The Best and the Brightest (85 page)

Oh, to run against Barry Goldwater, he of the quick tongue and the quick atomic trigger. It was not that he actually advocated nuclear war, it was just that he talked about nuclear war so much that he
seemed
to be advocating it (reporters covering Goldwater noted that in one thirty-minute speech alone, Goldwater mentioned nuclear weapons, war and devastation twenty-six times). In the past, Lyndon Johnson knew, there had been doubts in the public mind about him, not doubts about the Johnsonian ability to get things done, but about his ethical sense, doubts about his restraint, doubts stemming from his
Texanisms.
But Goldwater, the man of the real right, cleansed him of his sins; the more Goldwater campaigned, the better it was for Lyndon Johnson, a rare case where exposure of your opponent was a blessing. In case there was any question about what Goldwater might do with the issue of the war, the Administration was careful to send a young naval officer in civilian clothes to Goldwater’s headquarters each day to pick up his advance speeches; thus the Administration was prepared to answer any charge on the war almost before Goldwater made it. If Tonkin had tied up the nation, it had also tied up Goldwater, good old-fashioned patriot that he was. So Barry Goldwater made it possible for Johnson to run as he had always wanted and as he felt most comfortable, not as a man of ideology or region, but as someone who simply wanted to do good for all the folks. It was a lovely thing to watch, Lyndon out there, healing the wounds, as he put it.

The signs were good everywhere, in the polls, in the people who came to the White House. He was ebullient; he loved calling people into the White House, showing them the polls, and telling them what it would mean in the next session of Congress. He was going to win and win big, and he was going to get a real Congress, and there was nothing in his way. “We’ll have nine, eh, maybe even eighteen months before the Hill turns around on us,” he would say. “We have that much time to get it all through.” And then he talked of his plans, his dreams, what he would do, the education legislation, the housing program, the domestic vision, and he pushed his domestic staff to work harder and harder on domestic legislation, driving them relentlessly, always aware of the limits of time. “When you win big,” he would say, recalling Franklin Roosevelt’s experience, “you can have anything you want for a time. You come home with that big landslide and there isn’t a one of them who’ll stand in your way. No, they’ll be glad to be aboard and to have their photograph taken with you and be part of all that victory. They’ll come along and they’ll give you almost everything you want for a while and then they’ll turn on you. They always do. They’ll lay in waiting, waiting for you to make a slip and you will. They’ll give you almost everything and then they’ll make you pay for it. They’ll get tired of all those columnists writing how smart you are and how weak they are and then the pendulum will swing back.”

So you had that time and you had to use it, and he wanted everyone ready; when they came out of the election he wanted it all lined up. Then sometimes, when the others were gone, he would turn to the men around him and continue to talk about the Congress, and he would do something rare for him in those days, he would mention Vietnam. You had to control the Congress and keep it in line, keep it from thinking it could run over you. From smelling blood on you. That meant controlling Vietnam, keeping it down. If you didn’t handle Vietnam, the Congress would know and would strike at you, and would lose its respect for you. If he seemed weak as a President in dealing with Vietnam, he was sure it would undermine him politically. Hell, Truman and Acheson had lost China, and maybe it wasn’t their fault, but they were blamed for it, and when it happened the Republicans in Congress were waiting and jumped on it, and Truman lost the Congress and then the country—it hadn’t happened over domestic issues, remember that, he said, and Truman and Acheson were as strong anti-Communists as anyone he knew. Well, he did not want the blame for losing Vietnam, it might mean the loss of other things he wanted. So Vietnam became more than just a piece of terrain, it was something linked to the rest of his program, to his whole Presidency. Something you had to watch. It might not do you a lot of good, but it sure as hell, he said, could do you a lot of harm.

At the convention,
his
convention, there had been barely any challenge to his supremacy. Some kids and some Negroes from Mississippi tried to get in, tried to stir up trouble, trouble that would only help Goldwater, so he calmed them down, in his usual way, telling the liberals it was their job to take care of that Mississippi business, or else their man, Hubert Humphrey, would suffer. That was the price. And so they had quieted down the Mississippi people, and Humphrey had been on the ticket (“My link to the bomb throwers,” he had called Humphrey in the old days when he used him as an opening to the Senate left, though Humphrey was far from a bomb thrower any more), and it was one more victory for centrist pluralist politics over the extreme fringe.

American politics—the kind of coalition politics he knew best still worked—still delivered. The people might not always like it, but they had no alternative to it. Or did it work? Was it still effective? Or had there been a major change in the attitudes of the people, and in particular among his party’s special constituents, the liberal intellectuals, changes which were momentarily obscured by the one issue of 1964, Goldwater? If the benefit of Goldwater was that he dominated the campaign, the price was that he obscured other issues and warning signals, subtle changes in the society, for events and attitudes in America were very much in flux, and if anything, 1964 was a landmark year in American life. The people in power seemed to be very much in control of events; the Cold War still existed and high-level American political attitudes were still shaped by it; the old liberal Democratic coalition still held together, though some of the participants in it were increasingly uneasy with one another. On the surface, things seemed as they had in the past, only perhaps a little bit better. But it was a time when icons were about to be shattered, and when the order was about to change.

There was a growing citizen restlessness which was not reflected in the political order; the politicians and a good many in the population had very different definitions of who the enemies were and what the problems were. For the existing political structure still believed that America was threatened from without, while an increasing number of educated, articulate Americans felt the dangers were from within. The politicians in Washington were responding to issues which no longer affected large numbers of the people, and as a corollary, increasing numbers of people were bothered about elements of their life which were not defined as political issues. The gap between the politicians and the public, particularly an articulate educated minority, was growing, and nothing would widen it like the war in Vietnam. The government itself was still geared up to hold the lines in the Cold War, but a particularly influential part of the citizenry believed that it was a thing of the past, that the arms race was futile and destructive, that the enemy was really bigness, technology and the government itself. Liberals had always grown up thinking big and powerful government was good; now for a variety of reasons they were moving back from that position. So there were stirrings in the land; they had not surfaced as political forces and it would have taken a uniquely sensitive political figure to both perceive them and incorporate them into his policies. Lyndon Johnson certainly did not sense them; he saw power residing where it always had in the past and he had little sense of where it might go in the future. Perhaps some of these stirrings might have surfaced earlier, but the sheer charm and style of Kennedy had helped co-opt some of the dissidence and defuse some of the restlessness. Kennedy was intellectual, stylish, liberal and young, and thus seemed like them and of them; Norman Mailer had seen Kennedy as the existential President whose very presence would somehow make American intellectual and political life better.

Now in 1964 the cracks in the concrete were beginning to show in a variety of places, and the coming of the war would heighten the very restlessness which was just beginning to emerge. Hollywood of course had always supported the Cold War; at best a movie like
High Noon
was an oblique criticism of the McCarthy period. But generally certain things were sacred, and Hollywood seemed to be particularly good at grinding out films on the Strategic Air Command. In early 1964 nothing seemed to symbolize better the conflicting forces and changes of attitude, the new and the old, than the appearance of Stanley Kubrick’s movie
Dr. Strangelove,
and the review of it by Bosley Crowther in the
New York Times.
The Kubrick film was an important bench mark; it attacked not so much the other side as the total mindlessness of nuclear war, portraying how the irrational had become the rational. It was wild black humor at its best, and it touched some very sensitive nerve ends. But Crowther, who knew where the line should be drawn, was appalled and called it a sick joke: “I am troubled by the feeling which runs all through the film, of discredit and even contempt for our whole defense establishment, up to and even including the hypothetical commander in chief. It is all right to show the general who starts this wild foray as a Communist-hating madman convinced that a Red conspiracy is fluoridating our water in order to pollute our precious body fluids . . . But when virtually everybody turns up stupid or insane—or what is worse, psychopathic—I want to know what this picture proves . . .” (Significantly, as the change of values intensified in the middle and late sixties, there would be almost a complete turnover in the critics for all the major publications, such as the
Times,
the Washington
Post, Newsweek
and
Time.
The older reviewers would be moved aside and younger, more radical critics quickly promoted in film, books and the theater. Traditional outlooks still marked those publications’ political attitudes and reporting, but publishers, realizing that times were changing, had accommodated in their cultural sections; the result was that sometimes a paper like the
Times
seemed to have a split personality; its political reporters hailing what its critics shunned.)

In 1964 Lenny Bruce, who a few years later would become a major cultural hero, was being prosecuted by the District Attorney’s office. Bruce would lose the case, but what he stood for—the essential change in attitude—would win. Bruce was saying that individual foul epithets were not obscene; it was the tolerance of all kinds of inhumanity by people in power which was genuinely obscene. His definition of obscenity was rapidly gaining acceptance. He was by no means simply a popular nightclub comedian; he was linked to the same broad assault on the society’s attitudes that Kubrick was part of.

There were other political reflections. Young whites went to Mississippi that summer to attack segregation, but they made it clear that they were attacking the entire structure of American life and that Mississippi was merely the most visible part. Their activity led to the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party, which caused the one sour note as far as Johnson was concerned at the convention. There they were quickly put down, but what the Freedom Democrats symbolized politically, deep and abiding dissent from the processes and an unwillingness to compromise on terms dictated by the existing power structure, would live and grow. By 1968 many of the people who had helped put them down at the 1964 convention were with them, and the Democratic party itself seemed threatened.

At the same time the civil rights movement itself was winding down; there was a new and growing Negro discontent. There was a new anger in the air, particularly in Northern cities. A sense of bitterness and hate seemed to pervade, and traditional civil rights leaders were pushed aside. Riots started in the ghettos of Harlem, Rochester, Jersey City and Philadelphia, and other cities would soon follow; as the ghettos burned, the civil rights movement was coming to an end. More alienated and more scarred leaders such as Malcolm X rose. They were protesting not just legal segregation, but the very structure of American life. The problem was not a Negro problem, they said, it was a white problem. They did not want In, they wanted Out. They did not want programs; indeed, in the changing mood of the black communities, leaders who were seen co-operating with the white structure soon lost part of their credibility.

In California, at Berkeley, the university that was once a special monument to pluralistic free education, there was a growing student restlessness and a growing dissatisfaction with student and American life. When the protests were put down clumsily by local authorities, the students banded together and formed the Berkeley Free Speech Association; it was the first step in which a new educated youth of America flashed its power and its desire to have a say in political events. They were protesting many things, including the sheer size and insensitivity of the giant university, known as the multiversity. Their enemy was the president, Clark Kerr, a good liberal technocrat, a decent man trying to manage an enormous complex. He was, William O’Neill would write, “anything but a despot. He was, in fact, the Robert McNamara of higher education, a skillful manager of complex systems.” Berkeley was the beginning of a growing student protest which sometimes seemed unable to define its exact enemies, but which came together on the issue of the war as Johnson escalated in Vietnam. But to them, bigness, technology and bureaucracy was as much of an enemy. Even as Berkeley was breaking out, a young lawyer named Ralph Nader was finishing his book on auto safety, and he would come to symbolize the citizen protest against the government and against the corporation, a belief that government co-opted good ideas and served the large and powerful forces, and that a citizen, to be effective, had to work outside the government.