Tomorrow-Land (32 page)

By early February 1965, Moses' feud with city comptroller and mayoral hopeful Beame had spilled over into the courtroom. Beame wanted to subpoena the Fair's books. Meanwhile, Arthur T. Roth of the Long Island–based Franklin National Bank announced that he would lend Moses the $3.5 million necessary to open the exhibition in April. Undeterred by all the negative publicity and court battles, Moses continued with his plans for a post-Fair Flushing Meadow Park. While publicly he admitted that the Fair was unlikely to generate the $23 million in profits he needed, privately he sought alternative funding.

Mayor Wagner made his task easier by insisting that Moses was under no real obligation to pay back any of the $24 million in taxpayer funds the city had lent the Fair; it was all just a “gentleman's agreement.” After all, the struggling Fair had still added to civic coffers,
including large boosts to New York's hotels and restaurants. Broadway shows, the museums, taxis, the MTA, and airports had all seen spikes in business, too—all facts that Moses reminded his detractors of repeatedly. When asked about the Fair's fiscal priorities during a televised interview, Moses said that after meeting the World's Fair debt obligations, he had every intention of giving the city “a park a great deal better than what we inherited.”

After the interview, Moses flew to Spain to meet with Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco in Madrid and give the former Hitler ally a World's Fair medal for his generous support of the universally hailed Spanish Pavilion. At least one newspaper was unable to resist the obvious caption to the photo of the two shaking hands:
Dictator Meets Dictator
. But while Moses was meeting with Franco, back in United States discussions where being held between Mayor Wagner, Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, and Senator Javitz in New York City and Washington, DC. The topic? Replacing Moses, who at this point, they believed, had damaged the World's Fair's image—and their considerable investment. What good was it to launch a new ad campaign and seek a fresh start for the Fair's second season if Moses was going to be in the papers every day attacking someone and keeping the Fair's finances under a shroud of secrecy?

The idea was to kick the now seventy-six-year-old Moses upstairs, giving him an honorary status, and replace him with a new CEO. Of course, anyone who knew Moses—and Wagner had known him since he was a child—had to understand such a plan was unworkable. Still, they tried, and Wagner sent his good friend John A. Coleman, a former chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, to meet with Moses on his behalf. When asked by a reporter how he thought Moses would react, Coleman was honest. “I don't know,” he said. “You know Mr. Moses—he might throw me out of his office. Or he might hit me in the eye and blacken it. All I intend to do is listen to him.” While Coleman left the meeting unharmed, Moses refused to listen to his suggestions.

One Manhattan member of the New York City Council insisted that Mayor Wagner simply remove Moses from the World's Fair
Corporation, but the mayor—as per his style—insisted that he had no authority to do so. It was up to the World's Fair's Board of Directors. Before anyone could make a move against him, Moses used his parliamentarian knowledge of the Fair's bylaws and insisted on a vote of confidence. When all was said and done, Moses won: Twelve directors voted in his favor; nine—including Deegan and Moses himself—abstained. Hearing the news, a friend wrote the Master Builder, congratulating him on his unanimous victory. “It was hardly unanimous,” Moses wrote back.

Chastised but unbowed, Moses continued to plan for the Fair's second season. He arranged for the Hallmark Company to sponsor an exhibit devoted to Winston Churchill, who had died the month before. And Moses set his sights beyond 1965. He began steering $6.4 million in Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority funds to his park. Finance Committee chairman George V. McLaughlin, a Moses loyalist for four decades, quit, refusing to go along with the plan, calling it “a stretch of the law.” Indeed, the only connection between the TBTA and the World's Fair was the man who headed both: Moses. According to Moses' law, a park was in the interest of the public and the TBTA was a public authority, and he found an obscure bylaw to back up his case.

No one—not his friends, not his bosses, and certainly not some city councilman—was going to stop Moses from reaching his goal. Creating parks might have been siding with the angels, according to the Master Builder, but he was all too happy to employ decidedly non-angelic means to achieve his ends.

29.

You don't need a weatherman to know which way the winds blows.

—“Subterranean Homesick Blues,” Bob Dylan, 1965

 

When Bob Dylan returned to the recording studio in mid-January 1965, he wanted a new sound for his next record. “The sound of the streets,” he called it. “That ethereal twilight light, you now. It's the sound of the street with the sun rays . . . it's an outdoor sound that drifts even into open windows that you can hear. The sound of bells and distant railroad trains and arguments in apartments . . . ”

Dylan was in the middle of a major metamorphosis. While his previous album,
Another Side of Bob Dylan,
represented a shift in lyrical direction, musically the LP was still a folk record; the album's only instrumentation were Dylan's poetic rasp, an acoustic guitar, and harmonica. Still, there was something about his new tracks like “All I Really Want to Do” and “It Ain't Me Babe” that seemed ready-made for a band. At his Carnegie Hall concert on Halloween 1964, Dylan played a new song called “If You Gotta Go, Go Now (Or Else You've Got to Stay All Night).” It was pure rock 'n' roll in rhythm and sentiment, but he performed it in his usual acoustic setting.

Since he had first heard the Beatles, Dylan wondered what his own music would sound like in a band context. On January 13, at New York's Columbia Studios, he found out. The sessions began with Dylan recording nearly a dozen songs with his acoustic guitar but accompanied by the Loving Spoonful's John Sebastian on electric bass. Two days later, with a full band backing him up, Dylan recorded a new version of “If You Gotta Go, Go Now” that was truer to the song's intention. With its bluesy beat and roaring electric guitars, the track was the most conventional rock 'n' roll song he had yet written, complete with stripped down, uncomplicated lyrics: “Listen to me, baby / There's something you must see / I want to be with you, gal / If you want to be with me.” “Blowin' in the Wind” this was not. It was left off the finished album (the song
wouldn't officially be issued in the United States for nearly thirty years), but British pop band Manfred Mann turned the song into a No. 2 hit in the UK nine months later.

After three days, the sessions had yielded more than a dozen master-takes, and Dylan's new album was complete. Two months later the release of
Bringing It All Back Home
formally announced Dylan's new artistic direction. Of the album's eleven songs, seven were recorded with a band—voluminous electric guitars and soaring organ over a rollicking rhythm section—while the four tracks on side two were traditional acoustic Dylan. There wasn't a conventional protest song among them. When Joan Baez first heard the album, she wasn't impressed. “I'm afraid the message that comes through from Dylan in 1965 . . . is, ‘Let's all go home and smoke pot, because there's nothing else to do,' ” she said. Later she would complain that Dylan “just wanted to rock 'n' roll.”

With
Bringing It All Back Home,
Dylan was following the Beatles' direction and taking the music where, he said, it “had to go.” But the album's title, intentionally or not, was a reminder to the Beatles and their British brethren that his new music was baptized in the sacred river of the blues, a musical genre that—along with its tributary offspring such as rock 'n' roll, R&B, country, and even folk—was purely American. As Dylan reminded one British heckler on his UK tour in 1966, where he sometimes performed with an American flag as a backdrop: “This is not British music. This is American music.” He was reclaiming his country's musical heritage as his own.

While Dylan was making his first foray into rock 'n' roll, the Byrds released their version of “Mr. Tambourine Man”—one of the acoustic tracks from
Bringing It All Back Home.
The Byrds, whose stated mission, according to its founder, guitarist/vocalist Roger McGuinn, was to fill the “gap” between the Beatles and Dylan, translated the song's kaleidoscopic poetry into rock vernacular: all jingle-jangly guitars and three-part harmonies, set to a smooth backbeat. When McGuinn played it for Dylan, the songwriter was astonished. “Wow, you can dance to that!” he told McGuinn.

The Byrds' single of “Mr. Tambourine Man” was released in April 1965 and flew to the top of the charts, becoming a No. 1 hit that June. Meanwhile, Dylan's first-ever single, “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” a happy marriage of stream-of-consciousness poetics and Chuck Berry–like boogie, stalled at No. 39 on
Billboard
's Hot 100 chart. That same month the Byrds released their debut album, also titled
Mr. Tambourine Man,
nearly half of which consisted of Dylan songs transformed by the group into radio-ready rock anthems. As the Byrds and other pop groups like Sonny & Cher cracked the Top 10 with his music, Dylan became inextricably linked to the “folk-rock” trend that was dominating pop radio.

It also had an effect on the songwriter's outlook. “It got me thinking about the
Billboard
charts,” he admitted decades later. “I hadn't thought of that before.”

30.

Well, they'd impeach a president though that would run out, wouldn't they?

—President Lyndon B. Johnson in conversation with Senator Richard B. Russell about removing American troops from Vietnam, May 1964

 

Once on the tiger's back, we cannot be sure of picking the place to dismount.

—Undersecretary of State George Ball's warning against further military action in Vietnam to President Johnson, October 1964

 

Having dispatched—
destroyed
would not be too harsh a term—his Republican opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater, at the polls in November 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson had reason to celebrate. It was, at the time, the most lopsided presidential election in history. As he would later reveal, the Texan had felt ill-suited to follow the Harvard-educated, Boston-bred President John F. Kennedy prior to his landside victory. Before the assassination, there were even rumors among Washington's social set that the Kennedys would drop Johnson from the ticket in 1964. Taking Kennedy's place in those dark weeks after the events of Dallas had left LBJ feeling “illegitimate, a naked man with no presidential covering, a pretender to the throne, an illegal usurper.”

But now, that all changed. He had reinvented the moniker “Landslide Lyndon,” which Texas newspapermen derisively had called him after his paper-thin victory that marked the ignominious beginning of his senatorial career. President Johnson was now the choice of nearly forty-three million Americans to lead their country and serve as commander in chief, and he had every intention of doing so. The man was on a roll, having taken his slain predecessor's domestic agenda—in particular, his stalled Civil Rights Act of 1964—and made its passage through a
belligerent US Senate his number one priority, doing what no president had done before. Few had dreamed that any president would be able to do such a thing, much less a Southerner who had fought civil rights throughout his career. As Johnson told one civil rights leader who asked how and why he had converted to their cause, Johnson replied, “Well, to quote a friend of yours, ‘Free at least, free at least, thank God Almighty, I am free at last.' ”

No longer having to appease the pro–Jim Crow vote in Texas, Johnson was preparing to put his own stamp on the nation, moving the country along the lines of his own political agenda: the Great Society. He had previewed this vision throughout the spring of 1964, including at the World's Fair, both on opening day, when he was publicly chastised and ridiculed by college-aged activists, and upon his return to the Fair just a few weeks later on May 9 to greet a meeting of union workers. That same month, Johnson had spoken to a throng of University of Michigan students—receiving a far friendlier reaction than from the Queens College students who had gathered at the World's Fair—where the president regaled them with his liberal vision of what America could be: “The Great Society . . . demands an end to poverty and racial injustice,” he declared. The America that he envisioned was “a place where every child can find the knowledge to enrich his mind and enlarge his talent . . . where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.”

Johnson was in his element pushing his ambitious domestic agenda, wanting to wage a “War on Poverty.” His task was made easier by the large Democratic majorities in the Senate and the House of Representatives. So confident was the newly elected President Johnson that, standing with his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, at his side, he proclaimed at the White House tree-lighting festivities a week before Christmas Day 1964 that “these are the most hopeful times since Christ was born in Jerusalem.”

There was just one nagging problem that clouded Johnson's bold new vision to transform America into a far more egalitarian land: Vietnam. In fact, just two days before Christmas, two more American
“military advisors” had been killed there. By the start of the new year, 267 Americans had been killed in Vietnam since 1959.

Had President Kennedy lived and received a second term, Vietnam would have been his problem to solve; now it had fallen to Johnson. The Asian country quickly became a top priority. As the world watched Kennedy's burial on November 25, 1963, President Johnson issued a secret executive order insisting “all senior officers of the government” support the government's policy—that is,
his
policy—in Vietnam. Johnson would not accept disloyalty or dissent in his administration. The next month, when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara returned from a fact-finding mission in Vietnam, he told reporters that all was going well, but then gave a completely different story to the commander in chief. It was only the end of 1963, and already McNamara had concluded that current American policy would lead to a stalemate at best; at worst, the Communists would seize control of the country.

More hawkish voices urged the president to step up the military's involvement. “We are swatting flies, when we should be going after the manure pile,” declared Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay, the same man who had advocated a military showdown with the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis and called Kennedy's diplomatic solution to the crisis “the greatest defeat in our nation's history.”

By March 1964, when McNamara returned from another trip, he told Johnson that American prospects had “unquestionably been growing worse.” Seeking other opinions on the vexing matter, Johnson turned to his old mentor, Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia, who was as against having American troops in Vietnam as he was giving civil rights to black Americans. Johnson knew that Russell had a history with Vietnam: As anti-Communist as they came, and deeply conservative in foreign policy, Russell pleaded with his friend to get out of Vietnam and get out now. In 1954 both men had gone to President Eisenhower and argued against supporting France's colonial wars in Indochina—“[I] said we'd never get out, be in there fifty years from now,” Russell reminded his president.

Then in May 1964, the same month that Johnson was unveiling his Great Society, Russell issued another warning to his old friend. Having
just heard testimony from McNamara at a Senate hearing, the senator wondered if the defense secretary, despite his Ivy League education and impressive résumé, knew all the pertinent facts. “He's a can-do fellow,” Russell admitted. “But I'm not too sure he understands the history and background of those people out there as fully as he should.” As much as he trusted his old friend's instincts, however, Johnson refused to heed his advice.

Instead, his advisers drew up secret plans to increase military operations. But they needed an incident, a trigger to justify their actions. On August 4, 1964, the same day that the bodies of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner were dug out of the Mississippi earth, Johnson's team got it. Since July 30, US warships had been in the Gulf of Tonkin, off the coast of Communist-controlled North Vietnam, assisting small boats from the pro-US “South” Vietnam as they attacked military stations. On August 2, North Vietnamese ships sped toward the USS
Maddox,
which opened fire while US planes attacked from above. Such cat-and-mouse operations continued until finally, on August 4, the
Maddox
reported that they were under attack by enemy torpedoes and opened fire. It was exactly the moment the Johnson administration had been waiting for, an attack on a peaceful US vessel, an act of war.

Back in the United States late at night on August 4, President Johnson broke into regularly scheduled television and radio programming to inform the American public that US ships had come under fire by enemy troops. In response, he ordered two bomber planes to attack North Vietnamese targets. Privately, Johnson had his doubts about what had happened. “Hell, those dumb stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish,” he snorted to a staffer.

Within days, President Johnson ushered through Congress the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution—which passed the House of Representatives without a single dissenting vote and the Senate by a margin of ninety-eight to two. The president now had congressional approval to “take all necessary measures to repel an armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.”

With his electoral victory that November, Johnson was now holding all the cards. He might have talked peace—he had said as much at the World's Fair in April and May, and again and again throughout the 1964 campaign when painting his opponent Senator Goldwater as the warmonger—but now, having sold the American public on his peaceful intentions, it was Johnson who was setting the stage for one of the worst tragedies in the nation's history. And he had plenty of support from the media, Congress, and the American public. His advisers, led by McNamara, were urging him for more decisive action.

After the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in early August, Johnson's assistant secretary of defense, John McNaughton, suggested ways that such actions could be justified. The American military should create “a series of provocative actions . . . similar to those leading up to the Gulf of Tonkin incident,”
he wrote Johnson. If North Vietnam responded militarily—as they hoped it would—then the basis for further military action would be solidified and Johnson could escalate if he wished. After all, how could the greatest military power that the world has ever known lose to a ragtag bunch of Communist guerrillas from a Third World country?

After North Vietnamese fighters attacked an American air base in mid-January 1965, killing eight US troops and wounding more than a hundred, Johnson told his National Security Council, “I've had enough of this.” A month later, the president approved the beginning of Operation Rolling Thunder, the largest sustained bombing campaign in US history. From February 1965 until the end of the war a decade later, American bomber pilots blasted North Vietnam with three times as many bombs as were dropped in the entirety of the Second World War.

By the end of March 1965, just weeks before the World's Fair opened its second season, McNaughton drafted another secret memo. This one was the most brutally honest answer to the question that millions of Americans would ask in the decades after the war ended: Why were we fighting in Vietnam? According to McNaughton, the answer broke down according to percentages: 70 percent of the reason why we were there was “to avoid a humiliating US defeat”; 20 percent of the reason
why was to keep South Vietnam “from Chinese hands”; and the final 10 percent was to help the South Vietnamese “enjoy a freer way of life.”

Then, a few weeks later, General William Westmoreland, the top military commander in Vietnam, requested forty thousand American troops. The average age of such soldiers was nineteen years old. Instead of riding the eight-story Ferris wheel at the World's Fair, sampling the waffles at the Belgian Village, being lifted by the “People Wall” in the IBM Pavilion, or enjoying the myriad light shows and fountain displays as dusk settled over the Fairgrounds, strolling the Fair's paved walkways hand-in-hand with their sweethearts, many of these same nineteen-year-olds would draw their last breath in Southeast Asia. And the main reason they—and tens of thousands more like them—died so young, as McNaughton pointed out, was so the president, his cabinet, and his military advisers could save face.