Landslide (40 page)

Washington standing over him, Lincoln on either side—subtlety was not the order of the day. But for once Johnson’s extravagant stagecraft didn’t feel like overkill. With the stroke of a pen—or, rather, the strokes of several pens—Johnson had ended poll taxes and literacy tests and all of the violent indignities that for nearly two centuries had denied millions of American citizens the greatest promise of their nation. For a moment, Lyndon Johnson had earned the right to be mentioned in the same breath as the father of the nation and the man who had ensured it did not perish from the earth.

Yet he could not remain with them. And in the long story of America, the summer of 1965 would not be ringed in gold. In that
story, as we now know it, the summer of 1965 would be the moment when troubles overtook the country, troubles that would remain for years to come. We have come to think of that summer—the middle of the year in the middle of the decade—as the moment when Americans began to choose sides. Hope or fear, young or old, black or white, violent or nonviolent, radical or reactionary, student dissident or silent majority.

To Americans living through the summer of 1965, however, things were not so clear. In many respects, their lives looked the same as they had the summer before. Most of them were not fighting or dying in Vietnam. Most of them still enjoyed the benefits of a prosperous country with a stable government—their trash was collected, the water ran clear in their pipes, order was kept, and domestic peace was preserved. Most Americans still expected the policemen and the politicians to be trustworthy, decent, and good.

But, as in the previous summer, there remained a nagging fear that things were changing too fast, that some catastrophe loomed. The pitch of the anxiety had grown higher in the intervening year. Now everyone was talking about it, the causes of mistrust and worry, all the possible reasons for fear. Despite all the assurances of the prior twenty months, despite all the talk of the powerful president with his glad tidings of great joy, there was no use pretending anymore. Something was wrong in America. They could see it with their own eyes.

They could see it on their television screens, in the unsettling images coming out of Vietnam. The Rolling Thunder campaign had earned the conflict a regular spot at the top of evening newscasts and on the front pages of the papers. Fighting on the ground had been sporadic all spring, but Americans were warned of a coming summer offensive in which guerrilla fighters would emerge from the jungle to attack American holdings in South Vietnam with terrible force. Sure enough, in mid-June, Vietcong battalions had appeared as if from nowhere. They proceeded to destroy much of the South Vietnamese army, barely reconstituted from the offensive of the previous
year. From the sky, Saigon’s American allies continued to pound targets in the north, but the bombardment seemed to have little effect on the Vietcong’s morale. If anything, the bombing had brought more recruits into the Vietcong ranks. It was clear that without further American intervention, the Saigon government would fall.
In July, the press reported that the number of troops in Vietnam would soon top 75,000. For the moment, Johnson announced no further commitments, but he looked truly grim on television. “
Incidents are going up,” he told the nation. “The casualties are going up.… We expect that it will get worse before it gets better.”

It was clear that the South Vietnamese would not be able to charge through to victory on their own. So tenuous was Saigon’s hold on the country that it was barely safe for Johnson administration officials to visit. In July, McNamara arrived for a fact-finding mission. While he was there, Vietnamese
security officials learned of a plot, mere moments from being launched, to assassinate Ambassador Maxwell Taylor. The more the public learned about Vietnam, the more it seemed rigged with trip wires that extended far out from the jungle. There were Soviet-piloted jets on the ground just north of Hanoi; there were Chinese air defenses massing on the island of Hainan. That summer, the frightful reality sank in—the fighting in this faraway land could somehow trigger a nuclear war.

Criticism of the war was starting to come from more and more respectable quarters. The press complained about the lack of candor from the Johnson administration. “
Vietnam is a different kind of a war from Korea,” editorialized
The New York Times
, “but it is a war—one the nation must recognize as such; and it is time to say so.” In June, Senator William Fulbright, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, declared that “
military victory in Vietnam, though theoretically attainable, can in fact be attained only at a cost far exceeding the requirements of our interest and our honor.” He thought further escalation would only lead to “a bloody and protracted jungle war in which the strategic advantages would be with the other side.”

The sharpest establishment critic was Walter Lippmann. The progressive lion had been cheered by Johnson’s landslide the previous November and thrilled by his hundred days’ domestic push in the spring of 1965. But he was quicker to sound a note of caution on the Johnson presidency than younger liberal intellectuals, who were still confidently predicting in the summer of 1965 that a progressive golden age had arrived. At the age of seventy-five, Lippmann had lived through two previous hours of liberal triumph, during the presidencies of Woodrow Wilson and FDR. The twentieth century had taught him that progressive golden ages are always shorter than predicted. By summer, he was writing columns that got at the heart of the Johnson administration’s problems: its unwillingness to accept its own fallibility. In Vietnam, he wrote, “
we have set ourselves a task, which, like squaring the circle or perpetual motion or living 200 years, is impossible to do.… To say that something ought to be done does not make it possible to do it.”

Lippmann knew that his words did not please the president. He was in frequent contact with enough administration officials, including an old protégé, Mac Bundy. It was painful for the century’s greatest progressive writer to take a hard line against the most effective progressive politician in a generation. Still, he wrote with moral clarity, and foreboding, “
it is essential that the President should not talk himself into a position where he has foreclosed a rational and workable solution of the war. He will be doing just that if he continues to say that our honor is at stake.”

Johnson acted as if the criticism didn’t bother him. He assured the country that he was doing everything he could to sue for peace. He looked, as always, for the deal. He tried to entice Ho Chi Minh to the peace table with promises of American investment in a giant Mekong Delta Project, modeled on the TVA. In May, he announced a pause in the bombing in hopes of jump-starting negotiations.
Through his ambassador in Moscow he sent word to the North Vietnamese that he hoped they would reciprocate with an “equally constructive” act of good faith. The message came back to the ambassador
unopened. Before long, the American bombers were back in the air.

In private, Johnson raged at his domestic critics. The Communists were holding out, he believed, precisely because they believed Americans lacked the will to stay and fight. Any critical word, any suggestion that military victory was hopeless offered strength to the Vietcong. A story circulated of a testy exchange between the president and Frank Church, a senator from Idaho and an emerging Democratic critic of the war.
At a White House reception, the president had buttonholed Church to complain about a recent antiwar speech. “Mr. President,” Church protested, “if you read the speech all the way through, it isn’t the same as the headlines.”

Johnson was unimpressed: “
The headlines are all I read and all anybody reads.” He could remember when Church had been a green freshman and had to learn the ways of the Senate from the master of the Democratic caucus, Lyndon Johnson. “When you were in trouble out in your state, Frank, I used to come out and give you a hand, didn’t I?”

Church tried again to defend himself: “Mr. President, what I’ve been saying isn’t much different from what Walter Lippmann has been writing.”

“Walter Lippmann is a fine man,” Johnson replied. “Next time you’re in trouble out in Idaho, Frank, you ask Walter to come help.”

Polls showed a consistent majority of Americans supported the president’s course in the war. This was true in part because for most Americans, the war was not yet a question of life or death. Some 1,928 Americans would die in Southeast Asia by the end of 1965, an alarmingly high figure, nine times as many as had died there the year before. But most on the home front could hardly imagine that the death toll in the conflict would eventually exceed 58,000.

The war was hell for those fighting it; as yet, it was only confusing and unsettling for those back home. The newspapers were filled with strange Asian names with misplaced vowels and extraneous consonants. The fortunes of the United States depended on a rotating
cast of shady figures who made up the Saigon government. Buddhist monks were incinerating themselves in protest of suppression by the Catholic government. Catholics suspected the premier of having Buddhist sympathies. American men fighting to keep South Vietnam free faced an enemy whose ranks were swelling with South Vietnamese recruits. All of it was an indecipherable jumble that left the nation confused, and uneasy about what was coming next.

War correspondents, meanwhile, were growing pessimistic about the whole enterprise. The gap between the conflict they saw and the one described in official communiqués had grown appallingly large. From their reports, American readers began to sense that this war was different from others—deteriorating, disorganized, and altogether foul. “
The sky over Saigon is alive with noisy aerial boxcars, stuttering helicopters and flashing Skyhawk fighter-bombers,” wrote Scotty Reston during a late summer visit to Southeast Asia. “The airports, the bars and the restaurants are now all a little high—not to mention the G.I.’s on leave—and even the fancy hotels are beginning to smell like a men’s locker room.”

Bleak as the situation in Vietnam was, the most vividly frightening tales in the papers that summer came from much closer to home. In early July, the national press grew fascinated with the troubles of the O’Neal family of Los Angeles. Nineteen-year-old
Shirley O’Neal had been brutally raped by a gang of young men on June 29 in the suburb of Northridge. She had been going door to door selling cookbooks when a young man lured her into his home on the premise that his “uncle” would want to buy one. Inside, five men dragged her into a bedroom, where they threw her onto the floor and proceeded to torture and rape her. She escaped with her life but was psychologically shattered. A few days later, her father, a lieutenant with the Los Angeles Police Department, entered the department’s West Valley station where her assailants were being held. Mistaking a young man with a “Hellbound” tattoo for one of his daughter’s attackers, Lieutenant O’Neal pulled his service revolver and began
to shoot. As he fired, fellow officers would later say, he looked “
like a man in a dream.”

Something was happening to the nation. Neighbors could no longer be trusted, good people were at their breaking point, sick minds roamed the land.
A report showed that in the course of the year 1964, serious crime had risen 13 percent over the prior year. In August,
Newsweek
ran a cover story on “Crime in the Streets.”
The story began with the tale of one Chester E. Pierce, Jr., of Worcester, Massachusetts, who’d “strolled coolly” into a police station and announced that “that very morning” he had stolen from the sidewalk a five-year-old boy whom he had sexually abused and strangled to death and stuffed into a closet.

“And so it went,” the
Newsweek
story continued, “with astonishing variety and numbing repetition—across the U.S. in midsummer.” Moving on from the poor little boy in Worcester, the magazine provided a ghastly roll of crime victims across the country.
Suellen Evans, on her way home from summer school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, who’d “encountered a swarthy man who attempted rape and stabbed her fatally in the neck and heart.”
Mary Ellen Bay, twenty-seven, stabbed to death with a screwdriver by a nineteen-year-old rice mill worker.
Two “pretty … University of Texas coeds” found dead, their bodies “blackened” and only “partly clad.” These attacks and others like them, said
Newsweek
, left “an impression of U.S. society slipping into a condition of epidemic criminality.”

Never mind that, as the magazine noted briskly, “
many observers believe [the impression] is distorted.” What mattered wasn’t the reality of violent crime—“
a malignant enemy in America’s midst,” said President Johnson—but its effect on the nation’s imagination. “As the malignancy spread,”
Newsweek
observed, “it was inevitably outdistanced by anxiety and apprehension.” Most Americans were at no greater risk of falling victim to gruesome violence than they had been the year before or the year before that. But they
believed
they were. They grew afraid of something unknown but awful, lurking just out of sight.

Feeding the fear was now a chief pastime in the culture. That summer,
The New Yorker
had plans for a four-part excerpt of a new work of nonfiction by Truman Capote. The book,
In Cold Blood
, described the terrible fate of the Clutter family of Holcombe, Kansas. Herbert and Bonnie Clutter and their two teenage children had been murdered, one by one, by two paroled convicts who’d come to their isolated farmhouse for a hoard of cash they’d heard was in the Clutters’ safe. Capote’s tale, published in book form the following January, would become a classic for its deep reportage from inside the minds of the Clutters’ killers. But it grabbed readers in the 1960s with its terrible premise: a normal family, living in their unremarkable home, unaware of the evil agents on the highway getting closer by the second. “
I’ve been staggered by the letters I’ve received,” Capote would say after the book’s publication. “About 70 percent … think of the book as a reflection on American life, this collision between the desperate, ruthless, wandering, savage part of American life, and the other, which is insular and safe, more or less.” The tale of the poor Clutters spoke to people because “there is something so awfully inevitable about what is going to happen: the people in the book are completely beyond their own control.”