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December 8 - December 13, 2024
But he was the sort to spy betrayal even in the midst of affection.
But as I leave you I want you to know—just think of how much you’re going to be missing. You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”
And in a poll of Republican leaders, only 3 percent said Nixon would make a good candidate. He was too liberal.
In Oregon, Nixon hired operatives to set up a clandestine campaign via fifty phone lines installed in a Portland boiler room to wire a “spontaneous” primary upset.
“I do not raise the question of Professor Genovese’s right to be for segregation or integration, for free love or celibacy, for Communism or anarchy—in peacetime. But the United States is at war.” (Anarchistic, multiracial Communistic orgies, in wartime, no less.)
Langston Hughes: Negroes, Sweet and docile, Meek, humble, and kind: Beware the day They change their mind!
Chief Parker had provided this account of the riot’s origins to Governor Brown’s blue-ribbon panel studying Watts: “Someone threw a rock, and like monkeys in a zoo, they all started throwing rocks.”
“You know, a tree is a tree, how many more do you need to look at?” he had blundered in a speech on conservation.
Pat was not the most inspiring of politicians: a “tower of Jell-O,” according to the Democrats’ legislative boss, Jesse Unruh. It was only what he had accomplished that was inspiring. His first legislative session, in 1959, was the most productive in California history: bold new agencies for economic development and consumer protection; top-to-bottom bureaucratic reorganization; increased social security and welfare benefits; new funding for hospitals, mental health clinics, and drug treatment; a ban on racial discrimination in hiring; massive new funding for schools; miles upon miles of
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The pundits little noted the Reagan-friendly culture wars roiling beneath the surface of the bourgeois utopia.
Other activists went to war on a textbook—Negro historian John Hope Franklin’s Land of the Free, which, their pamphlets insisted, “destroys pride in America’s past, develops a guilt complex, mocks American justice, indoctrinates toward Communism, is hostile to religious concepts, overemphasizes Negro participation in American history, projects negative thought models, criticizes business and free enterprise, plays politics, foments class hatred, slants and distorts facts,” and “promotes propaganda and poppycock.”
More and more Americans were forthrightly asserting visions of what a truly moral society would look like. Unfortunately, their visions were irreconcilable. At their fringes, irreconcilable moralities begat violence.
An Oklahoma minister drummed up a movement to censure a “Southern Baptist preacher in a high government position”—White House press secretary Bill Moyers—for conduct that “brings dishonor to the work and name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Moyers’s sin was getting photographed in the papers dancing the Watusi at the White House.
For them the “Free Speech Movement” was a moment of moral transcendence. To the man on the street—especially the man on the street never afforded the privilege of a college education—it was petulant brattishness.
“All the most vociferous of them could produce was four-letter words,” Illinois’s Republican Senate candidate, Charles Percy, told eighteen hundred students at the University of Illinois in a speech on the New Left’s “general uncleanliness.” The students gave him a standing ovation.
He was providing a political outlet for all the outrages—outrages that, until he came along, hadn’t seemed like political issues at all.
neighborhood school-girls adopted a new jump-rope chant: “I’d like to be an Alabama trooper / That is what I’d truly like to be / ’Cause if I were an Alabama trooper / I could kill the niggers legally.”
To liberals, the law just made so much sense—how could it lose?
Alabama’s constitution wouldn’t let Governor George Wallace succeed himself. So he tried to ram through a constitutional amendment allowing him to run for reelection. But Alabama legislators proved unwilling to give up what slim reed of power they had over the state’s de facto dictator. Wallace wasn’t about to quit politics; “the only thing that counts,” he would tell his children at the dinner table, waxing philosophic, “is money and power.” He needed a political base to run for president in 1968. So he decided to run his cancer-ridden wife, Lurleen, for governor instead and run the state
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Wallace pledged to sign on as Lurleen’s “adviser” at $1 a year: “I’m gonna draw the water, tote in the wood, wind the clock, and put out the cat.” For anyone who dared critique the ruse, he affected disgust at the attack on the honor of Southern womanhood. Lurleen’s candidacy was announced mere days after she underwent surgery for the cancer that would kill her two years later. Behind the scenes, an acquaintance reported, Wallace treated her like a “whipped dog.”
An attorney general’s lapse in chivalry was apparently more disqualification for higher office than the lack of a twelfth-grade education.
The rest of the country was becoming more like the South.
“We are making South Vietnam into an American colony” and “ruining an unhappy nation in the process of ‘saving’ it.”
(CBS viewers missed Kennan’s musings, the network having by then returned to its regularly scheduled reruns of The Andy Griffith Show—explaining that the hearings “obfuscate” and “confuse” the issue.)
“Kill a commie for Jesus”
In Champaign, Illinois, leaders of peace demonstrations got stickers on their mailboxes reading, “You are in the sights of a Minuteman.” In Queens, the DA seized an arsenal, to be used by the right-wing vigilante group the Minutemen in assaults on “left-wing camps in a three-state area,” including mortars, bazookas, grenades, trench knives, over 150 rifles, a “half dozen garroting devices,” and over a million rounds of ammunition.
The crusade began in January with a speech to the white-gloved ladies of the Women’s National Republican Club at the Waldorf-Astoria (how he hated speaking to women’s groups: “I will not go and talk to those shitty ass old ladies!” he once said).
Byron de la Beckwith, the murderer of Medgar Evers, acquitted by a Mississippi jury though his fingerprints were on the murder weapon, followed them in his pickup truck, dandling a shotgun on his knee.
Diem was not a Communist. And that, said America, made him a democrat.
Ho sent telegrams to President Truman offering an independent Vietnam as “a fertile field for American capital and enterprise.” (Truman never answered.)
America’s war aim in Vietnam was supposed to be to win the allegiance of its people to the government we preferred. The brass called that “winning hearts and minds.” The acronym—WHAM—was all too apt. To warn VC, combat battalions took to nailing severed enemy ears to trees. Helicopter door gunners mowed down suspiciously placed figures wearing “black pajamas,” what the VC wore instead of proper uniforms. Problem being, Vietnamese farmers wore black pajamas, too. One of the main methods to protect the farmers was to exile them at gunpoint to refugee camps—from villages to whom their ties were
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Shell-shocked, he pronounced the neighborhood “unfit for human habitation” and announced he would open a state employment office in the inner city as soon as possible, then returned to Los Angeles and attended every conference session on economic opportunity he could find.
An item in the July 6, 1966, New York Times: “Montpelier—The Board of State Library Trustees voted 4 to 1 tonight to retain the name of Niggerhead Pond and Niggerhead Mountain in Groton State Forest.” Those opposed to the name change had argued that niggerhead was only a logging term for a burrlike passage in a river.
Through no agency of their own, Chicago’s white ethnics were the beneficiaries of an urban-planning miracle. The National Association of Real Estate Boards—the same group that turned itself into a political machine to lobby against open occupancy in 1966—launched an “Own Your Own Home” crusade in the 1920s to coax families into putting down payments on single-family houses of their very own; simultaneously, idealistic reformers coming out of England’s Arts and Crafts movement devised a new form of cheap and felicitous housing unmatched in the history of the industrial working class: the urban
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The job of the mayor’s Commission on Human Relations was to see that none of these incidents made it into one of the city’s six daily papers. Because officially, there was no segregation in Chicago.
On July 10, Martin Luther King led a rally at Soldier Field. He followed it with a march to City Hall—where, like his namesake, Martin Luther, he tacked the movement’s open-housing and slum-clearing demands on the mayor’s doorposts.
The public-housing high-rises seemed a brilliant solution to the overcrowding crisis in the 1950s. Now they looked like fortifications for guerrilla warfare.
On the third day eight young nurses were murdered by a slow-witted white drifter named Richard Speck. The Chicago Tribune connected the dots: the riots, the murders, both were “symptomatic of a deep sickness in society.”
Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a happy warrior for civil rights since 1948, told the National Association of Counties that “the National Guard is no answer to the problems of the slums,” and that if conditions didn’t improve, there would be “open violence in every major city and county in America,” and, indeed, if he lived in a slum, “I think you’d have more trouble than you have had already because I’ve got enough spark left in me to lead a mighty good revolt.”
Birchers no longer seemed so frightening at any rate. “The Bircher isn’t identifiable,” a frank Reagan strategist reflected to a reporter after the state Republican convention voted down a renunciation of the Birch Society but voted in a proclamation against open housing, “but the Negro is.”
If California’s welfare system was overburdened, it was because of elderly people moving into the state for its generous old-age pensions. But the elderly were sympathetic. So Reagan went after supposed abuses of Aid to Dependent Children.
The Los Angeles Times did an investigation: they could only find abuses in four-tenths of 1 percent of relief cases and editorialized that for the sins of these 180 families, and $31,960 lost from the state treasury, “innocent children whose birthright was poverty” were being put at risk of starvation. “If there is a better answer, it won’t come from demagogic moralizing.”
They observed how white California was “somehow frustrated in the midst of affluence,” and that their rage was “encapsulated in the welfare issue.”
It suddenly struck Jules Witcover that “this man never seemed, even in a crowded room, to really be with anybody—and that he much preferred it that way.”
Not recognizing his own wife’s anniversary on the campaign trail was a PR mistake, and he wasn’t making mistakes now. In L.A. it was near to his mother’s birthday, so he invited a slew of reporters to record the moment on her front porch. “Happy birthday, Mum,” he said, and shook her hand.
A news brief noted RN’s visit with the pope, part of every presidential aspirant’s ethnic stations of the cross; his next stop was Tel Aviv, and he had already visited Ireland.
“I think the people of Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.”
(The rhetorical question: a favorite Nixonian device. It made him look open-minded.)
Now, the Dixie gargoyles were gloating, an ancient piece of Southern political folk wisdom was receiving its vindication: that once civil rights bills started affecting North as much as South, it wouldn’t just be Southerners filibustering civil rights bills.
The proceedings trailed fumes of apocalypse.
