Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (70 page)
Authors: Kenneth C. Davis
Less than a year and a half after the first issue, circulation had climbed to 100,000, Hugh Hefner had money in the bank and was turning down offers from larger publishers to sell them the magazine. He had created a new American dream—and was living it out himself.
It was also about this time that a young singer from Mississippi was beginning to send female fans into a paroxysm. Parents shook their heads at the gyrating hips of Elvis Presley. But he, and a new kind of music, had clearly arrived.
Playboy
. Barbie. Elvis.
As Ike got ready to leave office, he was turning the lights out on a very different America.
Must Read:
The Fifties
by David Halberstam.
Chapter Eight
The Torch Is Passed
From Camelot to Hollywood on the Potomac
How did Richard Nixon’s five o’clock shadow spoil his 1960 campaign for president?
What happened at the Bay of Pigs?
What was the Cuban Missile Crisis?
What was
The Feminine Mystique
?
Who was right? The Warren Commission or Oliver Stone?
Did
Mississippi Burning
really happen?
What was the Tonkin Resolution?
How did a successful break-in in Pennsylvania change the FBI?
How did a botched burglary become a crisis called Watergate and bring down a powerful president?
How did OPEC cripple America during the 1970s?
What happened to the space shuttle Challenger?
Why was Ronald Reagan called the “Teflon president”?
What happened to the Evil Empire?
C
amelot
.
The Age of Aquarius. “All You Need Is Love.” Hippies and Haight-Ashbury. “Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair.” “Tune In. Turn On. Drop Out.” Free love. Men on the moon. Woodstock.
It has come down as “the sixties,” a romantic fantasy set to a three-chord rock beat. But the era viewed so nostalgically as the days of peace, love, and rock and roll didn’t start out with much peace and love. Unless you focus on the fact that Enovid, the first birth control pill, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960.
The flip side of the sixties was a much darker tune. Riots and long, hot summers. Assassinations. Rock-star obituaries etched in acid. A war that only a “military-industrial complex” could love.
Sympathy for the Devil.
Altamont Speedway.
The “bright shining moment” of the JFK years—the media-created myth of
Camelot
manufactured in the wake of Kennedy’s death—began with the same Cold War paranoia that set the tone of the previous decade. The “liberal” Kennedy campaigned in 1960 as a hard-line anti-Communist, and used a fabricated “missile gap” between the United States and the Soviet Union as a campaign issue against Republican candidate Richard Nixon. What we call the sixties ended with the death throes of an unpopular, costly war in a quagmire called Vietnam.
But it was an extraordinary era in which all the accepted orthodoxies of government, church, and society were called into question. And, unlike the glum, alienated mood of the fifties, the new voices questioning authority had a lighter side. Joseph Heller (1923–99) was one of the first to capture the new mood of mordant humor in his first novel,
Catch-22
(1961), which was a forecast of the antimilitary mood that would form to oppose the war in Vietnam. But the new generation of poets was more likely to use an amplified guitar than a typewriter to voice its discontent. In the folk music of Peter, Paul, and Mary and Bob Dylan, and later in the rock-and-roll revolution, “counterculture” was blasting out of millions of radios and TVs. Of course, the record business found it a very profitable counterculture. And it spilled into the mainstream as entertainers like the Smothers Brothers brought irreverence to prime time—which promptly showed them the door.
The seventies got under way with the downfall of a corrupt White House in a sinkhole called Watergate. Vietnam and Watergate seemed to signal a change in the American political landscape. The years that followed were characterized by a feeling of aimlessness. Under Gerald Ford (1913–2006), who replaced the disgraced Nixon, and Jimmy Carter (b. 1924), America suffered the indignity of seeing its massive power in a seeming decline. But this slide was not the result of a superpower confrontation with the archvillain Soviets. Instead, a series of smaller shocks undid the foundation: the forming of OPEC by major oil producing countries to place a stranglehold on the world’s oil supplies; the acts of international terrorists, who struck with seeming impunity at the United States and other Western powers, culminating in the overthrow of the once mighty shah of Iran; and the imprisonment of American hostages in the American embassy in Teheran.
More than anything else, it was that apparent decline, reflected in America’s economic doldrums, that brought forth a president who represented, to the majority of Americans, the cowboy in the white hat who they always believed would ride into town. After the doubt and turmoil produced by the seventies, Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) seemed to embody that old-fashioned American can-do spirit. For many critics, the question was who was going to do what, and to whom? A throwback to Teddy Roosevelt and his “big stick,” Reagan also saw the White House as a bully pulpit. His sermons called back the “good old days”—which, of course, only appeared so good in hindsight.
Though it is still too soon to assess properly the long-term impact of his presidency, Ronald Reagan has already begun to be judged by history. To those who admire him, he was the man who restored American prestige and economic stability, and forced the Soviet Union into structural changes through a massive buildup of American defenses. To critics, he was the president who dozed through eight years in office while subordinates ran the show. In some cases, those underlings proved to be corrupt or simply cynical. In perhaps the most dangerous instance, a lieutenant colonel working in the White House was allowed to make his own foreign policy.
How did Richard Nixon’s five o’clock shadow spoil his 1960 campaign for president?
“If you give me a week, I might think of one.” That’s what President Eisenhower told a reporter who asked what major decisions Vice President Richard Nixon (1913–94) had participated in during their eight years together. Although Ike later said he was being facetious, he never really answered the question, and the remark left Nixon with egg on his face and the Democrats giddy.
That was in August 1960, as Nixon and John F. Kennedy (1917–63) ran neck and neck in the polls. How many wavering Nixon votes did Ike’s little joke torpedo? It would have taken only a shift of about a hundred thousand votes out of the record 68,832,818 cast to change the result and the course of contemporary events.
Most campaign historians cite Ike’s cutting comment as a jab that drew blood, but that was not the knockout punch in this contest. Posterity points instead to the face-off between the contenders—the first televised debates in presidential campaign history—as the flurry of verbal and visual punches from which Nixon never recovered. In particular, the first of these four meetings is singled out as the blow that sent the vice president to the canvas. More than 70 million people watched the first of these face-to-face meetings. Or maybe “face-to–five o’clock shadow” is more accurate.
Recovering from an infection that had hospitalized him for two weeks, Nixon was underweight and haggard-looking for the debate. Makeup artists attempted to conceal his perpetual five o’clock shadow with something called Lazy Shave that only made him look more pasty faced and sinister. Jack Kennedy, on the other hand, was the picture of youth and athletic vigor. While radio listeners thought there was no clear winner in the debates, television viewers were magnetized by Kennedy. If FDR was the master of radio, Kennedy was the first “telegenic” candidate, custom-tailored for the instant image making of the television age.
Broadcast on September 26 from Chicago, the first debate focused on domestic affairs, an advantage for Kennedy because Nixon was acknowledged to be more experienced in international matters. It was Nixon, after all, who had stood face-to-face with Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow, angrily wagging a finger at the Soviet leader during their “kitchen debate” in 1959. But in the first TV debate, Kennedy had Nixon on the defensive by listing the shortcomings of the Eisenhower administration. With deft command of facts and figures, Kennedy impressed an audience that was skeptical because of his youth and inexperience. He stressed his campaign theme that the Republicans had America in “retreat,” and he promised to get the country moving again.
The audience for the three subsequent debates fell off to around 50 million viewers. The impressions made by the first debate seemed to be most lasting. Kennedy got a boost in the polls and seemed to be pulling out in front, but the decision was still too close to call. Invisible through most of the contest, Eisenhower did some last-minute campaigning for Nixon, but it may have been too small an effort, too late.
Two events in October also had some impact. First, Nixon’s running mate, Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, promised that there would be a Negro in the Nixon cabinet. Nixon had to disavow that pledge, and whatever white votes he won cost him any chance at black support. A second Kennedy boost among black voters came when Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested prior to the final debate. Kennedy called King’s wife, Coretta, to express his concern, and Robert Kennedy helped secure King’s release on bail. Nixon decided to stay out of the case. King’s father, who had previously stated he wouldn’t vote for a Catholic, announced a shift to Kennedy. “I’ve got a suitcase of votes,” said Martin Luther King Sr., “and I’m going to take them to Mr. Kennedy and dump them in his lap.” He did just that. When Kennedy heard of the senior King’s earlier anti-Catholic remarks, he won points by humorously defusing the situation, commenting, “Imagine Martin Luther King having a bigot for a father. Well, we all have fathers, don’t we?”
Kennedy certainly had a father. Joseph Kennedy Sr., FDR’s first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and later his ambassador to Great Britain, where his anti-Semitic and isolationist views won him no points, stayed in the background in the campaign. Bankrolling and string pulling, Joseph Kennedy had orchestrated his son’s career from the outset with his extensive network of friends in the media, the mob, and the Catholic church. A few examples: Writer John Hersey’s “Survival,” the now deflated account of Kennedy’s wartime heroics aboard PT-109, overlooked the fact that Kennedy and his crew were sleeping in a combat zone when a Japanese destroyer rammed them. Joe Kennedy made sure his son was decorated by a high-ranking Navy official. When JFK ran for the House, Joe arranged for the Hersey article to appear in
Reader’s Digest
and then made sure every voter in Kennedy’s district got a copy. Publication of JFK’s first book,
Why England Slept,
was arranged by Kennedy pal journalist Arthur Krock, who then reviewed the book in the
New York Times.
Kennedy’s second book, the best-selling and Pulitzer Prize–winning
Profiles in Courage,
was the output of a committee of scholars and Kennedy speechwriter Theodore Sorensen.
Other friends of Joe Kennedy, like Henry Luce and William Randolph Hearst, had added to building the Kennedy image. Through Frank Sinatra, another Joe Kennedy crony, funds of dubious origin were funneled into the Kennedy war chest. Also through Sinatra, JFK met a young woman named Judith Campbell, who would soon become a regular sexual partner. What Kennedy didn’t know at the time was that Judith Campbell was also bedding Mafia chieftain Sam Giancana and a mob hit man named John Roselli. In a few months, they would all converge as Giancana and Roselli were given a “contract” to pull off the CIA-planned assassination of Fidel Castro.
The debate, his father’s war chest, his appeal to women (the public appeal, not the private one, which remained a well-protected secret), the newly important black vote, and vice presidential candidate Lyndon B. Johnson’s role in delivering Texas and the rest of the South all played a part in what was the closest presidential election in modern history (until the Bush-Gore race of 2000). Nixon actually won more states than Kennedy, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. Kennedy had sewn up the biggest electoral vote states. The margin of difference in the popular vote was less than two-thirds of a percentage point.
