Chapter Eight: Kennedy, Johnson  and the Vietnam War

It was a harsh, snowy day on January 20, 1961 in Washington, D.C. A bystander on Connecticut Avenue pointed out to spectators three Rolls Royce limousines that had suddenly come to a stop. While no one knew what the problem was, the three drivers did know. Their batteries were dead from creeping along at a snail's pace with heaters at full blast. The passengers and the spectators were all there for the same reason. At noon, John F. Kennedy would be the next President of the United States. Promptly at noon, Chief Justice Earl Warren, having sworn in Lyndon B. Johnson as Vice President, administered the constitutional oath to Kennedy. Robert Frost, looking a little frail, read some of his poetry. Kennedy's Inaugural Address was memorable for several reasons, as he himself noted:

The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe-the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God. We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and to foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans -- born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage -- and unwillingness to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this Nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the globe. Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe in order to assure the survival and success of liberty...And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

Kennedy was the first president of this century and the last century to be under forty-eight upon becoming president For those young people who had worked so hard to elect Kennedy, the Inaugural festivities represented a magical moment in time. But then the work began in the White House. One of his most successful early programs was the Peace Corps. In a slightly different form, it exists today in 1995. In his inaugural address, Kennedy made no reference to civil rights, an omission that prompted James (Scotty) Reston of The New York Times to write in part: "...this week in his news conference he refused to carry out his promise to bar discrimination in government-insured housing....He is not spoiling for a fight with the Southern conservatives over civil rights..." It was a subject he could not ignore for long. In 1961, Sam Bailey, a black citizen of Mississippi filed suit in the United States District Court alleging that segregation of public transportation by rail and bus was a violation of the Constitution. Bailey v. Patterson, 199 F. Supp. 595 (ED Miss. 1961). The three-judge court held it should abstain from ruling on the law and directed Bailey to get whatever relief he could in the Mississippi state courts. On a direct appeal, the Supreme Court said that "We have settled beyond question that no State may require segregation of interstate or intrastate transportation (citations omitted). Nor was a three-judge court permissible, so the court vacated the judgment and remanded the case for expeditous disposition. Baily v. Patterson, 369 U. S. 31 (1962). Civil rights were not Kennedy's only concern.

Soon after his Inauguration, President Kennedy agreed the United States should proceed with the Bay of Pigs operation, using Cuban refugees trained by the CIA. The entire affair was a complete disaster as a military operation, and it made even Fidel Castro look as though he had successfully defeated an invasion of Cuba by American troops. To his credit, Kennedy took full responsibility for a fiasco at the outset of his administration, but he expressed remorse only because amateurish adventurism against Communist Cuba had failed. However, Walt Rostow, then part of the National Security Council, gave Kennedy another option. It permitted the president to project American military power in the Far East, Communist Vietnam. In all the books published about Vietnam, there appeared no suggestion from the CIA that China would intervene in Vietnam militarily to defeat any American effort to save its corrupt regime or even to come to the assistance of Ho Chi Minh, were Hanoi to be threatened. However, another crisis intervened before any firm decisions were made about intervention in South Vietnam, the Cuban missile crisis in the fall of 1962.

The Cuban missile crisis was something else, far more critical in the sense that the use of nuclear weapons was possible. Furthermore, Cuba was only 90 miles from Miami, while South Vietnam was 8,000 miles from Washington. Russia's premier had underestimated the new president's resolve after their first meeting in Vienna. Khruschev had shipped nuclear-tipped missiles to Cuba, and their presence was detected by photo reconnaissaance. Evidently, Khruschev wanted to match the Jupiter missile the United States had deployed to Turkey on the border of the Soviet Union. By October, 1962 Kennedy, with photos of the missile installations in Cuba condemned the secret bases and announced a quarantine of Cuba.

On the evening of his televised address, aircraft of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) had taken off on assigned missions with nuclear weapons, and the United States military had gone to DefCon3, an alert status close to hostilities with either Cuba or the Soviet Union. General Thomas Power was SAC commander, having replaced General Curtis LeMay. Without presidential authorization, General Power effectively told the Russians that SAC was "in an advanced state of readiness." Even worse, an unsanctioned incident occurred with the launch from Kwajalein of an Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile on a test. It was a thoughtless provocation, particularly since the military had gone to DefCon2. Kennedy's quarantine worked, and the crisis passed narrowly missing a nuclear war had the president followed the advice of the hawks, like LeMay. He wanted to wipe out Cuban missile bases and use SAC to deliver megatons of nuclear power against Russia if it even tried to retaliate.

Nuclear Test Nuclear Test

According to Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, millions of Americans would have been killed in such an exchange; the Russians had medium range nuclear-tipped weapons in Cuba with authority to use them in the hands of a Soviet officer. According to an unnamed SAC commander, SAC bombers deliberately flew past their turnaround points toward Soviet airspace, an unambiguous threat certain to be picked up by Soviet radar. These bombers only changed course when Soviet freighters bound for Cuba with missiles stopped dead in the water, finally returning to the Soviet Union. The American crisis management team included the new Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara and Kennedy's brother, Robert Kennedy. He was Attorney General of the United States. Less than a year earlier, Kennedy had his first brush with Vietnam fallout. He told a reporter we should be sending more troops to Vietnam, noting the anti-Communism feature of such an idea.

In his new book, Once Upon a Distant War, William Prochnau makes the early days of the war in Vietnam seem lightly confusing.The U. S. Ambassador Frederick Nolting had been instructed by Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State, not to give the press any more than routine information concerning current military information. An American carrier, the USS Core had arrived in Saigon with forty helicopters on deck. It had to steam up the river for almost thirty miles before unloading its cargo. This huge carrier, according to Prochnau, was perfectly visible to the Vietcong, their spies in Saigon and hundreds of spectators lining the river. Within days of its arrival, North Vietnam's Radio Hanoi had broadcast not only the numbers and type of helicopters but their serial numbers as well. Also heard on the news from Hanoi was word that hundreds of American servicemen had debarked from the carrier on December 11, 1961. Sending these soldiers to Saigon was clearly a violation of the Geneva Accords. This agreement among other things had divided Vietnam in to two areas in 1954, North Vietnam and South Vietnam.

There were U.S. advisers in Saigon sent there by President Eisenhower,but the government in Washington concealed the fact that American soldiers were even present in Vietnam. Eisenhower even sent a letter dated October 23, 1954, not long after the humiliating defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu. Retrieved from Internet, his letter was addressed to President of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem. "The purpose of this letter," Eisenhower wrote, " [was] to assist the Government of Vietnam in developing and maintaining a strong, viable state capable of resisting attempted subversion or aggression through military means. The Government of the United States expects that aid [from the United States] will be met by performance on the part of the Government of Vietnam in undertaking needed reforms. It hopes that such aid, combined with your own continuing efforts, will contribute effectively toward an independent Vietnam endowed with a strong Government...." Then on December 14, 1961 President Kennedy also sent a letter to Ngo Dinh Diem retrieved from Internet as a State Department Bulletin. The first paragraph read as follows:

I have received your recent letter in which you described so cogently the dangerous conditions caused by North Vietnam's efforts to take over your country. The situation in your embattled country is well known to me and to the American people. We have been deeply disturbed by the assault on your country. Our indignation has mounted as the deliberate savagery of the Communist programs of assassination, kidnapping, and wanton violence became clear.... At that time [of the Geneva Accords of 1954] the United States although not a party to the Accords declared that it "would view any renewal of the aggression in violation of the Agreements with grave concern and as seriously threatening international peace and security." In accordance with that declaration,...we are prepared to help the Republic of Vietnam to protect its people and preserve its independence. We shall promptly increase our assistance to your defense effort...

The arrival of military advisers in Vietnam followed rapidly by arms for the troops of the Republic of Vietnam was probably the beginning of American armed forces involvment in the quagmire of Vietnam. The arrival of a carrier plus helicopters was probably one of the first overt steps in furtherance of a policy that increasingly required rationalization from Washington, i.e. lies. This was the first policy to have its cover blown by the press, but it was a foolish policy. It was also delusional on the part of generals and admirals in Saigon. American officials refused to confirm or deny the most obvious facts. So the press had to scramble for other sources. With the passage of time, press sources became more reliable than official sources, the first steps in a growing public awareness of a government willing to lie about its conduct in another country. In 1961, television was difficult to use productively in Vietnam. The equipment was too heavy and cameramen had trouble carrying it. In time, however, television became easier to use for news, and film from Vietnam began to appear on television.

President Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated on November 2, 1963 by military coup leaders vying for power. His death exposed the myth of an independent democratic South Vietnam. From that point on, the United States had to operate through a succession of military dictators. They were unable to carry on a war in which South Vietnamese soldiers were increasingly unwilling to fight at all despite American military advisers' efforts to encourage them to resist "Communist aggression" from Hanoi. This meant that more and more Americans had to be drafted in the United States and sent to Vietnam in a war that became increasingly unpopular in the United States. The anti-Vietnam movement peaked in 1968, the year Johnson decided he would not seek reelection. Johnson had nade himself deeply unpopular by pursuing a war that itself had become deeply unpopular.

On patrol in Phuoc Tuy Province, June 1966 On patrol in Phuoc Tuy Province, June 1966
After receiving a fresh supply of food and ammunition flown in by helicopter, men of the US 173rd Airborne Brigade continue on a jungle "Search and Destroy" patrol.

On November 22, 1963 President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. He was murdered by a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald. This event deeply shocked the entire nation as nothing before this terrible event had ever done. Kennedy, his wife Jacqueline Kennedy, and the men around him had created a belief in the historical myth of Camelot as the heart of a new culture.

Had he lived another year, he and his wife would surely have invited the Beatles to sing at the White House as so many artists, and other famous people had already appeared. The Beatles appeared on the first American tour beginning in February, 1964. These four Liverpudlians, Paul McCartny, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr were greeted in New York by an ecstatic audience of young and older people stunned by the originality and verve of their music, most of it original. Beatlemania became a phenomonon of American culture and is currently undergoing a revival of three Beatles -- John Lennon was shot and killed in New York. But in 1964 to 1970 (when the Beatles went their own ways), the songs were of love, peace, and understanding. They did as much with their music and lyrics as any one could to raise the level of protest against the Vietnam War. The Beatles got their start in the United States -- even though their reputation preceded them -- with three appearances on Ed Sullivan's television show. Seventy-three million people were estimated to have watched their first show on February 9, 1964. The Beatles soon evolved into leading figures of the 1960s counterculture, putting to music a philosophy of love, peace, spiritual exploration, and social change, the very opposite of what was happening outside their world of music. Some people even credit the Beatles with creating a musical culture that allowed the anti-war environment to flourish. Had President Kennedy survived, he would certainly have invited the Beatles to appear in the White House, perpetuating the myth of Camelot.

With Kennedy's assassination, Lyndon B. Johnson succeeded to the presidency. Vietnam was expanding to reach more Americans via the draft. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who served under Kennedy stayed on and served in the same capacity for President Johnson. On February 27, 1965 the State Department issued its "Aggression from the North:" the State Department's White Paper on Vietnam. Retrieved from the Internet, its language had become more bellicose than ever:

South Vietnam is fighting for its life against a brutal campaign of terror and armed attack inspired, directed, supplied and controlled by the Communist regime in Hanoi. This flagrant aggression has been going on for years, but recently the pace has quickened and the threat has become more acute....The people of South Vietnam have chosen to resist this threat. At their request, the United States has taken its place beside them in their defensive struggle.

As one observer noted, there was no evidence that any member of the Vietcong ever read any Marx or Lenin, or understood either. The entire Vietnam War began as a misguided attempt to support France's colonial policy after World War II. Between the date of the White Paper in 1965 and 1968, the level of protest within the United States had reached a level that made Johnson realize, he could not successfully run for reelection in 1968. Accordingly, he made an announcement to that effect.

Johnson, however, did make significant contributions in the field of civil rights. Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It is questionable whether Kennedy could have done as well; the 1960 election had been so close that Kennedy would have needed votes in the Senate that only Johnson could deliver. Furthermore, the political landscape had been radically changed by Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186 (1962). This case opened the federal courts to urban interests that had been unable to force state legislators to reapportion state legislatures or to redistrict Congressional seats to reflect the increasingly urbanized United States. The litigation in the field of redistricting was destined to and did lead to more litigation that has still not finally decided questions of, for example, drawing district lines to provide safe districts from which to elect black Americans to Congress. Like the massive resistance in the South to desegregation in the nation's public schools, redistricting would continue in both areas.

In 1955 at the time of the Montgomery bus boycott, a new voice unmistakeably Southern in origin was heard. Martin Luther King, Jr., the newly installed pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, galvanized and mobilized a following. He eloquently described Brown v. Board of Education (II):

If we are wrong -- the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong -- God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong -- Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer and never came down to earth! If we are wrong -- justice is a lie And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

The Southern Manifesto was signed in the same year by governors of the South who called for massive resistance to the court's opinion in Brown v. Board of Education. This manifesto declared that the justices "with no legal basis for such action," had proceeded "to exercise their naked judicial power and substituted their personal political and social ideas for the established law of the land." Uninvited "outside agitators" were "threatening immediate and revolutionary changes" that would "destroy the system of public education" and "the dual system of government which has enabled us to achieve our greatness."

Martin Luther King, Jr. stood on the moral high ground, while George Wallace, not yet elected Governor of Alabama believed enthusiastically in the venom of the Southern Manifesto. He was inaugurated as governor on January 14, 1963. Two months earlier, the Kennedy Administration had been told the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa would be required to desegregate, and George Wallace decided he would take a stand there. He did at the entrance used by students to register. However, Robert Kennedy, Attorney General, had arranged to federalize the Alabama National Guard if Wallace showed any resistance. Wallace had not resisted except for a mild statement that he "would return to Montgomery to continue working for constitutional government -- black and white." However, his symbolic resistance made him a hero to the blue collar workers of Alabama, the Klansmen and other white supremacists. The next day, Byron de la Beckwith, a white fertilizer salesman from Mississippi shot and killed Medgar Evers, a black civil rights activist in Jackson, Mississippi. On September 15, 1963 a package of powerful explosives was placed next to the entrance of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. It exploded the next morning, a Sunday, while parishioners were attending services, killing four children. City officials lamented another public relations disaster, but not one of them expressed remorse for the four murdered victims. And in an absolute charade, Governor Wallace announced the arrest of the bombers. The local police knew the arrest would undermine the evidence so painstakingly gathered by the FBI, and it did. Chambliss, Cagle, and a third Klansman went on trial and were sentenced to six months for the misdemeanor of transporting dynamite without a permit. The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics by Dan T. Carter has told this entire story in riveting detail.

It is almost miraculous that Lyndon Johnson ever found the votes to pass any civil rights legislation in the 1960s, but the naked violence of Wallace's Alabama and the brutalities to which civil rights activists were subjected during these years certainly helped. Mickey Schwermer, Andrew Goodman, and James Cheney, three northern activists arrived in Meridian, Alabama on June 21, 1964. On the next day, all three were arrested on a trumped up speeding charge. Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price said he released them after getting a $20 fine. They were never seen again, until their bodies were unearthed near a dam on August 4, 1964. The Department of Justice convened a federal grand jury that indicted Price and others for conspiring to violate the civil rights of Goodman, Schwermer, and Chaney. Judge William Harold Cox, a judge of the United States District Court and a white supremacist, reduced the charge to a misdemeanor, which the Supreme Court reversed. United States v. Price, 383 U. S. 787 (1966). At the trial, Price and seven others were convicted, the first time an all-white jury convicted white defendants in a civil rights case.

Finally, the accumulated white-initiated violence against black Americans in the South compelled Congress to act. It enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and later, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It became clear, too, that Southern law and order was selective. It acquitted a white racist with a history of violence and jailed black demonstrators for civil rights. When one Northern woman, Viola Liuzzo, was run down , shot and killed by four Klansmen, the four were acquitted even after one of the four, an FBI informer, testified at the trial. White juries did nothing to promote justice for black Americans.

Every culture seems to need an enemy, and the Southern culture had plenty of enemies. However, too many Southerners tried shifting the blame for cruelty against blacks to the Supreme Court and "outside agitators" from the North who demonstrated out of the moral conviction they were right. With the South, it was "blame the victim" for the wrongs suffered by black Americans. Even though George Wallace presided over a corrupt system and exploited white racism perhaps better than any other American politician, he was a hero to the states of the Old Confederacy. In 1964, Wallace established organizations in Wisconsin and Indiana, his first political moves outside the solid South.

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson wanted to postpone any serious decisions about Vietnam until after the election in which ultra-conservative Barry Goldwater was the Republican nominee. Television ads and his militant conservatism at the Republican Convention ruined Goldwater -- "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," he said in accepting the nomination. One television ad asked the rhetorical question "Do you want this man with his finger on the [nuclear] button?" Goldwater projected a bellicose image, and this ad exploited the public perception of belligerence. The election was a landslide. Lyndon Johnson got 61.1 percent of the popular vote and 486 electoral votes, while Goldwater got 38.5 percent of the popular vote and only 52 electoral votes. After the 1964 election, Johnson moved ever deeper into the Vietnam quagmire, and an outraged public threatened to oust Johnson from the White House. He announced his withdrawal from the campaign in early 1968.

Lyndon Johnson announced a War Against Poverty modelled on principles worked out during the Kennedy Administration. In 1965, Johnson signed the bill he had proposed establishing Medicare. The amounts spent to support this program which covered medical aid to persons over 65 began modestly enough -- $7.6 billion in 1970 -- but expanded rapidly to $268 billion in 1990 according to the Statistical Abstract of the United States for 1992.

Johnson's War Against Poverty included a Community Action Plan (CAP) that allowed local citizens to organize using some federal funds appropriated for the Office of Economic Opportunity. A fair amount of OEO funds went into teaching the poor how to take action against slumlords and ineffective city bureaucrats, which resulted in alienating the mayors of cities like Los Angeles and Chicago. Then Senator Patrick Moynihan, in 1965 an Assistant Secretary of Labor in the Johnson Administration, wrote a report entitled "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action." Unfortunately, it was perceived as a "blame the victim" approach. Black Americans were irritated by this report and saw spending money on the Vietnam War as diverting funds away from advancing their their agenda on programs like Head Start and the Job Corps. For Johnson, advancing the interests of the poor and black became a choice of guns or butter, and Congress voted for guns and Vietnam. Going in to 1968, President Johnson had alienated or lost a major source of traditional support for the Democrats, black Americans who thought the United States should withdraw from a costly war in Asia. Whether George Wallace saw this dilemna in the offing is questionable, but the urban riots of summer, 1968 helped Wallace significantly.

George Wallace qualified his American Independence Party in enough states to represent a threat in the presidential election of 1968. Richard Nixon was the Republican nominee and ran against Hubert Humphrey. Nixon got 43.4 percent of the popular vote and 301 electoral votes to Humphrey's 191. The rest went to George Wallace who got 9.9 million votes, but only 46 electoral votes. Wallace votes came from blue collar workers in many states; his campaign rhetoric captured the rage of white workers at even the thought of equality with black Americans. In the South, Wallace featured speeches condeming the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The "pointy-headed liberals" who insisted on desegregating the public schools.were his favorite targets. Demonstrators for civil rights were all described as Communist "outside agitators." And on May 27, 1968 the Supreme Court added fuel to the Wallace fire. Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, Virginia. 391 U.S. 430 (1968). A unanimous court held that Virginia's "freedom of choice" operated to perpetuate the racially dual school system mandated by state law. And as white flight accelerated, only busing could achieve the objectives set forth in Green. "Busing," Wallace said, "is the most asinine cruel thing I've ever heard of."

Between 1964, when Barry Goldwater was the Republican nominee for president and 1968, Richard Nixon developed his Southern Strategy. Republicans, Nixon argued, should reach out to the South's emerging middle-class suburban constituency without using Goldwater's hard-line segregation identification. This played well in the South but alienated moderate Republicans in vote-heavy Northern states. Even though Goldwater lost in the proverbial landslide, some Republicans were elected to Congress from the South. Nixon had a few chips to cash in after the 1964 election. He had campaigned loyally for Goldwater and badly wanted the presidency in 1968. His key to the Southern Republicans was Strom Thurmond. Nixon convinced Thurmond that angry whites, if given a choice between any conceivable national Democrat and Nixon would reluctantly vote Republican, thus freeing him to appeal to moderates in the rest of the country. Thurmond was a racist hounded by his past; a civil rights rejectionist par excellence. Nixon told delegates from the South that he would have to defer to mandates from the Supreme Court and Congress, but he said he would do as little about either as circumstances required. And the delegates were pleased with the nomination of Spiro Agnew as the candidate for vice president. Agnew was a modest man, but "...as one observer noted, "he had a lot to be modest about." His ethical lapses later led to his resignation before being convicted of kickbacks in Maryland.

The Democratic nominee for president was Hubert Humphrey who had to campaign on Lyndon Johnson's record. While campaigning in the California primary of 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in a Los Angeles hotel. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was also assassinated in April, 1968 while standing on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee. The rioting in American cities spilled over into Chicago, the venue of the Democratic Convention. Anti-Vietnam demonstrators were very much in evidence, and televised rioting did not help the Democrats or advance the cause of civil rights. George Wallace initially ran an unorganized campaign with money rolling in, most of it from individuals who gave less than $20 each. It was a genuine grass roots campaign and it almost did what Wallace planned, to have the House name the president, because no candidate had the constitutional majority of electoral votes. Had there been a slight shift of the popular vote in certain states, the House of Representatives would decide who was to be president, with each state having one vote.

In 1968, George Wallace pioneered in what today we would consider to be the major social issues. Crime was one of them, and here's what he said more than once:

And so, my friends, today law and order is an issue. And, as I used to say, if someone knocks you in the head when you walk out of this building tonight, the person who knocks you in the head is out of jail before you bget to the hospital, and on Monday, they'll try a policeman about the matter, They'll line up trying a policeman about it.

Dan Carter, author of The Politics of Rage, was interviewed on National Public Radio on November 1, 1995. He elaborated on this archival tape: "Well, he was saying this even earlier. Obviously, there were other candidates who talked about the crime issue, but withWallace, again, it has to do with his effectivenes as an orator. What he does is to take the crime issue and personalize it. It's not some vague abstract issue. It's what's going to happen to you -- you're going to be hit over the head, you're going to end up in the hospital. And then he loads on to that this anger and rage over what is seen as the way in which the criminal is not sufficiently punished. And when he puts this together, it becomes one of the greatest crowd pleasers, really, beginning as early as 1968."

In response to an introductory question from the interviewer, Carter responded: "He [Wallace] understood that there were millions of Americans who felt in some way or another betrayed, betrayed by what they saw as the decline in American culture, in values, moral values, and frightened. The war in Vietnam, the riots, the rise in crime, and all these things we now associate with the 1960s, but Wallace saw them coming in every case." Everywhere in the country in the years following the Supreme Court rulings on desegregation saw Wallace as the man who stood in the schoolhouse door blocking desegregation of Alabama's schools. Here's what Wallace said in an archival tape:

I stand here today as governor of this sovereign state and refuse to willingly submit to the illegal usurpation of power to the central government. I claim today for all the people of the state of Alabama those rights reserved to them under the Constitution of the United States, among those powers so reserved and claimed is a right of state authority in the operation of the public schools, colleges, and universities. My action does not constitute disobedience to legislative and constitutional provisions. It is not defiance for defiance sake, but for the purpose of raising basic and fundamental constitutional questions. My action is a call for strict adherence to the Constitution of the United States as it was written for a cessation of usurpation and abuses. My action seeks to avoid having state sovereignty sacrificed on the altar of political expediency.

This tirade, similar to the argument raised by John Calhoun in 1830 leading to nullification of federal laws by the states, resonated throughout the country. According to Dan Carter, there are echoes of George Wallace in the politics of 1995, the Contract with America, Rush Limbaugh, and the assault from the right. The Republicans had more than ever committed the party to pursue conservatism mixed in with the patriotic theme of anti-Communism in Vietnam. Richard Nixon had not forgotten the shock of the Tet offensive in January, 1968. Vietcong guerillas actually occupied some of the American Embassy grounds in Saigon.

The President's National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders reported that the nation was "moving toward two societies, one black and one white -- separate and unequal." And the riots that followed King's assassination were on such a massive scale throughout the country that they generated a white backlash. President Johnson had left Richard Nixon an opportunity to use the Vietnam War differently, but he failed in the War against Poverty. However, events outside the United States in 1967 once again involved America in the affairs of Israel.

After the 1956 war when Israel, Great Britain, and France withdrew from the Suez Canal area, the United Nations authorized a UN peacekeeping mission in the Sinai. In conjunction with Syria, Egypt decided on war again to push Israel into the sea. Jordan's King Hussein joined this coalition. Egypt's Nasser first told the UN to withdraw its peacekeeping troops from the Sinai, troops massed on both the Jordanian borders, and it was clear to Israel's leaders that an Arab-Israeli war was about to occur again. Furthermore, Egyptian forces initiated a naval blockade preventing Israel-bound vessels from entering the Gulf of Aqaba to deliver their cargo to an Israeli port. A blockade like this was an act of war within the framework of international law. So on June 6, 1967 Israeli Air Force jets hit Egyptian aircraft on the ground, destroying all or most of them in this preremptive strike. All this led to a land war in which Egyptian troops were displaced from the Gaza Strip. Jordanian troops were driven out of the West Bank and back to Jordan which had unlawfully occupied the West Bank, having annexed it in 1950. Often noted as the Six Day War, the future of the West Bank may be determined by a resolution of the UN Securitry Council. On November 23, 1967 the Security Council adopted its Resolution 242. Its paragraph (i) contained the critical language. The Charter requires "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent [1967] conflict" (Emphasis added). In fact, Israel did withdraw from the Sinai in conformity with the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in 1979. Since then, Israel has signed and ratified a peace treaty between it and Jordan. There is nothing in that treaty requiring Israel to withdraw from the West Bank, even though Jordan occupied this area between 1949 and 1977. Israel has not signed a peace treaty with Syria. And there is nothing in either the UN Charter or customary international law which leads one to suppose that military occupation, pending a peace treaty, is illegal. The Golan Heights are properly administered by Israel.

Unsurprisingly, there is another dimension to the Arab-Israeli conflict. In 1988, Israel undertook to deport two Palestinians convicted of crimes of violence within Israel. Deportation was argued before the Supreme Court of Israel sitting as the High Court of Justice. All nine justices upheld the deportation order. The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, the opinion read, had never been incorporated into the internal law of Israel by legislative act of the Knesset. The process of incorporation is analogous to the constitutional requirement that a treaty of the United States must be ratified by the Senate, two-thirds concurring. This process if followed by an Act of Congress which incorporates the treaty itself into the internal law of this country is sufficient. Missouri v. Holland, 252 U.S. 416 (1920).

In 1995 and 1996, the United States supported the peace process initiated in 1994 by agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. However, as the first stages were implemented it became clear that Hamas and Hezbollah, both terrorist groups, would oppose the peace process. In April, 1996 Israel hit back at rocket attacks on its border with Lebanon by air attacks on what was said to be Hezbollah offices. Syria is the only real beneficiary of this low level war. It can support terrorist groups without being attacked itself. Syria's President Hafez al-Assad demands that the Golan Heights be returned to Syria without conditions, and Israel's Prime Minister Shimon Peres had scheduled a referendum for June, 1996 on the entire peace process. By reacting in self-defense, Peres hopes to position himself and his Labor coalition as the peacemakers. On May 29, 1996 Israel held an election under a new law that allowed voters to cast separate ballots for prime minister and members of the Knesset. Benjamin Netanyahu, a member of the Likud, was expected to win in a very close election with Labor's Shimon Peres, the Prime Minister who had been negotiating with Yasser Arafat. Peres was defeated,the only election issue was Israel's security during a peace process that contemplated the surrender of some West Bank land in exchange for peace with Palestinians.

A Palestinian claim to this land is tenuous at best. What is now Lebanon, Syria, and Israel was ruled for some three hundred years by the Ottomans. The Ottoman Empire was on the losing side during World War I, and the League of Nations conveyed all of Palestine, i.e., Israel, to Great Britain as a mandate in 1923. During the existence of the Mandate for Palestine, the British favored the Arabs, but Jews rallied support for their cause in London. In 1917, Prime Minister David Balfour announced the Balfour Declaration which favored Palestine as a "homeland for the Jews." This declaration had no legal effect at all. However, it buttressed a Jewish claim to a part of the West Bank when Great Britain terminated its mandate in 1947. In a cynical move, Great Britain colluded with Jordan which annexed all of the West Bank in 1950, having acquired it by violation of the United Nations Charter. Great Britain and Pakistan were the only nations recognizing this illegal act which occurred as the result of a cynical policy in London to avoid implementing the Balfour Declaration and appeasing the Arab world.

In 1967, Arab powers -- Egypt, Jordan, and Syria -- massed troops on the border of Israel. Egypt had not only demanded the UN peacekeeping force leave the Sinai area, but Gamal Nasser had authorized an Egtptian naval blockade which prevented commercial vessels from docking at Aqaba, an act of war. Israel launched a preemptive strike against Egypt, destroying all its aircraft on the ground. The Israeli Defense Forces, acting under Article 51 of the UN Charter -- its right of self defense against an armed attack by Jordan and Syria -- drove Jordanian troops out of the West Bank and Egyptian troops out of the Gaza District and back across the Sinai to the Suez Canal.

During the period between 1949 and 1967, Jordan occupied the entire West Bank. Jordanian armed forces and Muslim civilians razed Jewish synagogues and vandalized Jewish burial grounds. Jordan even announced its annexation of the West Bank as an extension of the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan and did so with the connivance fo Great Britain. See Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine by Avi Schlaim. It was published in 1988 by the Columbia University Press. In September, 1996 Israelis and Palestinians were once again shooting each other over an event that seemed minor at the time. An archaeological tunnel used primarily by tourists was opened at one end by the new Likud coalition government. The tunnel itself has been around for at least eighteen years.

In January, 1996 Yasser Arafat and the then Labor Government of Shimon Peres agreed to the new opening in the tunnel. However now that the peace process is being negotiated by Netanyahu, the new Prime Minister with a Likud coalition has taken a hardline with negotiations. The PLO agreement with the previous Labor government was signed in 1993. Amongst other matters, the parties agreed that a "five-year transitional period will begin upon the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and Jericho." Israel withdrew from both in 1995. The permanent status negotiations, including the legal status of Jerusalem, were to occur no later than 1998. Arafat and all Palestinian see Jerusalem as the capital of an independent Palestinian state. Prime Minister Netanyahu has said that would not be a negotiable matter, Even his predecessor, Shimon Peres never publicly committed Israel to agree with this Palestinian position.

The 1993 declaration of principles also called for or an election leading to the establishment of a Palestinian Council. The election occurred, and Yasser Arafat became its president. It also provided for a Palestinian police force "in order to guarantee public order and internal security for the Palestinians of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip."

Violence erupted in late September, 1996. Palestinian television showed the opening of a tunnel near the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The tunnel runs some 500 yards through history. It follows the giant retaining stones of the Temple Mount, which itself was the site of the First and Second Temples of the Jewish faith. The tunnel passes through layers of Jerusalem's history. from Arab structures back through Crusader foundations of the 13th. Century, a Byzantine pool, a Roman street and an aqueduct built by the Maccabeans in the year 2 BC. The only remnant of the structures of the Temple Mount left after 2000 years was the Western or Wailing Wall, a holy site of the Jews. In place of the temples which were destroyed, the Dome of the Rock, Islam's third holiest site and the Al Aqsa Mosque were built by the Arabs, probably in the 8th century AD.

In April of last year, the Labor government of Yitzshack Rabin made a deal with the Muslim authorities. Israel would allow Muslims to Worship in another underground complex -- Solomon's Stables -- under the Temple Mount, to be controlled by the Palestinians. The Muslims then would not oppose a new entrance to the tunnel at the North end. Visitors to the tunnel exit at that point instead of retracing their steps 500 yards to the South. Muslim authorities had long known of the tunnel, had visited it and were aware that it was far from any mosque.

However, the tunnel opening in late September, 1996 took place against a background of negotiations during the peace process that began in Madrid, Spain in 1992. Then, the Oslo Agreement led to the Israeli-Palestinian Liberation Organization Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government which was signed by Yitzshack Rabin and Yasser Arafat in 1993 in Washington D.C. Article VIII of the Declaration of Principles provided for a Palestinian police force "[to] guarantee public order and internal security for the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza..." By 1996, this Police force had some 40,000 members. The Israeli authorities allowed these police to carry arms, quite a concession from rabin's Labor government given the violent opposition of Hamas to any peace process and the terrorism of Hezbollah financed by Iran and initiated with training in Syrian-controlled Lebanon. It doesn't take a genius to conclude that the 40,000-member Palestinian police force could easily be supplied with weapons more lethal than rapid-firing rifles.

During the violence that followed the opening of the North exit by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Palestinian police used their weapons against Israelis, instead of keeping "public order". Most objective observers of the violence agreed that Palestinian fury was not motivated by religion at all; it was political. Palestinians were frustrated by Netanyahu's hard-line attitude; they had raised expectations from their discussions with Shimon Peres who succeeded Rabin as Prime Minister of Israel, after the 1995 assassination by a deranged Jew. An election took place in June, 1996 and Netanyahu defeated Peres by a narrow margin.

During the violence. members of the United Nations were reported to be lining up for their ritual condemnation of Israel. It seems clear that Arafat has been unable to restrain excesses of the Palestinians and the escalation of violence in late September was no exception. This has been a rite that has been almost continuous since 1967 when Israeli Defense Forces expelled Jordanian armed forces from the West Bank and Egypt from the Gaza Strip. Both of them had occupied these territories unlawfully by war in 1948-49. From 1949 to 1967, Jordan occupied the West Bank. During the occupation Palestinians vandalized Jewish synagogues and burial grounds. In 1973, Israel was once again attacked by Syria and Egypt. After the defeat of these invaders, President Carter managed to bring Israel and Egypt together at Camp David in 1978. This meeting finally brought peace between Israel and Egypt. As of 1996. Israel had signed peace treaties with both Jordan and Egypt. The Palestinians however seems to want an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. Netanyahu's Likud coalition opposes this as a real threat to Israel's security, and Syria, as of the end of 1996 had not yet indicated any willingness to join the peace process.





All contents © 1996 William M. Brinton
All photographs © Archive Photos, New York
All film © Archive Film, New York