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January 17 - January 23, 2018
Donald Trump should leave a thank-you note at Nelson Rockefeller’s grave in Sleepy Hollow, New York, for paving the way in Republican presidential politics for the rich men of Fifth Avenue with complicated marital histories.
The United States, that is, was already waging war in Vietnam by August 1964.
Probably only one torpedo had really been fired. And it missed. And yet that very night, the president went on TV and told the American people that two attacks on U.S. ships had been launched, out of nowhere, by North Vietnam.
the United States had been pursuing a wide range of covert military actions in Vietnam since the 1950s.
“There is no limit to what he says the President can do,” McCarthy told Marcy and Kenworthy in the hall. He seemed shaken yet firm.
That hearing changed Democratic Party politics forever. It changed the presidential campaign of 1968. It changed the course of the Vietnam War. It changed history.
Everyone except Al Lowenstein and the “Dump Johnson” idealists.
As Hubert Humphrey and Jack Kennedy approached the starting gate for the race for the Democratic nomination, Time quoted McCarthy as saying, “I’m twice as liberal as Hubert Humphrey . . . and twice as Catholic as Jack Kennedy.”
This was a mild patriotic dissent, within a supposedly unified party, within a country where most college students wouldn’t dream of violating the dress code, never mind taking over a building or rioting.
“War posthumously avenges the dead on the survivors.”
Al Lowenstein was the only person in Washington who could embrace a crazy idea and still be taken seriously by some members of Congress: the liberal members.
Lowenstein didn’t want a revolution. He wanted enlightened liberal members of Congress and he wanted an enlightened liberal president to end the war. He wanted Bobby.
At the microphone, the nerd became one of the most inspiring liberal preachers of the day.
Without Bobby, Al Lowenstein had nothing.
Joe McCarthy’s ten years in the Senate ended with his dying as an alcoholic at age forty-eight. Roy Cohn returned to New York City, where he eventually became Donald Trump’s legal adviser and mentor.
When at last he tried, his sentences were short, as if each word were a struggle. “Jack’s been shot.” Then: “It may be fatal.”
Bashful, pained, yet tentatively hopeful, he recited Juliet’s lines as a humble yet worthy heir apparent to the slain hero. This was the Robert Kennedy that, three years later, Al Lowenstein believed could dump Johnson.
In 1967, with Lowenstein’s Dump Johnson effort gathering speed, the press had picked up with gusto on this dramatic possibility: a history-making primary run by the Kennedy heir apparent against his own party’s incumbent, President Johnson.
As the Dump Johnson movement gained steam, Bobby never forgot that the day he was sworn in as a senator in January 1965, he found a note on his office desk from Walinsky saying simply, “Lyndon Johnson is a lame duck president.”
Despite Arthur Schlesinger’s growing hatred of the war in Vietnam, within ADA it was Schlesinger who had been cautioning Allard Lowenstein against trying to unseat a Democratic president.
Bobby walked out. Johnson seemed to him mentally unstable. Now it seemed irresponsible to allow that man to continue to hold the office. “How can we possibly survive five more years of Lyndon Johnson?” Bobby put it to Arthur Schlesinger. “Five more years of a crazy man?”
Jackie Kennedy hoped Bobby would run, too.
Lowenstein could not resist framing it as a joke to which Bobby obviously did not have to reply. He told Bobby, “If you want to run, we’ll let you.” Bobby laughed.
Bobby Kennedy had declined to criticize the antiwar movement.
Johnson would not, Goodwin believed, have the guts to withstand a challenge by RFK. This was a version of Jack Newfield’s Sonny Liston theory of LBJ.
He knew he had to run for the presidency. He also knew that when he ran, he would be running for himself, for Jack, for the Kennedys, and for the realization of the nation’s best hopes.
“You’re a historian, Arthur,” he said. “When was the last time millions of people rallied behind a plank?”
On the way out, Al Lowenstein had one more thing to tell Bobby, the man whom he had dreamed would be his knight-errant: “We’re going to do it without you, and that’s too bad. Because you could have become President of the United States.” Al Lowenstein discovered Bobby Kennedy was a mere mortal, not a knight, and that Camelot wasn’t real.
For McCarthy there was only one candidate for challenging Johnson, the only candidate Johnson feared—Bobby Kennedy.
There was nothing wrong with that plan. Nothing. Unless everything Lyndon Johnson and party professionals knew about politics was suddenly going to change in 1968. If it was, they would be the last to know.
when all the primary votes were counted, McCarthy won twenty delegates and LBJ won only four. McCarthy was officially ahead of the president in the earned delegate count for the convention in Chicago.
He put war and peace on the ballot, life and death, and he won. The insurgent won, and that changed Democratic Party politics forever.
Nixon was an eager member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, searching for communists operating inside the U.S. government.
The senators can stay in the Senate, as John McCain and John Kerry did. But most of them aren’t senators. Most of them are forced to mourn the death of their political careers.
Through political connections, Fred Trump benefited from preferential treatment in gaining millions in federal dollars. Then he built low-income housing and discriminated by race in renting those apartments.
King said that if the South had governors like Rockefeller, racial inequality would be solved in a matter of months.
In January, Ethel helped her kids hang a “Run, Bobby, Run” banner outside their bedroom window.
Bobby went public with his decision not to run two weeks before the New Hampshire primary. He told the press, “I have told friends and supporters that I would not oppose Lyndon Johnson under any foreseeable circumstances.” Everyone in politics hears the word foreseeable as wiggle room. Johnson, McCarthy, and Nixon certainly did. Al Lowenstein showed up right away in Bobby’s office and said, “I’m an unforeseen circumstance!”
I frequently wonder how much different a world we would have if neither Kennedy brother was assassinated.
Never more than now.
Four days before the New Hampshire primary, Bobby called Teddy Kennedy from California with news he wanted Teddy to tell McCarthy. Bobby had changed his mind. He would probably run in the Wisconsin primary after all, and he wanted McCarthy to know.
Under the pressure of their questioning, he felt he had to begin to turn over his cards. “I am actively assessing the possibility,” Bobby said, “of whether I will run against President Johnson.”
Gene McCarthy knew he was going to be asked to do something that no other “winner” of the New Hampshire primary had ever been asked to do—a request only the Kennedys would make.
They did not know that a year earlier Cronkite had personally urged Bobby to run. Walter Cronkite was a true believer, too.
The second Kennedy presidential campaign was launched. A few days later, Jackie Kennedy took Arthur Schlesinger aside at a dinner party in New York. “Do you know what I think will happen to Bobby?” she asked. Schlesinger waited for her to answer her own question. “The same thing that happened to Jack,” she said.
Congress—a bill that would not have even been written had not Dr. King led a ten-year national crusade for civil rights that included protests and civil disobedience, for which he was arrested twenty-nine times.
Dr. King hoped the Poor People’s Campaign could also get Stokely Carmichael’s support. He hoped to bring his economic justice movement together with the more radical demands of young Black Power leaders.
“In order for nonviolence to work,” Stokely Carmichael said in 1967, “your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.” H. Rap Brown said, “If America don’t come around, we’re gonna have to burn it down.” Dr. King well understood the movement’s potential for devolving into chaotic violence.
His aides called it Martin’s “war on sleep.” His staff was always more willing to decline the next invitation than he was.
eventually became a civil rights lawyer and fought the Ku Klux Klan. He described Wallace’s and Trump’s “politics of fear” this way: “You know, it’s like you gotta be afraid. You know, the black folks are taking over. And, you know, Trump, the Mexicans are coming. The Chinese are going to get you. And, you know, fear is a motivator in many many incidents—in politics number one and many other ways. And so they are a lot alike in that.
He knew that there were white people all over the country who thought about race the way he did: “whites hate niggers.” And so a month before the New Hampshire primary, George Corley Wallace announced his candidacy for president of the United States. He was running as an independent. He wouldn’t have to fight for a nomination. He was in this all the way. In a close election, the Wallace vote could determine the outcome.
Nixon had not spent years developing a strategy to beat Bobby. He didn’t have one.
