Nixonland. Part 1

NIXONLAND.

Rick Perlstein.

PREFACE.

IN 1964, 1964, THE THE D DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE L LYNDON B. J B. JOHNSON won practically the biggest landslide in American history, with 61.05 percent of the popular vote and 486 of 538 electoral college votes. In 1972, the Republican presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon won a strikingly similar landslide-60.67 percent and 520 electoral college votes. In the eight years in between, the battle lines that define our culture and politics were forged in blood and fire. This is a book about how that happened, and why. won practically the biggest landslide in American history, with 61.05 percent of the popular vote and 486 of 538 electoral college votes. In 1972, the Republican presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon won a strikingly similar landslide-60.67 percent and 520 electoral college votes. In the eight years in between, the battle lines that define our culture and politics were forged in blood and fire. This is a book about how that happened, and why.

At the start of 1965, when those eight years began, blood and fire weren't supposed to be be a part of American culture and politics. According to the pundits, America was more united and at peace with itself than ever. Five years later, a pretty young Quaker girl from Philadelphia, a winner of a Decency Award from the Kiwanis Club, was cross-examined in the trial of seven Americans charged with conspiring to start a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. a part of American culture and politics. According to the pundits, America was more united and at peace with itself than ever. Five years later, a pretty young Quaker girl from Philadelphia, a winner of a Decency Award from the Kiwanis Club, was cross-examined in the trial of seven Americans charged with conspiring to start a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

"You practice shooting an M1 yourself, don't you?" the prosecutor asked her.

"Yes, I do," she responded.

"You also practice karate, don't you?"

"Yes, I do."

"That is for the revolution, isn't it?"

"After Chicago I changed from being a pacifist to the realization that we had to defend ourselves. A nonviolent revolution was impossible. I desperately wish it was possible."

And, several months after that, an ordinary Chicago ad salesman would be telling Time Time magazine, "I'm getting to feel like I'd actually enjoy going out and shooting some of these people. I'm just so G.o.dd.a.m.ned mad. They're trying to destroy everything I've worked for-for myself, my wife, and my children." magazine, "I'm getting to feel like I'd actually enjoy going out and shooting some of these people. I'm just so G.o.dd.a.m.ned mad. They're trying to destroy everything I've worked for-for myself, my wife, and my children."

This American story is told in four sections, corresponding to four elections: in 1966, 1968, 1970, and 1972. Politicians, always reading the cultural winds, make their life's work convincing 50 percent plus one of their const.i.tuency that they understand their fears and hopes, can honor and redeem them, can make them safe and lead them toward their dreams. Studying the process by which a notably successful politician achieves that task, again and again, across changing cultural conditions, is a deep way into an understanding of those fears and dreams-and especially, how those fears and dreams change. change.

The crucial figure in common to all these elections was Richard Nixon-the brilliant and tormented man struggling to forge a public language that promised mastery of the strange new angers, anxieties, and resentments wracking the nation in the 1960s. His story is the engine of this narrative. Nixon's character-his own overwhelming angers, anxieties, and resentments in the face of the 1960s chaos-sparks the combustion. But there was nothing natural or inevitable about how he did it-nothing inevitable in the idea that a president could come to power by using using the angers, anxieties, and resentments produced by the cultural chaos of the 1960s. Indeed, he was slow to the realization. He reached it, through the 1966 election, studying others: notably, Ronald Reagan, who won the governors.h.i.+p of California by providing a political outlet for the outrages that, until he came along to articulate them, hadn't seemed like the angers, anxieties, and resentments produced by the cultural chaos of the 1960s. Indeed, he was slow to the realization. He reached it, through the 1966 election, studying others: notably, Ronald Reagan, who won the governors.h.i.+p of California by providing a political outlet for the outrages that, until he came along to articulate them, hadn't seemed like voting voting issues at all. If it hadn't been for the shocking defeats of a pa.s.sel of LBJ liberals blindsided in 1966 by a conservative politics of "law and order," things might have turned out differently: Nixon might have run on a platform not too different from that of the LBJ liberals instead of one that cast them as American villains. issues at all. If it hadn't been for the shocking defeats of a pa.s.sel of LBJ liberals blindsided in 1966 by a conservative politics of "law and order," things might have turned out differently: Nixon might have run on a platform not too different from that of the LBJ liberals instead of one that cast them as American villains.

Nixon's win in 1968 was agonizingly close: he began his first term as a minority minority president. But the way he achieved that narrow victory seemed to point the way toward an entire new political alignment from the one that had been stable since FDR and the Depression. Next, Nixon bet his presidency, in the 1970 congressional elections, on the idea that an "emerging Republican majority"-rooted in the conservative South and Southwest, seething with rage over the destabilizing movements challenging the Vietnam War, white political power, and virtually every traditional cultural norm-could give him a governing majority in Congress. But when Republican candidates suffered humiliating defeats in 1970, Nixon blamed the chicanery of his enemies: president. But the way he achieved that narrow victory seemed to point the way toward an entire new political alignment from the one that had been stable since FDR and the Depression. Next, Nixon bet his presidency, in the 1970 congressional elections, on the idea that an "emerging Republican majority"-rooted in the conservative South and Southwest, seething with rage over the destabilizing movements challenging the Vietnam War, white political power, and virtually every traditional cultural norm-could give him a governing majority in Congress. But when Republican candidates suffered humiliating defeats in 1970, Nixon blamed the chicanery of his enemies: America America's enemies, he had learned to think of them. He grew yet more determined to destroy them, because of what he was convinced was their determination to destroy him. him.

Millions of Americans recognized the balance of forces in the exact same way-that America was engulfed in a pitched battle between the forces of darkness and the forces of light. The only thing was: Americans disagreed radically over which side was which. By 1972, defining that order of battle as one between "people who identified with what Richard Nixon stood for" and "people who despised what Richard Nixon stood for" was as good a description as any other.

Richard Nixon, now, is long dead. But these sides have hardly changed. We now call them "red" or "blue" America, and whether one or the other wins the temporary allegiances of 50 percent plus one of the electorate-or 40 percent of the electorate, or 60 percent of the electorate-has been the narrative of every election since. It promises to be thus for another generation. But the size of the const.i.tuencies that sort into one or the other of the coalitions will always be temporary.

The main character in Nixonland Nixonland is not Richard Nixon. Its protagonist, in fact, has no name-but lives on every page. It is the voter who, in 1964, pulled the lever for the Democrat for president because to do anything else, at least that particular Tuesday in November, seemed to court civilizational chaos, and who, eight years later, pulled the lever for the Republican for exactly the same reason. is not Richard Nixon. Its protagonist, in fact, has no name-but lives on every page. It is the voter who, in 1964, pulled the lever for the Democrat for president because to do anything else, at least that particular Tuesday in November, seemed to court civilizational chaos, and who, eight years later, pulled the lever for the Republican for exactly the same reason.

BOOK I.

CHAPTER ONE.

h.e.l.l in the City of Angels.

YOU MIGHT SAY THE STORY STARTS WITH A TELEVISION BROADCAST. IT issued from the Los Angeles television station KTLA, for four straight August days in 1965, culminating Sunday night, August 15, with a one-hour wrap-up. Like any well-produced TV program, the wrap-up featured its own theme music-pounding, dissonant, like the scores composer Bernard Herrmann produced for Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k-and a logo, likewise jagged and blaring. It opened with a dramatic device: a voice-over redolent of the old L.A. police procedural issued from the Los Angeles television station KTLA, for four straight August days in 1965, culminating Sunday night, August 15, with a one-hour wrap-up. Like any well-produced TV program, the wrap-up featured its own theme music-pounding, dissonant, like the scores composer Bernard Herrmann produced for Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k-and a logo, likewise jagged and blaring. It opened with a dramatic device: a voice-over redolent of the old L.A. police procedural Dragnet Dragnet-elements familiar enough, almost, to make it feel like just another cops-and-robbers show.

"It was a hot and humid day in the city of Los Angeles, Wednesday, August eleventh, 1965," the gravelly narration began... the gravelly narration began...

"The City of Angels is the nation's third-largest metropolis.

"Two and a half million people live here, in virtually an ideal climate, surrounded by natural beauty, and the benefits of economic prosperity.

"Within the vast metropolitan spread live 523,000 Negroes. A sixth of them reside in southeastern Los Angeles in an area that is not an abject slum in the New York or Detroit context, but nonetheless four times as congested as an average area in the rest of the city.

"The community had prided itself on its relatively harmonious racial relations, few demonstrations, no ma.s.sive civil disobedience, little trouble from militant factions."

The camera tracks an ordinary-looking residential block, tree-lined and neat, a row of modest ranch houses fronted by postage-stamp lawns, suburban, almost. The angle came from a helicopter-KTLA-TV's "telecopter" was the first of its kind. The utility of the Korean Warvintage Bell 47G-5 with the camera affixed to its belly had so far been mostly prurient: shots of the swimming pool where Marlon Brando's maid had drowned; of the well that swallowed a darling little girl; of movie stars' mansions being devoured by brush fires in the Hollywood hills. Now the chopper was returned to its wartime roots. Los Angeles' black citizens were burning down their neighborhood.

When the Watts riots began, television stations sent in their mobile cars to cover it. They were stoned like a scene from Leviticus. The next day militants cautioned, or threatened, the TV crews not to come: they were all-white-the enemy. There was even fear that KTLA's s.h.i.+ny red helicopter might be shot down, by the same snipers peppering the firefighters who were trying to douse the burning blocks.

The risk was taken. Which was why the worst urban violence in American history ended up being shown live on TV for four straight days, virtually nonstop.

Then, that Sunday-night wrap-up: The narrator paused, the telecopter slowed to a hover at the end of the tree-lined block, lingering on a single bungalow on the corner. Its roof was gone, the insides blackened like the remains of a weekend barbecue.

The voice-over intensified: "Then with the suddenness of a lightning bolt and all the fury of an infernal holocaust, there was h.e.l.l in the City of Angels!"

Cue the music: shrieking trumpets, pealing from television speakers in Southern California recreation rooms and dens, apartments and bars, wherever people gathered, pealing as heralds, because American politics, for those white, middle-cla.s.s folks who formed the bedrock of the American political conversation, could never be the same again.

Until that week the thought that American politics was on the verge of a transformation would have been judged an absurdity by almost every expert. Indeed, its course had never seemed more certain.

Lyndon Johnson had spent 1964, the first year of his accidental presidency, redeeming the martyr: pa.s.sing, with breathtaking aplomb, a liberal legislative agenda that had only known existence as wish during John F. Kennedy's lifetime. His Economic Opportunity Act of 1964-the "war on poverty"-pa.s.sed nearly two to one. The beloved old general Dwight D. Eisenhower came out of retirement to campaign against the Kennedy-Johnson tax cut. But Lyndon Johnson pa.s.sed that, too. And then there was the issue of civil rights.

"Let this session of Congress be known as the session which did more for civil rights than the last hundred sessions combined," Johnson intoned in his first State of the Union address. It was just five weeks after John F. Kennedy's a.s.sa.s.sination, seven months after Kennedy, alarmed by a wave of civil rights uprisings sparked in Birmingham, Alabama, had introduced the most sweeping civil rights bill since Reconstruction. It had been bogged down by Congress's recalcitrant conservative coalition of Northern Republicans and Southern Democrats. Even Martin Luther King's heroic hundreds of thousands of pilgrims marching on Was.h.i.+ngton couldn't unstick it. But President Johnson unstuck it. By June of 1964, the first session of the Eighty-eighth Congress had indeed done more for civil rights than the last hundred sessions combined: segregation in the United States in public accommodations was now illegal. "Our Const.i.tution, the foundation of our republic, forbids it. The principles of our freedom forbid it. Morality forbids it. And the law I sign tonight forbids it," Johnson said at a ceremony carried live on all three networks.

What the ceremony marked was not merely a law but a liberal apotheosis-an apparent liberal national consensus. Johnson's approval rating even among Republicans was 74 percent. Pundits and public-opinion experts proclaimed him an exact match for the spirit of the age. So, even, did conservative businessmen: speaking before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the president was interrupted for applause some sixty times. They had reason to cheer. So dynamic had the American economic engine become that it was fas.h.i.+onable to presume that prosperity could fix any social problem. "I'm sick of all the people who talk about the things we can't do," Lyndon Johnson told an aide in one of his patented exhortations. "h.e.l.l, we're the richest country in the world, the most powerful. We can do it all." The Great Society was the name Johnson gave his ambition. It "rests on abundance and liberty for all," he said in a May 22 speech, "a society of success without squalor, beauty without barrenness, works of genius without the wretchedness of poverty." The rhetoric was incredible. Still more incredible: it seemed reasonable.

The Republican Party spent the year of the liberal apotheosis enacting the most unlikely political epic ever told: a right-wing fringe took over the party from the ground up, nominating Barry Goldwater, the radical-right senator from Arizona, while a helpless Eastern establishment-that-was-now-a-fringe looked on in bafflement. Experts, claiming the Republican tradition of progressivism was as much a part of its ident.i.ty as the elephant, began talking about a party committing suicide. The Goldwaterites didn't see suicide. They saw redemption. This was part and parcel of their ideology-that Lyndon Johnson's "consensus" was their enemy in a battle for the survival of civilization. For them, the idea that calamitous liberal nonsense-ready acceptance of federal interference in the economy; Negro "civil disobedience"; the doctrine of "containing" the mortal enemy Communism when conservatives insisted it must be beaten beaten-could be described as a "consensus" at all was symbol and substance of America's moral rot. They also believed the vast majority of ordinary Americans already agreed with them, them, whatever spake the polls-"crazy figures," William F. Buckley harrumphed, doctored "to say, 'Yes, Mr. President.'" It was their article of faith. And whatever spake the polls-"crazy figures," William F. Buckley harrumphed, doctored "to say, 'Yes, Mr. President.'" It was their article of faith. And faith, faith, and the uncompromising pa.s.sions attending it, was key to their political makeup. and the uncompromising pa.s.sions attending it, was key to their political makeup.

That, the experts said, was exactly what made Goldwater so frightening. Unadulterated political pa.s.sion was judged a dangerous thing by the dominant ideologists of American consensus. One of the deans among them, University of California president Clark Kerr, used to give his students a piece of advice that might as well have served as these experts' motto: a man should seek "to lend his energies to many organizations and give himself completely to none." Lest all the competing pa.s.sions crosscutting a modern, complex society such as America's become irreconcilable, beyond compromise-a state of affairs Kerr could only imagine degenerating into "all-out war."

Here was no idle metaphor. "I know that very often each of us did not just disagree, we poured forth our vituperation," the Episcopal bishop of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, wrote in a typical expression in late 1963. "The acc.u.mulation of this hatred expressed itself in the bullet that killed John Kennedy." Opinion-molders warned, with the numbness of habit, against "extremists of the left and right"-that veering too far from the center spurred the savage beast that lurked inside every soul. Goldwater, in accepting his party's nomination, had proudly declared that "extremism in defense of liberty is no vice." Lyndon Johnson successfully framed his reformist agenda as something that was not ideological at all-conservative, even, simply a pragmatic response to pressing national problems, swept forward on ineluctable tides of material progress. "The Democrats, in nominating Lyndon Johnson, made a rather careful decision to adhere to the rules of American politics," political scientist Clinton Rossiter wrote. "The Republicans, in nominating Barry Goldwater, deliberately chose to ignore, to downgrade, perhaps to change these rules."

And so in November 1964 Lyndon Johnson won the grandest presidential victory since Franklin Delano Roosevelt's in 1936. There was an old saying in Iowa, overwhelmingly Republican from time immemorial: "Iowa would go Democrat when h.e.l.l went Methodist." h.e.l.l went Methodist in 1964; or at least Iowa's seven-man delegation to the House of Representatives went five-sevenths Democratic. In Congress, Democrats now outnumbered Republicans more than two to one. A bright new cla.s.s of pro-Johnson liberals was swept in on his coattails, forty-seven in the House of Representatives alone. The right had been rendered a joke, an embarra.s.sment, a political footnote-probably for good.

"I doubt that there has ever been so many people seeing so many things alike on decision day," Lyndon Johnson declared in acknowledging his victory on November 5.

"These are the most hopeful times since Christ was born in Bethlehem," he said while lighting the White House Christmas tree.

And in his January 4, 1965, State of the Union address, he said, "We have achieved a unity of interest among our people that is unmatched in the history of freedom."

He continued: "I propose that we begin a ma.s.sive attack on crippling and killing diseases.

"I propose that we launch a national effort to make the American city a better and more stimulating place to live.

"I propose that we increase the beauty of America and end the poisoning of our rivers and the air that we breathe....

"I propose that we eliminate every remaining obstacle to the right and the opportunity to vote.

"I propose that we honor and support the achievements of thought and the creations of art."

And he insisted that America would honor its pledge to the people of Vietnam, where, according to the public record, not a single American bomb had been dropped save in immediate retaliation for the Gulf of Tonkin incident, nor a single infantryman sent. "Our goal is peace in Southeast Asia," the president intoned. "That will come only when aggressors leave their neighbors in peace. What is at stake is the cause of freedom and in that cause America will never be found wanting.... To ignore aggression now would only increase the danger of a much larger war."

And that, to a vast majority of Americans, sounded perfectly reasonable. It all sounded reasonable. Johnson "is almost universally liked," the left-wing Nation Nation reported that week-hinting, even, that they rather liked him, too. Even the man who wrote Barry Goldwater's 1964 convention platform, Representative Melvin Laird of Wisconsin, said it would be "suicidal" for the Republicans "to ignore the election results and try to resist any change in the party." A poll that month found that 65 percent of rank-and-file Republicans still called themselves conservatives. Should that two-thirds dominate their party's direction, warned two of the nation's most respected political scientists, "we can expect an end to the compet.i.tive two-party system." reported that week-hinting, even, that they rather liked him, too. Even the man who wrote Barry Goldwater's 1964 convention platform, Representative Melvin Laird of Wisconsin, said it would be "suicidal" for the Republicans "to ignore the election results and try to resist any change in the party." A poll that month found that 65 percent of rank-and-file Republicans still called themselves conservatives. Should that two-thirds dominate their party's direction, warned two of the nation's most respected political scientists, "we can expect an end to the compet.i.tive two-party system."

The system wasn't all that compet.i.tive in any event. The Republican National Committee had been purged of Goldwater holdovers. One staffer, Frank Kovak, had been allowed to remain for his financial expertise. Throughout the spring Kovak surrept.i.tiously pa.s.sed the RNC's private donor lists to right-wing groups that raised funds in compet.i.tion with the Republicans. Party chairman Ray Bliss found out and ordered him to stop. Kovak continued. So on June 18, two weeks after Bliss presided over a ceremonial RNC meeting meant to herald an era of Republican healing, his a.s.sistant broke into Kovak's desk. The break-in was bungled. Kovak alerted the press.

That was the Republican Party in 1965.

Lyndon Johnson took advantage of the weakened opposition. His hero was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Now he became became Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Actually, he outpaced him. The liberals' struggle to pa.s.s federal funding for education had been a political dry hole since the New Deal. Johnson pa.s.sed it in the House in March by a margin of 263153. He then insisted the Senate pa.s.s the same bill without a single word changed. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act pa.s.sed the Senate two weeks later with only eighteen votes in opposition. He then turned the nation to dreams of immortality, proclaiming, "Heart disease, cancer, and stroke can be conquered-not in a millennium, not in a century, but in the next few onrus.h.i.+ng decades." The down payment on the revolution was medical insurance for the elderly funded out of Social Security contributions-another stalled New Dealera initiative, steered by Johnson past its permanent obstacle, the American Medical a.s.sociation (the only major professional organization to back Barry Goldwater), by a 110-vote House margin. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Actually, he outpaced him. The liberals' struggle to pa.s.s federal funding for education had been a political dry hole since the New Deal. Johnson pa.s.sed it in the House in March by a margin of 263153. He then insisted the Senate pa.s.s the same bill without a single word changed. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act pa.s.sed the Senate two weeks later with only eighteen votes in opposition. He then turned the nation to dreams of immortality, proclaiming, "Heart disease, cancer, and stroke can be conquered-not in a millennium, not in a century, but in the next few onrus.h.i.+ng decades." The down payment on the revolution was medical insurance for the elderly funded out of Social Security contributions-another stalled New Dealera initiative, steered by Johnson past its permanent obstacle, the American Medical a.s.sociation (the only major professional organization to back Barry Goldwater), by a 110-vote House margin.

And then there was civil rights.

The genesis of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 echoed the genesis of the Civil Rights Act of 1964: televised images of Southern sadism. In 1963 it had been Birmingham children set upon by fire hoses and police dogs. Now Martin Luther King, the freshly minted n.o.bel Peace Prize laureate, came to Selma, Alabama, a town of twenty-nine thousand, of which fifteen thousand were blacks of voting age. Only about three hundred were registered to vote.

Soon came ma.s.s arrests-including, on February 1, the detention of five hundred schoolchildren, who had been transported to a state prison farm after the warning "Sing one more freedom song and you are under arrest." When King himself was arrested, he published an open letter in the New York Times: New York Times: "This Is Selma, Alabama. There Are More Negroes in Jail with Me Than There Are on the Voting Rolls." Soon after, troopers shot protester Jimmy Lee Jackson to death. "This Is Selma, Alabama. There Are More Negroes in Jail with Me Than There Are on the Voting Rolls." Soon after, troopers shot protester Jimmy Lee Jackson to death.

The stage was set. A march was planned for March 7 down U.S. Highway 80-thereabouts known as the Jefferson Davis Highway-to the state capital, Montgomery, fifty miles to the east. At the far side of the point of embarkation, the Edmund Pettus Bridge, stood rank upon rank of Sheriff Jim Clark's officers, and, outfitted in gas masks, cordons of Governor George Wallace's fearsome Alabama state troopers. The six hundred marchers, clutching sleeping bags for the five-day journey ahead, were ordered to disperse. They did not. The troopers rushed, clubs flailing, tear-gas canisters exploding, white spectators wildly cheering them on; then Jim Clark's forces, on horseback, swinging rubber tubes wrapped in barbed wire, and bullwhips, and electric cattle prods, littered the bridge with writhing black bodies splattering blood. The film ran on national TV. Over and over. On NBC, the broadcast cut into a showing of the film Judgment at Nuremberg Judgment at Nuremberg-a story about what happens when ordinary citizens turn a blind eye to evil.

Federal mediators negotiated safe pa.s.sage for a peaceful march a week later. The next night, local thugs beat the Reverend James Reeb, a white minister from Boston, to death (he had been watching Judgment at Nuremberg Judgment at Nuremberg when his conscience directed him to travel to Selma). Lyndon Johnson was a man given to towering rages. Now he was angrier than any of his intimates had ever seen him. He prepared to give the greatest speech of his career. Outside the White House, left-wing picketers marched by bearing signs reading when his conscience directed him to travel to Selma). Lyndon Johnson was a man given to towering rages. Now he was angrier than any of his intimates had ever seen him. He prepared to give the greatest speech of his career. Outside the White House, left-wing picketers marched by bearing signs reading LBJ, JUST YOU WAIT...SEE WHAT HAPPENS IN '68. LBJ, JUST YOU WAIT...SEE WHAT HAPPENS IN '68. The threat-redeem the martyrs or be punished at the polls-seemed viable. Answering that yearning now appeared not just a moral imperative, but a political one. The threat-redeem the martyrs or be punished at the polls-seemed viable. Answering that yearning now appeared not just a moral imperative, but a political one.

Yet no one was prepared for the moral force of the speech Lyndon Johnson gave to Congress and the nation on March 15. He wrote it himself, and delivered it over the objections of temporizing aides: "It is wrong-deadly wrong-to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country.... There is no issue of states' rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights.... Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice."

Then, stunningly, he raised his arms in the air and invoked the slogan of a movement that was not too long ago perceived as the preeminent irritant to America's national unity: "And...we...shall...overcome!"

There followed the silence of a reaction too stunned for mere applause. Martin Luther King cried. Senators cried. Southern legislators cornered LBJ's befuddled mentor, Georgia senator Richard Russell, and demanded an explanation for his protege's betrayal of his native South. They looked like heartless old jacka.s.ses.

The next Selma procession, on March 21, was celebratory-thousands of singing marchers, ranks of glamorous celebrities in the fore, marching all the way through to Montgomery.

That night one of the white marchers, a Detroit mother of five named Viola Liuzzo, while humming "We Shall Overcome" in her car, was shot to death by the Ku Klux Klan because she was sitting next to a black man.

The martyr only seemed to intensify the nation's moral resolve. "Should we defeat every enemy, should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue," Lyndon Johnson had proclaimed, "then we will have failed as a people and as a nation."

He signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on August 6 under the Capitol dome. He intoned about the slaves, who "came in darkness and they came in chains.... Today, we strike away the last major shackle of those fierce and ancient bonds."

People cried. The Negro's cause was America's cause. Who could argue with that? Johnson, the Times Times' agenda-setting pundit James "Scotty" Reston avowed, was "getting everything through the Congress but the abolition of the Republican party, and he hasn't tried that yet."

The rioting in Los Angeles began five nights later. The spark came at the corner of 116th and Avalon. Two black men, brothers, were stopped by a California highway patrolman at 7:19 p.m., the driver under suspicion of drunkenness. The three scuffled; a crowd gathered. Their mother came out from her house to quarrel with the cops, then another woman joined the fight. The crowd thought the second woman was pregnant (she was wearing a barber's smock). When the cops struck the second woman-kicking a pregnant woman in the stomach?-the mob surged as one. By ten fifteen several hundred Watts residents were on the street, throwing things at white car pa.s.sengers, staving in store windows, looting. Police tried to seal off the immediate area. But things had already spiraled out of control.

The images came soon afterward, raw and ubiquitous-and, because of a quirk of technology (the telecopter did not record its images on film, as most news cameras did, but via a microwave signal), live. live. KTLA fed it raw into people's homes for the next four days. As a public service, they shared the feeds with the other L.A. channels and the networks. KTLA fed it raw into people's homes for the next four days. As a public service, they shared the feeds with the other L.A. channels and the networks.

You would see the telecopter hovering over a hapless lone individual turning a garden hose on a fire at an army surplus store, whose exploding ammunition had already kindled adjacent drug and liquor stores, as upward of a thousand lingered to watch them burn and to hara.s.s the Good Samaritan as fire trucks approached and were turned away by a hail of bricks.

You saw fire trucks escorted by sixteen police cruisers to secure their pa.s.sage, flames high enough to down power lines, the transformer in front of a furniture store about to blow, black smoke spreading second by second over a ma.s.sive expanse of roof, then over the lion's share of the block, the helicopter tacking through banks of black smoke, looking for ribbons of light through which to capture the scurrying firemen below.

The reporter narrates the action in surges and lulls, like a demonic sports play-by-play: "There is little that they can do. These buildings will be a total loss before they can get the first drop of water on the building-AND ANOTHER FIRE JUST ERUPTED ABOUT A BLOCK AWAY!...

"And the spectators do not seem to be concerned by what's going on....

"Here are two kids running away from the fire right now!...If the command center can see our picture, I would check the parking lot next to the National Dollar Store for three individuals.... AND NOW THERE'S ANOTHER BUILDING ON FIRE ON THE NORTH SIDE OF THE STREET!...

"And there's another group of spectators! All they're doing is standing around and looking. They couldn't be less concerned....

"And now we have orders to climb higher into the air as potshots are being taken from the ground. Rifle fire and small-arms fire. So we're pulling up and out."

Then you saw the helicopter swof-swof swof-swof across two more miles of blazing streets, to Fifty-first and Avalon, for shots of a burning car turned on its back like a helpless scarab, the crowd guarding their treasure with a street barricade of picnic tables, park benches, and trash cans, the flames ascending heavenward. across two more miles of blazing streets, to Fifty-first and Avalon, for shots of a burning car turned on its back like a helpless scarab, the crowd guarding their treasure with a street barricade of picnic tables, park benches, and trash cans, the flames ascending heavenward.

War, breaking out in the streets of the United States of America, as if out of nowhere.

The supposed American consensus had always been clouded. The experts had just become expert at ignoring the clouds. The violent, feudal South had long been cla.s.sed as a vestige, its caste-ridden folkways soon to be inundated by the flood tide of progress, hastened by the salving balm of federal intervention, just as in Selma. Social critics on the left thought the kind of violence you saw in the South might just represent the nation's future, not its past. But they, too, were ignored-seen as vestiges of the thirties, back when there wasn't a consensus.

There had been race riots in the summer of 1964 in New York, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Rochester. And then, when Goldwater lost overwhelmingly, pundits systematically breathed a sigh of relief. "White Backlash Doesn't Develop," the New York Times New York Times headlined. But backlash headlined. But backlash was was developing, whatever the developing, whatever the Times Times's triumphant conclusion. In a statewide referendum in California, with Proposition 14, voters struck down the state's "open housing" law, which prevented property owners from discriminating against purchasers or renters on the basis of race, by a proportion of two to one-an anti-civil-rights vote of almost the same size as the day's vote for President Johnson.

A prominent liberal Southern newspaper editor, Samuel Talmadge Ragan, a.s.serted that after the aberration of five Southern states going for Goldwater, "leaders of both parties are confident" that "elections will be decided on issues other than civil rights." It was a perverse interpretation: in Mississippi, the presidential candidate who had voted against Johnson's 1964 Civil Rights Act won 87 percent of the vote, compared to the 24.7 percent Nixon had won in 1960. Yet Ragan's conclusions ran in the most respectable outlet imaginable, the sober quarterly American Scholar. American Scholar. American scholars, like liberals everywhere in early 1965, chose to bask in the sun. American scholars, like liberals everywhere in early 1965, chose to bask in the sun.

There had been violence on both sides in the presidential campaign-vandalism against campaign offices, civil rights activists and conservative partisans a.s.saulting one another, death threats against the candidates. None of it was seen as a pattern. Watts was absorbed, six days after the pa.s.sage of the Voting Rights Act, as a visitation from another planet. "How is it possible after all we've accomplished?" Lyndon Johnson cried in anguish. "How could it be? Is the world topsy-turvy?" Los Angeles radio station KNX fired its most popular call-in host. He insisted on talking about Watts. His bosses wanted him talking about anything but. In this way consensus was inst.i.tutionalized.

Vietnam made the myth harder to sustain. Johnson had spent the first thirteen months of his presidency in fits of sleeplessness. Holding the line against further Communist insurgency into South Vietnam, holding it against an escalating American commitment that might bring China and Russia actively into the fray, perhaps even forcing the threat of nuclear war: these were the Scylla and Charybdis through which Lyndon Johnson attempted to steer his Vietnam thinking. Some days it threatened to crack open his skull. Then, in January 1965, the latest in a series of South Vietnamese governmental coups led National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy to urge that America's present course, ma.s.sive aid to Saigon coupled with secret low-grade sabotage and airborne hara.s.sment, "could only lead to disastrous defeat." The election was over, Bundy reminded his boss-the election in which Johnson had run as a peace candidate even while authorizing elaborate plans not just to retaliate against Communist insurgency but to provoke a pretext to "retaliate" against.

The pretext presented itself on February 7: a deadly mortar attack on the American barracks of among the twenty-three thousand U.S. "advisers" at Pleiku, the Vietnamese Central Highlands outpost Americans had been introduced to a few months back during Bob Hope's televised USO Christmas special. ("They had a ring of security around us bigger than anything since I hit the Orpheum circuit," he quipped from the makes.h.i.+ft stage, brandis.h.i.+ng his golf club.) What followed was code-named Rolling Thunder-continuous air war against North Vietnam. What followed hard upon that was the landing of two marine battalions to secure the bases from which the air raids were launched. By spring there were thirty-six hundred Rolling Thunder sorties a month and ninety thousand troops to secure them. By mid-June the pretense of defense was dropped altogether, as squads were sent out on the first major missions to "search and destroy" the enemy. They said that if you supported Goldwater, Bob Hope had quipped, America would end up in Vietnam. "I forgot to take the Goldwater sticker off my car, and here I am." Not so funny now.

Johnson lied about all of it. Just as he lied about an April incursion of twenty thousand marines into the Dominican Republic-making up a story that the amba.s.sador phoned him from underneath his desk as Communist bullets ricocheted around the room. (A young administration defense intellectual named Daniel Ellsberg said actually the Dominican Republic was "one of the few Communist-free environments in the whole world.") By summer, plans were in place to put nearly one hundred thousand more American troops into Vietnam, though Johnson told the public the number was half that and denied any policy had changed. "Few Americans will quarrel with President Johnson's determined conclusion to hold on in Vietnam," the Newspaper of Record editorialized the day after that announcement.

Vietnam critics gathered exponentially: fourteen were arrested for blocking the entrance of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in February; the first of one hundred campus "teach-ins" by the end of the school year came days after the first marines landed at Da Nang (at first the administration sent spokesmen to these events, but they were so rhetorically manhandled for the gaps and contradictions in their presentations, they stopped showing up). The biggest peace rally in the history of the republic, organized by Students for a Democratic Society, the regnant "New Left" organization, brought twenty thousand to D.C. on April 27. SDS discussed a "Kamikaze Plan" to urge young men not to register for the draft in explicit violation of the 1917 Espionage Act.

But the Senate pa.s.sed the president's $700 million Vietnam appropriation that spring 883. The Times Times subheaded its report on the SDS protest "Holiday from Exams." According to one poll, more Americans thought such protesters were "tools of the Communists" than disagreed with Johnson on Vietnam. subheaded its report on the SDS protest "Holiday from Exams." According to one poll, more Americans thought such protesters were "tools of the Communists" than disagreed with Johnson on Vietnam.

Johnson kept on rolling out his Great Society: preschool for poor children, college prep for poor teenagers, legal services for indigent defendants, economic redevelopment funds for lagging regions, landmark immigration reform, a Department of Housing and Urban Development, national endowments for the humanities and arts-even a whole new category for the liberal agenda, environmentalism: a Highway Beautification Act, a Water Quality Act, a Clean Air Act, bulldozed through as if the opposition from the Big Three automakers, the advertising industry, and the chemical industry weren't even there. The Republican National Committee could hardly raise the $200,000 each month necessary to keep its office open. The conservative organizations thriving the most-such as the John Birch Society, which had leveraged a successful members.h.i.+p drive out of the Goldwater defeat-were so far out that Republican leaders wanted little to do with them. The Was.h.i.+ngton Post Was.h.i.+ngton Post editorialized of a party fighting off an "attempted gigantic political kidnapping" by "fanatics": a party in smoldering ruins, ghouls the only sign of life. editorialized of a party fighting off an "attempted gigantic political kidnapping" by "fanatics": a party in smoldering ruins, ghouls the only sign of life.

Only in hindsight did the report from thirty-three-year-old Morley Safer on August 5 from the village of Cam Ne look like a foreshadowing of Watts: marines torching a peasant village by touching off the straw roofs with cigarette lighters, what soldiers called a "Zippo raid."

"This is what the war in Vietnam is all about," Safer narrated. "To a Vietnamese peasant whose house meant a lifetime of backbreaking labor, it will take more than presidential promises to convince him that we are on his side."

What wasn't on film was even worse: a South Vietnamese cameraman persuading marines not to aim a flamethrower into the warren in which women and children were hiding.

In America, the first antiwar ma.s.s arrests soon followed: three hundred collared on the Capitol steps at an "a.s.sembly of Unrepresented Peoples" commemorating the twentieth anniversary of Hiros.h.i.+ma and Nagasaki. Brigades from Berkeley's Vietnam Day Committee made the most militant antiwar intervention yet, explicitly drawing parallels with the Germans who defied Hitler, standing in front of barreling troop trains s.h.i.+pping soldiers out for Vietnam, giving way like matadors only at the last possible moment. "I felt I might die," one partic.i.p.ant said, "and that would be okay." Others burned their draft cards even though a recently pa.s.sed law made the act a federal crime. J. Edgar Hoover called them "halfway citizens who are neither morally, mentally, nor emotionally mature."

"We have achieved a unity of interest among our people that is unmatched in the history of freedom."

Turn on the TV: burning huts in Vietnam. Turn on the TV: burning buildings in Watts. Turn on the TV: one set of young people were comparing another set of young people to n.a.z.is, and Da Nang was equated with Nagasaki.