Joe turned it over to his kid brother, Sirhan Bishara “Sol” Sirhan, who used it to assassinate Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles three years after Watts.

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  In the twelve-year cycle of the Vietnamese calender, the Year of the Snake, 1965, gave way to the Year of the Horse, 1966, which in turn was followed by the Year of the Goat, 1967. The Horse was supposed to be lucky, second only to the Year of the Dragon in auspiciousness, but almost half of America’s total Vietnam dead by the end of the first ten weeks of 1966—2,559 men—had fallen to Communist guns and bombs in those ten weeks, and that, it turned out, was only the beginning. That year’s toll was 4,800 U.S. soldiers killed in action. In May of the following year the total of U.S. dead passed 10,000, and as the war grew older, it grew bloodier. Average weekly losses in the Year of the Goat ran 33 percent higher than in the Year of the Horse. More men died in 1967 than in all the war’s previous years. And during that same period there were 53,000 civilian deaths, a matter of increasing concern to the war critics at home.

  The toll didn’t deter the Pentagon from proposing an ever more vigorous, aggressive policy. The Joint Chiefs kept pressing McNamara to recommend to the President the bombing of petroleum, oil, and lubricant supplies (POL raids, they were called) in North Vietnam. Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp of CINCPAC predicted that this would “bring the enemy to the conference table or cause the insurgency to wither.” McNamara finally agreed in March 1966, though the CIA prophesied that POL strikes would not halt infiltration of men and supplies. The CIA was right; despite heavy losses in combat, the number of North Vietnamese soldiers coming down the 1,000-mile Ho Chi Minh Trail grew from 1,500 a month to 3,500 and then to 4,000. By the end of the year Giap was sending an average of 8,800 men a month to the South. Soon the annual replacement rate would be 100,000 men.

  Defense Department study groups advised McNamara that despite the bombing the flow of guerrillas southward was “undiminished” and that the raids “had no measurable direct effect” on Hanoi’s capacity to make war below the 17th Parallel. The secretary flew over to see for himself; it was his eighth on-the-spot inspection. Returning, he told the President that “pacification has if anything gone backward,” and that the air war had not “either significantly affected infiltration or cracked the morale of Hanoi.” He recommended a reappraisal of the bombing campaign. The Joint Chiefs strenuously objected to any suggestion of a cutback in the raids. In a memorandum to the President they contended that the military situation had “improved substantially over the past year” and called bombing “a trump card.” General Westmoreland, flying home to address a joint session of Congress, reported: “I have never been more encouraged in my four years in Vietnam…. We have reached an important point when the end begins to come in view.”

  McNamara was not encouraged. By now he had seen too many optimistic forecasts go glimmering. In Saigon he had spent a gloomy session with one of his men there who told him that the official cheerfulness was false, that there was no light at the end of the tunnel; the informant was Daniel Ellsberg. In fact Westmoreland was in Washington not to report victories but to ask for more troops. He had ended 1966 with 375,000. By April of 1967 he had 480,000, more than in the Korean War at its peak. He wanted 680,000 men by June 1968, or at the very least 565,000. With the higher figure, he told Johnson, he could end the war in two years; with the smaller figure it would take three years. The President noted unhappily that the Communist force in the South was at a record high. He asked the general, “When we add divisions, can’t the enemy add divisions? If so, where does it all end?” Westmoreland said that if Giap’s infiltration rate went much higher his supply problems would become difficult. Anyhow, the grunts were killing North Vietnamese quicker than they could be replaced. Johnson asked what would happen if Giap asked for Chinese volunteers. The general replied, “That’s a good question.”

  Already American involvement in the Vietnam War had lasted longer than World War II or the Korean War. The conflict seemed more than ever a struggle between whites and Asians. MACV christened the battles with colorful names which became reminders of agony in the jungle and growing bitterness among an increasingly divided people at home. There was operation Attleboro, and Leatherneck Square, and operations Masher, Double Eagle, and White Wing. Then Dak To, Hill 881 North, Loc Ninh, and operations Crazy Horse, Hawthorne, and Hastings—Hastings, the costliest engagement since Ia Drang. And then Hill 881 South, Khe Sanh, the three red hills of Con Thien, and Ashu. The Iron Triangle, a three-cornered region of abandoned rubber plantations and rain forest between the Saigon River and Route 13 twenty miles north of Saigon, had been a Communist stronghold for twenty years. Operation Cedar Falls in January 1967, an attack on the Triangle by 30,000 grunts, was the larg
est American drive of the war till then. But operation Junction City, a month later, was even bigger: 45,000 American troops thrusting into Zone C near the Cambodian border to wipe out a Viet Cong base. They did it—and then had to let the enemy reclaim it, because ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) forces couldn’t hold it, even as garrison troops.

  Congress, meantime, was making dissent from Johnson’s war policies respectable. By later standards the protests were muffled; addressing Hanoi, sixteen senators who opposed the administration’s conduct of the war warned that there were limits to their dissent, that they were “steadfastly opposed to any unilateral withdrawal of American troops.” Yet the Hill was growing restive. At the request of the President, five senators led by Mike Mansfield spent thirty-five days in Vietnam. When they issued their report Johnson was dismayed; they had found that a year of U.S. campaigning had not altered the progress of the war and that America was becoming trapped in an “open-ended” conflict: “how open is dependent upon the extent to which North Viet Nam and its supporters are willing and able to meet increased force by increased force.” Senator Robert F. Kennedy charged that the administration had “switched” from the policy of his brother, so that now, “We’re killing innocent people… because [the Communists] are 12,000 miles away and they might get 11,000 miles away.”

  That was the highest level of protest. Senatorial doves might object to Johnson’s course in Indochina, but they voted him funds to continue on it, and their language was polite. Fulbright, the most outspoken of them, was never uncivil; when Westmoreland told a New York audience that he was “dismayed… by recent unpatriotic acts here at home” and accused the perpetrators of giving aid and comfort to the enemy, Fulbright merely replied that Westmoreland’s visit had been planned by the administration “to pave the way for escalation,” which was of course true. One step down was Martin Luther King, who called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” and compared American experiments with new weapons in Vietnam, where they were killing peasants, to Nazi tests of “new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe.” Eartha Kitt used much the same rhetoric in attacking the war at a White House luncheon given by Lady Bird. So did Dr. Spock in telling peace demonstrators that “Lyndon Johnson is the enemy”; so did folk singer Pete Seeger, censored by CBS for a number called “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” which dealt contemptuously with the President’s war policy (“And the old fool says, ‘Push on’”), and Captain Howard Brett Levy, a Brooklyn physician who refused to train medical corpsmen assigned to the Army’s Special Forces—Green Berets—on the ground that under the Nüremberg Doctrine he would thereby become an accessory to war crimes. One of the charges against Dr. Levy at his court-martial in June 1967 was that he had called the war a “diabolical evil.” He was found guilty, sentenced to three years in prison, and led off in handcuffs.

  Colleges and universities continued to be the centers of heavier protest. Job recruiters for the CIA, the Dow Chemical Company—manufacturers of napalm, the incendiary jelly—and the armed forces were treated roughly and sometimes ejected from campuses. The revelation on St. Valentine’s Day 1967 that $200,000 a year in CIA funds had been subsidizing the National Student Association (NSA), which represented student governments on over three hundred campuses, was enough to cripple the NSA. Students provided the leadership for “Stop-the-Draft Week” in October 1967, including a march to the steps of the Pentagon by more than fifty thousand demonstrators, and they were responsible for imaginative and sometimes shocking protests against the draft—pasting eight draft cards on the door of the American embassy in London, battling Oakland police for five days while attempting to block buses carrying draftees from an induction center to military bases, and seizing and holding the administration building at the University of Chicago for three days to dramatize opposition to the war.

  It was not all selfless idealism. College students were of the age most vulnerable to conscription, and as monthly draft calls in 1966 were boosted nearly tenfold over the 1965 average of five thousand, blanket deferments for students became rarer. Resistance to the draft was being expressed openly on posters, buttons, and bumper stickers. The theme of a 1967 hit tune, Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant,” was draft evasion, and virtually every undergraduate dormitory had a collection of leaflets providing tips on how to get rejected at Selective Service physical examinations. (“Arrive high. If you want to go about the addiction scene in a really big way, use a common pin on your arm for a few weeks in advance.”) General Hershey struck back by sending a directive to the country’s 4,088 draft boards instructing them to reclassify the protesters 1-A. Congressmen objected that Hershey was exceeding his authority, and the American Civil Liberties Union charged that using the draft to punish dissidents was “outrageous,” but Hershey wouldn’t back away. One consequence was that the flow of draft evaders to Canada grew until there were some ten thousand young American expatriates there, making new homes with the help of such groups as the Students Union for Peace Action in Toronto.

  As the polarization of the country grew, the hawks became more hawkish. In response to back-to-back antiwar speeches by Morse of Oregon (“The United States is leading mankind into World War III out of which will come no victory”) and Gruening of Alaska (who called a new war appropriation bill “a blank check for unlimited escalation”), Russell B. Long of Louisiana wrapped himself in the flag in attacking those who “encourage the Communists to prolong the war.” Long said, “I swell with pride when I see Old Glory flying from the Capitol…. My prayer is that there may never be a white flag of surrender up there.” Everett Dirksen predicted that if Vietnam fell, “the whole Pacific coastline” of the United States would be “exposed.” Manhattan hawks staged Operation Gratitude, a two-day vigil at Battery Park. At the same time, motorists who believed in the war were asked to drive with lights on—and suddenly every highway offered a vivid demonstration of how badly divided the people were.

  Lyndon Johnson characteristically said one thing while believing the exact opposite. “No American, young or old, must ever be denied the right to dissent,” he declared in June 1966, putting on his white hat. “No minority must be muzzled. Opinion and protest are the life breath of democracy—even when it blows heavy.” His deeper feeling was that those who quarreled with his conduct of the war were un-American, and that it was his duty to battle them with any weapon that came to hand. Presidential publicity was effective, and at various times he conferred with Asian allies at Guam, Honolulu, Manila, and Melbourne, staging the trips to coincide with antiwar events he wanted to drive off the front page. It didn’t always work. In Australia he discovered that American students weren’t the only ones capable of mounting antiwar demonstrations; Melbourne hecklers tossed two plastic balloons filled with paint at his limousine, smearing it red and green, the Viet Cong colors.

  His true feelings about opponents of the war boiled over on May 17, 1966, at a Democratic fund-raising dinner in Chicago, when he upbraided “Nervous Nellies” who “will turn on their leaders and on their country and on our own fighting men.” By the end of that summer he was avoiding the phrase “Great Society.” He had come to prefer the company of political conservatives to that of “knee-jerk liberals” who were such “trouble-makers that they force politicians to the right.” In the privacy of the White House he would flatly state that Americans in the antiwar movement were disloyal, that “the Russians” were “behind the whole thing.” The FBI and the CIA, he confided to his staff, were keeping him posted on what was “really going on.” The doves in the Senate were in touch with Soviet agents, he said; they lunched with them, attended parties at the Russian embassy, and encouraged the children of their aides to date Soviet diplomats in Washington and at the U.N. He asserted, “The Russians think up things for the Senators to say. I often know before they do what their speeches are going to say.” In June 1966 the parents of one of the winners of a Presidential Scholarship, a gifte
d seventeen-year-old girl, turned out to be critics of the war. Word went out to the staff that the girl was to be deprived of her medal. Eric Goldman protested and the order was rescinded, but Goldman was told that before Presidential Scholars were nominated in the future, they and their families would be subjected to FBI checks.

  Hawks, following Johnson’s example, saw the stain of disloyalty spreading. In 1966 CBS-TV showed marines in the “Zippo squads”—as they called themselves—setting fire to peasant huts, and the Pentagon virtually accused the commentators of treason. When McNamara opposed the bombing of Hanoi in a Montreal speech, noting that the weekly bomb tonnage dropped on North Vietnam already exceeded that of all the bombings of Germany in World War II, he too came under suspicion. He decided to resign in November 1967, joining Mac Bundy, George Ball, Jack Valenti, George Reedy, Richard Goodwin, and Horace Busby in the exodus of trusted Johnsonian advisers from Washington. The departure of Bill Moyers hurt the President most, but it was Johnson’s equivocations which had made Moyers’s role as press secretary untenable. Reston wrote of him that he had been wounded at Credibility Gap, and Moyers himself said that the gap had become so bad that “we can’t even believe our own leaks.” The President, stung by his resignation, accused Moyers of ingratiating himself with the Kennedys and exploiting the White House, using it to better himself at the expense of the administration. He read the clippings, LBJ stormed, and he wasn’t stupid; he saw what had been happening; the press secretary had been getting a good press for himself while Johnson’s grew worse and worse.

  He was right about his public image. By 1967 it was terrible. The Secret Service disclosed that the number of people arrested for threatening the life of the chief executive had increased by over 500 percent since Dallas. The number of people holding Lyndon Johnson responsible for the death of John Kennedy was growing. By May 1967 there were, Esquire estimated, some sixty different versions of the Dallas tragedy on sale. Early that year District Attorney Jim Garrison of New Orleans told the press, “My staff and I solved the assassination weeks ago.” Subsequent events made it plain that Garrison belonged in a padded cell, not a courtroom, but a Harris poll that May indicated that the number of Americans who doubted the Warren Report had jumped from 44 percent to 66. Many believed Garrison “had something”; others simply came to distrust everything about President Johnson, including the way he entered the White House.