Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (127 page)

But voting could not equalize black and white incomes. Nor could the huge and increasing sums of Federal money which Johnson poured into the black ‘problem’. The more progress made, the more cash available, the more black anger increased. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Federal power had been used to protect blacks from white violence. In the course of the series of enforcement battles staged under Kennedy, the initiative in violence shifted to the blacks. The turning-point was the night of 10 May 1962, in Birmingham, Alabama. There was a black riot, with police forced onto the defensive and white shops demolished: ‘Let the whole fucking city burn,’ shouted a mob-leader, ‘This’ll show the white
motherfuckers!’ This was a new cry, and a new attitude, in American race-politics, and it could not be confined to the South.
¹²⁹

To Johnson’s consternation, the scale and intensity of black violence, especially in the big cities outside the South, advanced step by step with his vigorous and effective efforts to secure black rights. The first really big and ugly black riots broke out in Harlem and Brooklyn on 18 July 1964, only two weeks after the epoch-making Civil Rights Act was passed. The violence spread to Rochester in New York State, to Jersey City, Patterson and Elizabeth in New Jersey, to Dixmoor in Chicago, and Philadelphia. In August 1965 the Watts riots in Los Angeles lasted six days, involved 15,000 National Guardsmen, killed thirty-four, injured 856 and destroyed $200 million of property. Thereafter, large-scale riots by blacks in the inner cities became a recurrent feature of the Sixties, in sinister counterpoint and sometimes in deliberate harmony with student violence on the campuses. The riots in Detroit on 24–28 July 1967 were among the most serious in American history, killing forty-three people and forcing a distraught President Johnson to move in the 18th Airborne Corps of paratroopers, whose commander said he entered a city ‘saturated with fear’.
¹³⁰
By 1968, with the Vietnam War moving to its sickly climax, students rioting on over 200 campuses, and blacks putting some of the biggest cities to fire, Johnson seemed a failure. His decision not to seek re-election was an admission of defeat. He was the first major casualty of the Sixties illusions. But not the last. America’s troubles were only beginning.

Nor was Johnson a victim of lost illusions alone. He was also, in a real sense, a victim of the media, and especially of the East Coast liberals who controlled the most influential newspapers and the big three
TV
networks. The two points were connected, for one of the deepest illusions of the Sixties was that many forms of traditional authority could be diluted: the authority of America in the world, and of the president within America. Lyndon Johnson, as a powerful and in many ways effective president, stood for the authority principle. That was, for many, a sufficient reason for emasculating him. Another was that he did not share East Coast liberal assumptions, in the way that Roosevelt and Kennedy had done. He had been doubtful about running for president even in 1964 for this reason: ‘I did not believe … that the nation would unite definitely behind any Southerner. One reason’… was that the Metropolitan press would never permit it.’
¹³¹
The prediction proved accurate, though its fulfilment was delayed. By August 1967, the Washington Correspondent of the
St Louis Post-Dispatch
, James Deakin, reported, ‘the relationship between the President and the Washington press corps has settled into a pattern of chronic disbelief’.
¹³²
Media misrepresentation of the Tet Offensive was immediately responsible for Johnson’s departure. But more fundamental
still was its habitual presentation of any decisive and forceful act by the White House as in some inescapable sense malevolent.

This was quite a new development. Opposition to a strong presidency had hitherto come, as was natural, from the legislature, especially from the senate. As Roosevelt had put it, ‘the only way to do anything in the American government was to bypass the senate’.
¹³³
His Republican opponent, Wendell Wilkie, had spoken of devoting his life to ‘saving America from the Senate’.
¹³⁴
Under Roosevelt and Truman the press and academic constitutionalists had strongly supported firm presidential leadership, especially in foreign policy, and contrasted it with Congressional obscurantism.
¹³⁵
During the McCarthy investigations, Eisenhower had been severely criticized by the press for failing to defend executive rights against Congressional probing. The
New Republic
commented (1953): ‘The current gravitation of power into the hands of Congress at the expense of the Executive is a phenomenon so fatuous as to be incredible if the facts were not so patent.’
¹³⁶
When Eisenhower invoked ‘executive privilege’ to deny information about government acts to the Un-American Activities Committee, he was warmly applauded by the liberal media. The Committee, said the
New York Times
, had no right ‘to know the details of what went on in these inner Administration councils’. Eisenhower, wrote the
Washington Post
, was ‘abundantly right’ to protect ‘the confidential nature of executive conversations’.
¹³⁷
Until the mid-1960s, the media continued to support resolute presidential leadership on civil rights, on social and economic issues and, above all, on foreign policy, endorsing Kennedy’s dictum (1960): it is the President alone who must make the major decisions on our foreign policy.’
¹³⁸

The change came after the Tonkin Gulf resolution. By the time Johnson handed over the White House to Richard Nixon in 1969, the East Coast media, along with many other vociferous elements in the nation, had moved into permanent opposition. As one commentator put it, ‘The men and the movement that broke Lyndon Johnson’s authority in 1968 are out to break Richard Nixon in 1969 … breaking a president is, like most feats, easier to accomplish the second time around.’
¹³⁹
Nixon was peculiarly vulnerable. He was a Californian whom the Eastern press had hated since the late 1940s. He felt the media had helped to deprive him of the presidency in 1960 and had made a concerted effort to destroy his political career for good in 1963; he returned their antipathy with interest. ‘Remember,’ he told his staff, ‘the press is the enemy. When news is concerned, nobody in the press is a friend. They are all enemies.’
¹⁴⁰
In 1968 Nixon won despite the media, but only just. He got 43.4 per cent of the vote to Hubert Humphrey’s 42.7. This was the smallest
proportion of the popular vote of any president since 1912, and as the poll was low (61 per cent), it meant only 27 per cent of all voters favoured him. He did not carry a single big city.
¹⁴¹
In parts of the media there was an inclination to deny his legitimacy as president and to seek to reverse the verdict by non-constitutional means.

Despite these handicaps, Nixon had considerable success in clearing up the anarchic heritage of the Johnson-Kennedy years, and especially in his skilful disengaging from Vietnam. He proclaimed the same objective as all his predecessors: ‘We seek the opportunity for the South Vietnamese people to determine their own political future without outside interference.’
¹⁴²
So long as he was fully in charge of American policy this aim was upheld, but at far smaller cost. In four years he reduced American forces in Vietnam from 550,000 to 24,000. Spending declined from $25 billion a year under Johnson to less than $3 billion.
¹⁴³
This was made possible by a more intelligent and flexible use of American force, in Cambodia in 1970, in Laos in 1971, in bombing North Vietnam in 1972, which kept the determined men in Hanoi perplexed and apprehensive about America’s intentions. At the same time Nixon actively pursued peace-negotiations with the North Vietnamese. More important, he did something neither Kennedy nor Johnson had dared: he exploited the logic of the Sino—Soviet dispute and reached an understanding with China.

It was Nixon’s Californian orientation which inclined him towards Peking; he saw the Pacific as the world-arena of the future. He began his new China policy on 31 January 1969, only eleven days after he started work in the White House. The policy was embodied in National Security Study Memorandum 14 (4 February 1969), and it was reinforced by a conversation Nixon had with André Malraux, who told him it was a ‘tragedy’ that ‘the richest and most productive people in the world’ should be at odds with ‘the poorest and most populous people in the world’.
¹⁴⁴
Because of Chinese fears, the moves towards a
rapprochement
with China were conducted in private, and Nixon went to considerable lengths to get pledges of secrecy from the Congressional leaders he consulted. He told his staff: ‘A fourth of the world’s people live in Communist China. Today they’re not a significant power, but twenty-five years from now they could be decisive. For the US not to do what it can at this time, when it can, would lead to a situation of great danger. We could have total
détente
with the Soviet Union, but that would mean nothing if the Chinese are outside the international community.’
¹⁴⁵

The new China policy, and the change in US military strategy, made possible peace with Hanoi. On 27 January 1973 in Paris, Nixon’s Secretary of State, William Rogers, and Nguyen Duy Trinh of
North Vietnam signed an ‘Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam’. The merit of this understanding, which made it possible for America to leave Vietnam, was that it reserved Nixon’s right to maintain carriers in Indo-Chinese waters and to use aircraft stationed in Taiwan and Thailand if the accords were broken by Hanoi.
¹⁴⁶
So long as Nixon held power, that sanction was a real one. Granted the situation he had inherited and the mistakes of his predecessors, Nixon had performed a notable feat of extrication.

But America, and more tragically the peoples of Indo-China, were denied the fruits of this success because, by 1973, Nixon and the nation were already engulfed in the maelstrom of hysteria known as ‘Watergate’. America seems peculiarly prone to these spasms of self-righteous political emotion in which all sense of perspective and the national interest is lost. The outbreak of xenophobia in 1918–20 was the work of right-wing Democrats. The anti-Communist scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s was largely directed by conservative Republicans. The Watergate witch-hunt, by contrast, was run by liberals in the media. In their eyes Nixon’s real offence was popularity. Though he won narrowly in 1968, he successfully appealed, as president, over the heads of opinion-formers and a Democratic Congress, to unfashionable, inarticulate ‘middle Americans’, family-loving, church-going, patriotic, industrious and anti-liberal. On 3 November 1969 he made a highly successful speech appealing for support in his foreign policy to those he termed ‘you, the great, silent majority of my fellow Americans’. This ended, for the time being, the ‘breaking of Nixon’ campaign by the media.
¹⁴⁷
In the 1972 campaign, Nixon was delighted when the Democrats nominated the ultra-liberal George McGovern. ‘Here is a situation’, he told his staff, ‘where the Eastern Establishment media finally has a candidate who almost totally shares their views.’ The ‘real ideological bent of the
New York Times
, the
Washington Post, Time, Newsweek
and the three
TV
networks’ was ‘on the side of amnesty, pot, abortion, confiscation of wealth (unless it is theirs), massive increases in welfare, unilateral disarmament, reduction of our defences and surrender in Vietnam.’ At last, he concluded, ‘the country will find out whether what the media has been standing for during these last five years really represents the majority thinking.’
¹⁴⁸
Whether or not that was the issue, Nixon won by a landslide, carrying the electoral college by 521 to 17 and securing 60.7 of the popular vote, only just short of Johnson’s record in 1964.
¹⁴⁹

Among the media there were many who were not merely humiliated by Nixon’s triumph but genuinely frightened. As one powerful editor put it: ‘There’s got to be a bloodletting. We’ve got to make sure nobody even thinks of doing anything like this again.’
¹⁵⁰
The aim was to use publicity to reverse the electoral verdict of 1972, which was felt to be, in
some metaphysical sense, illegitimate – rather as conservative Germans had regarded Weimar as illegitimate. The Nixon White House played into the hands of this desire by the use of extra-legal means to protect the President and his policies. The tradition of presidential skulduggery had begun with Franklin Roosevelt. He had created his own ‘intelligence unit’, responsible only to himself, with a staff of eleven and financed by State Department ‘Special Emergency’ money.
¹⁵¹
He used Hoover’s
FBI
and the Justice Department to harass his enemies, especially in the press, and to tap their phones – the mineworkers’ leader John L.Lewis being one victim.
¹⁵²
He made a desperate effort to ‘get’ the
Chicago Tribune
, which he hated, in the courts. He even used the intelligence service to bug his wife’s hotel room.
¹⁵³
Though Truman and Eisenhower kept clear of clandestine activities by their staffs and the ci
A
, they were aware of them, considering that, in dealing with Soviet Russia and other totalitarian-terror regimes, they were unavoidable. Kennedy and his brother Robert positively revelled in the game, and Kennedy’s chief regret was that he had not made Robert head of the ci
A
, to bring it under close family control. At the Justice Department, Robert Kennedy in 1962 had
FBI
agents carry out dawn raids on the homes of executives of US Steel who had defied his brother’s policies.
¹⁵⁴
In their civil rights campaign, the Kennedy brothers exploited the Federal contracts system and used executive orders in housing finance (rather than legislation) to get their way.
¹⁵⁵
They plotted against right-wing radio and
TV
stations.
¹⁵⁶
Under Kennedy and Johnson, phone-tapping increased markedly.
¹⁵⁷
So did executive ‘bugging’: the large-scale womanizing of the civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, was tapped and then played to newspaper editors.
¹⁵⁸
Johnson used secret government files, the Internal Revenue Service and other executive devices to protect himself against exposure in the Bobby Baker scandal of 1963, potentially the biggest since Teapot Dome.