- How did Richard Nixon's five-o'clock shadow spoil his 1960 campaign for President?
- What happened at the Bay of Pigs?
- What was the Cuban Missile Crisis?
- What was The Feminine Mystique?
- Who killed JFK?
- Did Mississippi Burning really happen?
- What was the Tonkin Resolution?
- Milestones in the Vietnam War
- What happened in Watts?
- Who was Miranda?
- What happened at My Lai?
- Why did Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger try to stop The New York Times from publishing the "Pentagon Papers"?
- Why did "Jane Roe" sue Wade?
- How did a botched burglary become a crisis called Watergate and bring down a powerful President?
- A Watergate Chronology
- How did the Arabs of OPEC cripple America during the 1970s?
- What was "voodoo economics"?
- Why was Ronald Reagan called the "Teflon President"?
Haight-Ashbury. "Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair." "Tune In. Turn On. Drop Out." Free love. Men on the moon. Woodstock.
It has come down as "the sixties," a romantic fantasy set to a three-chord rock beat. But the era viewed so nostalgically as the days of peace, love, and rock and roll didn't start out with much peace and love. Unless you focus on the fact that Enovid, the first birth-control pill, was approved by the FDA in 1960.
The flip side of the sixties was a much darker tune. Riots and long, hot summers. Assassinations. Rock-star obituaries etched in acid. A war that only a "military-industrial complex" could love. Sympathy for the Devil. Altamont Speedway.
The "bright shining moment" of the JFK years - the media-created myth of Cold War paranoia that set the tone of the previous decade. The "liberal" Kennedy campaigned in 1960 as a hard-line anti-Communist, and used a fabricated "missile gap" between the United States and the Soviet Union as a campaign issue against Republican candidate Richard Nixon. What we call the sixties ended with the death throes of an unpopular, costly war in a quagmire called Vietnam.
But it was an extraordinary era in which all the accepted orthodoxies of government, church, and society were called into question. And, unlike the glum, alienated mood of the fifties, the new voices questioning authority had a lighter side. Joseph Heller (b. 1923) was one of the first to capture the new mood of mordant humor in his first novel, Catch-22 (1961), which was a forecast of the antimilitary mood that would form to oppose the war in Vietnam. But the new generation of poets was more likely to use an amplified guitar than a typewriter to voice its discontent. In the folk music of Peter, Paul, and Mary and Bob Dylan, and later in the rock-and-roll revolution, "counterculture" was blasting out of millions of radios and TVs. Of course, the record business found it a very profitable counterculture. And it spilled into the mainstream as entertainers like the Smothers Brothers brought irreverence to prime time - which promptly showed them the door.
The seventies got under way with the downfall of a corrupt White House in a sinkhole called Watergate. Vietnam and Watergate seemed to signal a change in the American political landscape. The years that followed were characterized by a feeling of aimlessness. Under Gerald Ford (b. 1913), who replaced the disgraced Nixon, and Jimmy Carter (b. 1924), America suffered the indignity of seeing its massive power in a seeming decline. But this slide was not the result of a superpower confrontation with the archvillain Soviets. Instead, a series of smaller shocks undid the foundation: the forming of OPEC by major oil-producing countries to place a stranglehold on the world's oil supplies; the acts of international terrorists, who struck with seeming impunity at the United States and other western powers, culminating in the overthrow of the once-mighty Shah of Iran; and the imprisonment of American hostages in the American embassy in Teheran.
More than anything else, it was that apparent decline, reflected in America's economic doldrums, that brought forth a President who represented, to the majority of Americans, the cowboy in the white hat who they always believed would ride into town. After the doubt and turmoil produced by the Seventies, Ronald Reagan (b. 1911) seemed to embody that old-fashioned American can-do spirit. For many critics, the question was who was going to do what, and to whom? A throwback to Teddy Roosevelt and his big stick, Reagan also saw the White House as a "bully pulpit." His sermon called back the "good old days" - which, of course, only appeared so good in hindsight.
Though it is still too soon to assess properly the long-term impact of his presidency, Ronald Reagan has already begun to be judged by history. To those who admire him, he was the man who restored American prestige and economic stability, and forced the Soviet Union into structural changes through a massive buildup of American defenses. To critics, he was the President who slept through eight years in office while subordinates ran the show. In some cases, those underlings proved to be corrupt or simply cynical. In perhaps the most dangerous instance, a lieutenant colonel working in the White House was allowed to make his own foreign policy.
How Did Richard Nixon's Five-O'Clock Shadow Spoil His 1960 Campaign For President?
"If you give me a week, I might think of one." That's what President Eisenhower told a reporter who asked what major decisions Vice-President Richard Nixon (b. 1913) had participated in during their eight years together. Although Ike later said he was being facetious, he never really answered the question, and the remark left Nixon with egg on his face and the Democrats giddy.
That was in August 1960, as Nixon and John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) ran neck-and-neck in the polls. How many wavering Nixon votes did Ike's little joke torpedo? It would have taken only a shift of about a hundred thousand votes out of the record 68,832,818 cast to change the result and the course of contemporary events.
Most campaign historians cite Ike's cutting comment as a jab that drew blood, but that was not the knockout punch in this contest. Posterity points instead to the face-off between the contenders - the first televised debates in presidential campaign history - as the flurry of verbal and visual punches from which Nixon never recovered. In particular, the first of these four meetings is singled out as the blow that sent the Vice-President to the canvas. More than 70 million people watched the first of these face-to-face meetings. Or maybe "face-to-five-o'clock shadow" is more accurate.
Recovering from an infection that had hospitalized him for two weeks, Nixon was underweight and haggard-looking for the debate. Makeup artists attempted to conceal his perpetual five-o'clock shadow with something called "Lazy Shave" that only made him look more pasty-faced and sinister. Jack Kennedy, on the other hand, was the picture of youth and athletic vigor. While radio listeners thought there was no clear winner in the debates, television viewers were magnetized by Kennedy. If FDR was the master of radio, Kennedy was the first "telegenic" candidate, custom-tailored for the instant image-making of the television age.
Broadcast on September 26 from Chicago, the first debate focused on domestic affairs, an advantage for Kennedy because Nixon was acknowledged to be more experienced in international matters. It was Nixon, after all, who had stood face-to-face with Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow, angrily wagging a finger at the Soviet leader during their "kitchen debate" in 1959. But in the first TV debate, Kennedy had Nixon on the defensive by listing the shortcomings of the Eisenhower administration. With deft command of facts and figures, Kennedy impressed an audience that was skeptical because of his youth and inexperience. He stressed his campaign theme that the Republicans had America in "retreat," and he promised to get the country moving again.
The audience for the three subsequent debates fell off to around 50 million viewers. The impressions made by the first debate seemed to be most lasting. Kennedy got a boost in the polls and seemed to be pulling out in front, but the decision was still too close to call. Invisible through most of the contest, Eisenhower did some last-minute campaigning for Nixon, but it may have been too small an effort, too late.
Two events in October also had some impact. First, Republican Henry Cabot Lodge promised that there would be a Negro in the Nixon cabinet. Nixon had to disavow that pledge, and whatever white votes he won cost him black support. A second Kennedy boost among black voters came when Martin Luther King, Jr., was arrested prior to the final debate. Kennedy called King's wife, Coretta, to express his concern, and Robert Kennedy helped secure King's release on bail. Nixon decided to stay out of the case. King's father, who had previously stated he wouldn't vote for a Catholic, announced a shift to Kennedy. "I've got a suitcase of votes," said Martin Luther King, Sr., "and I'm going to take them to Mr. Kennedy and dump them in his lap." He did just that. When Kennedy heard of the senior King's earlier anti-Catholic remarks, he won points by humorously defusing the situation, commenting, "Imagine Martin Luther King having a bigot for a father. Well, we all have fathers, don't we?"
Kennedy certainly had a father. Joseph Kennedy, Sr., FDR's first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and later his ambassador to Great Britain, where his anti-Semitic and isolationist views won him no points, stayed in the background in the campaign. Bankrolling and string-pulling, Joseph Kennedy had orchestrated his son's career from the outset with his extensive network of friends in the media, the mob, and the Catholic church. A few examples: Writer John Hersey's "Survival," the now-deflated account of Kennedy's wartime heroics aboard PT-109, overlooked the fact that Kennedy and his crew were sleeping in a combat zone when a Japanese destroyer rammed them. Joe Kennedy made sure his son was decorated by a high-ranking navy official. When JFK ran for the House, Joe arranged for the Hersey article to appear in Reader's Digest and then made sure every voter in Kennedy's district got a copy. Publication of JFK's first book, then reviewed the book in the New York Times. Kennedy's second book, the best-selling and Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage, was the output of a committee of scholars and Kennedy speechwriter Theodore Sorensen.
Other friends of Joe Kennedy, like Henry Luce and William Randolph Hearst, had added to building the Kennedy image. Through Frank Sinatra, another Joe Kennedy crony, funds of dubious origin were funneled into the Kennedy war chest. Through Sinatra, JFK also met a young woman named Judith Campbell, who would soon become a regular sexual partner. What Kennedy didn't know at the time was that Judith Campbell was also bedding Mafia chieftain Sam Giancanna and a mob hit man named John Roselli. In a few months, they would all converge as Giancanna and Roselli were given a "contract" to pull off the CIA-planned assassination of Fidel Castro.
The debate; his father's war chest; his appeal to women (the public appeal, not the private one, which remained a well-protected secret); the newly important black vote; vice-presidential candidate Lyndon B. Johnson's role in delivering Texas and the rest of the South all played a part in what was the closest presidential election in modern history. Nixon actually won more states than Kennedy, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. Kennedy had sewn up the biggest electoral-vote states. The margin of difference in the popular vote was less than two-thirds of a percentage point.
But close only counts in horseshoes. Despite some Republican protests of voting fraud in Illinois, Nixon went back to California after telling reporters, "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore." America got its youngest President, his beautiful young wife, its youngest Attorney General in Jack's brother Robert F. Kennedy (1925-1968), and a new royal family whose regal intrigues were masked by sun-flooded pictures of family games of touch football.
American Voices
From John F. Kennedy's inaugural address (January 20, 1961):
Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans - born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage - and unwilling to witness 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 world. . . .
Now the trumpet summons us again - not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need - but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation" - a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.
. . . And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country.
What Happened At The Bay Of Pigs?
In March 1961, during his first hundred days in office, Kennedy announced a program that perfectly symbolized his inaugural appeal to "ask what you can do for your country." The Peace Corps would dispatch the energy of American youth and know-how to assist developing nations. Directed by another family courtier, Sargent Shriver, husband of John's sister Eunice, the Peace Corps was the new generation's answer to Communism, promoting democracy with education, technology, and idealism instead of the fifties rhetoric of "containment." Linked with the Alliance for Progress, a sort of Marshall Plan aimed at Latin America, the Peace Corps was the visible symbol of the vigor that Kennedy wanted to breathe into a stale American system.
What the Peace Corps idealism masked was a continuing policy of obsessive anti-Communism that would lead to one of the great disasters in American foreign policy. This failure would bring America to its most dangerous moment since the war in Korea and, in the view of many historians, helped create the mind-set that sucked America into the Vietnamese quicksand. It took its unlikely but historically fitting name from an obscure spot on the Cuban coast, Bahia de Cochinos. The Bay of Pigs.
If the operation had not been so costly and its failed results so dangerously important to future American policy, the Bay of Pigs fiasco might seem comical, a fictional creation of some satirist trying to create an implausible CIA invasion scenario.
The plan behind the Bay of Pigs sounded simple when put to the new President by Allen Dulles (1893-1961), the legendary CIA director and a holdover from the Eisenhower era, when his brother, John Foster Dulles (1888-1959), had been the influential Secretary of State. It was Allen Dulles's underlings who dreamed up the Cuban operation involving a force of highly trained and well-equipped anti-Castro Cuban exiles called La Brigada. Supported by CIA-planted insurgents in Cuba who would blow up bridges and knock out radio stations, the Brigade would land on the beaches of Cuba and set off a popular revolt against Fidel Castro, eliminating the man who had become the greatest thorn in the paw of the American lion. The most secret aspect of the plan, as a Senate investigation revealed much later, was the CIA plot to assassinate Castro using Mafia hit men Sam Giancanna and John Roselli, who were also sleeping with Judith Campbell, the President's steady partner. The Mafia had its own reasons for wanting to rid Cuba of Castro. (Giancanna and Roselli were both murdered mob-style in 1976. Giancanna was assassinated before he could testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee; Roselli testified, but his decomposing body was later found floating in an oil drum off Florida. Both men were believed to possess information connecting the Mafia to the assassination of President Kennedy.)
For most of the century, since Teddy Roosevelt and company had turned Cuba into an American fiefdom in the Caribbean, the island's economy was in nearly total American control. Almost all of the sugar, mining, cattle, and oil wealth of Cuba was in American hands. The Spanish-American war had also given the United States a huge naval base at Guantanamo. But American gangsters had a rich share, too. While American businessmen controlled the Cuban economy, the casinos and hotels of Havana, a hot spot in the Caribbean, were controlled by the Mafia from New Orleans and Las Vegas.
All that had come to an end in 1958, when Fidel Castro and Che Guevara marched out of the hills with a tiny army and sent dictator Fulgencio Batista into exile. At first, Castro got good press notices in the United States and made a goodwill visit to Washington, professing that he was no Communist. But that didn't last long.
By 1959, Castro had formed a ruthless, Moscow-supported military regime that jailed and murdered dissidents, ended any vestige of legal process, and put Cuba on a totally socialist footing. America was now Cuba's archenemy. Betrayed by Castro, many of the rebels who had helped Castro to power found their way to exile in Miami where they were taken into the welcoming embrace of the CIA.
Cuban Communism became a campaign issue in 1960 as Nixon and Kennedy tried to outdo each other on the Castro issue. As they campaigned, the plans for La Brigada's invasion were being hatched by the CIA, a plan that had the enthusiastic encouragement of Vice-President Richard Nixon and the nominal approval of Eisenhower. When Kennedy arrived in office, the plans only awaited the presidential okay. Briefed by Dulles himself before his inauguration, Kennedy agreed that preparations should continue. After his inauguration, momentum took over.
Franklin D. Roosevelt had his "brain trust" of academics who offered advice and counsel - which Roosevelt didn't always follow. Likewise, Kennedy surrounded himself with a group of elite academics - professors and Rhodes scholars among them. Unlike FDR's brain trust, Kennedy's "best and brightest," as they were dubbed in David Halberstam's book tracing the path of American involvement in Vietnam, were going to have enormous and disastrous influence on the course of American policy. For the most part, the best and the brightest went along with what the CIA had guaranteed was a successful plan for eliminating Castro.
The CIA planners cockily pointed to their successful 1954 Guatemala coup that had installed a pro-American regime there as proof of their abilities. But Cuba, as they were sadly going to learn, was not Guatemala. From the Cuban plan's outset, the Agency men in charge of the invasion (including a fanatical CIA operative named E. Howard Hunt, who also wrote third-rate spy novels and would later be involved in the Watergate debacle) bungled and blustered. Almost every step of the plan was misguided. The CIA overestimated themselves, underestimated Castro and the popular support he enjoyed, relied on sketchy or nonexistent information, made erroneous assumptions, and misrepresented the plot to the White House.
The secret invasion proved to be one of the worst-kept secrets in America. A number of journalists had uncovered most of the plan, and several editors, including those at the New York Times, were persuaded by the White House to withhold the information. When the curtain finally came down, it was on a tragedy.
On April 17, 1961, some 1,400 Cubans, poorly trained, underequipped, and uninformed of their destination, were set down on the beach at the Bay of Pigs. Aerial photos of the beaches were misinterpreted by CIA experts, and Cuban claims that there were dangerous coral reefs that would prevent boats from landing were ignored by invasion planners, who put American technology above the Cubans' firsthand knowledge. CIA information showing the target beaches to be unpopulated was years out of date. The bay happened to be Fidel's favorite fishing spot, and Castro had begun building a resort there, including a seaside cabin for himself.
The invasion actually began two days earlier with an air strike against Cuban airfields, meant to destroy Castro's airpower. It failed to do that, and instead put Castro on the alert. It also prompted a crackdown on many suspected anti-Castro Cubans who might have been part of the anticipated popular uprising on which the Agency was counting. Assuming the success of the air strike without bothering to confirm it, the Agency didn't know Castro had a number of planes still operable, including two jet trainers capable of destroying the lumbering old bombers the CIA had provided to the invaders. But these planes wouldn't have counted for much if the air "umbrella" that the CIA had promised to La Brigada had materialized. President Kennedy's decision to keep all American personnel out of the invasion squashed that, and Castro's fliers had a field day strafing and bombing the invasion "fleet." The CIA-leased "navy" that was to deliver the invasion force and its supplies turned out to be five leaky, listing ships, two of which were quickly sunk by Castro's small air force, with most of the invasion's supplies aboard.
Cuban air superiority was responsible for only part of the devastation. Castro was able to pour thousands of troops into the area. Even though many of them were untried cadets or untrained militia, they were highly motivated, well-equipped troops supported by tanks and heavy artillery. While the invasion force fought bravely, exacting heavy casualties in Castro's troops, they lacked ammunition and, most important, the air support promised by the CIA. Eventually they were pinned down on the beaches, while American navy fliers, the numbers on their planes obscured, could only sit and wonder why they had to watch their Cuban allies being cut to pieces. U.S. ships, their identifying numbers also pointlessly obscured, lay near the invasion beach, also handcuffed. Frustrated naval commanders bitterly resented their orders not to fire. In Washington, Kennedy feared that any direct U.S. combat involvement might send the Russians into West Berlin, precipitating World War III.
The sad toll was 114 Cuban invaders and many more defenders killed in the fighting; 1,189 others from La Brigada were captured and held prisoner until they were ransomed from Cuba by Robert Kennedy for food and medical supplies. Four American fliers, members of the Alabama Air National Guard in CIA employ, also died in the invasion, but the American government never acknowledged their existence or their connection to the operation.
What Was The Cuban Missile Crisis?
Those were the immediate losses. The long-term damage was more costly. American prestige and the goodwill Kennedy had fostered around the world dissipated overnight. Adlai Stevenson, the former presidential contender serving as the U.S. representative to the United Nations, was shamed by having to lie to the General Assembly about the operation because he was misled by the White House. In Moscow, Kennedy was perceived as a weakling. Soviet leader Nikita Kruschchev (1894-1971) immediately saw the Bay of Pigs defeat as the opening to start arming Cuba more heavily, precipitating the Missile Crisis of October 1962.
When American spy flights produced evidence of Soviet missile sites in Cuba, America and the Soviet Union were brought to the brink of war. For thirteen tense days, the United States and the USSR stood toe-to-toe as Kennedy, forced to prove himself after the Bay of Pigs, demanded that the missile sites be dismantled and removed from Cuba. To back up his ultimatum, Kennedy ordered a naval blockade to "quarantine" Cuba, and readied a full-scale American invasion of the island. On Sunday, October 28, Radio Moscow announced that the arms would be crated and returned to Moscow. Disaster was averted, temporarily.
The damage done to U.S. credibility by the Bay of Pigs fiasco had seemingly been undone. But the lesson of the foolishness of committing American military support to anti-Communism hadn't really sunk in. Kennedy was still willing to make an anti-Communist stand in the world. The next scene would be as distant from America as Cuba was close, a small corner of Asia called Vietnam.
What Was The Feminine Mystique?
Every so often a book comes along that really rattles America's cage. the 1940s and 1950s, John Hersey's Hiroshima and the Kinsey studies, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. All of these books delivered karate chops to the American perception of reality.
In 1963 it was a book that introduced America to what the author called "the problem without a name." Betty Friedan (b. 1921), a summa cum laude Smith graduate and free-lance writer who was living out the fifties suburban dream of house, husband, and family, dubbed this malady The Feminine Mystique.
"The problem lay buried," wrote Friedan, "unspoken for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning.... Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slip-cover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night - she was afraid to ask even herself the silent question - 'Is this all?'"
The book reached millions of readers. Suddenly, in garden clubs, coffee klatches, and college sorority houses, talk turned away from man-catching, mascara, and muffin recipes. Women were instead discussing the fact that society's institutions - government, mass media and advertising, medicine and psychiatry, education and organized religion - were systematically barring them from becoming anything more than housewives and mothers.
Friedan's book helped jump-start a stalled women's-rights movement. Lacking a motivating central cause and aggressive leadership since passage of the Nineteenth Amendment after World War I, organized feminism in the United States was practically nonexistent. In spite of forces that brought millions of women into the work force - like the wartime factory jobs that made "Rosie the Riveter" an American heroine - women were expected to return to the kitchens after the menfolk came home from defending democracy. Although individuals like Eleanor Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, Margaret Sanger, and Frances Perkins - the first woman Cabinet officer and a key player in FDR's New Deal - were proven achievers, most women were expected to docilely accept the task of managing house and family, or to hold a proper "woman's job" like teaching, secretarial work, or, for the poorer classes, factory labor. In all of these jobs, women were invisible. Once married, of course, the "ideal woman" stopped working. The idea of career as fulfillment was dismissed as nonsense, and that minority of pioneer "career women" was viewed practically as a class of social deviants. Overnight, Friedan made women question those assumptions.
white, middle-class phenomenon. It failed to explore the problems of working-class, poor, and minority women, whose worries ran far deeper than personal discontent. It also ignored the fact that a substantial portion of American women were satisfied in the role that Friedan had indicted.
But the book was like shock treatment. It galvanized American women into action at the same moment that an increasingly aggressive civil rights movement was moving to the forefront of American consciousness. And it came just as the government was taking its first awkward steps toward addressing the issue of inequality of the sexes. In one of his first acts, President Kennedy had formed a Commission on the Status of Women, chaired by the extraordinary Eleanor Roosevelt, then in her seventies. In 1964 a more substantial boost came when women actually received federal protection from discrimination because the legislative tactics of one crusty conservative congressman backfired.
Howard W. Smith of Virginia, an eighty-one-year-old vestige of the Old South, was looking for ways to shoot down the 1964 Civil Rights Act with "killer amendments." To the laughter of his House colleagues, Smith added "sex" to the list of "race, color, religion or national origin," the groups that the bill had been designed to protect. Assuming that nobody would vote to protect equality of the sexes, Smith was twice struck by lightning. The bill not only passed, but now protected women as well as blacks. Women were soon bringing appeals to the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, even though its director complained that the bill was "conceived out of wedlock" and wasn't meant to prevent sex discrimination. That complaint came too late. Women filed more discrimination complaints with the EEOC than did any other single group. It was the foot in the door, and a new generation of activist women was ready to push the door harder.
In 1966, three hundred charter members formed the National Organization of Women (NOW) with Friedan as its first president. In the years ahead, NOW spearheaded a movement that would splinter and change as younger women grew more angry and defiant, radicalized by the same forces that were altering the civil rights and antiwar movements. But it is safe to say that no movement so fundamentally altered America's social makeup as the feminist movement of the past three decades. The workplace. Marriage and family life. The way we have babies - or choose not to have them. Few corners of American life were left untouched by the basic shifts in attitude that feminism created.
Of course, the process is far from complete. The federal government, from the White House to Congress and the judiciary, is still largely male, middle-aged, white, and wealthy. The upper crust of American corporate management remains male-dominated. A considerable gap in salaries still exists between men and women. And it is still presumed impossible or at least unlikely for a woman to be elected President in this country, even though forceful leaders like Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, and Corazon Aquino have shown they are capable of acting as effectively, and even as ruthlessly, as any man.
Thirty years after Friedan gave a name to the problem, the greatest irony may be the new yearning created for a generation of younger women brought up to put careers first and families second. In a strange twist on the question plaguing Friedan's generation, many successful women in their thirties - unmarried, childless women, or career-bound mothers - are looking at their designer business suits, corporate perks, and power offices with a new stirring of dissatisfaction. It is now their turn to wonder about that silent question, "Is this all?"
American Voices
From Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington, D.C. (August 1963):
I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal."
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor's lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.
I have a dream today....
King's most memorable speech was the culmination of the massive march on Washington, D.C., that drew a quarter of a million blacks and whites to the capital. In his biography of King, Bearing the Cross, author David J. Garrow calls the speech the "clarion call that conveyed the moral power of the movement's cause to the millions who had watched the live national network coverage. Now, more than ever before . . . white America was confronted with the undeniable justice of blacks' demands." The march was followed by passage of the Civil Rights Act, signed into law by Lyndon Johnson in June 1964, and the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Dr. King in October 1964.
Who Killed JFK?
Americans probe this question like searching for a missing tooth. We keep running our tongue over the empty space.
This question has inspired a cottage industry of conspiracy theorists. In the view of an American majority, none of them has yet to answer the question to full and verifiable satisfaction. Some innate paranoia in the American makeup finds it far more appealing to believe that Kennedy's death was the result of some intricately constructed Byzantine conspiracy. The list of possible suspects reads like an old-fashioned Chinese restaurant menu. Just choose one from Column A and one from Column B. The choices include a smorgasbord of unsavory characters with the motive and ability to kill Kennedy: teamsters and gangsters; Cubans, both pro- and anti-Castro; white supremacists; CIA renegades; KGB moles; and, of course, lone assassins.
The conspiracy theories linger because the basic facts of the assassination remain shrouded in controversy. What is true is that JFK went to Texas in the fall of 1963 to shore up southern political support for a 1964 reelection bid. The Texas trip began well in San Antonio and Houston, where the President and the First Lady were met by enthusiastic crowds. Everyone agreed that Dallas would be the tough town politically, and several advisers told Kennedy not to go. A few months before, the good folks of Dallas had spat on Adlai Stevenson, JFK's UN ambassador. But even in Dallas on November 22, things were better than expected, and crowds cheered the passing motorcade. In the fateful limousine, Texas Governor John Connally's wife leaned over and told the President, "Well, you can't say Dallas doesn't love you."
Then the car made its turn in front of the Texas Book Depository and at least three shots rang out. Kennedy and Governor Connally were hit. The limousine carrying them sped off to the hospital. The President died and Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973) took the oath of office aboard Air Force One as a shocked and bloodied Jackie Kennedy looked on. Within hours, following the murder of a Dallas policeman, Lee Harvey Oswald was in custody and under interrogation. But two days later, as Oswald was being moved to a safer jail, Jack Ruby, owner of a Dallas strip joint, jumped from the crowd of policemen and shot Oswald dead in full view of a disbelieving national television audience.
This is where controversy takes over. A grieving, stunned nation couldn't cope with these events. Rumors and speculation began to fly as the country learned of the strange life of Lee Harvey Oswald - that he was an ex-Marine who had defected to Russia and come back with a Russian wife; that he was a Marxist and a Castro admirer; that he had recently been to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City.
Responding to these rumors, which were growing to include the suggestion that Lyndon Johnson himself was part of the conspiracy, LBJ decided to appoint a commission to investigate the assassination and to determine whether any conspiracy existed. After his first week in office, Johnson asked Chief Justice Earl Warren to head the investigation. Warren reluctantly accepted the job when Johnson said that he feared nuclear war might result if the Cubans or Soviets proved to be behind the assassination.
The Warren Commission spent ten months examining the deaths of Kennedy and Oswald. Its report, released in September 1964, concluded that Oswald had acted alone and there was no evidence of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign.
But twenty-five years after the Warren Commission tried to calm a very skittish nation, those findings are still viewed skeptically by a majority of the American public. The commission's detective work left much to be desired, and in later years, major new revelations followed. In particular, shocking facts were produced by the investigations into the activities of the CIA and the FBI during the 1970s. Among other startling discoveries, these investigations by a presidential commission and Congress uncovered the CIA's plans for assassinating Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders; that Kennedy's mistress Judith Campbell was also involved with the two gangsters hired by the CIA to kill Castro; and that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had ordered a cover-up of Bureau failures in the Oswald investigation in an effort to protect the Bureau's integrity and public image.
Were there only three shots fired by someone in the Texas Book Depository? Was Oswald the gunman who fired them? Or were other shots fired from the grassy knoll overlooking the route of the motorcade? Was Jack Ruby, who was both connected to the Dallas underworld and a friend of Dallas policemen, simply acting, as he said, to spare Mrs. Kennedy the pain of returning to Dallas to testify at a murder trial? Who were the two "Latins" that a New Orleans prostitute said she encountered on their way to Dallas a few days before the murder?
Dozens of books written during the past twenty-five years, from attorney Mark Lane's Rush to Judgment and Edward Jay Epstein's Inquest to David Lifton's Best Evidence and David Scheim's Contract on America: The Mafia Murder of President John F. Kennedy, have probed these and other "mysteries." All have relied on flaws in the Warren investigation and on new material the Warren Commission never saw to support a variety of possible conspiracies. All have been greeted by a public feeding frenzy.
Far less sensational is Final Disclosure, a 1989 book that refutes all of these theories, written by David W. Belin, the counsel to the Warren Commission and executive director of the Rockefeller Commission investigating abuses by the CIA. Obviously Belin, as a key staff member of the Warren Commission, has a personal interest to protect. But his book is well-reasoned and amply supported by evidence. Examining the Warren Commission's total evidence, the subsequent CIA and FBI revelations, and the analysis of a controversial audio tape that supposedly proved the existence of a fourth shot and a second gunman, Belin deflates the most serious charges brought by the conspiracists, often by showing they have made highly selective use of evidence and testimony.
Even so, that missing-tooth feeling remains. Can anyone say for sure that Oswald and then Ruby acted alone? It seems that few people are willing to accept that conclusion.
American Voices
From Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" speech (May 1964):
The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning.
The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce, but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.
It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what it adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.
In this speech, delivered during has election campaign against Republican Barry Goldwater, Johnson laid out the foundation for the ambitious domestic social program he carried out after his landslide victory over the conservative senator from Arizona. Johnson proposed attacking racial injustice through economic and educational reforms and government programs aimed at ending the cycle of poverty. The legislative record he then compiled was impressive, although social historians argue over its ultimate effectiveness. The Office of Economic Opportunity was created. Kennedy's proposed Civil Rights Bill was passed, followed by a Voting Rights Act and the establishments of Project Head Start, the Job Corps, and Medicaid and Medicare. But while Johnson was carrying out the most ambitious social revolution since FDR's New Deal, he was also leading the country deeper and deeper into Vietnam. And that futile and disastrous path, more than any of his domestic initiatives, would mark Johnson's place in history.
Did Mississippi Burning Really Happen?
If Hollywood gets its way, the civil-rights movement was saved when Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe rolled into town like two gunslinging western marshals. In this revisionist cinematic version of history, two FBI men bring truth and vigilante justice to the nasty Ku Klux Klan while a bunch of bewildered Negroes meekly stand by, shuffling and avoiding trouble.
The 1989 film Mississippi Burning was an emotional roller coaster. It was difficult to watch without being moved, breaking into a sweat, and finally cheering when the forces of good terrorized the redneck klansmen into telling where the bodies of three murdered civil-rights workers were buried. The movie gave audiences the feeling of seeing history unfold. But in the grand tradition of American filmmaking, this version of events had as much to do with reality as did D. W. Griffith's racist "classic," Birth of a Nation.
The movie opens with the backroads murder of three young civil-rights activists in the summer of 1964. That much is true. Working to register black voters, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two whites from the North, and James Chaney, a black southerner, disappeared after leaving police custody in Philadelphia, Mississippi. In the film, two FBI agents arrive to investigate, but get nowhere as local rednecks stonewall the FBI and blacks are too fearful to act. The murderers are not exposed until Agent Anderson (Gene Hackman), a former southern sheriff who has joined the FBI, begins a campaign of illegal tactics to terrorize the locals into revealing where the bodies are buried and who is responsible.
It is a brilliantly made, plainly manipulative film that hits all the right emotional notes: white liberal guilt over the treatment of blacks; disgust at the white-trash racism of the locals; excitement at Hackman's Rambo-style tactics; and, finally, vindication in the murderers' convictions.
The problem is that besides the murders, few of the events depicted happened that way. Pressed by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sent a large contingent of agents to Mississippi, but they learned nothing. The case was only broken when Klan informers were offered a $30,000 bribe and the bodies of the three men were found in a nearby dam site. Twenty-one men were named in the indictment, including the local police chief and his deputy. But local courts later dismissed the confessions of the two klansmen as hearsay. The Justice Department persisted by bringing conspiracy charges against eighteen of the men. Tried before a judge who had once compared blacks to chimpanzees, seven of the accused were nonetheless convicted and sentenced to jail terms ranging from three to ten years.
Although J. Edgar Hoover put on a good public show of anti-Klan FBI work, it masked his real obsession at the time. To the Director, protecting civil-rights workers was a waste of his Bureau's time. Although the film depicts a black agent, the only blacks employed by the Bureau during Hoover's tenure as head, were his chauffeurs. The FBI was far more interested in trying to prove that Martin Luther King was a Communist and that the civil-rights movement was an organized Communist front. Part of this effort was the high-level attempt to eavesdrop on King's private life, an effort that did prove that the civil-rights leader had his share of white female admirers willing to contribute more than just money to the cause. Hoover's hatred of King boiled over at one point when he called King "the most notorious liar" in the country. Another part of this effort involved sending King a threatening note suggesting he commit suicide.
What Was The Tonkin Resolution?
When is a war not a war? When the President decides it isn't, and Congress goes along.
America was already twenty years into its Vietnam commitment when Lyndon Johnson and Kennedy's best and brightest holdovers decided to find a new version of Pearl Harbor. An incident was needed to pull American firepower into the war with at least a glimmer of legitimacy. It came in August 1964 with a brief encounter in the Gulf of Tonkin, the waters off the coast of North Vietnam.
In the civil war that was raging between North and South since the French withdrawal from Indochina and the partition of Vietnam in 1954, the United States had committed money, material, advice, and, by the end of 1963, some 15,000 military advisers in support of the anti-Communist Saigon government. The American CIA was also in the thick of things, having helped foster the coup that toppled prime minister Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963 and then acting surprised when Diem was executed by the army officers who overthrew him.
Among the other "advice" the United States provided to its South Vietnamese allies was to teach them commando tactics. In 1964, CIA-trained guerrillas from the South began to attack the North for months in covert acts of sabotage. Code-named Plan 34-A, these commando raids failed to undermine North Vietnam's military strength, so the mode of attack was shifted to hit-and-run operations by small torpedo boats. To support these assaults, the U.S. Navy posted warships in the Gulf of Tonkin, loaded with electronic eavesdropping equipment enabling them to monitor North Vietnamese military operations and provide intelligence to the South Vietnamese commandos.
One of the American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin was the destroyer USS Maddox. Operating approximately ten miles off the coast of North Vietnam, the Maddox was within North Vietnamese territorial waters rather than in international waters, as the United States would later claim. From behind an island, three North Vietnamese patrol boats suddenly appeared and sped toward the Maddox, which responded by firing on the boats and calling for air support from the nearby carrier Ticonderoga. Minutes later, jet fighters joined the attack, sinking one of the patrol boats and crippling the other two. The Maddox withdrew to open waters without damage or casualties, and the jets returned to the carrier.
Coming as it did in the midst of LBJ's 1964 campaign against hawkish Republican Barry Goldwater, President Johnson felt the incident called for a tough response. Johnson had the navy send the Maddox and a second destroyer, the Turner Joy, back into the Gulf of Tonkin. A radarman on the Turner Joy saw some blips, and that boat opened fire. On the Maddox there were also reports of incoming torpedoes, and the Maddox began to fire. There was never any confirmation that either ship had actually been attacked. Later, the radar blips would be attributed to weather conditions and jittery nerves among the crew.
According to Stanley Karnow's Vietnam: A History, "Even Johnson privately expressed doubts only a few days after the second attack supposedly took place, confiding to an aide, 'Hell, those dumb stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish.'"
But that didn't stop Lyndon Johnson. Without waiting for a review of the situation, he ordered an air strike against North Vietnam in "retaliation" for the "attacks" on the U.S. ships. American jets flew more than sixty sorties against targets in North Vietnam. One bitter result of these air raids was the capture of downed pilot Everett Alvarez, Jr., the first American POW of the Vietnam War. He would remain in Hanoi prisons for eight years.
President Johnson followed up the air strike by calling for passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. This proposal gave the President the authority to "take all necessary measures" to repel attacks against U.S. forces and to "prevent further aggression." The resolution not only gave Johnson the powers he needed to increase American commitment to Vietnam, but allowed him to blunt Goldwater's accusations that Johnson was "timid before Communism." The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed the House unanimously after only forty minutes of debate. In the Senate, there were only two voices in opposition. What Congress did not know was that the resolution had been drafted several months before the Tonkin incident took place.
Congress, which alone possesses the constitutional authority to declare war, had handed that power over to a man who was not a bit reluctant to use it. One of the senators who voted against the Tonkin Resolution, Oregon's Wayne Morse, later said, "I believe that history will record that we have made a great mistake in subverting and circumventing the Constitution." After the vote, Walt Rostow, an adviser to Lyndon Johnson, remarked, "We don't know what happened, but it had the desired result."
Milestones in the Vietnam War
1950
While U.S. troops fight in Korea, President Truman grants military aid to France for its war against Communist rebels in Indochina. The United States will ultimately pay the lion's share - 75 to 80 percent - of France's military costs in the war against the Ho Chi Minh-led Viet Minh rebels.
1954
Although the use of an atomic bomb is actively considered, President Eisenhower decides against providing direct military support to the French in their stand at Dienbienphu. Eisenhower instead favors continued aid for France in Indochina, and tells the press in April that Southeast Asia may otherwise fall to Communism. Says Eisenhower, if you "have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly."
May
The French stronghold at Dienbienphu is overrun by Vietnamese rebels. The French withdraw from Indochina, and Vietnam is partitioned at a conference in Geneva. A political settlement to the country's division is left to a future election that will never take place. The United States continues its direct involvement in Vietnam by sending $100 million in aid to the anti-Communist Saigon government led by Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem.
1955
Direct aid and military training are provided to the Saigon government. Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos receive more than $200 million in U.S. aid this year.
October
The Republic of Vietnam is proclaimed by Prime Minister Diem following a rigged election organized by the United States.
1959
July 8
Two American soldiers, Major Dale Buis and Master Sergeant Chester Ovnard, are killed by Vietcong at Bienhoa. They are the first Americans to die in Vietnam during this era. By year's end, there are some 760 U.S. military personnel in Vietnam.
1961
After touring Vietnam, President Kennedy's advisers, Walt Rostow and General Maxwell Taylor, recommend sending 8,000 U.S. combat troops there. Instead, President Kennedy chooses to send more equipment and advisers. By year's end, there are 3,205 U.S. military personnel in Vietnam.
1962
February 6
The American Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) is formed on February 6, based in Saigon.
May
President Kennedy sends 5,000 Marines and fifty jets to Thailand to counter Communist expansion in Laos. The number of American advisers is increased to nearly 12,000.
1963
January
The Army of the Republic of South Vietnam suffers a major defeat against a smaller Vietcong force at the Battle of Ap Bac. The performance of the Vietnamese troops and commanders, under American guidance, is disastrous.
May-August
Anti-government demonstrations by Buddhist monks provoke violent reprisals. In protest, numerous monks commit suicide by setting themselves afire.
November
General Duong Van Minh and other South Vietnamese officers stage a coup and overthrow the Diem government with U.S. knowledge and CIA assistance. Diem and his brother are murdered. Three weeks later, President Kennedy is assassinated.
December
By the end of the year, President Johnson has increased the number of American advisers to 16,300, and the United States has sent $500 million to South Vietnam in this year alone. The CIA begins training South Vietnamese guerrillas as part of an ambitious covert sabotage operation against the North, under American direction.
1964
January
Lieutenant General William Westmoreland (b. 1914) is appointed deputy commander of Military Assistance Command Vietnam.
January 30
General Nguyen Khanh seizes power in Saigon; General Minh is retained as a figurehead chief of state.
June
Westmoreland is promoted to commander of MACV.
August 2
While conducting electronic surveillance ten miles off North Vietnam, in the Gulf of Tonkin, the American destroyer Maddox is pursued by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats. As the patrol boats close in, the Maddox opens fire and the patrol boats respond with torpedoes, which miss. The destroyer calls for air support from the nearby carrier Ticonderoga, and three United States fighter planes attack the boats. The Maddox sinks one patrol boat, cripples the other two, and withdraws. Two days later the Maddox and a second destroyer, the Turner Joy, are ordered back to Tonkin to "reassert freedom of international waters."
August 4
President Johnson reports to congressional leaders that a second attack has been made on the Maddox, although this attack was never confirmed and was later shown not to have taken place.
August 5
U.S. planes bomb North Vietnam in retaliation for the "attacks" on the U.S. ships. The American bombing mission is called "limited in scale," but more than sixty sorties are flown, destroying oil depots and patrol boats. Two American planes are shot down and Everett Alvarez is captured, the first American prisoner of war in Vietnam. He is held for more than eight years.
August 7
By a unanimous vote in the House, and with only two dissenting votes in the Senate, Congress passes the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving President Johnson powers to "take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression." Johnson later says the resolution was "like grandma's nightshirt - it covered everything."
August 26
President Johnson is nominated at the Democratic National Convention and chooses Hubert Humphrey as his running mate. Pledging before the election to "seek no wider war," Johnson defeats Republican candidate Barry Goldwater in a landslide, with a plurality of 15.5 million votes.
September
UN Secretary General U Thant proposes mediating talks with North Vietnam to avert a war. Withholding some information from Johnson, American officials reject these negotiations.
October 30
In a Vietcong attack on the U.S. airbase at Bien Hoa, six B-57 bombers are destroyed and five Americans are killed.
December 31
The number of American military advisers rises to 23,300.
1965
February 7
Following a Vietcong attack on a U.S. base at Pleiku in which eight Americans are killed, President Johnson orders air raids against North Vietnam and the beginning of a new round of escalation in the war, in what is named Operation Flaming Dart. Communist guerrillas then attack another American base, and Flaming Dart II is ordered in retaliation.
February 24
The United States begins Operation Rolling Thunder, the sustained bombing of North Vietnam.
March 8
Two battalions of American marines land and are assigned to protect the airbase at Danang. They are the first American combat troops in Vietnam.
April 7
President Johnson calls for talks with Hanoi to end the war. The plan is rejected by Hanoi, which says any settlement must be based on their Vietcong program.
April 15
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) sponsor a large antiwar rally in Washington.
June 11
Air Vice-Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky, a flamboyant young officer, takes over as prime minister of a South Vietnamese military regime.
November 14-16
In the first major conventional clash of the war, U.S. forces defeat North Vietnamese units in the Ia Drang Valley.
December 25
President Johnson suspends bombing in an attempt to get the North to negotiate. By year's end, American troop strength is nearly 200,000, combat losses total 636 Americans killed, and at home, draft quotas have been doubled.
1966
January 31
The bombing of the North is resumed after failure of the "peace offensive" that was designed to promote negotiations.
March 10
In Hue and Danang, Buddhist monks demonstrate against the Saigon regime. Both cities are taken over by government troops.
June 29
American planes bomb oil depots near Haiphong and Hanoi, in response to North Vietnamese infiltration into the South to aid the Vietcong.
September 23
The U.S. military command in Vietnam announces that it is using chemical defoliants, Agent Orange among them, to destroy Communist cover.
October 25
A conference between Johnson and heads of six allied nations involved in Vietnam (Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, New Zealand, South Korea, and South Vietnam) issues a peace plan calling for the end of North Vietnamese aggression. By year's end, American troop strength in Vietnam is nearly 400,000.
1967
January 5
American casualties in Vietnam for 1966 are announced: 5,008 killed and 30,093 wounded. (Totals since 1961 are 6,664 killed, 37,738 wounded.)
January 8
Thirty thousand combined American and South Vietnamese troops begin Operation Cedar Falls, an offensive against enemy positions in the "Iron Triangle." (Among the U.S. battalion commanders in this operation is General Alexander Haig.)
January 28
The North Vietnamese announce that U.S. bombing must stop before there can be peace talks.
July 7
The Joint Economic Committee of Congress reports that the war effort created "havoc" in the U.S. economy during 1966.
August
Testifying before Congress, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara says bombing of North Vietnam is ineffective.
September
Major Communist offensives begin. General Westmoreland fortifies Khe Sanh.
October 21
Two days of antiwar protests take place in Washington, and are the subject of Norman Mailer's book Armies of the Night.
December 8
The wave of antiwar protests becomes more organized and active. In New York, 585 protestors are arrested, including Dr. Benjamin Spock and poet Allen Ginsburg. Spock and four other protesters issue A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority, later used as the basis for Spock's prosecution by the government. In the following days of anti-draft protests, arrests are made in New Haven, Cincinnati, Madison, Wisconsin, and Manchester, New Hampshire. At year's end, U.S. troop strength stands at nearly half a million.
1968
January 21
The Battle of Khe Sanh. A strategic hamlet that General Westmoreland had heavily fortified and stockpiled with ammunition as a future staging point for attacks on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the Communist supply route from the North, Khe Sanh becomes the scene of one of the war's most controversial sieges. When Vietcong and North Vietnamese regulars begin the siege of American forces at Khe Sanh, it is seen by many Americans, including Westmoreland, President Johnson, and the media as a repeat of the 1954 attack on the French stronghold at Dienbienphu. Westmoreland and Johnson are committed to preventing such a disaster, and Johnson tells one of his senior aides, "I don't want any damn Dinbinphoo." A military catastrophe such as the French suffered is averted as Khe Sanh is heavily reinforced and supported by massive B-52 bombings. But at home, Americans watch the siege unfold like a nightly TV serial. Fought in the midst of the Tet Offensive (see below), the battle for Khe Sanh seems to be one more example of the resolve of the Vietnamese, who ultimately lost some ten to fifteen thousand men at Khesanh against 205 Americans killed. The siege lasts until April. Ironically, the base at Khe Sanh will be abandoned one year later, when a planned strike at the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos is cancelled.
January 23
The intelligence vessel USS Pueblo is captured by North Korea.
January 31
The Tet Offensive. Although a brief truce is set to celebrate the Vietnamese lunar New Year holiday, the Vietcong launch a major offensive throughout South Vietnam, and the American embassy in Saigon is attacked. Although most of the attacks are eventually repulsed, Tet is seen in the United States as a defeat and a symbol of the Vietcong's ability to strike at will anywhere in the country. It also damages the optimistic views of the war's progress that General Westmoreland and other American military leaders have been bringing back to Congress and the American people.
February 25
After twenty-six days of fighting since the Tet Offensive began, the city of Hue is recaptured by American and South Vietnamese forces. Mass graves reveal that an enormous atrocity was committed by the retreating Vietcong and North Vietnamese who killed thousands of civilians suspected of supporting the Saigon government.
February 29
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara resigns after concluding that the United States cannot win the war. He is replaced by Clark Clifford.
March 12
Senator Eugene McCarthy, an outspoken opponent of the war, nearly defeats President Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, a stunning setback for Johnson.
March 16
Following McCarthy's near upset of Johnson, Senator Robert F. Kennedy announces that he will campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.
March 31
In an extraordinary television address, President Johnson announces a partial bombing halt, offers peace talks, and stuns the nation by saying he will not run again.
April 4
Martin Luther King, Jr., is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.
April 23
At New York's Columbia University, members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) seize five buildings in protest of Columbia's involvement in war-related research.
May 10
Peace talks begin in Paris between the United States and North Vietnam.
June 6
Following his victory in the California primary, Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated by Sirhan B. Sirhan.
June 14
Dr. Benjamin Spock is convicted of conspiracy to aid draft evasion. (The conviction is later overturned.)
August 26
The Democratic National Convention opens in Chicago. In the midst of antiwar protests and violent police response, the Democrats nominate Hubert Humphrey.
October 31
President Johnson orders an end to bombing of the North, in an attempt to break the stalemate at Paris. Progress at Paris will presumably help the chances of the Democratic ticket of Humphrey-Muskie.
November 6
In one of the closest presidential elections, Richard Nixon defeats Hubert Humphrey, with third-party candidate George Wallace drawing more than 9 million votes. At year's end, American troop strength is at 540,000.
1969
January
Paris peace talks are expanded to include the South Vietnamese and Vietcong.
March 18
President Nixon orders the secret bombing of Cambodia.
May 14
President Nixon calls for the simultaneous withdrawal of American and North Vietnamese forces from the South.
June 8
Nixon announces the withdrawal of 25,000 American troops, the first step in a plan called "Vietnamization," the aim of which is to turn the war over to the South Vietnamese.
September 3
Ho Chi Minh, leader of the North since the 1950s, dies in Hanoi at the age of seventy-nine.
September 25
Congressional opposition to the war grows as ten bills designed to remove all American troops from Vietnam are submitted.
October 15
The first of many large, nationwide protests against the war, the "Moratorium" is designed to expand the peace movement off the campuses and into the cities, drawing broader popular support. Led by Coretta Scott King, 250,000 protesters march on Washington.
November 3
Attempting to defuse protest, Nixon makes his "silent majority" speech, claiming that most of the nation supports his efforts to end the war.
November 15
A second "Moratorium" march on Washington takes place.
November 16
A 1968 massacre of civilians at the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai is revealed. U.S. Army Lieutenant William L. Calley is tried and convicted for his role in the massacre. The atrocity further discredits the war and adds momentum to the peace movement in America.
December 1
The first draft lottery of the Vietnam era is instituted in an effort to reduce criticism of the draft as unfair. It signals the end of student draft deferments.
1970
February 18
Following a long, theatrical trial highlighted by the courtroom antics of defendants Abbie Hoffman,Jerry Rubin, and others, the "Chicago Seven" are acquitted on charges of conspiring to incite a riot. They are convicted on lesser charges, which are later overturned.
February 20
National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger begins secret Paris negotiations with Le Duc Tho.
April 20
Nixon promises to withdraw another 150,000 men from Vietnam by year's end. The withdrawals are decreasing American casualties.
April 30
Nixon announces that U.S. troops have attacked Communist sanctuaries in Cambodia, following the overthrow of Prince Sihanouk by U.S.-aided Lon Nol.
May 4
As part of the widening campus protests against the war, a demonstration is held at Kent State University in Ohio. When national guardsmen open fire on the demonstrators, four students are killed. Ten days later, two more students are killed, at predominantly black Jackson State College in Mississippi.
October 7
Nixon proposes a "standstill cease fire," and reissues a proposal for mutual withdrawal the next day.
November 23
A raid into North Vietnam, in an attempt to rescue American POWs, comes up empty-handed. Heavy bombing of the North continues. At year's end, U.S. troop strength falls to 280,000.
1971
February 8
The South Vietnamese, with American support, begin attacks on Vietcong supply lines in Laos.
June 13
The New York Times begins publication of the "Pentagon Papers," the top-secret history of American involvement in Vietnam, which has been turned over by Pentagon employee Daniel Ellsberg to Times reporter Neil Sheehan. Nixon tries to stop publication of the documents, which reveal much of the duplicity within the government surrounding Vietnam. But on June 30 the Supreme Court rules that the Times and the Washington Post may resume publication. On Nixon's orders to investigate Ellsberg, a group is set up known as the "plumbers," whose purpose is to try to stop "leaks." The "plumbers" soon expand their activities to a campaign aimed at a Nixon "enemies list." Also on their agenda is a break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate Office Building in Washington, D.C.
November 12
President Nixon announces the withdrawal of 45,000 more men, leaving an American force of 139,000 in Vietnam.
1972
January 13
President Nixon announces withdrawal of an additional 70,000 troops.
January 25
President Nixon reveals that Henry Kissinger has been in secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese, and makes public an eight-point peace proposal calling for a ceasefire and release of all U.S. POWs, in exchange for U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam.
March 30
The North Vietnamese launch a massive offensive across the Demilitarized Zone into the South. In five weeks, Hanoi's troops have penetrated deep into the South.
April 15
President Nixon orders resumption of bombing in the North, suspended three years earlier.
May 1
The city of Quang Tri is captured by the North.
May 8
President Nixon announces the mining of Haiphong harbor and stepped-up bombing raids against the North.
June 17
Five men are arrested at the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate Office Building. They work for the Committee to Reelect the President. Subsequently, two former intelligence operatives, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, are arrested for their involvement in the break-in, and the ensuing cover-up by the White House begins to unravel.
October 8
Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho achieve a breakthrough in their Paris negotiations. Henry Kissinger returns to the United States to say that peace is "within reach." The announcement is made two weeks before the presidential election, in which Nixon is opposed by the Democratic senator from South Dakota, George McGovern, an outspoken opponent of the war.
November 7
Nixon is reelected in a landslide victory. Following the election, Kissinger's talks with Le Duc Tho break down.
December 18
The United States resumes bombing raids over North Vietnam, which continue for eleven days. Communists agree to resume talks when bombing stops.
1973
January
Kissinger resumes talks with the North. A cease-fire agreement is signed and formally announced on January 27. Defense Secretary Melvin Laird announces the end of the draft as the army shifts to an all-volunteer force. During the Vietnam War, 2.2 million American men have been drafted.
March 29
The last American ground troops leave Vietnam.
April 1
All American POWs held in Hanoi are released.
April 30
President Nixon's aides H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and John Dean resign amid charges that the White House has obstructed justice in the Watergate investigation. On June 25, Dean accuses Nixon of authorizing a cover-up, and another White House aide reveals the existence of a secret taping system that has recorded conversations in the Oval Office.
July 16
The Senate begins an investigation of the secret air war against Cambodia.
August 14
The U.S. officially halts bombing of Cambodia.
October 10
Vice-President Spiro Agnew resigns after pleading "no contest" to charges of tax evasion. House minority leader Gerald Ford is nominated by Nixon to replace Agnew under the Twenty-fifth Amendment, which allows the President to fill a vacancy in the vice-presidency.
November 7
Over the President's veto, Congress passes the War Powers Act, which restricts the President's power to commit troops to foreign countries without congressional approval.
1974
January
South Vietnam's President Thieu announces that war has begun again. Communists proceed to build up troops and supplies in the South.
July 30
The House Judiciary Committee votes to recommend impeachment of President Nixon on three counts of "high crimes and misdemeanors."
August 9
Nixon resigns and is replaced by Gerald Ford.
September 8
Ford pardons Nixon for all crimes he "committed or may have committed."
1975
In an offensive that lasts six months, combined Vietcong and North Vietnamese forces overrun South Vietnam and Cambodia.
April 17
Pnompenh, the capital of Cambodia (renamed Kampuchea), falls to the Khmer Rouge.
April 23
President Ford calls the war "finished."
April 29
The last Americans are evacuated from Saigon, on the same day that the last two American soldiers are killed in Vietnam. On the following day, Communist forces take Saigon.
1976
January 21
President Jimmy Carter unconditionally pardons most of the 10,000 men who evaded the draft.
1982
November 11
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is unveiled in Washington, D.C. It commemorates the 58,000 American lives lost in Vietnam between 1959 and 1975.
American Voices
From The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965):
Few white people realize that many black people today dislike and avoid spending any more time than they must around white people. This "integration" image, as it is popularly interpreted, has millions of vain, self-exalted white people convinced that black people want to sleep in bed with them - and that's a lie! Or you can't tell the average white man that the Negro man's prime desire isn't to have a white woman - another lie! Like a black brother recently observed to me, "Look, you ever smell one of them wet?"
If Martin Luther King, Jr., gave J. Edgar Hoover bad dreams, Malcolm X (1925-1965) was his nightmare. Born Malcolm Little, in Omaha, Nebraska, Malcolm joined that vast migration of blacks into the cities, moving to Harlem. While serving prison time, he came under the influence of the black nationalist movement called the Nation of Islam or the Black Muslims. He took the name Malcolm X, renouncing his "slave name," and quickly rose as a charismatic and forceful spokesman for the movement.
After a pilgrimage to Mecca, he returned to the United States and split from the Black Muslims, forming the Organization for Afro-American Unity. Malcolm X seemed to be tilting toward a more conciliatory message. But early in 1965 he was assassinated in a Harlem mosque. Two men, identified as Black Muslims, were arrested for the murder. They were convicted, but, as with other assassinations, the truth behind Malcolm's death remains buried in suspicious circumstances.
What Happened In Watts?
In the tumultuous decade after Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat (see Chapter 7), the civil-rights movement coalesced behind the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., achieved some gains through the courts and legislation, and moved the question of racial equality to the front burner of American life. For most of those ten years, blacks seemed willing to accept King's nonviolent vision of overcoming the hurdles of racism and segregation. But sometimes the front burner gets very hot. Before long, the pot was boiling over.
By 1965 the rhetoric and the actions of the civil-rights movement changed because the country had changed. The war in Vietnam was moving into full swing. The year 1963 brought the assassination of President Kennedy, and Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers (1925-1963) was gunned down in front of his home in Jackson. The nonviolent integration movement was being met by violence and death. A Birmingham church was bombed, with four little girls killed. Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney were murdered in Mississippi in the summer of 1964. In February 1965, it was Malcolm X who went down. A month later, after thousands of marchers led by Martin Luther King, with U.S. Army protection, walked from Selma to Montgomery, a white civil-rights worker named Viola Liuzzo was murdered. In the car with the klansmen who shot her was an FBI informer.
Once solidly anchored by King's SCLC and the NAACP, with their emphasis on peaceful, court-ordered remedies, the movement was coming under fire. The violence in the air was producing a new generation of activists who lacked King's patience. Men like Floyd McKissick of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) and Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) were no longer willing to march to Dr. King's moderate tune. They preferred the martial drumbeat of Malcolm X's aggressive rhetoric. Built on frustration and anger, this basic split in tactics splintered the movement. By the summer of 1965, only days after the Voting Rights Act was signed into law, strengthening protection of black voter registration, the anger no longer just simmered. It boiled over. The scene was a section of Los Angeles called Watts.
This was not the Los Angeles of Hollywood, Malibu, and Bel-Air. Watts was a rundown district of shabby houses built near the highway approaching Los Angeles International Airport. Ninety-eight percent black, Watts was stewing in a California heat wave. In the stewpot were all the ingredients of black anger. Poverty. Overcrowding. High unemployment. Crime everywhere. Drugs widely available. The nearly all-white police force was seen as an occupation army.
On August 11, a policeman pulled over a young black man to check him for drunken driving. A common occurrence for blacks, it seemed to happen all too infrequently to white drivers. When the young man was arrested, a crowd gathered, at first joking and taunting, then growing more restive. Rumors of police brutality started to waft through the summer heat. The crowd grew larger and angrier. Soon the lone policeman called for reinforcements, and when the police arrived, they were met by hurled stones, bottles, and chunks of concrete. Within a few hours the crowds had grown to a mob, and the frustration was no longer simmering in the August heat. it had exploded.
Watts was sealed off, and for a while all was quiet. But the next day the anger returned. By nightfall the small, roving bands had grown to a mob of thousands, hostile, angry, and beyond control. The rocks and bottles were replaced by Molotov cocktails as the riot erupted into a full-blown street rebellion. Black storeowners posted signs that read, "We Own This One." The signs didn't always help. Among the most popular looted items were weapons, and when police and firefighters responded to the violence and fires, they were met with a hail of bullets and gasoline bombs. All of the pent-up rage and helplessness boiled over in white-hot fury. Reason lost out. When Dick Gregory, the wellknown stand-up comic and activist, tried to calm the crowds, he was shot in the leg. Mob frenzy had taken over. Watts was in flames.
The battle - for that was what it had become - raged on for days as thousands of national guardsmen poured in to restore order. There was open fighting in the streets as guardsmen set up machine-gun emplacements. Vietnam had seemingly come to L.A. By the sixth day of rioting, Watts was rubble and ashes. One European journalist even commented, "It looks like Germany during the last months of World War II."
The toll from six days of mayhem was thirty-four killed, including rioters and guardsmen; more than 1,000 injured; 4,000 arrested; and total property damage of more than $35 million.
But the aftermath of Watts was more than just a body count, police blotters, and insurance estimates. Something fundamental had occurred. There had been race riots before in America. In Detroit, during World War II, as many people had died as were killed in Watts. There had been smaller riots in other northern cities in previous years. But Watts seemed to signal a sea-change in the civil-rights movement. When Martin Luther King toured the neighborhood, he was heckled. Saddened by the death and destruction, he admonished a local man, who responded, "We won because we made the whole world pay attention to us." The time of King's "soul power" was passing. The new call was for "Black Power."
The Watts summer of 1965 was only the first in a string of long, hot summers that left the cities of the North and Midwest smoldering with racial unrest. In the summer of 1966, several cities saw rioting. But the worst came in 1967, particularly when Newark and Detroit were engulfed in more rebellions. The death due to urban violence toll that year rose to more than eighty.
In the wake of these rebellions, presidential commissions were appointed, studies made, and findings released. They all agreed that the problem was economic at its roots. As Martin Luther King had put it, "I worked to get these people the right to eat hamburgers, and now I've got to do something to help them get the money to buy them." One of these studies, conducted by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, warned forebodingly that America was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal."
That was on February 29, 1968. About a month later, Martin Luther King was killed by James Earl Ray in Memphis. His death set off another wave of riots that left cities smoldering.
Who Was Miranda?
No, not Carmen.
For anyone who grew up on a TV diet of Joe Friday and "Dragnet," "Streets of San Francisco," "NYPD," and a hundred other "cop" shows, "Read him his rights" is a familiar bit of requisite dialogue. That is, for any cop shows that came after 1966. To America's lawmen, that was the year that the world started to come unglued.
Ernesto Miranda was hardly the kind of guy who might be expected to change legal history. But he did, in his own savage way. A high school dropout with a criminal record dating to his teen years, Miranda abducted a teenage girl at a Phoenix movie-house candy counter in 1963, and drove her into the desert, where he raped her. Based on his record, Miranda was soon picked up, and was identified by the victim in a police lineup. After making a written confession in which he stated that he had been informed of his rights, Miranda was convicted and sentenced to prison for forty to fifty-five years. But at the trial, Miranda's court-appointed attorney argued that his client had not been told of his right to legal counsel.
The American Civil Liberties Union took the case of Miranda v. Arizona all the way to the Supreme Court, where it was heard by the Warren Court in 1966. The issue was the Fifth Amendment's protection against self-incrimination. On June 13, 1966, the Court announced a five-to-four ruling in favor of Miranda that said a criminal suspect must be told of his right to silence, that his remarks may be used against him, and that he had a right to counsel during interrogation, even if he could not afford one.
Depending on your point of view, it was either a great mile-stone for civil liberties and the protection of the rights of both the innocent and the criminal, or the beginning of the end of civilization.
As for Miranda, he did not live long enough to see his name become part of American legal textbooks and television culture. On the basis of new evidence, he was convicted again on the same charges of kidnapping and rape, and imprisoned. He was eventually paroled and ten years after the Court inscribed his name in legal history, Ernesto Miranda died of a knife wound suffered during a bar fight.
What Happened At My Lai?
On March 16, 1968, in a small Vietnamese village, "something dark and bloody" took place. With those words, a lone veteran of the war forced the U.S. Army to reluctantly examine a secret that was no secret. America was forced to look at itself in a manner once reserved for enemies who had committed war crimes. With those words, America found out about the massacre of civilians by U.S. soldiers at My Lai.
The GIs of Charlie Company called it Pinkville. That was how it was colored on their maps of Vietnam's Quang Ngai province. Or maybe it was because the village was suspected of being a stronghold for the Vietcong. Under the command of Lieutenant William L. Calley, Charlie Company of the Americal Division's Eleventh Infantry had nebulous orders from its company commander, Captain Ernest Medina, to "clean the village out." In the previous three months, Charlie Company had taken about one hundred casualties without even seeing action. Sniper fire and booby traps were to blame. Frustrated and angry at the hand they had been dealt in a war in which there were no uniforms to separate "good gooks" from "bad gooks," the men of Charlie Company were primed to wreak havoc on a phantom enemy they had never been able to confront in an open battle.
Dropped into the village by helicopter, the men of Charlie Company found only the old men, women, and children of My Lai. There were no Vietcong, and no signs of any. There were no stashed weapons, no rice caches, nothing to suggest that My Lai was a staging base for guerrilla attacks. But under Lieutenant Calley's direct orders, the villagers were forced into the center of the hamlet, where Calley issued the order to shoot them. The defenseless villagers were mowed down by automatic-weapons fire. Then the villagers' huts were grenaded, some of them while still occupied. Finally, small groups of survivors - some of them women and girls who had been raped by the Americans - were rounded up and herded into a drainage ditch, where they too were mercilessly machine-gunned. A few of the soldiers of Charlie Company refused to follow the order; one of them later called it "point-blank murder."
Only one American tried to intervene. A helicopter pilot saw the bodies in the ditch and went down to investigate. Placing his helicopter between the GIs and a band of children, the pilot ordered his crew to shoot any American who tried to stop him. He managed to rescue a handful of children. But that was the day's only heroic deed. Another witness to the massacre was an army photographer who was ordered to turn over his official camera, but kept a second secret camera. With it, he had recorded the mayhem in which more than 560 Vietnamese, mostly women and children, were slaughtered. Those pictures, when they later surfaced, revealed the extent of the carnage at My Lai. But not right away. Although many in the chain of command knew something "dark and bloody" had happened that day, there was no investigation. The mission was reported as a success back at headquarters.
But Ronald Ridenhour, a veteran of Charlie Company who had not been at My Lai, began to hear the rumors from buddies. Piecing together what had happened, he detailed the events in a letter he sent to President Nixon, to key members of Congress, and to officials in the State Department and Pentagon. The dirty little secret of My Lai was out. Within a few weeks the army opened an investigation. More than a year had passed since the day My Lai became a killing ground.
In the immediate aftermath of the investigation, a number of ranking officers of the Americal Division were court-martialed for dereliction of duty. At worst, they were reduced in rank or censured. Thirteen officers and enlisted men were also charged with war crimes. But of these, only Lieutenant Calley was found guilty of war crimes. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, but President Nixon then reduced the sentence and changed it to house arrest in response to the outpouring of public support for Calley, who was seen as a scapegoat. Calley was later paroled. A documentary about My Lai that was broadcast in 1989 showed Calley, a prosperous businessman, getting into an expensive foreign car and driving off. He refuses to comment on the incident.
To the war's supporters on the right, the atrocity at My Lai was an aberration and Calley a victim of a "leftist" antiwar movement. To the war's opponents, Calley and My Lai epitomized the war's immorality and injustice. In a sense, My Lai was the outcome of forcing young Americans into an unwinnable war. As others have pointed out, this was not the only crime against civilians in Vietnam. It was not uncommon to see GIs use their Zippo lighters to torch an entire village. As one officer said early in the war, after torching a hamlet, "We had to destroy this village to save it." That Alice-in-Wonderland logic perfectly embodied the impossibility of the American position.
Even though the United States would drop 7 million tons of bombs - twice the total dropped on Europe and Asia during all of World War II - on an area about the size of Massachusetts, along with Agent Orange and other chemical defoliants, the United States was losing the war. The political and military leadership of this country failed to understand the Vietnamese character, traditions, culture, and history. That failure doomed America to its costly and tragic defeat in Vietnam.
American Voices
Astronaut Neil Armstrong (b. 1930) on July 20, 1969, as he became the first man to walk on the moon:
That was one small step for a man and a great leap for
mankind.
Armstrong's words, and the images of him stepping onto the lunar surface, were seen and heard by the entire world. The moment was the culmination of the obsessive push for putting a man on the moon, a challenge that began with the humiliation of Sputnik. (See Chapter 7.) Armstrong and fellow moon-walker Buzz Aldrin planted an American flag on the lunar surface and left a plaque that read, "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon July, 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind."
Why Did Richard Nixon And Henry Kissinger Try To Stop The New York Times From Publishing The "Pentagon Papers"?
In the summer of 1971, President Richard Nixon learned that what you don't know can hurt you.
In June 1971, the New York Times ran a headline that hardly seemed sensational: "Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing U.S. Involvement." What the headline did not say was that the study also traced thirty years of deceit and ineptitude on the part of the United States government.
In page after numbingly detailed page, the Times reprinted thousands of documents, cables, position papers, and memos, all referring to the American effort in Vietnam. Officially titled The History of the U.S. Decision Making Process in Vietnam, the material quickly became known as the "Pentagon Papers." Richard Nixon was not aware of its existence. But it would shake his administration and the military establishment in America to their toes.
Ordered by Robert McNamara, one of Kennedy's "best and brightest" prior to his resignation as Defense Secretary in 1968, this massive compilation had involved the work of large teams of scholars and analysts. The avalanche of paper ran to some 2 million words. Among the men who had helped put it together was Daniel Ellsberg, a Rand Corporation analyst and onetime hawk who, like McNamara himself, became disillusioned by the war. Working at MIT after his resignation from Rand, which was involved in collecting and analyzing the papers, Ellsberg decided to go public with the information. He turned a copy over to Times reporter Neil Sheehan.
When the story broke, the country soon learned how it had been duped. Going back to the Truman administration, the Pentagon Papers revealed a history of deceptions, policy disagreements within several White House administrations, and outright lies. Among the most damaging revelations were cables from the American embassy in Saigon, dating from the weeks before Prime Minister Diem was ousted with CIA encouragement and then executed. There was the discovery that the Tonkin Resolution had been drafted months before the incident occurred from which it took its name. And there were memos showing Lyndon Johnson committing infantry to Vietnam at the same time he was telling the country that he had no long-range plans for a strategy in Vietnam.
The papers did not cover the Nixon years, and White House reaction was at first muted, even gleeful at the prospect of the embarrassment it would create for the Democrats. But Nixon and his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger (b. 1923) soon realized that if something this highly classified could be leaked, so could other secrets. Both men were already troubled by leaks within the administration. How could they carry on the business of national security if documents this sensitive could be photocopied and handed out to the nation's newspapers like press releases? There was a second concern. The revelations in the Pentagon Papers had fueled the antiwar sentiment that was growing louder and angrier and moving off the campuses and into the halls of Congress.
The administration first tried to bully the Times into halting publication. Attorney General John Mitchell threatened the paper with espionage charges. These were ignored. Nixon then tried the courts and received a temporary injunction blocking further publication. But the brush fire started by the Times was growing into a forest fire. The A federal court ordered the Post to halt publication and the question went to the Supreme Court. On June 30, the Court ruled six to three in favor of the newspapers on First Amendment grounds.
Kissinger and Nixon went nuclear. Said Nixon, "I want to know who is behind this.... I want it done, whatever the costs."
When Ellsberg was revealed as the culprit, a new White House unit was formed to investigate him. Their job was to stop leaks, so they were jokingly called "the plumbers." White House assistant Egil Krogh, Nixon Special Counsel Charles Colson, and others in the White House turned to former CIA man E. Howard Hunt and ex-FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy to bring their special clandestine talents to the operation. One of their first jobs was to conduct a break-in at the offices of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist. As a burglary, it was only marginally more successful than the next break-in planned by the group, at an office complex called Watergate.
Apart from setting into motion some of the events that would mutate into the Watergate affair, the publication of the Pentagon Papers had other important repercussions. From the government's standpoint, American security credibility had been crippled, severely damaging intelligence operations around the world, for better or worse. On the other side, the antiwar movement gained new strength and respectability, increasing the pressure on Nixon to end the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. And the Supreme Court's action in protecting the newspapers from prior restraint established and strengthened First Amendment principles.
But the Pentagon Papers case also reinforced a "bunker mentality" that already existed within the White House "palace guard." There was an us-against-them defensiveness emanating from the Oval Office. Publication of the Pentagon Papers made the Nixon White House far more aggressive in its defense of "national security," an idea that was expanded to include the protection and reelection of Richard Nixon by any means and at any cost.
Why Did "Jane Roe" Sue Wade?
"To be or not to be." For Shakespeare and the Supreme Court, that was and is the question. There is no other issue more emotionally, politically, or legally divisive in modern America than the future of abortion rights.
Most Americans thought the question was settled on January 22, 1973. That was the day the Supreme Court decided, by a seven-to-two margin, that it was unconstitutional for states to prohibit voluntary abortions before the third month of pregnancy; the decision also limited prohibitions that states might set during the second three months.
The decision grew out of a Texas case involving a woman who, out of desire to protect her privacy, was called "Jane Roe" in court papers. "Roe" was a single woman living in Texas who became pregnant. She desired an abortion, but was unable to obtain one legally in her home state of Texas, and so she gave birth to a child she put up for adoption. Nonetheless, she brought suit against Texas in an attempt to overturn the restrictive Texas abortion codes. The case ultimately reached the Supreme Court, which made the decision in the case known as Roe v. Wade.
For sixteen years the Roe precedent influenced a series of rulings that liberalized abortion in America. To many Americans, the right to an abortion was a basic matter of private choice, a decision for the woman to make. But to millions of Americans, Roe was simply government-sanctioned murder.
The mostly conservative foes of legal abortion - who call their movement "pro-life" - gained strength in the 1980s, coalescing behind Ronald Reagan and contributing to his election. And it will ultimately be Reagan's legacy through his appointments to the Supreme Court who determine the future of Roe v. Wade. In the summer of 1989, the Supreme Court decided five-to-four, in the case of Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, to give states expanded authority to limit abortion rights. The Court also announced that it would hear a series of cases that would give it the opportunity to completely overturn the Roe decision.
American Voices
From Justice Harry A. Blackmun's majority decision in Roe v. Wade (January 22, 1973):
The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy. In a line of decisions, however ... the Court has recognized that a right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy, does exist under the Constitution.... They also make it clear that the right has some extension to activities relating to marriage; procreation; contraception; family relationships; and child rearing and education.
The right of privacy ... is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy. ... We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.
How Did A Botched Burglary Become A Crisis Called Watergate And Bring Down A Powerful President?
Break-ins and buggings. Plumbers and perjury. Secret tapes, "smoking guns," and slush funds.
We know now that Watergate wasn't what Nixon press secretary Ron Zeigler called it, "a third-rate burglary." This nationally televised soap opera of corruption, conspiracy, and criminality only began to unravel with a botched break-in at the Watergate office complex. That ludicrous larceny was only a tiny strand in the web of domestic spying, criminal acts, illegal campaign funds, enemies lists, and obstruction of justice that emerged from the darkness as "Watergate." But it ended up with Richard Nixon resigning from the presidency in disgrace and only a few steps ahead of the long arm of the law.
After the Civil War and Vietnam, few episodes in American history have generated as many written words as the Watergate affair. Just about everybody who participated in this extraordinary chapter ended up writing a book about his view of the events. They were joined by the dozens of historians, journalists, and other writers who turned out books. The notoriety of Watergate gave convicted felon E. Howard Hunt a renewed lease on a life as a writer of inferior spy novels, a pursuit in which he was joined by John Ehrlichman and even Spiro Agnew, another of the rats who went down with the sinking ship that was Richard Nixon's second administration. Even the rabidly right-wing former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy was able to parlay his macho, fanatical, "hand over a lighted candle" image into a lucrative career including playing guest roles on "Miami Vice," founding a "survivalist" camp to teach commando techniques to weekend warriors, and a lecture tour that pitted Liddy in the role of mad-dog conservative against sixties relic Timothy Leary, the onetime high priest of psychedelic drugs.
This ludicrous aftermath has been combined with some of the comical aspects of the bungled break-in and Howard Hunt's notoriously bad CIA-provided disguises to soften the image of Watergate's implications. It seems almost opera bouffe, a light-hearted satire. But that perspective overlooks the seriousness of the crimes committed in the name of national security and Richard Nixon's reelection - two objectives that a large number of high-placed fanatics equated with each other.
American Voices
Richard Nixon, from the Oval Office tapes:
I don't give a shit what happens, I want you to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, coverup or anything else, if it'll save the plan.
A Watergate Chronology
1972
June 17
At the Watergate Office Building in Washington, D.C., five men are arrested during a pathetically bungled break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The men are all carrying cash and documents that show them to be employed by the Committee to Re-elect the President (later given the acronyn CREEP), and the purpose of the burglary is to plant listening devices in the phones of Democratic leaders and obtain political documents regarding the Democrats' campaign strategy. The men arrested include a former FBI agent and four anti-Castro Cubans who have been told that they are looking for material linking Castro to the Democratic Party. Two former White House aides working for CREEP, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, are also arrested. Hunt, it will be learned, was one of the CIA agents responsible for planning the Bay of Pigs invasion and some of the Cubans arrested also took part in the invasion. The seven men are indicted on September 15. Even though their relationship to the election committee is established, none of the seven men connects the committee or the White House to the break-in.
November 7
After an October Gallup poll shows that less than half of the American people have even heard of the break-in, President Nixon defeats his Democratic challenger Senator George McGovern in a landslide, capturing 60.8 percent of the popular vote and 520 of the 537 electoral votes. McGovern carries only Massachusetts and Washington, D.C.
December 8
The wife of E. Howard Hunt dies in a plane crash in Chicago. She is carrying $10,000 in $100 bills. The money is "hush money" she was ferrying to someone in Chicago.
1973
February 7
Amid swirling rumors of widespread wrongdoing, corrupt financing, and political dirty tricks committed by the Nixon reelection committee, the Senate establishes a Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, chaired by North Carolina senator Sam Ervin (1896-1985).
March 23
Former CIA agent James W. McCord, one of the seven men convicted in the attempted burglary, admits in a letter to Judge John Sirica that he and other defendants have been under pressure to remain silent about the case. McCord reveals that others were involved in the break-in, and he eventually names John Mitchell, the former Attorney General who had become chairman of the Committee to Re-elect the President, as the "overall boss."
April 20
L. Patrick Gray, acting director of the FBI, resigns after admitting he destroyed evidence connected to Watergate, on the advice of Nixon aides in the White House.
April 30
Nixon's chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, domestic affairs assistant John Ehrlichman, and presidential counsel John Dean III all resign. In a televised speech announcing the shake-up, President Nixon denies any knowledge of a cover-up of White House involvement in the Watergate break-in.
May 11
Charges against Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony J. Russo are dropped for their theft and release of the Pentagon Papers. The judge makes this decision following the revelation that Watergate conspirators E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy had burglarized the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist in an attempt to steal Ellsberg's medical records.
June 25
Testifying before Ervin's Senate committee, John Dean accuses President Nixon of involvement in the Watergate cover-up and says the President authorized payment of "hush money" to the seven men arrested in the break-in.
July 16
In testimony that rocks the nation, White House aide Alexander Butterfield tells the Ervin committee that President Nixon secretly recorded all Oval Office conversations. This startling revelation provides the committee with the means to substantiate testimony implicating the President in the cover-up of the Watergate burglary. It also sets off a constitutional crisis over the President's right to keep the tapes secret under the umbrella of "executive privilege."
October 10
In an unrelated development that further damages White House credibility, Vice-President Spiro Agnew, the chief voice of "law and order" in the Nixon White House, resigns after pleading nolo contendere (no contest) to tax-evasion charges dating from his days as governor of Maryland. Two days later, President Nixon nominates House Minority Leader Gerald Ford to succeed Agnew under the provisions of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, allowing the President to fill a vacancy in the vice-presidency.
October 20
"The Saturday Night Massacre." President Nixon orders Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, who has refused to accept the President's compromise offer to release a "synopsis" of the tapes. Richardson and his assistant, William D. Ruckelshaus, refuse to follow this order and both resign. Solicitor General Robert Bork, third in the Justice Department chain of command, fires Cox. (The Democrats' revenge will come when Ronald Reagan nominates Bork to the Supreme Court in 1988. Bork's nomination will open an acrimonious debate over his legal views, and he will be rejected by the Senate.) The resignations and the firing of Cox raise a storm of protest in Congress, and the House actively begins to consider impeachment of the President.
October 23
The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Representative Peter Rodino, announces an investigation into impeachment charges against the President. Leon Jaworski is appointed special prosecutor in the Watergate investigation after Archibald Cox's firing.
October 30
After Nixon reluctantly agrees to turn over the Oval Office tapes, investigators learn that two tapes are missing.
November 21
Investigators learn that one of the tapes contains a mysterious eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap. The White House claims that Rosemary Woods, Nixon's secretary, accidentally erased part of the tape while transcribing it, a feat that, owing to the way the recording apparatus was set up, would have required the skills of a contortionist. (In January 1974, analysis of the tape will show that the erasure was deliberate.)
November 9
Six of the Watergate defendants are sentenced for their roles in the break-in. E. Howard Hunt receives a sentence of two and a half to eight years and a $10,000 fine. The others are given lesser sentences. G. Gordon Liddy is sentenced to twenty years, in part because of his refusal to cooperate with investigators.
November 13
Representatives of two oil companies plead guilty to making illegal contributions to the Nixon campaign. The next day, Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans, who was the Nixon campaign treasurer, admits that such contributions were expected from major corporations. Two days later, three more companies - Goodyear, Braniff Airlines, and American Airlines - report similar donations.
November 30
Egil Krogh, Jr., who headed the White House "plumbers" unit, pleads guilty to charges stemming from the break-in at the offices of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist.
December 6
Gerald Ford is sworn in as Vice-President. Besides having been a member of the Warren Commission investigating the death of President Kennedy, Ford is best known for what Lyndon Johnson once said about him: "Shucks, I don't think he can chew gum and walk at the same time.... He's a nice fellow, but he spent too much time playing football without a helmet."
1974
January 4
Claiming "executive privilege," President Nixon refuses to surrender five hundred tapes and documents subpoenaed by the Senate Watergate Committee.
March 1
Seven former White House staff members, including Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and former Attorney General John Mitchell, are indicted for conspiring to obstruct the investigation of the Watergate break-in.
April 3
Following months of investigation by a separate congressional committee, President Nixon agrees to pay more than $400,000 in back taxes. Using suspect deductions, the President had paid taxes equivalent to those levied on a salary of $15,000, despite the President's $200,000 salary and other income.
April 29
In another nationally televised address, President Nixon offers a 1,200-page edited transcript of the tapes subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee and Special Prosecutor Jaworski. Both Jaworski and the committee reject the transcripts.
May 16
Richard Kleindienst, John Mitchell's successor as Attorney General, pleads guilty to a misdemeanor charge of failing to testify accurately before a Senate committee, Kleindienst is the first Attorney General ever convicted of a crime.
July 24
The Supreme Court rules unanimously that Nixon must turn over the tapes requested by the special prosecutor. Eight hours later, the White House announces it will comply with the order.
July 27
The House Judiciary Committee approves two articles of impeachment against Nixon, charging him with obstructing justice and accusing him of repeatedly violating his oath of office. Three days later the committee will recommend a third charge of unconstitutional defiance of committee subpoenas.
August 5
In another televised address, Nixon releases transcripts of a conversation with chief of staff H. R. Haldeman. The transcript shows that, six days after the break-in, Nixon ordered a halt to the FBI investigation of the affair. Nixon concedes that he failed to include this information in earlier statements, what he calls "a serious omission." This is the "smoking gun" that everybody has been looking for. Following the speech, Nixon's remaining congressional support disappears.
August 8
President Nixon announces his resignation, effective noon the following day. The decision comes in the wake of his revelation three days earlier, after which key Republican congressmen told him he would probably be impeached and convicted.
August 9
President Nixon formally resigns and leaves for California. Vice-President Gerald Ford is sworn in as President.
August 21
President Ford nominates Nelson Rockefeller, the wealthy governor of New York and a three-time candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, as his choice for Vice-President.
September 8
President Ford grants Richard Nixon a "full, free and absolute pardon ... for all offenses against the United States which he ... has committed or may have committed or taken part in while President."
1975
January 1
Four of the former White House staffers charged with obstruction are found guilty. They are H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John Mitchell, and Robert Mardian. A fifth, Kenneth Parkinson, is acquitted. The Watergate charges against Charles Colson are dropped after he pleads guilty to crimes connected with the Ellsberg-psychiatrist break-in. A seventh defendant, Gordon Strachan, is tried separately.
1976
In the presidential election this year, Jimmy Carter narrowly defeats President Ford. Besides the economic problems facing the country, Carter's victory is widely attributed to the post-Watergate atmosphere of cynicism and a very specific rejection of Ford for his pardon of Nixon.
The final accounting of the Watergate affair produced an impressive list of "high crimes and misdemeanors," as the Constitution labels impeachable offenses. Some of them seem laughably innocuous in retrospect. But others were offenses against the law, against individual citizens, and against the Constitution itself. The Watergate "rap sheet" breaks down into five general categories, as follows:
1. Breaking and Entering/Assault
In the wake of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg became the prime target of the "plumbers." One of the group's first missions was to break into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist and steal Ellsberg's confidential medical records. Although they got in, they were unable to find any incriminating or embarrassing material about Ellsberg.
Some of the same team members later planned the break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices to install listening devices. This job was ordered by White House officials and with the knowledge of some of the President's closest advisers.
One of the Watergate burglars was given orders to "physically harm" Ellsberg when he spoke at a Washington peace rally. This order was not carried out.
2. Illegal Contributions
A secret "slush fund," controlled by Attorney General John Mitchell, was set up to finance a campaign of "dirty tricks" against key Democratic party figures. Some of this money was used to pay the Watergate burglars for the job and later to keep them silent.
The "slush fund" was built out of illegal campaign contributions solicited by Nixon officials from some of the country's largest corporations, who thought they were buying "access" to the President. Other contributions were made to derail criminal investigations or antitrust activities going on in the Justice Department.
Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans took a secret payment of $250,000 from fugitive financier Robert Vesco to kill a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation of Vesco's criminal activities.
3. "Dirty Tricks"
Like the "plumbers," the "Dirty Tricks" team was set up in the White House for the purpose of damaging and embarrassing key Democrats. In fact, the Democrats didn't need any help - they were doing just fine by themselves. The activities ranged from ordering pizzas delivered to Democratic campaign offices to forging letters that were used to discredit and embarrass Democratic leaders like Senators Edmund Muskie and Henry Jackson.
Using material he culled from the Pentagon Papers, E. Howard Hunt forged cables that implied that President John Kennedy ordered the toppling and assassination of Vietnam's Prime Minister Diem in 1963. Hunt then tried unsuccessfully to plant these cables with major news magazines.
An "enemies list" was created, an extensive collection of opposition politicians, entertainers, newsmen, and other prominent public figures deemed disloyal by the White House. The list was used to target the people that the White House wanted to "screw" through the use of selected federal agencies. The list included Jane Fonda, Bill Cosby, and CBS newsman Daniel Schorr.
4. Cover-up/Obstruction of Justice
White House officials, from the President down to lower-echelon staffers, ordered the payment of hush money from the campaign "slush fund" to the Watergate conspirators. These men also orchestrated the cover-up of White House involvement in the conspiracy.
President Nixon secretly pledged clemency to the Watergate burglars in return for their silence.
L. Patrick Gray, acting head of the FBI and in line for appointment to the permanent job of director, turned over FBI files on Watergate to White House staffers.
Nixon ordered ranking CIA officers to dissuade the FBI from investigating Watergate.
Incriminating evidence in E. Howard Hunt's White House safe was removed and destroyed.
Two of the White House tapes subpoenaed by the special prosecutor were discovered to be missing. Another tape contained a crucial eighteen-minute gap, the result of a deliberate erasure.
5. Miscellaneous Offenses and Revelations
Nixon had used more than $10 million in government funds for improvements on his private homes in Florida and California, ostensibly in the name of "security."
Nixon had taken illegal tax deductions on some papers donated to a presidential library.
The illegal secret war against Cambodia was revealed.
What was the real payback for these abuses? President Nixon resigned in disgrace. But he was quickly pardoned, guaranteeing that his pension checks would keep coming. Within a short time, Nixon was "rehabilitated" by his party and the press, gradually easing his way back into a new role as "elder statesman" and foreign-policy expert.
Liddy and Hunt both went to prison. Liddy probably used the time to work on his book Will, which was turned into a television miniseries. Hunt continued to write spy novels. John Mitchell was jailed and disbarred. His book was rejected by its publisher. Mitchell died in 1988.
Haldeman and Ehrlichman, the two aides closest to Nixon, also served brief jail terms. Both wrote successful books. John Dean served four months, but wrote Blind Ambition, his memoir of the Watergate affair, a best-seller also turned into a television miniseries.
Many of the other minor characters in Watergate served brief prison terms. A spate of legislation addressing the issues of ethics in government, campaign financing, and presidential powers, all followed in Watergate's wake. The ensuing years brought more investigations that further revealed the extent of the abuses committed by the FBI and the CIA in the name of national security. More laws were passed.
Watergate and those revelations cost the Republicans the White House in 1976, when Gerald Ford, the man who pardoned Nixon, was defeated by Jimmy Carter, who ran as an "outsider" pledged to rid Washington of its corruption. It was assumed that such abuses were now in check and that nobody in the White House could manage such an illegal undertaking again.
Then along came Ronald Reagan's CIA Director, William Casey, and his fire-breathing protege, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North.
How Did The Arabs Of OPEC Cripple America During The 1970s?
The international hot spots during the fifties and sixties were Cold War battles waged in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia. But in the late sixties and early seventies, the scene shifted. The Middle East emerged as the world's most significant flashpoint, a political and military battlefield in which superpower rivalries took a backseat to an enmity as old as the Bible. As Arabs and Jews struggled over the existence of Israel and the future of the Palestinian Arabs, the United States got caught "between a rock and a hard place."
Almost from the moment Israel battled the British in a terrorist war of independence in 1948, Israel occupied a singular, untouchable position in American foreign policy. This unique status was based on a tight web of philosophical, religious, social, political, and strategic conditions. After the horrors of the Holocaust, Americans endorsed a homeland for the Jews. Culturally, Americans felt a kinship with Israelis and viewed the remarkable agricultural, industrial, and economic island they had created in the desert with admiration. The Israeli determination to build a nation seemed to mirror the pioneer spirit Americans romantically viewed as their own. The Israelis - many of them transplanted Europeans, along with American Jews - sounded, looked, and acted like Americans.
The Arabs, on the other hand, rode camels, wore funny robes, and carried around mats for praying at odd hours of the day. The typical American view of Arabs as rather backward was seemingly confirmed in a series of brief wars in which Israel easily defeated larger combined Arab armies, expanding its territories with each conquest. While the idea of Israel was widely accepted, the displacement of Palestinians was disregarded.
On the simplistic American scale of good versus bad, Israel was democratic and pro-western. Over the years, a pro-Israeli political lobby, organized for maximum voting impact, kept Israel well armed and well supported. Strategically, Israel was a reliable client-state in the midst of unstable Arab lands. For years, while these Arab states had remained in the control of western oil companies, the American position was comfortable.
But as time passed, that position was transformed from one of unequivocal alliance with Israel to a more slippery footing, greased by oil diplomacy. Beginning in the 1960s, the Arabs increasingly took control of their valuable resource, and the balance of power began to shift. The seesaw tilting toward the Israelis got its most violent bounce after the October 1973 Yom Kippur War. Again the Israeli army prevailed, but its cloak of invincibility had been torn. While Israel beat back the combined offensive of several Arab states, Egyptian armies crossed the Suez and retook territory in the Sinai held by Israel since the Six-Day War of 1967.
But that was only a small part of the shifting sands of Middle East power politics. In an effort to compel the Israelis to return the lands captured in 1967, the Arab nations cut off oil shipments to the United States, Japan, and Western Europe in a boycott that precipitated the first great "energy crisis" of the 1970s. This boycott was made possible by the enormous reserves of petroleum controlled by the Middle Eastern countries, especially the Saudis, who were members of a group called OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries). Formed in 1960 by the world's principal oil exporters, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, Iraq, and Venezuela, OPEC lacked economic clout until the 1973 Arab boycott demonstrated their power in a world guzzling oil and dependent on other petroleum-related products. (Besides the obvious gasoline and home heating oil, hundreds of other products, such as plastics, fertilizers, paint, and ink, are petroleum-based.)
In the United States, the boycott caused mayhem. A series of energy-saving measures were instituted, from Sunday closings of gas stations to a rationing system based on license plate numbers (plates having even numbers could buy gas one day; odd-numbered plates could buy it the next). Speed limits were lowered; environmental standards were relaxed; a new generation of gasoline mileage targets was set for automakers. American car companies, which had ignored the market for inexpensive, fuel-efficient cars pioneered by the Europeans and Japanese, soon found their once-imperturbable empire crumbling around their expensive, gas-guzzling showboats. Overnight, a generation unaccustomed to the kind of sacrifices made during the Depression and World War II reacted angrily to the idea that a bunch of Arabs could shackle that great American freedom - owning and driving a car. As gas lines lengthened, frustration boiled over into fistfights and even gas-pump homicides. A bit of the American fabric was unraveling.
After the Arab boycott was lifted in March 1974, the future was altered. Having tasted power through the boycott, the OPEC members realized the control they actually possessed. Pre-boycott oil prices of about three dollars per barrel rose to nearly twelve dollars in 1974. The end of the boycott did not bring a return to the old pricing system. Oil prices stayed high, controlled by Arabs who could make the oil flow in a gush or just a trickle. The non-Arab OPEC members, such as Venezuela and Nigeria, were quite content to allow the prices to go as high as the Arabs wanted. American oil companies eagerly seized on the perception and reality of higher costs to force their prices up as well, bringing new profits to the oil companies at the expense of the American economy.
The following years of oil shortages and altered economic realities produced by the OPEC domination created the highest rates of unemployment since the Depression and historically high inflation - a combination of low growth and rising prices termed "stagflation" - striking a severe blow to American prestige and confidence. Once built on a bedrock of cheap labor and cheap oil, the American economy no longer enjoyed either.
An inflationary cycle of double-digit dimensions had been set in motion, and it would take Americans through a dizzying decade that seemed beyond the control of the country's leadership. The crisis, begun in Nixon's final days, became Gerald Ford's problem. His inability to "WIN" - "Whip Inflation Now" was his administration's inept, empty economic rallying cry - played a large part, along with post-Watergate disillusionment, in the 1976 election of former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, the first southern President since Woodrow Wilson.
While America agonizingly transformed itself into a more efficient energy user and adjusted to new economic realities, it also began the search for alternative sources of energy. Congress, under Carter, funded development of wind, solar, and synthetic fuels. The American nuclear industry got a new boost as well. But there were still shocks to come. In 1978, Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlevi (1919-1980), the Shah of Iran, a military dictator established in 1954 through a CIA-backed coup, was overthrown by a fundamentalist Islamic revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni (1900-1989). Iran cut off oil exports, setting off another mild oil shortage. A year later, America's energy future was darkened when there was a major accident in the core of a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, which severely curtailed the planned development of nuclear power in this country. To make matters worse, that year OPEC announced another drastic price increase.
But it was the situation in Iran that would move to the foreground of American life, overshadowing Carter's historical achievement in negotiating a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel in 1978. On November 4, 1979, five hundred Iranians stormed the American embassy in Tehran, capturing ninety American diplomats and beginning a hostage crisis that effectively ended Jimmy Carter's hopes for governing effectively and being reelected. Carter's inability to free the hostages, including a disastrous, abortive rescue mission that ended with eight Americans dead in the Iranian desert, seemed to symbolize American powerlessness.
In 1980, America turned to a man it thought represented old-style American ideals and strength. Ronald Reagan (b. 1911), former movie star and governor of California, soundly defeated Carter in 1980 by promising to restore American prestige, power, and economic health. At the moment of Reagan's inauguration, as a last insult to Jimmy Carter and an omen of the good fortune Reagan would enjoy, the hostages were freed by Iran.
American Voices
From Jimmy Carter's "crisis of confidence" speech (July 15, 1979):
All the legislation in the world can't fix what's wrong with America. So I want to speak with you first tonight about a subject even more serious than energy or inflation. I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy....
The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.
The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.
What Was"Voodoo Economics"?
If there is one thing America does not want from its Presidents, it's a sermon. America wants pep talks. America wants the coach to tell the country that it only has to fear "fear itself." America likes the trumpet sounding a summons. Americans want to be told they're the best. When America thumbed its nose at Jimmy Carter's "crisis of confidence" speech, he belatedly learned that lesson. But Ronald Reagan knew it instinctively. He also understood a basic American political precept: This country, since the pre-Revolutionary days of James Otis back in Boston doesn't like taxes.
When Ronald Reagan campaigned in 1980, he promised to cut taxes, reduce government deficits, reduce inflation, and rebuild America's defenses. One of his Republican primary opponents said it could only be done "with mirrors." Another Republican called Reagan's ideas "voodoo economics." He was George Bush, later to become Reagan's loyal Vice-President and then President himself. Bush got a laugh with that line in 1980.
But Ronald Reagan got the last laugh when he was resoundingly elected, bringing to power a new conservative coalition pledged to reverse what it saw as the damage done by decades of liberal Democratic control of American economic and social policy. The Reagan coalition featured the "neo-conservatives," political theorists who put a new face on old-line anti-Communism; the so-called Moral Majority, the religious right wing led by Reverend Jerry Falwell, whose solutions to America's problems included returning prayer to public schools, outlawing abortion, and reducing government's role in social policy; conservative southerners, who responded to Reagan's call for a strengthened American defense and lower taxes; and, perhaps most importantly but least visibly, a blue-collar majority who saw their paychecks disappearing in taxes and an endless inflationary spiral.
The theoretical underpinning of Reagan's plans was called "supply-side economics." The basic premise was that if taxes were cut, people would produce more goods and spend more money, creating more jobs and broader prosperity, which would lead to higher government revenues. Coupled with deep cuts in "wasteful" government spending, these revenues would provide a balanced budget. Reagan supporters even pointed to the fact that Democratic hero John Kennedy had had a similar idea in 1963, when he promoted a tax cut by saying, "A rising tide lifts all boats."
There certainly was nothing new about this idea. President Carter had proposed tax cuts, smaller government, and tight credit to keep down inflation. Earlier in American history, another Republican administration had used a similar strategy. Herbert Hoover had tried the same things during the Depression; back then the name for supply-side economics was "trickle-down economics."
With strong popular support and the congressional backing of a bloc of southern Democrats known as "boll weevils," Reagan's economic package sailed through Congress in 1981. But there was certainly no immediate relief, and the American economy was soon in the midst of a full-blown and devastating recession.
Unemployment was high, inflation continued, bankruptcies and business failures skyrocketed, and family farms went on the auction block. Committed to purging inflation from the world economic system, the Federal Reserve Board under Carter and Reagan had adopted a policy of high interest rates to put the brakes on the economy. Without easy credit, houses go unbuilt, cars unsold, and businesses and factories contract or fold.
Oil had been at the root of the inflationary pressure, and it was only the eventual tumble in oil prices that relieved that pressure. Brought on by the international recession, the oil shortage became an oil glut. Buffeted by new competition from non-OPEC oil producers like Mexico, Norway, and Great Britain, OPEC's chokehold on the western economies began to loosen. Suddenly awash in their unsold oil, the OPEC members saw their clout crippled as they struggled to maintain artificially high prices through production quotas that were routinely broken by OPEC's members.
The beneficiary of this reversal was none other than Ronald Reagan. The slide in oil prices signaled the beginning of the recovery. With oil prices falling, the heart of the inflationary dragon was cut out, and Ronald Reagan looked like Saint George. Other pro-business Reagan policies, such as deregulating industry and ignoring the antitrust laws, fueled the recovery. Employment started to grow, and inflation, which had been running at 12 percent, dropped to less than 5 percent. The tax cuts passed in 1981, to be phased in over three years, fueled a resurgence in the financial markets and would reap a bonanza for the nation's wealthiest, but the poor and the middle class would feel few of its rewards.
The shift in tax policy was accompanied by a new reality in government spending. A succession of Reagan budgets slashed domestic spending in those areas that most affected the poor - the legacy of LBJ's Great Society. Welfare, housing, job training, drug treatment, and mass transportation all fell under the rubric of wasteful government spending. Yet in spite of these cuts and the passage of the tax changes meant to stimulate government revenues, the federal deficits ballooned. Apart from the reductions made by the tax cuts, the chief culprit in the deficits was the expansion of the defense budget. Although pledged publicly to cutting the budget, Reagan was merely overseeing a massive transfer of funds from the domestic sector to the Pentagon. For years, conservatives had complained that liberal social programs had tried to solve problems by "throwing money at them." Now, under President Reagan, the conservatives were going to solve the "weakness" of America's defenses by doing the same thing.
American Voices
Thomas K. Jones, Reagan administration defense official in an interview with Los Angeles Times reporter Robert Scheer:
Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top. It's the dirt that does it.... Everybody's going to make it if there are enough shovels to go around.
According to Robert Scheer's 1982 book, With Enough Shovels, T. K. Jones was the man responsible for administering a multi-million-dollar civil defense program, the centerpiece of which seemed to be making sure that America had plenty of doors, dirt, and shovels. This was his plan for saving American lives and putting the country back on its feet within a few years of an all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
Why Was Reagan Called The "Teflon President"?
Through his eight years in the White House and in the period since President Reagan left office, many views of the Reagan presidency have depicted a detached, disinterested Executive who asked no questions, ignored details, and allowed subordinates to run amok. Almost every memoir by former administration figures - most notably those by David Stockman and Donald Regan - as well as a number of books about Reagan's administration by journalists, such as Hedrick Smith's The Power Game, and The Acting President by Bob Schieffer and Gary Paul Gates, present an almost frightening picture of Reagan as ill-informed and disengaged.
Yet, through it all, Ronald Reagan held on to extraordinary public approval ratings, if national polls are to be trusted. Reagan's uncanny ability to keep the controversies and problems of his eight years in office from sticking to himself prompted the gently derisive nickname of "Teflon President."
Part of that "Teflon" image was simply a matter of Reagan's extraordinary good luck. The fact that the American embassy hostages held in Tehran were freed at the moment Reagan took office, and through no effort of his own, seemed to give the Reagan years the first blush of serendipity. This image got another boost when Reagan survived an assassination attempt on March 30, 1981, and the country reveled in press reports of how he joked with the emergency-room staff. It was only after George Bush's election that Reagan's onetime White House physician stated that the Twenty-fifth Amendment should have been invoked to transfer presidential powers temporarily to Vice-President Bush while Reagan was under general anesthesia and recovering from emergency surgery.
But he emerged from the shooting unbowed, sitting taller in the saddle than ever in the American estimation. The surge in his approval polls after the shooting helped him ramrod through Congress the tax cuts and Pentagon spending plans he called for. After a generation of failed and disgraced Presidents, Washington observers were marveling at Reagan's considerable power. This gloss of invincibility and his personal affability carried Reagan through scandals at the highest levels of his administration, all of which he was able to shrug off with a chuckle, a wave, and a bemused shrug. Even the public embarrassment of his wife feeding him lines to shout to reporters didn't dent the armor. The revelations of gross corruption by a large number of administration officials - the so-called sleaze factor that bubbled beneath the surface for his eight years - continued after Reagan's departure. In the summer of 1989, a new scandal broke through in revelations of abuses in the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), led by a Cabinet secretary, Samuel Pierce, whom Reagan once failed to recognize at a Rose Garden party.
Even major policy disasters rolled off his back. When a terrorist bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut killed 239 marines assigned to an indefensible position with no real justification for their presence other than to assert American interests in the area, Reagan assumed "responsibility" without any damage to his image and popularity. An American air raid on the home of Libyan strongman Muammar Khadaffy left only two American pilots and some civilians dead, including one of the Libyan leader's children. Yet Reagan's popularity soared after what amounted to an attempted assassination.
But Reagan's armor got its most severe test with the series of events that came to be called "Iran-Contra." Although the full story of these events may never be learned, President Reagan personally escaped that controversy unscathed, even if it did serve to cripple his administration's final days.
The "facts" in Iran-Contra are still shrouded in some mystery, obfuscated by denials and silence from some of the key participants, including Director of Central Intelligence William Casey, who died before the extent of his involvement was fully known to the press and the public. The situation went back to a problem that had bedeviled Jimmy Carter right up to Ronald Reagan's inauguration - American hostages held in the Middle East. Unlike the Carter hostage dilemma, in which American diplomatic personnel were held by a surrogate arm of the Iranian government and whose whereabouts were known, the hostage situation facing Reagan involved a number of separate hostages held in the chaotic anarchy of Lebanon by mysterious parties, assumed to be linked to Iranian leadership. In addition, one of these hostages, William Buckley, was the CIA head of station in Beirut, a fact likely known to his kidnappers. Reagan was personally tormented by the plight of the hostages and their families, but publicly stuck to his guns that there would be no yielding to terrorist demands. Such a trade-off, it was stated, would only encourage further hostage-taking.
In the summer of 1985, Reagan's National Security Adviser, Robert McFarlane, was approached by a group of Israelis with a plan for winning release of the hostages. That plan involved a rather dubious Iranian arms merchant who proposed that Tehran would use its influence to free the hostages in return for a few hundred U.S. antitank missiles, which Iran needed to carry on its long war of attrition with neighboring Iraq. To McFarlane, the deal presented not only an opportunity to free the hostages but to establish contacts with so-called moderates within the Iranian government. After returning from surgery to remove a malignancy, President Reagan met with key staffers to discuss the arms-for-hostages deal. Secretary of State George Shultz and Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger both voiced strong opposition. (The two later said George Bush was present; Bush claimed he was not present at any meeting at which Shultz and Weinberger objected to the deal.) No decision was voiced at the meeting, and Shultz and Weinberger left thinking the idea was dead.
But in McFarlane's account, Reagan called him with a go-ahead. Reagan would say he had no recollection of such a call. No formal record of this major decision was ever made. The first shipment of arms went through, and one hostage was released. The Iranian arms dealer withheld the news that CIA man Buckley, the man McFarlane wanted out most, was already dead, tortured before being executed. A second arms shipment, now being handled by one of McFarlane's Security Council deputies, marine lieutenant colonel Oliver North, went awry and no hostages were released.
While "Let's Make a Deal" went on with Iran, the Reagan administration was in the thick of another foreign-policy struggle - the ongoing support of a rebel army known as the Contras, committed to overthrowing the Marxist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. The Democratic-controlled Congress had taken the upper hand in its power struggle with the White House over Contra aid by passing an amendment that cut off all U.S. funds for the rebel army. But inside the White House, plans were hatched to make an end run around Congress by soliciting foreign money for the Contras, and that was done, first from the Saudis. With money in the till, the problem became one of its disbursement. Even though Reagan was advised that sending such funds might be considered an impeachable offense, the plan went ahead, and that job was turned over to the same man who was in charge of the Iranian situation - Oliver North.
The man Reagan was later to call "a national hero" even as he fired him was seen by some White House staff as a power-grabbing zealot, delusional and willing to lie about his contacts and closeness with the President to advance his cause. A battle veteran of Vietnam and a fire-breathing anti-Communist, North had been involved in planning the military strike on the Caribbean island of Grenada to overthrow a Marxist government there on the pretext of rescuing American medical students.
To help him run his secret war in Nicaragua, North recruited a number of characters with past connections to the CIA and the American military, chief among them former air force general Richard Secord. At about this time, someone - nobody wants to take credit - came up with the idea of using profits being made from the sale of arms to Iran to fund the Contras. Hence the title "Iran-Contra." CIA chief Casey was an enthusiastic supporter of the idea and became North's chief White House patron, soon expanding the idea into what was called a permanent "off-the-shelf" covert enterprise that would circumvent congressional oversight of CIA secret operations.
One of the many ironies in this muddle was that the story was broken by an obscure Middle Eastern magazine, which revealed that McFarlane and North had been to Tehran, where McFarlane had tried to deliver a Bible and a birthday cake to the Ayatollah Khomeini as a goodwill gesture. Within days of this revelation, the strings began to unravel in the White House, and a seemingly befuddled Ronald Reagan issued a stream of conflicting statements and press conferences that were contradicted as soon as he made them.
The immediate outcome of the story was the formation of a presidential commission composed of Senator John Tower, a conservative Republican (later to be rejected by the Senate as George Bush's Defense Secretary, owing to reports of his drinking and womanizing); former Senator Edmund Muskie, Jimmy Carter's Secretary of State; and retired General Brent Scowcroft, a former subordinate of Henry Kissinger. The "Tower Commission" released its report early in 1987, and it was a scathing rebuke of Reagan.
In an introduction to one published version of the report, New York Times Washington correspondent R. W. Apple, Jr., wrote of the findings:
The board painted a picture of Ronald Reagan very different from what the world had become accustomed to in the last six years. No trace here of the lopsided smile, the easy wave, the confident mien that carried him through every past crisis; this portrait is of a man confused, distracted, so remote that he failed utterly to control the implementation of his vision of an initiative that would free American hostages and reestablish American influence in Iran, with all of its present and future strategic importance. At times, in fact, the report makes the President sound like the inhabitant of a never-never land of imaginary policies.
The Tower Commission was followed by a congressional investigation in which all of the deceptions. lies to Congress and the public, and illegality attached to large amounts of money passing through various sticky fingers began to be revealed. Although never taken as seriously by the public as was Watergate, the abuses of Iran-Contra were frightening: a President seemingly out of touch with reality and allowing very junior officers to control major foreign-policy adventures without any oversight; a plan to set up a secret CIA to circumvent the Congress; an attempt to ignore a law by using a technicality, a maneuver that even the President's closest advisers said might be an impeachable offense.
In the aftermath of Iran-Contra, only Oliver North has come to trial to date. Under the rubric of "national security," substantial amounts of evidence were withheld in the case. Oliver North was eventually convicted on a number of the Iran-Contra-related charges brought against him. He avoided conviction, however, on some of the most serious of these. In July 1989, with the judge in the case calling him a "fall guy," North was sentenced to a suspended sentence, community service in a drug program, and a fine that he would presumably pay out of his substantial speaking engagement fees.
Iran-Contra was a potentially dangerous escapade that might have seemed like the work of some novelist forming a scenario for a takeover of the inner workings of American government. Only Oliver North wasn't fiction. It is exactly his brand of zealotry that created the need for the system of checks and balances that exists at every level of the system.
History's long-range judgment of the Reagan years will obviously have to wait. Will ten or twenty years of wear and tear dull the "Teflon" finish? Given the American public's tendency to lionize and romanticize its characters from the past, it seems unlikely.
§
Title:
Don't Know Much About History
Author:
Davis, Kenneth C.
Date: New
York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1990