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

by Manchester, William

  Carswell’s chief qualification appeared to be that he wasn’t rich and thus, unlike Haynsworth, couldn’t be charged with conflict of interest in corporate verdicts. Unfortunately he had other liabilities. A reporter dug out a sentence from a 1948 Carswell speech: “Segregation of the races is proper and the only practical and correct way of life in our states.” Confronted with the quotation, the nominee called it “obnoxious and abhorrent,” but the NAACP came out against him anyway. Then it was revealed that Carswell had participated actively in a campaign to exclude blacks from a Tallahassee golf club, had insulted civil rights lawyers in his court, and had been often reversed on appeal. This last development inspired a well-meant comment by Senator Roman L. Hruska of Nebraska. He told a television interviewer that “even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. Aren’t they entitled to a little representation and a little chance? We can’t have all Brandeises and Cardozos and Frankfurters and stuff like that. I doubt we can. I doubt we want to.”

  Later Hruska was asked if he regretted saying it. “Indeed I do,” he said, “indeed I do.” A GOP floor leader remarked later, “Everywhere I go I hear that word—mediocre. If there was one single thing it was that. You could see the votes deserting in droves.” Before Hruska said it, Senator Kennedy had forecast a maximum of 25 votes against Carswell, and Scott had predicted that the most the opposition could muster would be “in the 30s.” In fact the ayes were 45 and the nays 51; “the nomination,” said the presiding officer, Vice President Agnew, “is not agreed to.” Two days later an angry President Nixon told newspapermen that as long as the Democrats controlled the Senate “I cannot successfully nominate to the Supreme Court any federal appellate judge from the South who believes as I do in the strict construction of the Constitution.”

  This was a far cry from the bring-us-together theme of his inaugural, but it was deliberate. Nixon was abandoning nonpartisanship and was counterattacking. The strategic shift had begun with a televised speech to the nation in response to the first in a series of new antiwar demonstrations which dramatized demands for peace in Vietnam. The President said they were unnecessary because he had “a plan… for the complete withdrawal of all United States ground combat forces and their replacement by South Vietnamese forces.” He called this “Vietnamization.” He said he believed it would succeed and asked for support from “the great silent majority of my fellow Americans.” In a thrust at his critics he said: “Let us be united for peace. Let us also be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.”

  Gallup reported that 77 percent of his audience approved of the speech—only 6 percent disapproved it—and Nixon, heartened, decided to send his Vice President into the breach with even more vivid rhetoric. This was to be what Agnew himself called the “politics of polarization,” a deliberate effort to isolate the President’s critics. He had won Nixon’s warm congratulations for assailing the dissidents as “an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals” and their political supporters as “parasites of passion” and “ideological eunuchs.” Because 70 million Americans watched television network news programs, and because the White House was unhappy with TV coverage of the President, Agnew made that his first target.

  Speaking in Des Moines on November 13, he took out after “a small group of men, numbering perhaps no more than a dozen anchormen, commentators and executive producers,” who “settle upon the twenty minutes or so of film and commentary that is to reach the public.” This “unelected elite,” he said, was “a tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men… enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by government.” He accused it of distorting “our national search for internal peace and stability.” A week later he zeroed in on the press, singling out the New York Times and the Washington Post and deploring “the monopolization of the great public information vehicles and the concentration of more and more power over public opinion in fewer and fewer hands.” Both the networks and the newspapers reported a heavy run of mail supporting Agnew and condemning the “eastern liberal establishment.” Washington wondered whether Agnew had been speaking for himself or for Nixon. Hubert Humphrey said “Anyone who thinks that the Vice President can take a position independent of the President or his administration simply has no knowledge of politics or government. You are his choice in a political marriage, and he expects your absolute loyalty.”

  His bombast identified Spiro Agnew as a man of the era, for it was a time of overstatement, of exaggerated gestures and posturing and hyperbole, when everything from eating grapes and lettuce to wearing (or not wearing) a brassiere carried political overtones, and CBS fired the Smothers Brothers, a comedy team, for encouraging guest stars to make flippant remarks about patriotism and the Vietnam War.

  A number of courtrooms were preoccupied with political trials. James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan, the assassins of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, were being convicted, and in one of the most bizarre actions in American legal history, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison was trying to convince a jury that Clay L. Shaw, a retired Louisiana businessman, had conspired to murder John Kennedy. The key witnesses were a former taxi driver who had vaguely incriminated Shaw while under hypnosis, a drug addict, a paranoid accountant, and a perjurer who ultimately confessed that he had invented his testimony. The trial lasted thirty-four days. The jury voted to acquit Shaw in less than an hour.

  Norman Mailer ran for mayor of New York, Dr. Timothy Leary for governor of California. President Nixon appointed Shirley Temple Black, now forty-one, to the U.S. delegation to the United Nations (“because,” someone said, “he wanted the world to have a happy ending”). Bernadette Devlin arrived from Ireland to ask New Yorkers for money that would be used for murdering British soldiers. At San Francisco State College, Timothy Peebles, black and nineteen, bungled while trying to set a crude time bomb and blinded himself. SDS Weathermen vowing to “Bring the War Home” rioted in Chicago; sixty were arrested and three shot. Over a five-month period in 1969 Manhattan terrorists bombed the Marine Midland Grace Trust Company, the Armed Forces Induction Center, the Federal Office Building, Macy’s, a United Fruit Company pier, and the RCA, Chase Manhattan, and General Motors buildings. On the night of November 13 police arrested three young men and Jane Lauren Alpert, twenty-two, a brilliant Swarthmore student and the daughter of upper-middle-class parents, charging them with conspiring to bomb federal property. Miss Alpert’s parents put up a $20,000 bond for her and forfeited it when she vanished.

  Environmentalists were angry over the new jumbo jets, taxpayers over teacher strikes, cigarette manufacturers because they had been forbidden to advertise on television after the end of 1970. Honeymooners were irate because the water had been temporarily diverted from Niagara Falls. Believers in flying saucers were indignant at the Air Force, which concluded a two-year investigation of 11,000 reported sightings by declaring that the saucers did not exist. Squeamish theatergoers objected when the 1969 New York Drama Desk Award went to Peace, an antiwar play in which the God of War flushed nations down a huge toilet.

  To millions of Americans the nation’s abrasive new mood appeared to be symbolized when Mel Finkelstein, a New York Daily News photographer trying to photograph Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as she left a Manhattan showing of I Am Curious (Yellow), sprawled on the pavement outside the theater. He said she flipped him over her thigh in a judo maneuver; she said he slipped and fell. Whatever had happened, another cameraman snapped President Kennedy’s widow striding away from Finkelstein and the Swedish blue movie. She was wearing a tight black leather miniskirt. In the background a sign advertised WINES AND LIQUORS. Camelot seemed very far away.

  ***

  It was the roughest year yet on college campuses. Although Gallup found that 72 percent of the country’s 6.7 million students had never joined a demonstration, and a Fortune poll reported that only 12.8 per
cent were “revolutionary” or “radically dissident,” the minority disrupted or paralyzed institutions in every part of the country. San Francisco State was closed for three weeks. The home of San Mateo Junior College’s dean was fire-bombed. A rally of a thousand students and two hundred faculty members forced the resignation of Rice’s president, and desperate administrators summoned police to, among others, San Fernando State, Howard, Pennsylvania State, and the University of Massachusetts. At the University of Chicago Bruno Bettelheim said that “many of these kids are very sick—paranoid,” and he compared them to German students who had backed Hitler. Their demands continued. Negroes sought more courses in black: studies, whites called for an end to ROTC and Dow Chemical recruitment. And all wanted an end to the Vietnam War.

  Campus clashes had a way of escalating rapidly, often reaching ugly proportions before authorities—or even some of the participants—clearly understood the issues at stake. At the University of Wisconsin an organization of Negro students, the Black People’s Alliance, called a strike. Conservative students of the Young Americans for Freedom decided to cross the blacks’ picket lines. Blows were exchanged, and in swift succession the governor called out 1,900 National Guardsmen, bayonets and tear gas were used on the Negroes, over five thousand whites marched on the state capitol to protest this use of force, faculty groups supported the black demands, and the Wisconsin legislature, lashing back, cut the university budget.

  Puerto Rican students joined blacks at the City College of New York—CCNY, “the poor man’s Harvard”—in locking themselves inside the South Campus and issuing a manifesto demanding that the college’s enrollment reflect New York’s racial balance, that a black studies program be introduced, and that they control it. Confronted by this threat to academic standards and consequently to the value of their diplomas, the white students mobilized. In the subsequent struggle an auditorium was burned. President Buell Gallagher closed the school twice and then resigned. The faculty senate then approved an almost unbelievable proposal under which 40 percent of the next freshman class would be blacks and Puerto Ricans who would not have to meet the academic requirements of CCNY, which as a consequence could no longer be called the poor man’s Harvard.

  Harvard itself blew on April 9, when undergraduates invaded University Hall, evicted the deans, and began rifling confidential files. President Nathan Pusey responded by calling on the state police, four hundred of whom fought their way into the building and arrested 197 students. Their classmates—six thousand of them—met in Harvard Stadium and voted to strike in protest. A faculty resolution asked that charges against the 197 be dropped. Pusey agreed, but the judge didn’t; he fined them twenty dollars each for criminal trespass and sentenced a twenty-five-year-old graduate student to a year in prison for striking a dean. The university then formally endorsed a faculty resolution calling for agreement to the chief demand of the original group of demonstrators—an end to ROTC at Harvard.

  Cornell was no more strife-torn than a dozen other campuses that spring, but a local aspect at Ithaca produced a sequence of photographs which shocked the world. Demanding an autonomous Afro-American college, two hundred and fifty Negro undergraduates took over Willard Straight Hall, the student union, on April 19. When rumors spread inside Willard Straight that a band of whites with guns was on its way, the Negroes acquired weapons themselves. That, said President James A. Perkins, made it “a whole new thing.” He capitulated to every black demand, and the Negroes who had seized the building walked out—armed to the teeth, the newspaper pictures showed, with rifles in their hands and bandoliers of ammunition crisscrossed on their chests. The faculty rejected the president’s settlement and then reversed itself. The university trustees announced an investigation and Perkins quit.

  All this was being watched closely in Washington, where, as might be expected, the Nixon administration’s sympathy was with everybody except the rebellious students. HEW Secretary Finch wrote to the head of every institution of higher learning in the country, pointing out that more than a million students were receiving aid which could be terminated if they abused their privileges. Nixon himself spoke out after Reverend Theodore M. Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame, warned his undergraduates that any who resorted to force would be expelled and charged with trespassing. In a “Dear Ted” letter, Nixon wrote Hesburgh, “I want to applaud the forthright stand you have taken,” and asked him to forward his opinions on student unrest to Vice President Agnew, who was about to confer with the state governors. Hesburgh advised caution; “even the most far-out students,” he observed, “are trying to tell society something that may be worth searching for today.” His point was not lost on the governors, who rejected a proposal from Ronald Reagan for a federal inquiry into the student riots.

  If Negro activists were busy on the campuses, they were lying low in most inner cities. For the second straight summer the ghettos were relatively quiet. The mood in the ghettos was changing. The turmoil of the mid-1960s had opened new lines of communication with the city halls, and big cities could now field well-trained, well-equipped riot police. The new emphasis among blacks was on political action. With the upsurge in Negro registrations, the election of Negro candidates had become a realistic alternative in many areas to open revolt against society. Howard Lee became the first black mayor of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1969, and Charles Evers won the mayoralty of Fayette, Mississippi, with the slogan: “Don’t vote for a black man. Don’t vote for a white man. Vote for a good man.”

  Nixon called the role of the new administration in race relations a “middle course.” By any term it was a slowdown in desegregation. The Johnson policy had been to end federal subsidies to schools which failed to integrate. Nixon rejected it, saying, “I do not consider it a victory for integration when the federal government cuts off funds for a school and thereby, for both black and white students in that school, denies them the education they should have.” In one of his first press conferences in the White House he conceded that Negroes distrusted him, believing him, despite his earlier record, to be indifferent now to their cause. In his campaign he had made much of promises of help for “black capitalism.” Nothing more was heard about it. Instead, in August 1969 Finch proposed a delay in Mississippi school integration.

  This was widely regarded as a stratagem to court the South’s white voters. It was thwarted late in October when the Supreme Court, in its first major decision since Warren Burger’s appointment as Chief Justice, unanimously ruled that “the obligation of every school district is to terminate dual school systems at once and to operate now and hereafter only unitary schools.” Nixon responded that he would make every effort to enforce the decree with “full respect for the law.”

  ***

  Although student riots were the work of a minority, American youths in much larger numbers were continuing to assert their separate identity by dressing, speaking, and behaving in ways alien to adult society. Their extraordinarily high visibility was in large part a result of their life-style, which was, and was meant to be, conspicuous and even outrageous. But there were also more of them to be seen. This was the inevitable sequel to the postwar baby boom. In 1960 there had been 27 million Americans between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four. Now there were 40 million of them, accounting for a full 20 percent of the population. Their numbers and their affluence guaranteed that youth’s counterculture would grow in magnitude, and that if a sizable proportion of them flocked to any one event, its popularity would be tremendous. Such an event occurred on the weekend of August 15–17, 1969. It was a rock music festival, and it was called Woodstock.

  Actually that was a misnomer. Originally the two twenty-four-year-olds who conceived and promoted the festival planned to stage it in the Hudson River village of Woodstock, New York, and it was so advertised. Zoning regulations and local opposition thwarted them there, however, and the event was moved to the six-hundred-acre dairy farm of one Max Yasgur in the Catskill town of Bethel, on White Lake, about seve
nty miles northwest of New York City. The promoters hoped the kids could find it. They were expecting to draw about 50,000 customers at seven dollars a ticket.

  They grossly underestimated the festival’s appeal. Max Yasgur’s farm was stormed by a multitude of 400,000. Bethel briefly became the third largest city in the state. The surrounding road net was cluttered with abandoned cars, motorcycles, and microbuses decorated with psychedelic drawings. All adjacent exits from the Catskill highway were jammed. Collecting fees from so enormous a throng was impractical, and the promoters had to give up the idea, thereby losing two million dollars. That was one of two things which went wrong at Woodstock. The other was the weather. Two tremendous cloudbursts turned the farm into a swamp. The youths huddled in soggy sleeping bags and under plastic tents and lean-tos fashioned from blankets and pieces of clothing. The lack of normal supplies of food and water, or even of sanitation facilities, should have made Woodstock a disaster.

  Instead it was a triumph. Looking out nervously over the huge crowd, one of the first performers said, “If we’re going to make it, you had better remember that the guy next to you is your brother.” They remembered. A police officer called the audience “the most courteous, considerate, and well-behaved group of kids that I have ever been in contact with in my twenty-four years of police work.”