A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror

by Larry Schweikart

  As with much of the history of slavery and racism in America, the desegregation of schools ultimately had required a perversion of the apparatus of the state in order to get people to act responsibly and justly. The Founders never imagined in their wildest dreams that federal courts would be determining the makeup of student bodies in a local high school, yet the utter collapse of the state legislative process to act morally—or at the very least, even effectively—pushed the courts into action. It was a cautionary tale. At every point in the past, the continued refusal of any group to abide by a modicum of decency and tolerance inevitably brought change, but also brought vast expansions of federal power that afflicted all, including the groups that initially benefited from the needed change.

  If lawsuits and federal action constituted one front in the struggle for civil rights, the wallet and the heart were two other critical battlefields. On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, police arrested a black seamstress, Rosa Parks, for refusing to give up her seat in the middle of the bus to a white man in defiance of a local ordinance. (Blacks could sit in the middle, but only if no whites wanted the seat.) “Back of the bus” not only embodied the actual laws of many Southern states, but it also represented a societywide attitude toward blacks.

  Parks, along with other black female activists, members of the Montgomery Women’s Political Council, had looked for the proper ordinance to challenge. Her refusal to “get back” sparked an organized protest by the black community. Local black leaders met the following night in a Baptist church to use the power of the market to bring justice to Montgomery. They organized a boycott of the bus system under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr., a young Atlanta-born pastor who had studied Thoreau and Gandhi as well as the Gospels. Contrary to a widely held view that later developed among conservatives, King specifically condemned and repudiated communism. A man with a mighty presence and a charismatic speaker, King had discerned that the battle was not about Montgomery—that was only a skirmish in the war for justice—and he developed a brilliant plan to use the innate goodness of many, if not most, Americans to turn the system.

  King promised his enemies to “wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and in winning our freedom we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process.”74 “We are determined,” he stated, “to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”75 King’s gamble hinged on the essential decency of Americans, and for every racist he thought could elicit the support of five nonracists. King also appreciated that for all its serious defects, the American system could actually work in his favor. Police might unleash dogs, fire hoses, and nightsticks, but (at least in daytime, under the watchful eye of the press) they would not dare kill unarmed protesters. While these strategies germinated in his mind he set to the task of leading the boycott.

  Blacks constituted the majority of riders on the Montgomery buses, and the protesters used car pools or simply walked as the income plummeted for the privately owned bus company. The boycott continued for months, and eventually the media began to notice. Finally, after a year, the Supreme Court let stand a lower court ruling stating that the “separate but equal” clause was no longer valid. Montgomery blacks, led by King, boarded buses and sat where they pleased. The episode illustrated the power of the market and the colorblind processes in capitalism.

  The moral issues in the initial civil rights cases in the 1950s and 1960s were crystal clear. But the steady encroachment of government into race relations later raised difficult issues about freedom of choice in America. Black economist Walter Williams has referred to “forced association laws,” noting that the logical outcome of defining every business as “public” increasingly restricts a person’s freedom to choose those with whom he or she wishes to associate. In cases of genuinely public facilities, the issue is clear: all citizens pay taxes, and thus all citizens must have access without regard for race or color. But where was the line drawn? Private clubs? The logic of the issue transcended race. Did Christians or others whose religion dictated that they not aid and abet sin have to rent apartments to unmarried couples living together? Did Augusta National Golf Club—a private club—have to admit women, contrary to its rules? Likewise, the firewall of states’ rights also deteriorated in the civil rights clashes. A phrase used all too often by racist whites, the fact is that “states’ rights” still represented a structural safeguard for all citizens of a state against direct federal action.

  Both the bus boycott and the Brown decision represented significant steps toward full equality for all citizens, but as always the real lever of power remained the ballot. Since Reconstruction, Southern whites had systematically prevented blacks from voting or had made them pay dearly for going to the polls through intimidation, threats, and often outright violence. Poll taxes sought to eliminate poorer voters, and literacy tests could be easily manipulated, for instance, by allowing a white person to read only his name, whereas a black person would be required to interpret Beowulf or a Shakespearean play.

  Eisenhower offered the first civil rights law since Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Act of 1957. It established a Civil Rights Commission and created a Civil Rights Division inside the Justice Department specifically charged with prosecuting election crimes. Most Southern Democrats opposed the bill, and Southern Democratic governors would not support the law, leaving enforcement to the federal government, which was not equipped to police every precinct in the South. Far from revealing Ike’s lack of commitment to civil rights, the president’s position stated a reality that, again, underscored the basic structure of the federal system, which never intended Washington, D.C., to supervise voting in New Orleans or Richmond. More widespread change depended on a transformation of hearts and attitudes. When the next round of civil rights legislation emerged from Congress in 1964, public perceptions of race and racism had changed enough that large numbers of whites, both in the South and from the North, assisted in making it possible to enforce the laws.76

  Black leaders did not simply wait timidly for attitudes to change. They actively worked to place racism and discrimination squarely in front of the American public. Following the successful bus boycott, Martin Luther King assembled some hundred black Christian ministers to establish the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Assisted by another minister, Ralph Abernathy, King called on the leaders to engage in the struggle for equality with nonviolence, not as a symbol of weakness or cowardice, but with courage and persistence. Formation of the SCLC transferred leadership of the civil rights movements from the descendants of northern freemen of color to the Southerners who had to live daily with discrimination.77

  From Boring to Booming? Expectations at Decade’s End

  Given America’s position in the world, its tremendous wealth, the success with which it had resisted communism, and the fact that it had at least begun to confront some of its greatest domestic problems, most observers in 1959 would have predicted a marvelous decade ahead for the United States. Few would have imagined that within ten years the American economy would be nearly flat; that a continued foreign war would absorb tremendous amounts of blood and treasure; that society would find itself ripped asunder and torn by race, generation, and ideology. Fewer still would have foreseen the earthquake generated by the coming of age of the massive baby-boom generation.

  The United States had gone through a particularly turbulent era whose dynamic upheavals and impetus toward freedom and individualism had been effectively masked and less effectively contained by powerful pressures of order. In the resulting cookie-cutter America, the outward signs of conformity concealed a decade of dramatic change in lifestyle, income, social mobility, religion, and racial attitudes. The seeds of virtually all of the revolutionary developments of the 1960s had already started to bloom before Eisenhower ever left the presidency.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Age of Upheaval, 1960–74

  The Fractured Decade<
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  Following the perceived stability of the 1950s—a decade which, in reality, involved deep social change and substantial foreign threats—the 1960s were marked by unmistakable turmoil and conflict from policy divisions, racial clashes, and generational strife unseen in many generations. Much of the division came from the increasingly vocal presence of the baby boomers—exaggerated and sharpened by a foreign war—the assassination of a president, and, toward the end of the decade, economic stagnation that had not been seen since the end of World War II. The “fractured decade” of the sixties brought some needed social reforms, but also saddled the nation with long-term problems stemming directly from the very policies adopted during the period.

  Except, perhaps, for the decade between 1935 and 1945, the 1960s changed American life and culture more profoundly than any other ten-year period in the twentieth century. Modern society continues to deal with many of the pathologies generated by the era of “free love,” “tune in, turn on, and drop out,” and rebellion.1 Every aspect of America’s fabric, from national image and reputation to family life, experienced distasteful side effects from the upheaval that began when John F. Kennedy won the presidential election over Richard Nixon.

  Time Line

  1960:

  John F. Kennedy elected president

  1961:

  Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba; Soviet Union erects Berlin Wall

  1962:

  Cuban Missile Crisis

  1963:

  John F. Kennedy assassinated; Lyndon B. Johnson assumes presidency

  1964:

  Johnson introduces Great Society legislation; Civil Rights Act passed; Tonkin Gulf Resolution; Ronald Reagan campaigns for Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign; Johnson defeats Goldwater

  1965:

  Johnson sends combat troops to Vietnam

  1968:

  Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy assassinated; Richard Nixon elected president

  1969:

  United States lands man on the moon

  1971:

  Twenty-sixth Amendment to the Constitution; wage and price controls

  1972:

  Nixon visits China; Watergate break-in; Nixon reelected

  1973:

  Nixon withdraws last of American troops from Vietnam; Roe v. Wade case decided

  1974:

  Nixon resigns; Gerald Ford assumes the presidency

  It might have appeared that Richard Nixon should have waltzed to victory in 1960. He had numerous advantages. As vice president, he was associated with eight years of peace and prosperity bestowed on the nation by Eisenhower. A former congressman with a record of being tough on communists, Nixon would be hard to attack on defense or national security issues. A well-read man and a solid, though hardly eloquent, speaker, Nixon had held his own in debates with the soviet premier Nikita Khruschev. Yet Nixon began the campaign as the underdog for several reasons.

  First, Eisenhower was no traditional Republican and more of a moderate. In his eight years, he posed no threat to Roosevelt’s legacy. Nixon, on the other hand, appeared to represent more of a break from the New Deal (although, in reality, his social and economic programs had far more in common with FDR than with a true conservative like Ronald Reagan).2 Second, public affection for Ike was personal, but Nixon generated little fondness. He seemed to have had only one or two genuine friends in his entire adult life. Twenty years later, even those Nixon subordinates who had been caught up in the Watergate scandal—men who received jail sentences and had their careers destroyed—operated out of loyalty to the cause more than out of love for the man. Third, Nixon suffered from plain old bad timing. Whereas the congenial Eisenhower (who did a great deal quietly) had met Americans’ desire for a caretaker, the nation, having caught its breath, now gathered itself for another step in the ascent to greatness—or so many believed. Any candidate who could give voice to those aspirations, anyone who could lay out a vision, whether he had any intentions of acting on the promises or not, would have the edge in such a climate.

  Another factor worked against Nixon: television. Nixon was the first public figure to use a television appearance to swing an election his way with his famous 1952 “Checkers” speech, but the tube became his enemy. It automatically benefited the more handsome and photogenic candidate. Television news favored the man better suited to deliver a “sound bite” (although the term had not yet been coined). Neither case fit Nixon. For the first time in American history physical appearance played a large part in the selection of a president. Finally, Nixon had never viewed the press as his friends, and beginning with the 1960 election the media actively worked against him. Eisenhower would be the last Republican president to receive favorable, or even balanced and fair, treatment by the increasingly liberal national mainstream press.

  An irony of the election was that Richard Nixon and Jack Kennedy were friends, far more so than Nixon and Ike, or Kennedy and his running mate, Lyndon Johnson. When JFK was in the hospital with back surgery, and close to death (it was thought), Nixon wept. Kennedy, for his part, told loyalists that if he did not get the Democratic nomination, he would be voting for Nixon in the November general election.3 Friendship, however, did not stand in the way of winning.

  As it turned out, Kennedy did not have to go against his party. He carried an incredibly close election, but it is questionable whether he won the popular vote. Typical reports had Kennedy winning by about 120,000 votes. Little known electoral quirks in Alabama and Georgia reduced Kennedy’s popular totals. Un-pledged Democratic votes for segregationist Democrat Henry F. Byrd and others, totaling 292,121, were lumped eventually with JFK’s totals, giving him the final edge.4

  Republican leaders, detecting fraud in two states, Texas and Illinois, urged Nixon to file a formal legal challenge and demand a recount. Earl Mazo, the national political correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, examining the election returns in Texas, found that huge numbers of votes were dismissed on technicalities, whereas Kennedy had gained some 100,000 phantom ballots. Nixon lost the state by 46,000 votes, and then lost Illinois by less than 9,000 votes. Robert Finch, a Nixon confidant who later served as secretary of health, education, and welfare, said flatly that fraud had carried Texas and Illinois, and that Kennedy “needed Missouri, too, which was very close, but we didn’t think he stole that.”5 In one district in Texas, where 86 people were registered to vote, Nixon got 24 votes. JFK got 148.

  Nixon refused to protest any of these states, saying an electoral crisis had to be avoided. It would take a year to get a full recount of Illinois, and Nixon did not want to put the country through the ordeal. He not only accepted the electoral college verdict, but also contacted the Herald Tribune to insist that it abort a planned twelve-article series detailing the fraud. It was a remarkable and civic-minded position taken by a man later excoriated for abusing power, and stands in stark relief to the actions of Al Gore in the 2000 election. Nixon never fully realized that in the contest with his friend JFK he was pitted against one of the most ruthless candidates—and political families—in the twentieth century.

  Kennedy and Crisis

  John Kennedy’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy, or “old Joe,” as friends called him, had risen from poverty to great wealth primarily through booze running during Prohibition. Having accumulated a black-market fortune, Joe “went legit” during the market crash of 1929, buying when stock prices bottomed out and becoming a multimillionaire when stock values returned. By then he had already decided his oldest son, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., would one day become president of the United States.

  Roosevelt appointed Joseph senior ambassador to Great Britain (an odd choice, given that the Irish Kennedy hated the British), and John Fitzgerald, the second oldest son, studied in England. As war loomed, Joseph routinely blamed the British for failing to accommodate Hitler, as if the occupation of Czechoslovakia and the invasion of Poland occurred because Britain had not given Hitler enough concessions. John Kennedy supported his father,
producing an undergraduate thesis on the arrival of war, called Why England Slept, an oddly pro-German treatment of the Munich Agreement, later made into a book by an affiliate of Joseph’s and published as Kennedy’s original work.6

  During the war—at a time when all future political leaders were expected to do their military duty—Joseph junior went to fly patrol bombers in England. John had a safe position in naval intelligence in Washington. There he struck up a sexual relationship with a woman named Inga Arvad, who was suspected by the FBI of being a Nazi spy. Aware of the potential danger to Jack (as John F. was called), Joe Kennedy arranged a sudden transfer several thousand miles from “Inga Binga” (as the FBI referred to her) to the South Pacific, where he added to his own legend.