PART IV
It is not an overstatement to say that the destiny of the entire human race depends on what is going on in America today. This is a staggering reality to the rest of the world; they must feel like passengers in a supersonic jet liner who are forced to watch helplessly while a passel of drunks, hypes, freaks, and madmen fight for the controls and the pilot’s seat.
—ELDRIDGE CLEAVER, Soul on Ice, 1968
CHAPTER 20
Do you realize the responsibility I carry? I am the only person standing between Nixon and the White House.
—JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY, 1960
I believe that if my judgment and my intuition, my gut feeling, so to speak about America and American political tradition is right, this is the year that I will win.
—RICHARD M. NIXON, 1968
PRESIDENT GUSTAVO DíAZ ORDAZ of Mexico formally proclaimed the opening of the games of the XIX Olympiad yesterday in a setting of pageantry, brotherhood and peace before a crowd of 100,000 at the Olympic Stadium in Mexico City.” So read the lead on page one of The New York Times and in major newspapers around the world. Díaz Ordaz got the coverage he had killed for. The dove of peace was the symbol of the games, decorating the boulevards where students were lately beaten, and billboards proclaimed, “Everything Is Possible with Peace.” It was generally agreed that the Mexicans were running a good show, and the opening ceremonies were hailed for pomp as each team presented its flag to the regally perched Díaz Ordaz, El Presidente, the former El Chango. And no one could help but be moved as the Czechoslovakian team marched into the stadium to an international standing ovation. For the first time in history, the Olympic torch was lit by a woman, which was deemed considerable progress since the ancient Greek Olympics, where a woman caught at an Olympiad was executed. There was no longer any sign of the student movement in Mexico, and if it was mentioned, the government simply explained in the face of all logic that the movement had been an international communist plot hatched by the CIA. Yet the size of the crowd was disappointing to the Mexican planners. There were even empty hotel rooms in Mexico City.
“Freedom of expression.” 1968 student silk-screen poster with the logo of the Mexico City Olympics at the bottom
(Amigos de la Unidad de Postgrado de la Escuela de Diseño A.C.)
The United States, as predicted, assembled one of the best track and field teams in history. But then politics began to chip away at it. Tommie Smith and John Carlos, receiving gold and bronze medals for the 200-meter dash, came to the medal presentation shoeless, wearing long black socks. As the U.S. national anthem played, each raised one black gloved hand in the fist that symbolized Black Power. It looked like a spontaneous gesture, but in the political tradition of 1968, the act was actually the result of a series of meetings between the athletes. The black gloves had been bought because they had anticipated receiving the medals from eighty-one-year-old Avery Brundage, the president of the International Olympic Committee, who had spent most of the year trying to get South Africa’s segregated team into the games. Certain that they would win medals, they planned to use the gloves to refuse Brundage’s hand. But in a change of plans, Brundage was at a different event. Observant fans might have noticed that they had split one pair of gloves, Smith using the right hand and Carlos the left. The other pair of gloves was worn by 400-meter runner Lee Evans, a teammate and fellow student of Harry Edwards’s at San Jose State. Evans was in the stands returning the Black Power salute, but no one noticed.
The next day Carlos was interviewed on one of the principal boulevards of Mexico City. He said, “We wanted all the black people in the world—the little grocer, the man with the shoe repair store—to know that when that medal hangs on my chest or Tommie’s, it hangs on his also.”
The International Olympic Committee, especially Brundage, was furious. The American contingent was divided between those who were outraged and those who wanted to keep their extraordinary team together. But the committee threatened to ban the entire U.S. team. Instead they settled for the team banning Smith and Carlos, who were given forty-eight hours to leave the Olympic Village. Other black athletes also made political gestures, but the Olympic committee seemed to go out of its way to find reasons why these offenses were not as severe. When the American team swept the 400-meter, winners Lee Evans, Larry James, and Ron Freeman appeared at the medal ceremony wearing black berets and also raising their fists. But the International Olympic Committee was quick to point out that they didn’t do this while the national anthem was being played and therefore had not insulted the flag. They in fact removed their berets during the anthem. Also, much was made of the fact that they were smiling when they raised their fists. Smith and Carlos had been somber. And so, as in the days of slavery, the smiling Negro with a nonthreatening posture was not to be punished. Nor did bronze medal–winning long jumper Ralph Boston, going barefoot in the ceremonies, achieve condemnation for his protest. Long jumper Bob Beamon, who on his first attempt jumped 29 feet 2.5 inches, breaking the world record by almost 2 feet, received his long jump gold medal with his sweat pants rolled up to show black socks, which was also accepted.
The original incident at the medal presentations of Smith and Carlos attracted almost no attention in the packed Olympic stadium. It was only the television coverage, the camera zooming in on the two as though everyone in the stadium were doing the same, that made this one of the most remembered moments of the 1968 games. Smith, who had broken all records running 200 meters in 19.83 seconds, had his career in sports overshadowed by the incident, but whenever asked he has always said, “I have no regrets.” He told the Associated Press in 1998, “We were there to stand up for human rights and to stand up for black Americans.”
On the other hand, an unknown nineteen-year-old black boxer from Houston had his career shadowed by the Olympics for doing the reverse of Smith. After George Foreman won the heavyweight gold medal in 1968 by defeating the Soviet champion Ionas Chepulis, he pulled out from somewhere a tiny American flag. Had he been carrying it during the fight? He began waving it around his head. Nixon liked the performance and contrasted him favorably with those other antiwar young Americans who were always criticizing America. Hubert Humphrey pointed out that the young man with the flag when interviewed in the ring had saluted the Job Corps that Nixon was threatening to disband. But to many boxing fans, especially black ones, it had seemed like a moment of Uncle Tomism, and when Foreman went professional some started referring to him as the Great White Hope, especially when he faced the beloved Muhammad Ali, who beat him in an upset in Zaire, where all of black Africa and much of the world cheered Ali’s victory. It was a humiliation from which Foreman did not recover for years.
Yet through this year of upheavals and bloodshed, the baseball season glided eerily, as false and happy as a Norman Rockwell painting. Names like Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, Maris now traded to the St. Louis Cardinals, were still popping up, names that belonged to another age, before there were the sixties, before the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, when most Americans had never heard of a place called Vietnam. On April 27, less than a mile from besieged Columbia University, Mickey Mantle hit his 521st home run against the Detroit Tigers, tying Ted Williams for fourth place in career home runs. The night Bobby Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles, the Dodgers were playing in town and thirty-one-year-old right-handed pitcher Don Drysdale threw his sixth consecutive shutout, this time against the Pittsburgh Pirates. This broke Doc White’s sixty-four-year-old record for consecutive shutouts. On September 19, the day before the Mexican army seized UNAM, Mickey Mantle hit his 535th home run, breaking Jimmie Foxx’s record, to become the third-biggest career home run producer in history, behind only Willie Mays and Babe Ruth. The massacre at Tlatelolco shared front pages with the Cardinals’ Bob Gibson, who, while the massacre was unfolding, struck out seventeen Detroit Tigers in the opening game of the World Series, beating Sandy Koufax’s memorable fifteen strikeouts against the Yankees in 1963.
Baseball was having a great season, but it was getting difficult to care. Attendance was low in almost every stadium except Detroit, where the Tigers had their first good team in memory. Some of the stadiums were in neighborhoods associated with black rioting. Some fans thought that the pitching had gotten too good at the expense of hitting. Some thought that football, with its fast-growing audience, was more violent and therefore better suited to the times. The 1968 World Series was expected to be one of history’s finest pitching duels, between Detroit’s Denny McLain and St. Louis’s Bob Gibson. It was a seven-game series in which the Tigers, after losing three out of four games, came back to win the next three, thanks to the unexpectedly brilliant pitching of Mickey Lolich. For baseball fans it was a seven-game break from the year 1968. For the rest, Gene McCarthy—who was said to have been a respectable semiprofessional first baseman—said that the best ball players were men who “were smart enough to understand the game and not smart enough to lose interest in it.”
The only thing as out of step with the times as baseball was Canada, which was in the strange embrace of something called Trudeaumania. This country that became the home to an estimated fifty to one hundred U.S. military deserters and hundreds more draft dodgers was becoming a weirdly happy place. Pierre Elliott Trudeau became the new Liberal prime minister of Canada. Trudeau was one of the few prime ministers in the history of Canada to have been described as flashy. At forty-six and unmarried, he was the kind of politician whom people wanted to meet, touch, kiss. He was known for his unusual dress, sandals, a green leather coat, and for other unpredictable whimsy. He even once slid down the bannister of the House of Commons while holding piles of legislation. He practiced yoga, loved skin diving, and had a brown belt in karate. He had a stack of prestigious graduate degrees from Harvard, London, and Paris and until 1968 was known more as an intellectual than a politician. In fact, one of the few things he was not known to have experienced very much of was politics.
As Americans faced the bleak choice of Humphrey or Nixon, Time magazine captured the thinking of many Americans when it wrote:
The U.S. has seldom had occasion to look north to Canada for political excitement. Yet last week, Americans could envy Canadians the exuberant dash of their new Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau who, along with intellect and political skill, exhibits a swinger’s panache, a lively style, an imaginative approach to its nation’s problems. A great many U.S. voters yearn for a fresh political experience. . . .
In a time of extremism, he was a moderate with a lefty style, but his exact positions were almost impossible to establish. He was from Quebec and of French origin, but he spoke both languages beautifully and it was so uncertain whose side he was on that many hoped he might be able to resolve the French-English squabble that consumed much of Canada’s political debate. While most Canadians were against the war in Vietnam, he said he thought the bombing should halt but that he was not going to tell the United States what to do. A classic Trudeauism: “We Canadians have to remember that the United States is kind of a sovereign state too.” He was once apprehended in Moscow for throwing snowballs at a statue of Stalin. But he was sometimes accused of communism. Once, when asked flat out if he was a communist, he answered: “Actually I am a canoeist. I’ve canoed down the Mackenzie, the Coppermine, the Saguenay rivers. I wanted to prove that a canoe was the most seaworthy vessel around. In 1960 I set out from Florida to Cuba—very treacherous waters down there. Some people thought I was trying to smuggle arms to Cuba. But I ask you, how much arms can you smuggle in a canoe?”
It is a rare politician who can get away with answers like that, but in 1968, with the rest of the world turned so earnest, Canadians were laughing. Trudeau, with his lack of political experience, would say that the voters had put him up to running as a kind of joke. And now they “are stuck with me.” Fellow Canadian Marshall McLuhan described Trudeau’s face as a “corporate tribal mask.” “Nobody can penetrate it,” McLuhan said. “He has no personal point of view on anything.”
On social issues, however, his position was clear. Despite a reputation for womanizing, he took strong stands on women’s issues, including liberalizing abortion laws, and he was also an outspoken advocate of rights for homosexuals. Prior to the April election, Trudeau had always been seen in a Mercedes sports car. A reporter asked him, now that he was prime minister, whether he was going to give up the Mercedes. Trudeau answered, “Mercedes the car or Mercedes the girl?”
When Trudeau died in 2000 at the age of eighty, both former president Jimmy Carter and Cuban leader Fidel Castro were honorary pallbearers.
The Beatles also surprised everyone with their lack of stridency, or lack of commitment, depending on the point of view. In the fall of 1968 they released their first self-produced record—a single with “Revolution” on one side and “Hey, Jude” on the other. “Revolution” carried the message “We all want to change the world”—but we should do it moderately and slowly. The Beatles were attacked for the stance in many places, including the official Soviet press, but by the end of 1968 many people agreed. By the fall, when there is usually a sense of renewal, there was instead a feeling of weariness.
Not everyone felt it. Student activists returned to school hoping to resume where they had left off in the spring, while the schools hoped to go back to the way things were before. When the Free University of Berlin opened in mid-October, the women’s dormitories had been occupied by men for most of the summer. The university gave in and announced that the dormitories would henceforth be coeducational.
At Columbia, the radical students hoped to continue and even internationalize the movement. In June the London School of Economics and the BBC had invited New Left leaders from ten countries to a debate it called “Students in Revolt.” Student movements seized on this opportunity. Opponents such as de Gaulle talked of an international conspiracy, and the students thought this might be a good idea. The fact was, they had mostly never met one another, except those who had gone to Berlin for the spring anti-Vietnam march.
Columbia SDS had decided to send Lewis Cole, as Rudd said impatiently, “because he chain-smoked Gauloises. ” In truth, Cole was the group intellectual most fluent in Marxist theory. Cole and Rudd were being regularly invited on the better talk shows such as David Susskind and William Buckley.
At Columbia, SDS students felt the need for an ideology that fit their action program. Martin Luther King had had his moral imperative, but since these students hadn’t come from religious backgrounds, this approach did not suit most of them. The communist approach of being part of a great party, the great movement—was too authoritarian. The Cuban approach was too militaristic. “There was an idea in SDS that we have the practice but the Europeans have the theory,” said Cole. Cohn-Bendit had the same view. He said, “The Americans have no patience for theory. They just act. I was very impressed with this American Jerry Rubin, just do it.” But at Columbia, where the students had been so successful at getting attention, they were feeling the need for an underlying theory that could explain why they were doing the things they did. Cole admitted to a feeling of intimidation at the prospect of debating with skilled European theoreticians.
The London meeting was almost stopped by British immigration, which tried to keep the radicals out. The Tories did not want to let Cohn-Bendit in, but James Callaghan, the home secretary, interceded on his behalf, saying that exposure to British democracy would be good for him. Lewis Cole was stopped at the airport, and the BBC had to contact the government to get him in.
Cohn-Bendit immediately clarified to the press that they were not leaders but rather “megaphones, you know, loudspeakers of the movement,” which was an accurate description of himself and many of the others. Cohn-Bendit engaged in a put-on. De Gaulle had first come to prominence in June 1940 when he left France, and in exile in Britain he made a famous broadcast to the French people asking them to keep resisting the Germans and not to follow the collaborationist government of Philippe Pétain. Cohn-Bendit now announced that he was asking for British asylum. “I will ask the BBC to reorganize the Free French radio as they did during the war.” He said that he would copy de Gaulle’s exact message, except that where he had said “Nazis” he would say “French fascists” and where he had said “Pétain” he would say “de Gaulle.”
The debate was dominated by Tariq Ali, the Pakistani-born British leader who had once been president of the famous debating society the Oxford Union. Ali said that students renounced elections as a means for social change.
Afterward they all went to the grave of Karl Marx and had their picture taken.
Cohn-Bendit returned to Germany vowing that he would renounce his leadership and disappear into the movement. He said that he had fallen prey to “the cult of personalities” and that “power corrupts.” He told the Sunday Times of London, “They don’t need me. Whoever heard of Cohn-Bendit five months ago? Or even two months ago?”
Cole found it a confusing experience. He never did understand what Cohn-Bendit’s ideology was, and he found Tariq Ali’s debating skills offputting. The people he connected with most were from the German SDS, and he toured Germany afterward with “Kaday” Wolf. “In the end,” he said, “the ones with the greatest similarities were the Germans. And the Germans had a lot of the same cultural influences—Marcuse and Marx. And an intense feeling of youth being incredibly alienated. A young person in young dress walks down a street in Germany and the older Germans just glared at him.”
But by fall Cole was back at Columbia with a theory he had gleaned from the French called “exemplary action.” The French had done exactly what the Columbia students were trying to do—analyze what they had done and evolve a theory from their actions. The theory of “exemplary action” was that a small group could take an action that would serve as a model for larger groups. Seizing Nanterre had been such an action.
Traditional Marxist-Leninism is contemptuous of such theories, which it labels “infantilism.” In June Giorgio Amendola, a theoretician and member of the steering committee of the Italian Communist Party, the largest Communist Party in the West, attacked the Italian student movement for “extremist infantilism” and scoffed at the idea that they were qualified to lead a revolution without having built their mass base in the traditional Marxist approach. He termed it “revolutionary dilettantism.” Lewis Cole said, “Exemplary action gave us our first theory. That was why we had so many meetings. The question was always, what do we do now?”
SDS poster announcing a demonstration before election day, 1968
(Center for the Study of Political Graphics)
With their theory now in place, they were ready to be a revolutionary center to prepare, as Hayden had said, “two, three, many Columbias.” The theory also helped the national office of the rapidly growing SDS become more of a command center. The first action at Columbia was a demonstration against the invasion of Prague. But that was still in August, and few people came. According to Cole, “It wasn’t very well done. The slogan was ‘Saigon, Prague, the pig is the same all over the world.’”
Columbia SDS, looking for an event to restart the movement, came up with the idea of hosting a student international, but from the outset it was a disaster. Two days before the conference began, the news broke of the student massacre in Mexico. Columbia students, feeling guilty because they had not even known that there was a student movement in Mexico, tried to organize a demonstration at the conference. But they were unable to come up with any consensus. The French situationists spent the second day doing parodies of everyone who spoke. To some, it was a welcome diversion from too much speaking. Cole recalled, “We found that there were huge differences between all of us. All we could agree on was antiauthoritarianism, and alienation from society, these sorts of cultural issues.” Increasingly, the other delegations grew irritated at the French, especially the Americans, who felt the French were lecturing them on Vietnam and failing to understand what a burning issue it was in the United States.
In Mark Rudd’s assessment, “The Europeans were too pretentious, too intellectual. They only wanted to talk. It was more talk. People made speeches, but I realized nothing would happen.”
Rudd had no doubt that he was at a historic moment, that a revolution was slowly unfolding and his job was to help it along. A bit of Che—“The first duty of a revolutionary is to make a revolution”—mixed with the notion called “bringing the war home” and the theory of exemplary action, and in June 1969 he came up with the Weathermen, a violent underground guerrilla group named after the Bob Dylan lyrics “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” In March 1970 they changed their name to the Weather Underground because they realized that the original name was sexist. In hindsight, it seems evident that a guerrilla group started by middle-class men and women who name their group from a Bob Dylan song will likely be their own worst enemies. Their only victims were three of their own, who blew themselves up making bombs in a house in Greenwich Village. But others turned to violence as well. The government was violent. The police were violent. The times were violent and revolution was so close. David Gilbert, who had first knocked on Rudd’s dormitory door to recruit him for SDS, continued after the mid-1970s when the Weather Underground dissolved and more than twenty years later was still in prison for his part in a fatal 1981 shootout. Many 1968 student radicals became 1970s underground guerrilla fighters in Mexico, Central America, France, Spain, Germany, and Italy.
Politics sometimes has longer tentacles than imagined. That fateful first day of spring when Rockefeller collapsed the earth from under the liberal wing of the Republican Party unleashed a chain of events that the United States has been living with ever since. A new kind of Republican was born in 1968. That became clear at the end of June, when President Johnson appointed Justice Abe Fortas to succeed Earl Warren as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Warren had resigned before the close of the Johnson administration because he believed Nixon would win and he did not want to see his seat taken over by a Nixon appointee. Fortas was a predictable choice, a friend of Johnson, who had appointed him to replace Arthur Goldberg three years earlier. Fortas had distinguished himself as a leader of the liberal activist judges who had characterized the Court since the mid-1950s. Although he was the fifth Jewish justice on the Court, he would have been the first Jewish chief justice.
At the time, the Senate rarely battled over Court appointments. Both Republican and Democratic senators recognized the right of the president to have his choice. In fact, there had not been a battle since John J. Parker, Herbert Hoover’s appointee, was rejected by two votes in 1930.
But when Fortas was named there was an immediate outcry of “cronyism.” Fortas was a long-standing friend and adviser to the president, but he was also eminently qualified. The charge of cronyism was more effective against Johnson’s other appointment to take Fortas’s seat, Homer Thornberry. Thornberry was an old friend of Johnson, who had advised him not to accept the vice presidential nomination and then changed his mind and was at Johnson’s side when he was sworn in as president after John Kennedy’s death. A congressman for fourteen years, he became an undistinguished circuit court judge. He had been a segregationist until Johnson came to power and then reversed his stance, coming out on the desegregation side of several notable cases.
But cronyism was not the main issue; it was the right of Johnson to appoint Supreme Court justices. Republicans, who had been in the White House only eight of the past thirty-six years, felt they had a good chance of taking over in 1968, and some Republicans wanted their own judges. Robert Griffin, Republican from Michigan, got nineteen Republican senators to sign a petition saying that Johnson, with only seven months left in office, should not get to pick two judges. There was absolutely nothing in law or tradition to back up this position. At that point in the twentieth century, Supreme Court judges had been appointed in election years six times. William Brennan had been named by Eisenhower one month before the election. John Adams picked his friend John Marshall, one of the most respected appointments in history, only weeks before Jefferson was to take office. Griffin simply wished to deny Johnson his appointments. “Of course, a lame duck president has the constitutional power to submit nominations for the Supreme Court,” argued Griffin, “but the Senate need not confirm them.” But Griffin and his coalition of right-wing Republicans and southern Democrats were not doing this completely on their own. According to John Dean, who later served as special counsel to President Nixon, candidate Nixon kept in regular contact with Griffin through John Ehrlichman, later the president’s chief adviser on domestic affairs.
But the Democrats had an almost two-to-one majority and supported the appointments, and a great deal of the Republican leadership, including the minority leader, Everett Dirksen, did as well.
At his hearings Fortas was submitted to a grilling unprecedented in the history of chief justice appointees. He was attacked by a coalition of right-wing Republicans and southern Democrats. Among his chief inquisitors were Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and John Stennis of Mississippi, who denounced him for being a liberal in “decisions by which the Court has asserted its assumed role of rewriting the Constitution.” It was a new kind of coalition, and in carefully coded language they were attacking Fortas and the Warren Court in general for desegregation and other pro–civil rights decisions as well as for protection for defendants and rulings tolerating pornography. Fifty-two cases were brought up in which it was claimed that in forty-nine of them Fortas’s vote had prevented material from being ruled pornography; this was followed by a private, closed-door session in which the senators reviewed slides of the allegedly offensive material. Strom Thurmond even attacked Fortas for a decision made by the Warren Court before Fortas was on the bench. In October they managed to defeat the nomination with a filibuster, which requires a two-thirds majority to break. The pro-Fortas senators lacked fourteen votes, so the appointment was successfully tied up until the end of the congressional session—the first time in American history that a filibuster was used to try to block a Supreme Court appointment. Since Fortas would not be vacating his associate justice seat, Thornberry’s nomination was dead also.
When Nixon came to power, he began to attack the Supreme Court, attempting to destroy liberal judges and replace them with judges, preferably from the South, who had an anti–civil rights record. The first target was Fortas, who was driven from the bench by a White House–created scandal for accepting fees in a manner that was common practice for Supreme Court justices. Fortas resigned. The next target was William O. Douglas, the seventy-year-old Roosevelt-appointed liberal. Gerald Ford spearheaded the impeachment drive for the White House but it failed. The attempt to place southerners with anti–civil rights records in the court failed. The first, Clement Haynsworth, was rejected by the Democratic majority still angry over the attack on Fortas. The second, G. Harrold Carswell, was found embarrassingly incompetent. But the Fortas attack plus bad health of elderly judges did give Nixon the unusual opportunity of appointing four Supreme Court judges in his first term, including the Justice Department’s legal expert behind the Supreme Court attacks, William Rehnquist.
To the astute observer, Nixon’s strategy, the new Republican strategy, was first presented at the Republican convention in Miami when he chose Maryland governor Spiro T. Agnew. Many thought the choice was a mistake. Given Rockefeller’s popularity, Nixon-Rockefeller would have been a dream ticket. Even if Rockefeller wouldn’t accept the number two spot, New York mayor John Lindsay, a handsome, well-liked liberal who had helped write the Kerner Commission report on racial violence, had made it clear that he was eager to run as Nixon’s vice president. Conservative Nixon with liberal Lindsay would have brought to the Republican Party the full spectrum of American politics. Instead Nixon turned to the Right, picking a little-known and not much loved archconservative, with views, especially on race and law and order, that were so reactionary that to many he seemed an outright bigot.
Agnew, sensitive to the unusually hostile response to his nomination, complained, “It’s being made to appear that I’m a little to the right of King Lear.” The press took the obvious follow-up question, Why was King Lear a rightist? Agnew replied with a smile, “Well, he reserved to himself the right to behead people, and that’s a rightist position.” Quickly the smile vanished as he talked about the reception he was getting in the party and press. “If John Lindsay had been the candidate, there would have been the same outburst from the South and accolades from the Northeast.” This was exactly the point. Agnew was part of a geographic strategy, what was known in politics as a “southern strategy.”
For one hundred years, southern politics had remained frozen in time. The Democratic Party had been the party of John Caldwell Calhoun, the Yale-educated South Carolinian who fought in the decades leading up to the Civil War for the southern plantation/slave-owning way of life under the banner of states’ rights. To white southerners, the Republican Party was the hated Yankee party of Abraham Lincoln that had forced them to release their Negro property. After Reconstruction, neither party had much to offer the Negro, so for another century white southerners stayed true to their party and the Democrats could count on a solid block of Democratic states in the South. The point George Wallace was making in his independent runs for president was that southern Democrats wanted something different from what the Democratic Party was offering, even though they were not going to become Republicans. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina was expressing the same idea as early as 1948 when he ran against Truman as the candidate for president for a party significantly named the States’ Rights Party.
In 1968 Thurmond, Abe Fortas’s harshest interrogator, committed the once unspeakable act of becoming a Republican. He was an early supporter of Nixon’s and worked hard for him at the Miami convention after getting Nixon’s promise that he would not pick a running mate who was distasteful to the South. So Lindsay had never really been in the running, though he didn’t know this.
In 1964, after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, close associates said he was depressed and talked of his having just signed over the entire South to the Republican Party. This was why he and Humphrey had adamantly opposed seating the Mississippi Freedom Party at the 1964 Democratic convention. The inconsistent support from the president, attorney general, and other government agencies that the civil rights movement experienced was the result of an impossible juggling act the Democrats wanted to perform—promoting civil rights and keeping the southern vote.
Many white liberals and blacks, including Martin Luther King, had always been distrustful of the Kennedys and Johnson because they knew these were Democrats who wanted to keep the white southern vote. John Kennedy, in his narrow victory over Nixon, got white southern support. Johnson, as a Texan with a drawling accent, was particularly suspect, but John Kennedy’s southern strategy was choosing him for running mate. Comedian Lenny Bruce, in his not always subtle satire, had a routine:
Lyndon Johnson—they didn’t even let him talk for the first six months. It took him six months to learn how to say Nee-Grow.
“Nig-ger-a-o . . .”
“O.K., ah, let’s hear it one more time, Lyndon now.”
“Nig-ger-a-o . . .”
After the Civil Rights Act, white bigots, if not blacks and white liberals, had no doubt about where Johnson stood. In the 1964 election Johnson defeated Goldwater by a landslide. Republicans bitterly blamed northern liberal Republicans, especially Nelson Rockefeller, for not getting behind the ticket. But in the South, for the first time, the Republican candidate got the majority of white votes. In a few states, enough black voters, including newly registered voters, turned out, combined with traditional die-hard southern democrats and liberals who hoped to change the South, to deny Goldwater a regionwide victory. But the only states that Goldwater carried, aside from his home state of Arizona, were Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina.
Now Nixon was realigning the party. “States’ rights” and “law and order,” two thinly veiled appeals to racism, were mainstays of his campaign. States’ rights, from the time of Calhoun, meant not letting the federal government interfere with the denial of black rights in southern states. “Law and order” had become a big issue because it meant using Daley-type police tactics against not only antiwar demonstrators, but black rioters as well. With each black riot, more white “law and order” voters came along, people who, like Norman Mailer, were “getting tired of Negroes and their rights.” The popular term for it was “white backlash,” and Nixon was after the backlash vote. Even that most moderate of black groups, the NAACP, recognized this. Philip Savage, NAACP director for Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, called Agnew and Nixon “primarily backlash candidates.” He said that having Agnew on the ticket “insures the Republican Party that it will not get a significant black vote in November.”
In 1968 there were still black Republicans. Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, the only black senator and the first since Reconstruction—a moderate social progressive who served with Lindsay on the Kerner Commission—was a Republican. The Democratic Party had not yet become the black party. It was the nomination of Agnew that changed that. Most of the 78 black delegates to the Miami convention, out of a total of 2,666, went home either unwilling or unable to back the ticket. One black delegate told The New York Times, “There is no way in hell I can justify Nixon and Agnew to Negroes.” A black Chicago delegate said, “They are telling us they want the white backlash and that they don’t give a damn about us.” The Republican Party lost its most famous black supporter when Jackie Robinson, the first black to break the color line in Major League baseball and one of the country’s most highly respected sports heroes, announced that he was quitting Rockefeller’s Republican staff and going to work for the Democrats to help defeat Nixon, calling the Nixon-Agnew ticket “racist.”
Accurately defining the political party division of the future, Robinson said, “I think what the Republican Party has forgotten is that decent white people are going to take a real look at this election, and they’re going to join with black America, with Jewish America, with Puerto Ricans, and say that we can’t go backward, we can’t tolerate a ticket that is racist in nature and that is inclined to let the South have veto powers over what is happening.”
One of the advantages of Agnew as a running mate was that he could run a little wildly to the right, while Nixon, statesmanlike, could strike a restrained pose. Agnew insisted that the antiwar movement was led by foreign communist conspirators, but when challenged on who these conspirators might be, he simply said that some SDS leaders had described themselves as Marxists and he would have more information on this later. “Civil disobedience,” he said in Cleveland, “cannot be condoned when it interferes with civil rights of others and most of the time it does.” Translation: The civil rights movement has impinged on the civil rights of white people. He called Hubert Humphrey “soft on communism” but retracted the statement with apologies after the Republican congressional leaders, Everett Dirksen and Gerald Ford, complained. Agnew said, “It is not evil conditions that cause riots but evil men.” Another famous Agnew declaration was, “When you have seen one slum you’ve seen them all.” And when criticized for using the words Jap and Polack, the vice presidential candidate countered that Americans were “losing their sense of humor.”
Liberal Republicans struggled not to show their revulsion at the ticket. Lindsay, whose city had seen its share of rioting and demonstrating from blacks, students, and antiwar protesters, wrote:
We have heard loud cries this year that we should insure our safety by placing bayoneted soldiers every five feet, and by running over nonviolent demonstrators who sit down in the streets.
You can now see the kind of society that would be. Look to the streets of Prague, and you will find your bayoneted soldier every five feet. You will see the blood of young men—with long hair and strange clothes—who were killed by tanks which crushed their nonviolent protest against communist tyranny. If we abandon our tradition of justice and civil order, they will be our tanks and our children.
As for the Humphrey campaign that came limping out of Chicago, it was clear to Humphrey that he had to challenge Nixon on the right. His running mate, Senator Edmund Muskie from Maine, was an eastern liberal who helped solidify their natural base. The Left might be unhappy with Humphrey, but they were not going to turn to Nixon. His position on the war was that it was not an issue because North Vietnam “has had it militarily” and a peace would be negotiated before he came to office in January. But in the last weeks before the election, Humphrey started to speak out against the campaign of fear and racism and began to gain ground against Nixon. “If the voices of bigotry and fear prevail, we can lose everything we labored so hard to build. I can offer you no easy solutions. There is none. I can offer you no hiding place. There is none.”
Humphrey added a new chapter to the fast-developing television age by campaigning on local TV. Traditionally, a politician would come to a town, arrange a rally, as large as possible, at the airport, and arrange an event at which he made a speech. Humphrey often did this, too, but in many towns he skipped it. The one thing he did everywhere he went was appear on the local television show. As for Nixon, he was probably not the last nontelegenic presidential candidate, but he was the last one to accept that about himself. It was widely believed that his five o’clock shadow on television during the debates had cost him the 1960 election. Significantly, the majority of people who only listened to the debates on radio thought Nixon had won. In 1968 a makeup team had worked out a regimen of pancake foundation and lighteners so that when the lights went on he did not look like the villain in a silent movie. His television coordinator, Roger Ailes, who believed his young age of twenty-eight to be his advantage, said, “Nixon is not a child of TV, and he may be the last candidate who couldn’t make it on the Carson show who could make it in an election.” In 1968 appearing on television talk shows had become the newest form of campaigning. Ailes said of Nixon, “He’s a communicator and a personality on TV, but not at his best when they say on the show, ‘Now here he is . . . Dick!’”
With the election only weeks away, the Humphrey-Muskie campaign started running peculiar but effective print ads. Never before had a front-runner been attacked in quite this way. “Eight years ago if anyone told you to consider Dick Nixon, you’d have laughed in his face.” It went on to say, “November 5 is Reality Day. If you know, deep down, you cannot vote for Dick Nixon to be President of the United States you’d better stand up now and be counted.” The ad included a campaign contribution coupon that read, “It’s worth to keep Dick Nixon from becoming President of the United States.”
George Wallace was the wild card. Would he draw away enough southern voters to deny Nixon states, thus ruining his southern strategy? Or was he, like the old States’ Rights Party, going to draw away traditional southern Democrats still loyal to the old party? Wallace told southern crowds that both Nixon and Humphrey were unfit for office because they supported civil rights legislation, which to cheering crowds he termed “the destruction of the adage that a man’s home is his castle.” Nixon had called Wallace “unfit” for the presidency. Wallace responded by saying that Nixon “is one of those Eastern moneyed boys that looks down his nose at every Southerner and every Alabamian and calls us rednecks, woolhats, peapickers and peckerwoods.” Ironically, Nixon himself always thought he was up against “Eastern moneyed boys” himself.
Out of despair came frivolity. Yetta Brownstein of the Bronx ran as an independent, saying, “I figure we need a Jewish mother in the White House who will take care of things.” There was a large bloc of people whose feelings about the election were best expressed by the candidacy of comedian Pat Paulsen, who said with his sad face and droning voice, “I think I’m a pretty good candidate because first I lied about my intention to run. I’ve been consistently vague on all the issues and I’m continuing to make promises that I’ll be unable to fulfill.” Paulsen deadpanned, “A good many people feel that our present draft laws are unjust. These people are called soldiers. . . .” His campaign began as a routine on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, a popular television show. With Tom Smothers as his official campaign manager, Paulsen on the eve of the election was predicted by pollsters to attract millions of write-in votes.
In the last two weeks of the campaign, polls started to show that Nixon was losing that mystical mandate known in political races and baseball series as “momentum.” The fact that Nixon’s numbers were stagnant and Humphrey’s continuing to grow implied a trend that could propel Humphrey.
The campaigns for the House of Representatives were gaining attention, becoming better financed and more contentious than they had been in many years. The reason was that there was a possibility, if Humphrey and Nixon ended up very close in electoral votes, with Wallace taking a few southern states, that no one would have a majority of state electoral votes, in which case the winner would be picked by the House. The voting public did not find this a very satisfying outcome. In fact, a Gallup poll showed that 81 percent of Americans favored dropping the electoral college and having the president elected by popular vote.
But on election day, Wallace was not an important factor. He took five states, denying them to Nixon, and Nixon swept the rest of the South except Texas. While the popular vote was one of the closest in American history—Nixon’s margin of victory was about .7 percent—he had a comfortable margin in the electoral college. The Democrats kept control of both the House and Senate. Only 60 percent of eligible voters bothered to cast votes at all. Two hundred thousand voters wrote in for Pat Paulsen.
The Czechs saw the victory of Nixon, the old-time cold warrior, as a confirmation of U.S. opposition to Soviet occupation. Most Western Europeans worried that the change in the White House would slow down Paris peace talks. Developing nations saw it as a reduction in U.S. aid. Arab states were indifferent because Nixon and Humphrey were equally friendly to Israel.
Shirley Chisholm was elected the first black woman member of the House. Blacks gained seventy offices in the South, including the first black legislators in the twentieth century in Florida and North Carolina and three additional seats in Georgia. But Nixon won a clear majority of southern white votes. The strategy that undid Abe Fortas also elected Nixon, and it became the strategy of the Republican Party. The Republicans get the racist vote and the Democrats get the black vote, and it turns out in America there are more racist voters than black ones. No Democrat since John F. Kennedy has won a majority of white southern votes.
This is not to say that all white southern voters are racist, but it is clear what votes the Republicans pursue in the South. Every Republican candidate now talks of states’ rights. In 1980 Ronald Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign in an obscure, backwater rural Mississippi town. The only thing this town was known for in the outside world was the 1964 murder of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. But the Republican candidate never mentioned the martyred SNCC workers. What did he talk about in Philadelphia, Mississippi, to launch his campaign? States’ rights.