Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (94 page)

LBJ's ideas about the draft reflected visceral feelings that he harbored about anti-war activists. A conventional patriot, he was infuriated by draft card burnings and other studied insults to the American way. Militants who attacked him personally outraged him. On one occasion a demonstrator confronted him with a sign,
LBJ, PULL OUT LIKE YOUR FATHER SHOULD HAVE DONE
. He complained bitterly to Joseph Califano, a trusted aide, that the "thickness of daddy's wallet" offered protection to the privileged and to the hypocritical young men who were pontificating in order to save their skins.
⁹⁴

Johnson's rising rage against anti-war activists convinced him by 1967 that they included Communists acting on directions from abroad. Determined to stop the conspiracy, he told the CIA to spy on them. This was a violation, as he well knew, of the CIA's charter, which was supposed to prevent the agency from conducting surveillance at home. This program, which ultimately compiled information on more than 7,000 Americans, was later known as CHAOS. Johnson also encouraged the FBI to infiltrate and disrupt the peace movement. The Counter-intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) that had been begun in the 1950s to fight domestic Communism now directed "black bag" jobs of surreptitious entry into private residences of anti-war activists. When the CIA failed to come up with evidence connecting anti-war people with Communism, LBJ leaked information to right-wing congressmen that such connections existed. The congressmen then charged, as he had assumed they would, that "peaceniks" were being "cranked up by Hanoi."
⁹⁵

Reactions such as these exposed the emotional stress that afflicted Johnson because of the Vietnam War by 1967. He was obsessed by the carnage, often unable by then to think of anything else. Earlier he had ordered the installation in the Oval Office of three large-screen television sets. He did the same in a den next to the Oval Office, in his bedroom at the White House, and in his bedroom at the LBJ Ranch, his home in Texas. He also placed Associated Press and United Press International news tickers in the Oval Office. When he sensed that important news was coming off the tickers, he left his desk, ripped off a sheet, and read through the reports. When he stayed at his ranch—a source of solace in these trying times—he placed a transistor receiver in his ear while he walked about his property.
⁹⁶

The rise of opposition to his policies intensified this obsessiveness. While polls in mid-1967 showed that a majority of the people still supported the war, they also revealed widening public dissatisfaction with Johnson's performance as President. Approval of his handling of the war dropped to a low of 28 percent in October.
⁹⁷
Despairing, Johnson agonized over news of American casualties. He wept when he signed letters of condolence. He found it hard to sleep, and he paced the corridors of the White House at night. Frequently he invaded the operations room to check casualty figures at 4:00 and 5:00
A.M.
Sometimes he slipped off in the night, accompanied only by agents of the Secret Service, to pray and read scriptures with monks at a small Catholic church in southwest Washington.
⁹⁸

At the same time, Johnson lost tolerance for disagreement or even debate. Reporters and columnists became enemies. "I feel like a hound bitch in heat in the country," he said in a characteristic sexual metaphor. "If you run, they [the press] chew your tail off. If you stand still, they slip it to you."
⁹⁹
"Newspapermen," he added, "are the only group in the counslip it try who operate without license. Reporters can show complete irresponsibility and lie and mis-state facts and have no one to be answerable to."
¹⁰⁰
Johnson came to loathe public figures—Robert Kennedy, by then a senator from New York, Martin Luther King, Fulbright (or "Half-bright," as Johnson called him)—who dared to question his policies. Those who raised doubts at White House meetings, such as McNamara, got nowhere. Johnson distrusted even advisers on the National Security Council. Some of these people, he complained later, were "like sieves. I couldn't control them. You knew after the National Security Council met that each of those guys would run home to tell his wife and neighbors what they said to the President."
¹⁰¹
By late 1967 Johnson felt fully comfortable only with a handful of aides, such as Rusk and Rostow, who joined him for the Tuesday noon luncheons where they picked bombing targets. He dominated them, virtually demanding sycophancy. The deft and solicitous legislative conductor who had orchestrated the Great Society had become a frightened and high-strung maestro who shuddered at the sound of a dissonant note.

What especially frustrated the President was the trap that the military situation had snared him in. Military leaders such as Westmoreland assured him that the United States could prevail, but Westmoreland also kept asking for authorization to carry the ground war into Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam. He also requested more in the way of American manpower and materiel. In April 1967 he called for 95,000 more soldiers, which would bring the total to 565,000. He added that another 100,000 would be needed in fiscal 1969. He told Johnson that "last month we reached the crossover point. In areas excluding the two northern provinces, attrition [of the enemy] will be greater than additions to the force." Johnson, however, opposed extending the ground war, and he did not dare announce expansion of troop numbers on such a scale. "Where does it all end?" he replied. "When we add divisions, can't the enemy add divisions? If so, where does it all end?" Westmoreland had no good answer to this question.
¹⁰²

Westmoreland's reports tended to be overoptimistic. In June he estimated enemy capability at 298,000 men, compared to CIA numbers that ranged between 460,000 and 570,000. "Westy's" estimates excluded "self-defense" forces of 200,000 or more that the NLF could deploy if necessary.
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These numbers were too much for McNamara, who had become increasingly skeptical of upbeat reports from the field. He then authorized a wide-ranging review of the war that later became known as the Pentagon Papers. Even Westmoreland admitted that defining the size of the opposition depended on how one counted the foe. Guessing the size of enemy manpower, he conceded, was like "trying to estimate roaches in your kitchen."
¹⁰⁴

Most advisers, moreover, knew that Johnson detested pessimistic reports, and they shielded him from bad news. The discouraging CIA estimates stopped at the desk of Wheeler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Wheeler was especially frightened that requests such as Westmoreland's might somehow leak to the media. He told Westmoreland, "If these figures should reach the public domain, they would, literally, blow the lid off of Washington. Please do whatever is necessary to insure that these figures are not repeat not related to News Media or otherwise exposed to public knowledge."
¹⁰⁵

For political reasons Johnson dared not adopt the more expansive ideas of military advisers in mid-1967. In August he limited troop increases to 45,000. These would bring the total to around 515,000. But the President was hardly deceived by being shielded from bad news, for by then he had studied hundreds and hundreds of documents and reports. He had "big ears" for intelligence. Optimistic reports from the field notwithstanding, he knew full well that the war was going badly for the United States and South Vietnam. The bombing was not deterring the enemy; missions to search and destroy, and pacification, were not working; Communists controlled vast areas of the South Vietnamese countryside.

The President nonetheless stayed his course. Having approved escalation for nearly three years, he refused to believe that the South could not be saved. Summoning Westmoreland to Washington in November 1967, he set in motion a blitz of happy-sounding publicity. Coached by LBJ, Westmoreland gave the press what was by then a tired cliché: there was "light at the end of the tunnel." He added, "I am absolutely certain that whereas in 1965 the enemy was winning, today he is certainly losing. There are indications that the Vietcong and even Hanoi know this. . . . It is significant that the enemy has not won a battle in more than a year."
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The public relations blitz of November 1967 was characteristic Johnson: bold, carefully orchestrated, optimistic, grand in its expectations. Although he agonized in private, he would not give in. Like the Texans who had fought at the Alamo, he would stand tall in defense of his beliefs.

21
Rights, Polarization, and Backlash, 1966–1967

Although the war in Vietnam shook the optimism of liberals who had imagined that a New Frontier and a Great Society would transform the United States, it was but one of many sources of backlash, as it came to be called, that gathered strength after 1965 and polarized the nation. The roots of the backlash, while varied, sprang mainly from divisions of race and class. They were so deep that they would almost surely have fragmented the nation even in the absence of military escalation.

The extraordinary affluence of postwar American society, a blessing to millions of people, did much to exacerbate these divisions. By 1967–68, when the economy peaked, it had worked wonders in living standards. Even more than earlier, people took for granted conveniences that would have seemed luxurious to earlier generations. Millions of Americans in the ever-larger middle classes now assumed that their children could go to a college or a university and fare better than they had. They also imagined that modern science and technology would radically reduce suffering and endow their lives with comfort. It was only a matter of time, they were certain, before the United States, the world's greatest nation, would place a man on the moon.

Rising living standards, however, also expanded expectations, particularly among the huge and self-assertive cohorts of young people—the baby boom generation—who had grown up in the abundance of the postwar world. By the late 1960s these expectations also affected Americans of less favored socio-economic backgrounds. Blacks, having achieved legal protection under the civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965, were quick to demand social and economic equality. Poor people, including welfare recipients, insisted on their "right" to better benefits. Ethnic groups, notably Mexican- and Native Americans, grew increasingly self-conscious and, like blacks, turned to direct action to achieve their goals. Women, too, raised the banner of equal rights. In 1966 expectant leaders formed the National Organization for Women.

Most of these groups turned eagerly to government, especially Washington, for redress of their grievances. Like liberals, whom many protestors came to disdain, they hoped that they could influence the system and expand the Great Society. Their expectations, however, had grown grand indeed, and they were impatient. Increasingly, they sought not only benefits but also guarantees and entitlements. The rise of rights-consciousness, having flourished in the early and mid-1960s, became central to the culture by 1970.

The Rights Revolution received special inspiration from the civil rights movement, which in turn had drawn on one of the most enduring elements of the American creed: belief in the equal opportunity of individuals.
¹
As passage of the civil rights laws had suggested, large majorities of people supported this ideal, and they persisted in doing so amid the backlash that ensued: the laws continued to matter. As events after 1965 showed, however, Americans were much less sympathetic when people demanded the "right" to
social
equality or special entitlements for
groups
. That was taking the Rights Revolution too far.

Those who resisted the expectant demands of rights-conscious groups in the mid- and later 1960s controlled many of the levers of power, including Congress, in the United States. Some championed "rights" of their own, including the right to run their lives (or their businesses) without government regulation. As LBJ and liberals lost influence after 1965, these conservatives won most of the battles. In so doing they frustrated the new claimants, driving them to new levels of fury and sometimes to more confrontational forms of protest. These protests, in turn, fanned a backlash that whipped out at a wide variety of targets, including anti-war demonstrators, the New Left, "welfare bums," and "uppity" blacks. By 1968 life in the United States had grown far more contentious than it had been in the hopeful days of the Great Society. Fragmentation and polarization, much of it displayed on TV, seemed to endanger the give-and-take of political compromise and to threaten the social stability of the nation.

A
MID THIS ONGOING POLARIZATION
liberals (and others) took heart from a few developments in 1966 and 1967. One, of course, was the continuing advance of prosperity. To be sure, there were problems to worry about, including widespread poverty among minority groups, agricultural workers, and female-headed families. Moreover, early seeds of inflation, fueled by the boosts in military spending, began to worry economists.
²
Still, the economy seemed extraordinarily healthy in these years. High levels of productivity continued, bolstering uneven but real economic growth. Unemployment overall fell from 4.5 percent in 1965 to 3.5 percent in 1969, the lowest it had been since the Korean War.
³
Income taxes, having been reduced by the tax cut of 1964, remained relatively moderate, considerably lower than they were in other industrialized nations.
⁴
Inequality of personal assets actually declined slightly.
⁵
Notwithstanding the concerns among economists—concerns that turned out to be justified in the 1970s—most Americans remained confident during the Johnson years about the future performance of the economy. This confidence did much to inflate already substantial expectations.
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Advocates of liberal programs in these years observed with satisfaction that the federal government managed to sustain spending on human resources even amid the escalation in Vietnam. Indeed, such expenditures, while small compared to defense spending, rose substantially between 1965 and 1970, and much more rapidly than in the New Frontier-Great Society years between 1961 and 1965.
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As a percentage of gross domestic product they increased from 5.2 percent in 1960 to 5.4 percent in 1965 to 7.7 percent in 1970. The United States, it seemed, had the wealth to spend for butter (though not so much as reformers would have liked) while also handing out very large sums for guns.

Liberals rejoiced especially at the performance of the Supreme Court, which continued as a bulwark of support for the Rights Revolution until Chief Justice Warren's retirement in 1969. In 1966 it endorsed efforts to bring federal might into play in prosecuting the people who had murdered Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman in 1964; in 1967 it unanimously struck down a Virginia law that had banned interracial marriage.
⁸
Civil libertarians especially hailed the majority opinion of
Miranda
v.
Arizona
(1966), in which the Court extended, 5 to 4, earlier decisions that had broadened the rights of criminal suspects.
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In a voice charged with emotion Warren declared from the bench that an alleged criminal "must be warned that he has a right to remain silent, that any statement he does make may be used in evidence against him, and that he has a right to the presence of an attorney, either retained or appointed." Police might interrogate an accused who waived these rights, but even then the suspect might stop the questioning by demanding to see a lawyer or invoking his or her constitutional rights.

As it turned out
Miranda
did not much change the practices of law enforcement: police and prosecutors managed to figure out ways of maneuvering around the decision. At the time, however, the decision aroused heated controversy, for "crime in the streets" was becoming an inflammatory national issue. Enraged conservatives began to mobilize into increasingly self-conscious lobbies. Justice John Marshall Harlan pounded the table in registering dissent. "This doctrine has . . . has no sanction, no sanction. . . . It's obviously going to mean a gradual disappearance of confessions as a legitimate tool of law enforcement." Justice Byron White, a Kennedy appointee, added, "In some unknown number of cases the Court's rule will return a killer, a rapist, or other criminal to the streets . . . to repeat his crime whenever it pleases him." The executive director of the International Association of Chiefs of Police grumbled, "I guess now we'll have to supply all squad cars with attorneys."
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These important decisions pointed to a key trend that was to accelerate in coming years: the tendency of people to join groups in defense of their rights and seek legal redress in order to advance them. More and more, Americans turned to litigation. The legal profession, both guiding and reflecting this trend, grew rapidly in size and attracted many of the nation's most ambitious and rights-conscious college graduates. Its most sucessful practitioners joined a "new class" of highly trained, well-paid "experts"—technocrats, consultants, medical specialists, scientists—that flourished in these dynamic years. Many of the lawyers, stimulated by the example of the highest court in the land, trumpeted the seductive language of rights to advance the claims of their clients.

Some of these lawyers undertook liberal causes, volunteering as counsel for aggrieved and oppressed people, often under the auspices of the Legal Services programs of the OEO. In the process they widened the rights of welfare recipients, assisted minorities seeking fair housing, and abetted the efforts of the poor. Much of the support at the top for the Rights Revolution after the mid-1960s came not from legislation—Congress balked at further moves—but from the courts and from government bureaucracies composed of liberal activists, many of them in agencies expanded by such Great Society landmarks as the OEO and the aid to education and civil rights acts. Then and later, opponents of these activists complained bitterly that the courts and federal agencies were overriding a more conservative popular will and giving unreasonably favorable political treatment to adamant groups, especially blacks.
¹¹

The drive for rights proved particularly compelling in Washington, where newly created bureaucracies such as the Office of Federal Contract Compliance and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission became increasingly responsive to protest groups. New notions about "affirmative action" began slowly to secure a hold in the mid-1960s. In September 1965 LBJ issued Executive Order No. 11246, which (as amended to include sex in 1967) stated that contractors should "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, color, religion, sex, or national origin." In May 1968 Johnson's Department of Labor elaborated on this order, requiring contractors to prepare ethnic censuses of potential workers and to develop "specific goals and timetables for the prompt achievement of full and equal employment opportunity." The department designated groups to be counted as "Negroes," "Orientals," "American Indians," and "Spanish Americans." These were guidelines that still focused on enhancing employment opportunity for disadvantaged individuals. They did not establish quotas for groups, and they were yet to be implemented. Still, a trend toward governmental enforcement of equal rights seemed clear. Many liberals were encouraged by it; others, foreseeing "reverse discrimination," grew alarmed.
¹²

T
HE RISE OF ORGANIZED MOVEMENTS
among previously marginalized groups was indeed contagious in these years. One was composed of farm workers, especially in California. In 1965 César Chávez, a thirty-eight-year old Mexican-American who had picked crops most of his life, took the lead in merging the predominantly Mexican and Mexican-American membership of the National Farm Workers Union with Filipino workers to create the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee. Chavez, a frail, shy, and almost monastic man, possessed a charisma that gave him legendary status as a leader. Uniting workers as never before, the UFW joined a strike of grape-pickers in Delano, California, in 1965, thereby setting off a much wider action of workers, La Huelga ("the strike"), throughout the San Joaquin Valley. La Huelga, dramatized nationally by a boycott in 1968 against producers of table grapes in the valley, lasted for five years. At the peak of the boycott some 17 million Americans stopped buying grapes, thereby costing the growers millions of dollars. In 1970 the growers agreed at last to sign union contracts.
¹³

The contagion of rights-consciousness especially attracted women, who grew more politically engaged than they had been since the achievement of women's suffrage in 1920. Their restlessness had begun to flourish openly in 1963, thanks in part to the publication in that year of Betty Friedan's highly popular
The Feminine Mystique
. Friedan had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Smith College in 1942 and had been bent upon going to graduate school, but instead became a wife and mother of three in suburban New York. Increasingly unhappy, she discovered at her Smith reunion in 1957 that many of her classmates shared her discontent. The home, she wrote later, had become a "comfortable concentration camp." Friedan did not use the word "feminist" in the book, writing instead about the "problem that has no name." This was the sense of frustration and lack of fulfillment that some well-educated, middle-class women such as herself had experienced as round-the-clock housewives.
¹⁴

Friedan said little that was new, but she wrote effectively out of personal experience, and hundreds of thousands of women identified with her. Her book came at an especially opportune time. Kennedy's Commission on the Status of Women was already drawing attention to some of the problems that Friedan complained about. After concluding its deliberations in October 1963, the commission issued some 83,000 copies of its final report in the next year.
¹⁵
More important, Friedan's book appealed because it reflected two of the most powerful social trends of the era. One was the ever-increasing number of women—many of them housewives—who were working outside the home. In 1963, 36.1 percent of American women over the age of 14, or 24.7 million people, were in the labor force. This was an increase of 6.3 million over 1950.
¹⁶
More than three-fifths of them, or 15.4 million, were married. The other current was the civil rights movement. It sensitized millions of Americans—men as well as women—to inequality in the United States.
¹⁷