Penguin History of the United States of America (124 page)

Johnson might have ridden out the storm if he had been less in earnest (his cynical successor was to show how); or if his enterprise had not coincided with a curious upheaval in American society. Instead, his war reached its peak just as the age group most affected by it came together in what was, for a year or two, a formidable political movement.

It is easy to be unkind about youth in the sixties. At one moment to be twenty-three and an admirer of the Rolling Stones (a popular team of musicians) was, it seemed, sufficient guarantee of private wisdom and public virtue. Certainly there was something maddening, to their elders, in these ignorant, provincial, conceited young people, who from the gilded shelter of universities which their parents’ money had bought for them and in many cases built for them (never had the colleges and universities of America raised funds more successfully than during the fifties and early sixties) looked out with absolute intolerance on the modern world and condemned it as unclean. Some of them turned out to be quite as unpleasant and as stupid as what they condemned, like the young zealots in Greenwich Village who blew up themselves and their house while making bombs for blowing up other people. It was nevertheless a great mistake (one which many committed) to dismiss them all as no more than middle-class hooligans.

Young idealists demand a lot of other people; they also demand a lot of themselves. Both propositions are demonstrated by the sixties youth movement, which had originated in the Freedom Riders, when college America had not only discovered, to its horror, just how racialist and brutal parts of the country were, but also that there was effective action it could take to improve matters. While Jack Kennedy was alive it could also believe that the power structure was on its side, or at any rate had been captured by a friend; but Kennedy’s murder broke the picture. Even before that
event a deep scepticism had been growing; now it had free rein. Alienation from conventional society and its pieties was reinforced by the effects of prosperity. Children, teenagers and college students were now a major consuming group and called a new world into being by their expenditure. Original popular music became the exclusive property of the young in a way that had only been foreshadowed in the past. A youth market was discovered for clothes, cars, books, pictures, records and drugs, and the suppliers catered for it assiduously. The result was a sub-culture which efficiently insulated its exponents from outsiders. Particularly, it insulated them from the men who ran the universities. Words like ‘square’ (unfashionable, dated) and ‘hip’ (fashionable, up-to-date) had acquired mystic force, and university administrators were almost by definition square. They were also, it must be allowed, sadly unimaginative, too concerned with the feelings, tastes and prejudices of parents, alumni, state governments and their colleagues, too little with those of their charges. These presidents of institutions with forty or fifty thousand members each proposed to create a world which was not much to the liking of the young. It is not surprising that in the mid-sixties a widespread challenge was mounted, beginning at Berkeley, near San Francisco, the object of which, in so far as something so vast and incoherent could have one, seems to have been to force university teachers and administrators alike to treat their pupils with human interest, and not as mere statistics, useful for extracting public subsidies, otherwise mere raw material for processing. Rebellion against the men in grey suits spread from one campus to another, and then, borne like a virus by American students travelling abroad, reached the institutions of Europe, thus reinforcing the anti-Americanism already stimulated by Vietnam. Then Lyndon Johnson began to send members of this generation, in large numbers, as conscripts to the war.

Conscription, ‘the draft’, had been a fact of life ever since Pearl Harbor. It had grown harder and harder to administer since the end of the Korean War, for vast though America’s commitments were, the growth of her population was vaster still, and certainly not so slow: in 1968 it passed the 200 million mark. During the fifties there were more eligible males of military age than the armed forces knew what to do with, and an elaborate system of reclassification and declassification had grown up, the net effect of which was that on the whole the poor got drafted and the well-off, if they took pains, did not. One of the most popular forms of evasion was the so-called college deferment, by which youths could put off their military service until they had finished their education – which helps to explain the then-common phenomenon of the thirty-year-old American student, whose college days seemed to be endless. General Westmoreland’s constant clamour for reinforcements began to change all that. In return the cry went up, ‘Hell, No, We Won’t Go!’

It is natural enough to dislike conscription, especially if it is likely to send you to dangerous places to be wounded or killed. But the call to serve in
Vietnam was something else again: a war which made less and less sense and (look at the television screen) was ever crueller and more slaughterous. The response was various. Clever lawyers were much in demand to find ways through the draft regulations. The Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC), a part-time, federally paid-for officer training system, was expelled from most universities. In a few well-publicized incidents individuals burnt their draft cards (an indictable offence) or other people’s draft records. On the whole the main reactions were two.

Tens of thousands of draftees went missing: some left for foreign parts; others tried to lose themselves in the United States itself. Some deserted, others refused to go before their draft boards. The movement reached sufficient dimensions to constitute a major harassment for the military authorities.

Far worse was the political action taken by the majority. The civil rights movement had taught them tactics, and the continuing black movement frequently gave them fresh ideas; the battles over university regulations had shown them their strength. They were still congenitally disorganized; some regarded the whole thing as an excuse for non-stop pot parties; others, survivors of the Old Left, saw it all as a chance to recruit more members for another sort of party – the communist; dissension was endemic among such leaders as the movement threw up. But as they marched, sang, conferred and issued manifestos it became clear that something of great political significance was occurring; and if student protest should link up effectively with the protest of the blacks and the poor, no one knew where it would all end. The professionals watched and worried.

Matters came to a head in 1968. On 30 January the Viet Cong launched the so-called ‘Tet’ offensive (named after the Buddhist holiday on which it began) which involved American troops in desperate battles for control of their bases at Da Nang and Khe Sanh, the city of Hue and the grounds of the US embassy in Saigon itself. All this was displayed on television, and the lesson was rubbed in by the widely respected television journalist Walter Cronkite, who visited Vietnam and came back appalled by what he had discovered. ‘It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate,’ he said; and LBJ, watching, commented that if he had lost Cronkite he had lost America. It made no difference that the communists were eventually driven from all their targets, with losses much heavier than those of the Americans: the essential intractability of the war had been made clear to all. Senator Eugene McCarthy, Democrat of Minnesota – no relation of the late Senator Joe and formerly a close associate of Vice-President Hubert Humphrey – after waiting in vain for Robert Kennedy to move (Kennedy was universally regarded as his brother’s true heir), announced his candidacy for the Democratic Presidential nomination, and in the March primary election in New Hampshire got an astonishing 40 per cent of the vote. That was enough for Kennedy, who promptly (too promptly for decency, said
McCarthy’s friends) announced his own candidacy. Lyndon Johnson read the signs of the times; he had long ago decided provisionally not to run for re-election in 1968, and now he hoped, by suspending the bombing of North Vietnam, to open the way to peace negotiations. He accepted that his candidacy would only split the Democrats further and weaken America’s negotiating position: on 31 March he announced a suspension of the bombing, asked Hanoi to begin negotiations, and said he would not seek re-election. Hubert Humphrey immediately began to move to inherit his mantle; and then Martin Luther King was killed. The summer of blood had begun.

McCarthy and Kennedy battled against each other in one primary election after another; Kennedy won the early contests, lost Oregon, carried California and, before the news commentators had time to point out that this gave him a good chance to win the Democratic nomination when the convention met at Chicago, was shot dead by yet another witless loner: this time a young Palestinian, who resented the pro-Israeli remarks that Kennedy had made during his campaign. This murder handed the nomination to Hubert Humphrey, since to the masters of the Democratic party such as Mayor Daley McCarthy seemed too lightweight, too capricious, for the job of President. But to the youth movement Humphrey was just Lyndon Johnson’s puppet, a liberal who had abandoned his principles in the quest for power. (LBJ’s sadistic taste for publicly humiliating Humphrey lent plausibility to this picture.) The fact that both the President and the Vice-President now put the quest for peace in Vietnam at the top of their agenda seemed unimportant compared with their record. The convention suddenly seemed all-important. The movement’s leaders warned their followers to stay away – trouble was brewing – and many of them did; but enough went to Chicago, or emerged from the city itself, to make it seem just possible that they could win the nomination for McCarthy. Instead they were brought to battle by Mayor Daley’s police, who loathed them because they were dirty, anti-war, sexually uninhibited and politically radical, and didn’t belong in Chicago even if they and their parents lived there. The young were driven from the public parks with night sticks and tear gas, attacked in the streets, chased into the hotels. Battle outside the convention hall did nothing to stop Humphrey getting the nomination, but once more television showed its power: the whole country had witnessed what an official report later termed a ‘police riot’; the young turned away from the Democrats. So did large numbers of the working class, and the South. This was the outcome of the years of civil rights agitation; of the long, hot summers of riot; most certainly, of the civil rights legislation and the war. The Republican vote climbed from its abysmal depth of 1964, though it was still substantially less than it had been in 1960; the Democratic vote collapsed. This election marked the end of the Solid South: the section put up its own candidate, George Wallace, who had been Governor of Alabama during the worst of the troubles there. Wallace had a knack of appealing to racists by infiammatory
words and deeds, without ever letting them hurry him away into unsustainable resistance. For instance, he had vowed to ‘stand in the doorway’ to prevent the integration of the University of Alabama, but in the end had stepped aside. It was scarcely surprising, given the white South’s state of mind, that he carried Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi; or that the Republicans carried every other Southern state except Texas, still loyal to its President, and Maryland, where the black and liberal vote was fully mobilized. Much more ominous for the Democrats was Wallace’s showing outside the South: he took more than four million votes, two-thirds of them from manual workers, and thereby ensured that the next President would be the old Republican wheelhorse, Richard Nixon. In terms of popular votes it was the best performance of a third-party candidate since 1924; in terms of electoral votes, the best in American history. The year 1968 was unusual: even the other fringe parties doubled their total vote, though among them, as usual, was the Prohibition party, whose vote was halved. It was a year in which everyone was protesting, it seemed: the South against blacks, the blacks against whites, the young against the war, the Northern working class against the young, and the 70 per cent of Democrats who remained faithful to their party against Richard Nixon.

Nixon had announced that he had a secret plan for ending the war. But as it turned out the war, or at least America’s involvement in it, lasted longer under him than it had under Johnson. The secret plan amounted to little more than an impious hope that he could bomb the North Vietnamese to the conference table and to concessions there, while finishing off the communists in the south with a still harsher battle. A procedure was initiated for replacing American fighting men with Vietnamese, but the agony dragged on, indeed spread. The US high command in Vietnam was still obsessed by the idea of dealing the enemy a crushing blow by bombing what was believed to be his command centre in the Parrot’s Beak – a triangular area of Cambodia that projected into South Vietnam. Nixon authorized the attack, while doing his utmost to keep it secret from Congress (still controlled by the Democrats), the world and the American people. Hideous damage was done to eastern Cambodia, but the guerrillas were not destroyed. So after a
coup d’état
toppled Prince Sihanouk, Nixon sent troops into Cambodia to try to eliminate the imaginary Viet Cong base on the ground. This enterprise failed, both militarily and politically: the communists now undertook the systematic conquest of Cambodia and Laos, and the non-communist forces were unable to stand up to them, especially in gentle, Buddhist Cambodia. American forces had a larger area to defend than ever, at just the time when their numbers were beginning to be reduced. Their overwhelming bombing offensive (in the end more bombs were dropped on Indo-China than had been dropped in the entire Second World War) pushed on the destruction of South-East Asia, but did not bring military victory any nearer. Morally, the attack on Cambodia was
America’s worst crime, for it forced a neutral, peaceful people to experience the horrors of war and generated a uniquely horrible aftermath, when a genocidal communist regime took power for three years. There is reason to believe that the Cambodians eventually suffered more than any of the other peoples of Indo-China; Richard Nixon’s legacy. His attack on Cambodia led in 1970 to further widespread student disturbances. During a demonstration at Kent State University in Ohio four students were shot and killed by the National Guard. There was universal outrage on the campuses of America: students, faculty and administrators at last came together to express their indignation. The manual workers who had voted for Wallace did not share this feeling in the least, for they regarded the peace movement as unpatriotic, if not treasonable. However, they also regarded the war as pointless. As one construction worker remarked, on seeing the coffin of an American soldier go by, ‘The whole goddamn country of South Vietnam is not worth the life of one American boy, no matter what the hell our politicians tell us.’ When the Republicans did badly in the Congressional elections of 1970 and the peace party made striking gains, Nixon realized that he had no choice but to negotiate seriously. Without a settlement he would lose the 1972 Presidential election; and he had no intention of stepping down like LB J.