A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (144 page)

Hendrix, already a guitar legend, wrapped up Woodstock with a “truly apocalyptic” vision of a “battlefield, [with] zombies crawling over a field littered with paper cups, plastic wrappers, and half-eaten food, gnawing on corn husks, slobbering over ketchup-and mustard-smeared half-eaten hot dog rolls sprinkled with ants….”
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The event generated the single largest pile of garbage of any event in human history, and when the perpetrators departed, they left the mess for someone else to clean up.

Less than a week before Woodstock, on August 9, 1969, the cult followers of Charles Manson broke into the house of director Roman Polanski in Bel Air, California. Polanski was away, but his beautiful pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, and four of her friends were home. Manson’s gang—though not Manson himself—stabbed and butchered the houseguests, smearing slogans on the walls in the victims’ blood. Reflecting the depravity of the counterculture, the underground paper
Tuesday’s Child
named Manson its man of the year. Yippie leader Jerry Rubin said he fell in love with Manson’s “cherub face and sparkling eyes,” and Bernardine Dohrn, leader of the Weathermen, exclaimed, “Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into [Sharon Tate’s] stomach! Wild!”
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If anything, the Manson murders hurled icy water on the sixties myth that drugs made people holy, nonviolent, or pure.

At any rate, the drug culture and the so-called hippie movement never amounted to more than a well-publicized fringe. It certainly did not outnumber the body of apathetic or apolitical youth, and, even though it enjoyed better publicity, the hippie movement may have had fewer adherents than a growing conservative student movement that had taken root two years before the Port Huron Statement. The media did not view conservative youth groups, such as the Young Americans for Freedom, as newsworthy, and thus they never received the attention or coverage of the radicals, but they were influential nonetheless. Traditionalists and conservatives, those that Richard Nixon would call the Silent Majority, all faded into relative nonexistence from the media’s perspective. It was much more interesting to cover a firebombing or a riot.

Protests, Mobs, and the Media

Given the radicals’ dominance of the antiwar movement, it should not be surprising that “the demonstrations at the time of the Democratic convention in August 1968, and the moratorium events of October 1969 were orchestrated by organizations with changing names but with essentially the same cast of leaders.”
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On March 31, 1968, Lyndon Johnson shocked the country with an unexpected announcement that he would not again seek the Democratic nomination for president. Polls had indicated that he probably would lose, especially with a challenge from the dovish side of the Democratic Party. Equally shocking to some was that one of the emerging “doves,” Robert Kennedy, had abruptly repudiated his brother’s war. Suddenly many who still yearned for the presidency of John Kennedy—and the magic of Camelot—found him available again in the person of Robert. But just two months after Martin Luther King’s assassination, Bobby Kennedy, giving a speech in Los Angeles, was killed by Sirhan Sirhan. The motive given for the assassination—Sirhan was an Arab nationalist—remains puzzling to this day: Kennedy did not have a reputation as a strong friend of Israel, although he did come from New York, which had a strong Jewish lobby. Kennedy’s assassination left a void among the antiwar Left in the Democratic Party, whose dove leadership now devolved to the rather bland Eugene McCarthy. Certainly, though, the antiwar Left would not unite behind Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota.

A tireless legislator and principal author of the affirmative action laws, Humphrey lacked the commanding presence of a national leader and could only have won by sidestepping the turmoil that the antiwar elements promised to bring to the Democrats’ convention. Those groups sought to nominate McCarthy, a sincere-looking, soft-spoken senator from Minnesota who reminded people of a wise uncle. His appearance enhanced his antiwar positions, which were in many respects dangerous. Between 10,000 and 20,000 protesters moved into Chicago, with some of the most radical elements threatening to pour LSD into the city’s water or throw acid into the eyes of policemen. Others promised to lead a 150,000-person march on the Amphitheater. Democratic mayor Richard Daley, having just regained control of the city from race riots, had no intention of allowing a new group to disrupt the Windy City when he authorized police to “shoot to kill” any suspected looters.

Daley placed the nearly 12,000-strong Chicago police on twelve-hour shifts, augmented by 7,500 army troops airlifted in from Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado. He dispatched police to guard Chicago’s water supply and assembled “Daley dozers,” jeeps specially outfitted with rolls of barbed wire on the front to clear streets of demonstrators. More important, he had already infiltrated the radical groups, sabotaging their schemes to acquire buses, and giving out false information at phone banks.
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After weeks of denying the protesters march permits, Daley relented. The first riot broke out on August 25, 1968, when the police charged Lincoln Park, driving the peaceniks out. One policeman told a reporter, “The word is out to get newsmen,” and Daley himself implied that journalists would not be protected.
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A symbiotic relationship, which developed between the Chicago protesters and the news media, accelerated. But the journalists also failed to see the adroit manipulation by the demonstrators. Witnesses reported an absence of violence until the mobs saw television cameras, at which point they began their act. A later study by the national Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence reported that demonstrators stepped up their activities when reporters and photographers appeared, and, worse, camera crews “on at least two occasions
did stage violence and fake injuries
(emphasis ours).”
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The city of Chicago issued a report on the riots charging that the news media was guilty of “surprising naïveté,” but in reality the television cameras especially had encouraged and facilitated the rioters, and the images shifted all the blame to the police, who had their share of malignant club-wielding patrolmen. Advocates for maintaining public order were few and far between: NBC
Today Show
host Hugh Downs asked his viewers if the label “pigs” didn’t apply to the Chicago police. Chet Huntley of NBC complained that “the news profession…is now under assault by the Chicago police,” and Walter Cronkite said on the air that the “Battle of Michigan Avenue” made him want to “pack my bags and get out of this city.”
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Such rhetoric quickly faded as the media quietly reaffirmed its support of the Democratic Party in the general election.

The 1968 race pitted the inevitable winner, Humphrey, against the suddenly revived Richard Nixon, who had made one of the most amazing political comebacks of all time to capture the Republican nomination. Just six years earlier, when he lost the governor’s race in California, Nixon had told reporters, “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.” Nixon resurrected himself largely because of the rampant lawlessness in the country and his insight that Americans longed for “law and order.” He also understood that, if elected, he had to get the United States out of the war, one way or another, and he therefore claimed to have a “secret plan” to get America out of Vietnam. His anticommunist record suggested that whatever it was, it would not be concession to Hanoi. Claiming there was a “Silent Majority” of Americans who did not protest and did not demonstrate, but worked at their jobs, paid their taxes, and raised their families, Nixon appealed to the many who held the country together, kept the roads and Social Security funded, and raised kids who never broke any laws, yet who constantly found themselves portrayed by the media as boring, unimaginative, unhip, uncool, and generally not with it. In selecting Spiro T. Agnew, the governor of Maryland, as his running mate, Nixon further alienated the media and the elites, handing them a human lighting rod to absorb their attacks. During the first incarnation of the Republican “southern strategy,” Nixon told southern convention delegates that he would not “ram anything down your throats” and that he disliked federal intervention. Many took Nixon’s comments as code words for a lackadaisical approach to desegregation—which they may well have been—but he had also acknowledged that states did have legitimate constitutional protections against federal interference. At any rate, the southern strategy effectively nullified a strong third-party candidacy by former Alabama governor George Wallace, a segregationist and strong hawk.
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Although the margin of victory was somewhat distorted by Wallace, Richard Nixon won convincingly in the electoral college, 302 to 191. Wallace received nearly 10 million popular votes, along with 46 electoral votes in five southern states that almost certainly would have gone to Nixon in a two-way race. This meant that Nixon received only 43 percent of the popular vote, or about the same as in other three-way races, for example, Wilson in 1912 or Bill Clinton in 1992. He failed to carry a single large city, yet racked up California, Illinois, Ohio, and virtually all of the West except Texas.
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Viewing the Nixon and Wallace states together spotlighted a strong rejection of LBJ and his policies. Of course, the press was unhappy with this result. Reporter David Broder warned that the “men and the movement that broke Lyndon Johnson’s authority in 1968 are out to break Richard Nixon…[and it is] easier to accomplish the second time round.”
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Nixon saw the press as the enemy, telling his staff “nobody in the press is a friend.”
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In fact, he was right. Virtually unnoticed, the media in America had undergone a fundamental and radical shift in the sixties. This began with journalists’ utter failure to cover the Kennedy administration fairly and, subsequently, to cover the assassination either objectively or thoroughly. Seeking to recover lost ground and their journalistic virginity, members of the press had accelerated their attack on LBJ throughout the Vietnam War; then, when “their” candidate—Eugene McCarthy—scarcely made a dent in the Democratic nominating process, they opened up all their guns on Nixon. Most members of the press did not like Nixon, either personally or ideologically, and his “illegitimate” election allowed them to attack mercilessly.

“We Are All Keynesians Now”

Nixon came into office hoping to restore the pomp and circumstance of the White House, outfitting the marine guards with European-style ostentatious uniforms. Patriotic, convinced of the rightness of his position, Nixon unfortunately lacked the charisma that Kennedy, Jackson, or the Roosevelts had exhibited. His taste never seemed quite right: the new uniforms he had ordered for the White House guards only led to complaints that he was trying to create an “imperial” presidency. Having struggled through a poor childhood, Nixon never adapted to the modest wealth and trappings associated with the presidency. He never looked comfortable in anything less than a coat and tie. Yet he was a remarkable man.

Raised as a Quaker, he had played piano in church and was a high school debater. He entered the navy in World War II after putting himself through Whittier College and Duke University Law School. Elected to Congress from California in 1946, he was largely associated with anticommunism, especially the investigation of Alger Hiss. Criticized for failing to support desegregation issues, Nixon took states’ rights seriously. The notion that he was a racist in any way is preposterous: since 1950, when it was definitely not fashionable, he had been a member of the NAACP, and he had received the praise of Eleanor Roosevelt for his nondiscrimination policies as chairman of the Committee on Government Contracts.

Politically, Nixon’s election promises of respecting Main Street and upholding “law and order” had touched a desire among Americans to control the decade that had spun out of control.
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Billed as the “the most reactionary and unscrupulous politician to reach the White House in the postwar era,” Nixon was neither.
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Both Kennedy and Johnson had exceeded Nixon in their ability to deceive and lie, and if one considers Nixon’s economics, he was arguably was less conservative than Truman.

Far from retreating from liberalism, Nixon fully embraced the basics of New Deal economics and, at least in practice, continued to treat social programs as though they were indeed effective and justifiable public policies. “We are all Keynesians now,” he stated, indicating a faith in Keynesian economics, or the proposition that the government, through fiscal and monetary policy, could heat up or cool off the business climate. With the remnants of Great Society congressional delegations entrenched, and with the Democrats controlling both houses of Congress, the giant welfare state of the Great Society promised to grow, and grow rapidly, without a chief executive holding it in check. Meanwhile, the bill for LBJ’s programs started to come due under Nixon, and social spending rose dramatically during his administration, especially the budget for AFDC. Per-person costs to “lift” someone out of poverty went from $2,000 in 1965 to $167,000 by 1977.
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Even without the prodding of the Democrats, Nixon expanded government’s scope and activities. Under his watch, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) came into being, with its tendency to acquire vast and unchecked powers over private property in the name of the environment. The agency had a $2.5 billion budget and had employed seven thousand people in less than two years.
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Its Endangered Species Act of 1973 stopped construction of a $116 million dam in Tennessee because it might affect a fish called a snail darter, but that was only a taste of the runaway power the environmental agencies would later wield. By 1998, some 1,100 different endangered species were protected by the government to the extent that merely shining a light on a kangaroo rat at night—even if by accident—constituted a federal violation!