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A Thousand Days

Page 135

by Arthur M. Schlesinger


  * The tradition was even older. Robert R. Livingston, an American Minister to France under Napoleon, wrote to his Secretary of State in 1802: “There never was a government with which less could be done by negotiation than here. There is no people, no legislature, no counsellors. One man is everything. He seldom asks advice and never hears it unasked.”

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  * Henry Kissinger similarly reported that he saw “no signs of any domestic pressure in Germany for a national nuclear-weapons program.”

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  * He was also dissatisfied with the programs of underground testing, which had advanced nuclear technology little and had been by no means so fallout-proof ai advertised. In the year after September 1961 there were seventeen cases of venting—that is, the discharge of radioactive debris, primarily iodine 131, into the atmosphere—at the Yucca Flats Proving Ground in Nevada.

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  * He repeated this thought more explicitly eighteen days later in his speech before the Irish Parliament: “Across the gulfs and barriers that now divide us, we must remember that there are no permanent enemies. Hostility today is a fact, but it is not a ruling law. The supreme reality of our time is our indivisibility as children of God and our common vulnerability on this planet.”

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  * The following week the American University speech produced 781 pro and 5 con; the freight rate bill 23,646.

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  * He noted, “Lines found in an old sentry box found in Gibraltar. Based on poem by Thomas Jordan.”

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  * Gallup and Harris, the two main polling organizations, give figures ranging from 68 to 78 per cent.

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  * W. S. White, The Professional: Lyndon B. Johnson (Boston, 1964), 228.

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  * This became the 24th Amendment to the Constitution in January 1964.

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  ** Harry S. Murphy, Jr., a light-skinned Negro, later revealed that he had studied at Ole Miss in 1945–46 as a Navy V-12 student. Doubtless there had been others in the years since the university was founded in 1848.

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  * Walter Lord’s The Past That Would Not Die (New York, 1965) provides a careful, accurate and In eh account of the Meredith affair. See also, for further detail, Michael Dorman, We Shall Overcome (New York, 1965), 11–143.

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  * Whose book Mississippi: The Closed Society (New York, 1964) contains an invaluable account of these days as well as of the atmosphere in Mississippi.

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  * See Marshall’s illuminating Speranza lectures of 1964, Federalism and Civil Rights (New York, 1964).

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  * See the testimony of the Australian Communist writer, W. T. Burchett, in Vietnam: Inside Story of the Guerrilla War (New York, 1965).

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  * For details, see Malcolm W. Browne, The New Face of War (Indianapolis, 1965), David Halberstam, The Making of a Quagmire (New York, 1965), John Mecklin, Mission in Torment (New York, 1965) and Robert Shaplen, The Lost Revolution (New York, 1965).

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  * A document produced by a free spirit lodged in the machinery of government eager to spare Bromley Smith of the National Security Council the labor of keeping a record of each separate Vietnam meeting.

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  * Some commented on the apparent contradiction between the willingness of the United States government to recognize a military coup in Vietnam and its reluctance to recognize military coups in Latin America. While a strong case can be made for a policy of automatic recognition of all governments which can maintain internal order and meet international commitments, the United States had special obligations within the western hemisphere to “the consolidation on this continent, within the framework of democratic institutions, of a system of individual liberty and social justice based on respect for the essential rights of man” (Charter of the Organization of American States). This would justify a policy of suspending recognition of western hemisphere regimes which came to power by overthrowing legitimate governments—i.e., governments which were freely elected and which had not denied political opposition normal channels of expression. This test would not prevent recognition of coups against dictatorships, such as those of Castro or Duvalier. At the same time, it would justify the suspension of relations with the Dominican Republic and Honduras until they could take measures to restore legitimacy by reopening the channels of political opposition and pledging free elections, as it would also justify our resumption of relations with the military regime in Peru once it had taken such steps in 1962.

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  * These and other atrocities are discussed by Philip M. Stern in The Great Treasury Raid (New York, 1964) and by Stewart Alsop in two pieces for the Saturday Evening Post, “The Great Tax Myth” and “More on the Great Tax Myth” (November 23 and December 21, 1963). It should be added that the American Congress greeted the Stern-Alsop revelations with curious apathy.

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  * It is idle to speculate whether Keynes himself was a “reactionary” or “progressive” Keynesian. He was a political realist and, like Heller and Harris, might well have favored a tax cut in 1963 as the only form of major stimulus acceptable to Congress. On the other hand, those, like Colin Clark and Business Week, who claimed him as a conservative, forgot his burning outrage over unemployment, which always seemed to him cruel and senseless human waste. In the thirties, except for a passing reference in The Means to Prosperity (“given sufficient time to gather the fruits, a reduction of taxation will run a better chance, than an increase, of balancing the budget”), he hardly mentioned tax reduction, arguing instead for public spending. (It should be noted, however, that tax reduction would then have been a feeble weapon in the United States. As late as 1939 there were less than 4 million taxable returns. The Second World War made the income tax a powerful instrument of fiscal policy. By 1945 45 million persons were filing taxable returns.)

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  * This figure is from the first quarter of 1961 to the third quarter of 1963.

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  ** The administrative deficits were $3.9 billion in 1961, $6.4 billion in 1962 and 16.3 billion in 1963.

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  * Outside the University of Chicago.

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  * This intention will now be carried out in the John F. Kennedy Institute of Politics under the direction of his friend Richard Neustadt.

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  * About this time the December issue of Redbook came on the newsstands. An article by Jhan Robbins recorded the impressions of European children about Americans. The first answer to the question “What are Americans like?” was: “The average American is, of course, a Texan. He eats lots of breakfast and gets fat so he has to go on a diet because he likes to look skinny. He calls everyone ‘sweetheart’ and is bad to colored people. If he doesn’t like who is his President, he usually shoots him.”

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  * For Dugger’s vivid record of the Kennedy trip, see the Texas Observer, November 29, 1963; also “Dallas, After All,” Observer, March 6, 1964.

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  * The children were not responsible; they expressed the atmosphere of the city. What was more shocking was that the Reverend William Holmes, who reported these incidents in a sermon on the following Sunday and said that “the spirit of assassination” had pervaded the city, received such threats that he had to take his own children out of school and go into hiding. The Dallas feelin
g evidently was that, whether true or false, Holmes’s remarks reflected on their city and were therefore unforgivable. Subsequently a Dallas school teacher who asked in a letter to Time how her students could be expected to “grow up to be good citizens when the newspapers, their parents and the leaders of their own city preached dissension” was suspended. Judge Sarah T. Hughes of Dallas, who administered the presidential oath to Lyndon Johnson on the plane back to Washington, said, “It could have happened anywhere, but Dallas, I’m sorry to say, has been conditioned by many people who have hate in their hearts and who seem to want to destroy.”

  On May 29, 1965, the 48th anniversary of Kennedy’s birth, the Texas House of Representatives defeated on a record vote of 72–52 (with Governor Connally’s brother voting with the majority) a bill passed unanimously in the State Senate proposing to rename the state school for the mentally retarded at Richmond in President Kennedy’s honor. One resident of Fort Bend County testified in the House hearings that changing the name of the school might cause local people to withdraw their support. When the Texas Observer asked the sponsor of the bill, Representative Neil Caldwell of Alvin, what reasons his colleagues had given him for their no votes, he said, “With most of them it’s the politics of the man—the dead man. They think enough things have been named for him. ‘Just wouldn’t be popular back home.’ ‘Not well thought of.’ ‘Don’t want to get hurt politically.’ Some of ’em say, ‘I didn’t like him.’” In the debate Caldwell said that, though memorials had been raised to Kennedy around the world, there were none in Texas. See “And Finally, As to John F. Kennedy,” Texas Observer, June 11, 1965.

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  * In the summer of 1964 Richard Wilson of Look asked congressional leaders whether Kennedy would have got his legislative programs, especially the civil rights and tax reduction bills, if he had lived. He received the following answers. Everett Dirksen: “This program was on its way before November 22, 1963. Its time had come.” Carl Albert: “The pressure behind this program had become so great that it would have been adopted in essentially the same form whether Kennedy lived or died.” Charles A. Halleck: “The assassination made no difference. The program was already made.” Mike Mansfield: “The assassination made no real difference. Adoption of the tax bill and the civil-rights bill might have taken a little longer, but they would have been adopted.” Look, November 17, 1964.

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