Nixonland. Part 5

As American consensus transformed itself into American cacophony, the man whom Pat Brown had forced into political retirement in 1962 oiled his political machine. He had a full-time researcher and writer, a combative twenty-eight-year-old orthodox Catholic out of St. Louis named Patrick Buchanan. Brazenly, he had approached Nixon at a St. Louis party and said if he was running in 1968, he wanted to come aboard. Summoning Buchanan to New York for a grueling three-hour interview, Nixon asked him, "You're not as conservative as William F. Buckley, are you-or am I wrong?" Buchanan, who was more more conservative than Buckley (his specialty as an editorial writer for the right-wing conservative than Buckley (his specialty as an editorial writer for the right-wing St. Louis Globe-Democrat St. Louis Globe-Democrat was disseminating smears about civil rights leaders pa.s.sed on by J. Edgar Hoover), artfully dodged the question: "I have a tremendous admiration for Bill Buckley." was disseminating smears about civil rights leaders pa.s.sed on by J. Edgar Hoover), artfully dodged the question: "I have a tremendous admiration for Bill Buckley."

You had to admire a kid who could play the game like that.

Nixon also had a flack on retainer, William Safire, who sported ostentatious plaid coats and an air of intellectual pretension. Other conspirators flitted in and out of Nixon's office at 20 Broad Street: young lawyers from the firm like Len Garment, Tom Evans, and John Sears; congressmen and lobbyists; advance men from the '60 campaign like Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman (they wouldn't commit to help until he pledged to delegate more and drink less); consultants like Edward Teller, the nuclear sage. Nixon even hired Paul Keyes from the Jack Paar Show Jack Paar Show to write his gags. It worked. Soon, a journalist was writing, "His jokes are less forced, his delivery is better, and, most importantly, he has learned the value of poking fun at his own foibles." to write his gags. It worked. Soon, a journalist was writing, "His jokes are less forced, his delivery is better, and, most importantly, he has learned the value of poking fun at his own foibles."

What he really needed was money. He needed it to finance the cornerstone of his master plan: a national political tour dubbed "Congress '66." Thus the most important member of the team was fund-raiser Maurice Stans. Dwight D. Eisenhower's former budget director spoke with an aristocratic accent-though he was the son of an impoverished bricklayer. As a penniless youth, he had trekked to Chicago to study business at night school: an Orthogonian. He learned more practical skills, though, as a stenographer at a sausage-casings factory. "What are friends for if you can't screw them once in a while?" his boss instructed him. He would later have occasion to plead to Senate investigators that he had put his education in the relationship between sausage-making and accountancy well behind him.

Stans thought d.i.c.k Nixon stood head and shoulders above any other man in the country. But Stans was like most Americans: he thought the notion of Richard Nixon running for president again a bit absurd. Then, one evening in September of 1965, after Nixon's latest Far Eastern trip, the Nixons and the Stanses went to the World's Fair in Queens. Watching the former vice president get mobbed by autograph seekers, Stans realized the idea of a Nixon comeback wasn't so crazy after all. And once Stans pledged himself to the effort, money came rolling in: from blue-chip CEOs like Pepsi's Donald Kendall and Warner-Lambert's Elbert Bobst; from rich right-wingers grateful Nixon had stuck with Barry Goldwater in 1964 like oilmen J. Howard Pew and Henry Salvatori and J. Paul Getty, and Walter Harnischfeger, the Milwaukee mining-equipment manufacturer and onetime n.a.z.i sympathizer. Lila and DeWitt Wallace chipped in $8,500, though their most important contribution was s.p.a.ce for Nixon to pontificate in their magazine, Reader's Digest, Reader's Digest, the most widely read monthly in America. the most widely read monthly in America.

Nixon still pleaded cloth-coated poverty when he wrote old a.s.sociates: "Dear (Insert Name Here): I am planning to spend five weeks in September and October campaigning in some of the key congressional and Senate races across the country. As usual, I am undertaking this ambitious schedule with only a very part time staff at my disposal. If you could find the time to do some volunteer advance work during that period I would greatly appreciate it.... As usual, we have no funds available for salaries for our advance men." He hit up the Republican National Committee for a free airplane because, he said, he would be working for the party's sake, not his own. Fortunately for the other 1968 contenders, RNC chair Ray Bliss, who had a keen ear for bulls.h.i.t, made him rent one, out of the half million dollars raised by Stans.

The crusade began in January with a speech to the white-gloved ladies of the Women's National Republican Club at the Waldorf-Astoria (how he hated speaking to women's groups: "I will not go and talk to those s.h.i.tty a.s.s old ladies!" he once said). The next day, he appeared on the ABC Sunday show Issues and Answers, Issues and Answers, and the and the New York Times New York Times nicely obliged him by featuring his most important talking point: "I do not expect to be a candidate. I am motivated solely by a desire to strengthen the party so that whomever we nominate in 1968 can win." nicely obliged him by featuring his most important talking point: "I do not expect to be a candidate. I am motivated solely by a desire to strengthen the party so that whomever we nominate in 1968 can win."

His usual round of Lincoln's-birthday Republican fund-raising dinners followed, run this year like a miniature presidential campaign: blocks of hotel rooms reserved for the press; mimeographed bullet points slipped under their doors; then on to the next city by Jetstar-the same plane "in which James Bond was transported by the fabulous p.u.s.s.y Galore in the movie version of Goldfinger, Goldfinger," wrote an agog David Broder of the New York Times, New York Times, who found Nixon's "wearying" pace "a source of wonder." who found Nixon's "wearying" pace "a source of wonder."

So did Leonard Garment. "Day after day," he wrote in his memoirs, "he mused and muttered, fussing with details, calling here and there, soaking up information, reacting to events, doubling back, breaking away occasionally for a foreign trip or business meeting, ceaselessly tinkering, bobbing, weaving, and maneuvering at his disciplined chess player's pace toward the 1968 endgame. This time, Nixon must have said to himself, over and over, there must be no screwup." Garment thought to himself this must be how Olympic decathletes trained. Trips to fifty congressional districts were already scheduled for the rest of the year. Nothing-locale, personnel, audience-was left to chance.

Broder marveled at "the durability of his political appeal." In Cleveland he spoke before four thousand. In Seattle the local paper reported he got the "biggest, noisiest reception any Republican has had in years" (much bigger than the media's darling for the nomination, Michigan governor George Romney). Then he sat for a televised Q&A with high school students, slaying them with Paul Keyes's one-liners. ("I'm a dropout from the electoral college. I flunked debate.") Then to Louisville, where he laid a wreath on the grave of Abraham Lincoln's grandfather. At every stop, he heaped praise on local GOP office seekers. The fiction was that he was doing this for them.

He was actually implementing an old Nixon technique: discredit your opponent before he even realizes the campaign has started. Lyndon Johnson, he told these Republican audiences, was a "political operator"-whose "political luck has finally begun to peak." He "doesn't come across well on television" ("and I'm an expert on that"-another Keyes one-liner). He'd stop just short of calling the president a liar on Vietnam, then add that he would not be speaking about the war during Johnson's "sensitive negotiating efforts with Hanoi," before extending his sympathy to the president for all the "well-intentioned but mistaken Democrats who have taken the soft line, the appeas.e.m.e.nt line." For we could only lose in Vietnam "if President Johnson fails to take a strong line that will preserve the peace by refusing to reward the aggressors."

The bad faith, in retrospect, was pungent. In his memoir, Leonard Garment later revealed that Nixon then believed-though he would only say so in private meetings with top donors-that militarily, Vietnam could not be "won," and that the only practical question was how and when and at what disadvantage the eventual withdrawal would be staged.

Every dig-at Johnson's untrustworthiness, his awkwardness, his divided party-played to a neurotic man's fears. Nixon harped on inflation-within ten months "the country will face higher prices or higher taxes, or controls on wages and prices, and perhaps all three"-baffling reporters: inflation, Evans and Novak observed, was a problem "more phantom than reality," averaging less than 2 percent a year. Every word was entirely deliberate, though what the tactic was would only later become clear. As Nixon noted in an oral history he gave in February about his foreign-policy mentor John Foster Dulles, being Machiavellian "was not necessarily bad. It could be very good."

The Du Bois Club/Boys Club flap broke in March. Len Garment, spending every spare moment preparing what the Franklins at the firm considered the most important component of Nixon's political comeback-arguing as attorney of record in a case before the Supreme Court-went through the roof. The New Yorker New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" had mocked Nixon: "Custom and continuity are so lacking in these quick times that it was downright heartwarming last week to hear Richard M. Nixon warning us once again about the creepy, infinitely devious ways of the Communist party." Garment thought the boss had just p.i.s.sed away two years of work spent rehabilitating his postLast Press Conference reputation-in fresh jeopardy now that the University of Rochester faculty were working to deny him a promised honorary degree because of his depredations against academic freedom in the Genovese flap. The boss was unfazed. He told Garment to stop listening to the "d.a.m.ned press." In the Gallup Poll, among presidential contenders, he was the leading Republican by thirteen points. Appealing to Orthogonians didn't hurt him. It helped.

On April 10 a Boston University senior sat down in front of the White House and tried and failed to do what Quaker Norman Morrison had done beneath Robert McNamara's Pentagon window the previous year: burn himself to death to protest the war. On April 15, five thousand antiwar activists marched in New York, four thousand in Berkeley. The next day Nixon spoke at Tulane University in Louisiana. He asked whether the United States should let China "blackmail us out of the Pacific." "No!!!!!" "No!!!!!" students roared back. Youth politics came in many stripes. students roared back. Youth politics came in many stripes.

Nixon was touring the South on the eve of House deliberations on the civil rights bill. Liberal Republicans were demanding state GOP parties drop the segregationist planks in their platforms such as: "We feel segregation of the races is absolutely essential to harmonious racial relations and the continued progress of both races in the State of Mississippi." Nixon was, an unnamed prominent Republican told David Broder for a profile he was doing of George Romney, "trying to take the remnants of the Goldwater thing and give it some respectability, but it isn't going to work."

At Nixon's press conference upon arrival in Jackson, Mississippi, a national reporter asked if he was there to raise money for "segregationist candidates."

Nixon was prepared. He'd carved his response with precision: "I will go to any state in the country to campaign for a strong two-party system, whether or not I agree with local Republicans on every issue."

It was his version of an old Dixie war cry: accusing its critics of anti-Southern bigotry. He pressed on, "I am opposed to any so-called 'segregationist plank' in the Republican platform.... I would fight it in the national Republican platform and speak against it." But to direct state party platforms from above was "unrealistic and unwise." Washington "cannot dictate to them."

The cleverness was sublime. He was ventriloquizing a generation of Southern lost-cause speechifying about Yankees dictating to Dixie. At a party dinner that night-the largest in Mississippi since Goldwater came to Jackson in '62-he urged all all political parties to cease using race in favor of the "issues of the future." Language like this was a flawlessly polished diamond, glinting different colors depending from which angle light struck. To the applauding segregationists, it was a blow at the likes of Richmond Flowers, Lurleen Wallace's liberal opponent who mucked up Alabama politics by campaigning with Martin Luther King- political parties to cease using race in favor of the "issues of the future." Language like this was a flawlessly polished diamond, glinting different colors depending from which angle light struck. To the applauding segregationists, it was a blow at the likes of Richmond Flowers, Lurleen Wallace's liberal opponent who mucked up Alabama politics by campaigning with Martin Luther King-that was "using" race. To another variety of Southern Republican-sophisticated, white-collar Episcopalian types who were attracted to the party to strike a blow against the dirty-necked, economically populist courthouse Democrats-"issues of the future" referred to the South's integration into the national industrial economy. Finally, for the consensus-besotted national media, it sounded as if he were heralding the de-Dixifying of Dixie. "Nixon, in the South, Bids GOP Drop Race Issue," Broder's dispatch was headlined on May 7. was "using" race. To another variety of Southern Republican-sophisticated, white-collar Episcopalian types who were attracted to the party to strike a blow against the dirty-necked, economically populist courthouse Democrats-"issues of the future" referred to the South's integration into the national industrial economy. Finally, for the consensus-besotted national media, it sounded as if he were heralding the de-Dixifying of Dixie. "Nixon, in the South, Bids GOP Drop Race Issue," Broder's dispatch was headlined on May 7.

The headline belied the piece's sophisticated understanding of what Nixon was up to. By June, Broder reported, "Nixon will have completed a carefully planned circuit of the 11 states of the Confederacy, begun last year." Broder had been one of the myriad reporters to realize too late what F. Clifton White had been up to in 1963. Now he grasped what Clif White grasped. Delegates from the South had comprised 279 out of the 655 needed to nominate in 1964, the biggest regional-bloc vote by far. What's more, Broder wrote, "With convention voting strength keyed to party performance in the last election, the South's relative strength in the Republican convention in 1968 is likely to be even greater because it contributed nearly all of Mr. Goldwater's electoral votes and almost all the few new Republican congressmen." "Nixon is trying to take the remnants of the Goldwater thing and give it some respectability, but it isn't going to work." "Nixon is trying to take the remnants of the Goldwater thing and give it some respectability, but it isn't going to work." Actually, it might work just fine. The conventional wisdom also was that Nixon's gravest liability was his lack of a geographical base. Broder, in his calm, methodical way, shredded it. Nixon's geographical base was these eleven Southern states-"As of today," Broder concluded, "more than adequate dimensions for a serious bid." Actually, it might work just fine. The conventional wisdom also was that Nixon's gravest liability was his lack of a geographical base. Broder, in his calm, methodical way, shredded it. Nixon's geographical base was these eleven Southern states-"As of today," Broder concluded, "more than adequate dimensions for a serious bid."

Nixon's most important coup came at his next stop, South Carolina, where die-hard conservative Republicans had led the surprise attempted draft of Barry Goldwater at the 1960 convention. The Palmetto State's most powerful Republican was Senator Strom Thurmond, running for reelection for the first time since switching from the Democratic Party in 1964. Nixon sought an audience with Thurmond's closest political confidant, state Republican chairman Harry Dent. He learned that the beloved Dent family dog had just been run over by a car. Maybe, just maybe, dispatching a new one to the bereaved family would help his hand with Dent by some appreciable amount.

Regardless of what they might say about it, he was going to try it.

Whether because of the dog or not, Nixon got his meeting. By that time, Nixon was confident he could win the nomination. His terror was the possibility of George Wallace running as a third-party candidate, denying him enough states for an electoral college majority. Nixon flattered Dent by asking him his advice on how to handle the problem, already knowing the answer. It was, Dent said, to win the loyalty of Strom Thurmond. Then Dent told Nixon how to do it. In his press conference the next day, some Eastern Establishment reporter asked Nixon if he found it embarra.s.sing to share a party with "ol' States' Rights Strom." Nixon responded, "Strom is no racist. Strom is a man of courage and integrity."

Richard Nixon understood what dirty-necks like Strom most deeply craved: respect from the elite. "It was like being granted absolution from purgatory by the pope of American politics," one wise interpreter of Southern politics later reflected. Because of course of course Strom Thurmond was a racist, a thoroughgoing racist gargoyle, and forevermore, he would be grateful for the absolution. And Richard Nixon was on his way. This, he told young Buchanan, was Strom Thurmond was a racist, a thoroughgoing racist gargoyle, and forevermore, he would be grateful for the absolution. And Richard Nixon was on his way. This, he told young Buchanan, was living. living. "If I had to practice law and nothing else, I would be mentally dead in two years and physically dead in four." "If I had to practice law and nothing else, I would be mentally dead in two years and physically dead in four."

In the middle of May an L.A. cop stopped a black man named Leonard Deadwyler for speeding through Watts. He stuck his gun in the driver's-side window-"to attract the driver's attention," he later testified. He also claimed the car suddenly lurched forward, causing his gun to discharge. Leonard Deadwyler slumped into the lap of his wife and muttered his last words-"But she's having a baby"-as his two-year-old son looked on from the backseat. He had been speeding her to the nearest hospital, miles away; there was no hospital in Watts-an area twice the size of Manhattan.

Hundreds marched to the Seventy-seventh Precinct in protest. They dispersed peacefully-then a Newsweek Newsweek reporter was ambushed from behind by a two-by-four. ("They stoned him with boulders a foot in diameter," the right-wing tabloid the reporter was ambushed from behind by a two-by-four. ("They stoned him with boulders a foot in diameter," the right-wing tabloid the L.A. Herald Examiner L.A. Herald Examiner embellished in a story headlined "New Race Violence: Riot, Beating, in L.A. Area.") Every day, hundreds of angry Negroes clamored for entrance to the hearing over whether the cop acted properly. The embellished in a story headlined "New Race Violence: Riot, Beating, in L.A. Area.") Every day, hundreds of angry Negroes clamored for entrance to the hearing over whether the cop acted properly. The New York Times New York Times-every broken window in Watts was a national story now-quoted a "well-dressed man" who said that if the cop was cleared, "it'll be like World War II all over again." The Times Times also ran a feature on a Los Angeles black nationalist leader, Ron Karenga, who "told an enthusiastic Negro teenager audience last night they should be prepared to defend themselves-if need be from whites." Mayor Yorty said the Communists were behind it all. Southern California clenched for the next riot. also ran a feature on a Los Angeles black nationalist leader, Ron Karenga, who "told an enthusiastic Negro teenager audience last night they should be prepared to defend themselves-if need be from whites." Mayor Yorty said the Communists were behind it all. Southern California clenched for the next riot.

What prevented it was an agreement between the district attorney and KTLA to televise the inquest live. One token of the city's eggsh.e.l.l sensitivities was that the anchorman felt compelled to remind his viewers over and over that the hearing officer referred to Deadwyler's lawyer as "Johnnie" Cochran because that was how the black lawyer preferred to be called, "no disrespect or condescension intended." The jury ruled the discharge accidental. Cochran addressed the camera on behalf of his client, pleading for peace. Race war was averted, but only in Los Angeles. In Bakersfield, two thousand Negroes at a "grits and gripes" picnic to discuss the city council's nondisbursal of federal poverty funds firebombed a school bus. Whites retaliated with a Molotov c.o.c.ktail attack on the ghetto.

The gubernatorial election was June 7, one week away.

On Memorial Day weekend Ronald Reagan fulminated at a stadium rally about "arson and murder in Watts." The Times Times led its report noting that when the emcee, Chuck Connors, the television cowboy, said that you could search "from the coasts of Maine to the coasts of California" and not find another politician like Reagan, someone shouted, "Try Arizona!" The led its report noting that when the emcee, Chuck Connors, the television cowboy, said that you could search "from the coasts of Maine to the coasts of California" and not find another politician like Reagan, someone shouted, "Try Arizona!" The Times Times reporter was impressed that Reagan didn't take the bait: he never mentioned Barry Goldwater, and "did not sound much like the conservative hero. He only talked about the same things." That Reagan represented Goldwater's ideas without Goldwater's liabilities was precisely why his boosters backed him for governor in the first place. The Newspaper of Record's conclusion suggested their political instincts had been correct. reporter was impressed that Reagan didn't take the bait: he never mentioned Barry Goldwater, and "did not sound much like the conservative hero. He only talked about the same things." That Reagan represented Goldwater's ideas without Goldwater's liabilities was precisely why his boosters backed him for governor in the first place. The Newspaper of Record's conclusion suggested their political instincts had been correct.

This San Diego speech was a typical performance. Reagan pointedly distanced himself from the "nuts and kooks of the extreme right"-though he also courted them by humoring their paranoia: after a microphone failed and was replaced by another, he joked, "How about that, we found one they didn't cut!" He worked in a reference to Vietnam that simultaneously hammered the administration and distanced him from accusations of unpatriotic meddling: "A suspicion prevails," he said-note the artful pa.s.sivity-that American troops "are being denied the right to try for victory in that war." The Times Times observed how, when the subject turned to Berkeley, "he dwells on 's.e.xual orgies...so vile I cannot describe it to you.'" That got the wildest applause of all. observed how, when the subject turned to Berkeley, "he dwells on 's.e.xual orgies...so vile I cannot describe it to you.'" That got the wildest applause of all.

He spoke of outrageous taxes ("There's no more leeway for squeezing the people"), "the philosophy that only government has the answer," that under Great Society bureaucrats "we cannot remain a free society." He announced as his campaign theme the "Creative Society," where "the people have the strength and ability to confront the problems before us." (For example, since state hospitals and mental inst.i.tutions were "in a sense, hotel operations," an expert committee of hotel operators could oversee them instead of "government planners.") He savaged skyrocketing welfare programs that brought migrants to the state to "loaf." The California Supreme Court had just invalidated Proposition 14, the anti-open-housing referendum pa.s.sed in 1964, and Reagan didn't like that one bit: "I have never believed that majority rule has the right to impose on an individual as to what he does with his property. This has nothing to do with discrimination. It has to do with our freedom, our basic freedom." Southern California's bourgeois utopians roared. The Times Times said California Democrats "now believe Ronald Reagan has an excellent chance to be the next governor of the most populous state in the union." said California Democrats "now believe Ronald Reagan has an excellent chance to be the next governor of the most populous state in the union."

Brown stubbornly kept to his strategy of aiding Reagan. George Christopher had been convicted in 1939 for violating a milk-pricing statute. The conviction, later reversed, was for the sin of setting the price too low low-hardly a political liability when his opponents had introduced it in past campaigns, so Brown's managers advised him to leave well enough alone. Instead, Brown had the information pa.s.sed on to muckraking columnist Drew Pearson. Right-wingers in Southern California, where the revelation was fresh, did their part by circulating anonymous handbills featuring Christopher with a number across his chest and the caption "Wanted." Reagan surged some more.

Christopher fought back with theatrics of his own. He flew to Eureka College in Illinois, his opponent's alma mater, where the hypocrite Reagan had once led a student strike himself. A Christopher TV doc.u.mentary alerted Californians that their hero had belonged to Communist fronts. The charges didn't stick. Nothing stuck to this guy. "I disagree with almost everything he says," an exasperated Brown appointee told the Sat.u.r.day Evening Post. Sat.u.r.day Evening Post. "But dammit, I can't help but feel that he is basically a nice guy." "But dammit, I can't help but feel that he is basically a nice guy."

Reagan latched onto a stricture laid down by California's Republican chairman, San Diego obstetrician g.a.y.l.o.r.d Parkinson, after the divisive 1964 primary between Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater: "Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican." Christopher backed it, too, until his last-ditch dispatch from Eureka, after which Parkinson publicly censured him-making Reagan look like the candidate of Republican unity.

Ronald Reagan had been underestimated, not for the last time. He learned to count on it, cherish it, revel in it: it was his political capital.

At a rally in San Francisco's Chinatown, Brown cried that Reagan was "sailing a course that's pure Goldwater; the only difference is that Reagan's turned out the running lights." Brown meanwhile did his best to sail a course more like Reagan's, not quite getting the coordinates right: signing the nation's first law outlawing LSD, he promised it would "not hamper proper use of the drug for legitimate purposes." He put in gray-"proper use...legitimate purposes"-what Reagan rendered in black and white: "The smell of marijuana was thick throughout the hall." "The smell of marijuana was thick throughout the hall."

In the California Poll the top issues of public concern were now "crime, drugs, and juvenile delinquency." Forty-five percent credited Reagan as the candidate who would do a better job on them. He used phrases like "basic freedom," "basic principles," "basic individual rights of all citizens." He called "the one overriding issue of this campaign...the issue of simple morality." In a season of moral panic, it made him the star.

The leftists of the California Democratic Council, moralists in their own right, turned their back on Brown for his support of the administration on Vietnam. One of the president's favorite congressmen, Jeffrey Cohelan, was almost knocked off in a primary challenge in the district straddling Oakland and Berkeley from New Leftist magazine editor Robert Scheer. Johnson's poverty czar, Sargent Shriver, gave a speech to a conference of the Citizen's Crusade Against Poverty and was jostled off the stage by radicals: "You're lying!" they cried. "Stop listening to him!"

Moral panics from the right, moral panics from the left; poor, dumpy Pat Brown pinioned helplessly in the middle. On primary day he couldn't even get a majority, holding on to the nomination only because minor candidates diluted Yorty's tally. Yorty received 38 percent of the vote practically without campaigning, overwhelmingly winning in blue-collar areas adjacent to black neighborhoods. People started talking about running him for Senate against the liberal Republican Thomas Kuchel in 1968.

Also on the ballot in L.A. County was a $12.3 million bond issue to finally build a hospital in Watts. The hospital that would have saved Leonard Deadwyler's life.

It failed.

And, oh, yes, California Republicans, "against all counsels of common sense and prudence," in the words of the New York Times New York Times editorial, "insisted upon nominating actor Ronald Reagan for governor." They did it in a landslide. editorial, "insisted upon nominating actor Ronald Reagan for governor." They did it in a landslide.

Reagan the conquering hero was invited to address the National Press Club. Nixon briefed Senator George Murphy and a young factotum named Sandy Quinn on how to coach the neophyte for his national political coming-out. The press would bug Reagan about whether he was using California as a stepping-stone to a presidential candidacy in 1968, Nixon explained, just as they had bugged Nixon in 1962; the customary answer-Reagan had a contract with the people of California to serve out his term-"will not go over with this sophisticated group." It had not, after all, worked for Nixon-and he was the most skilled political professional in the country. The charge that Nixon was plotting to use the governorship as a stepping-stone to the presidency had stuck-it was what the slogan "Would you buy a used car from this man?" referred to. But he should at least try it, Nixon had his friends tell Reagan.

Nixon's advice bore a double agenda. First, he wanted Ronald Reagan to be in his debt should Reagan win the statehouse. At the same time, conservatives were already talking about Reagan as a presidential prospect-so Nixon stood to benefit mightily if Reagan pledged before the national political press corps not to run in 1968 (for if Reagan did run, he could claim he had accomplished what Nixon could not: beating Pat Brown).

Reagan dashed off a note thanking Nixon for "your very good suggestions," then jetted East. In Pittsburgh he was the guest of right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. In Gettysburg his host was General Eisenhower-who said "you can bet" Reagan would be a presidential prospect if he beat Pat Brown. (The b.a.s.t.a.r.d, Nixon had to be thinking, kicking d.i.c.k Nixon once more.) In Washington, Reagan met with the California congressional delegation-all except Senator Thomas Kuchel, who had been complaining that the Republican Party in California was being taken over by "fanatical" and "neo-fascist elements." Shrewdly, skillfully, Reagan refused to cop to a feud; he said his relationship with Kuchel had always been "very cordial."

Thence to the National Press Club, where he introduced the Creative Society as a "constructive alternative" to a so-called Great Society that cost Americans "an ounce of personal freedom for every ounce of federal help we get." He envisioned instead "a state government mobilizing the energies of the people...helping them organize their own solutions to these problems." Not a word on orgies so vile. He spoke a language Washington insiders could abide.

Came the inevitable question: are you interested in taking on LBJ in 1968?

Reagan's face sparked a boyish grin. "Wel-l-l-l"-that word, followed by a chuckle, would become the most famous in his lexicon-"gosh, it's taken me all my life to get up the nerve to do what I'm doing. That's as far as my dreams go."

And that was it. No follow-up questions, then or in the months to come. D.C.'s ink-stained wretches thought of themselves as the toughest audience in the world. Now they were applauding Ronald Reagan like schoolboys. Reagan dashed to New York for a secret meeting at 20 Broad Street. His host had to wonder who was the master, and who was the student. This Reagan was someone to watch. He was someone to learn from.

Nixon started watching Reagan very, very carefully.

Commencement season. Which had traditionally been the nation's consensus season: occasion for endless Johnsonesque bromides about the challenge of making our society even greater than it already was.

Not this year.

Richard Nixon, speaking at the University of Rochester in defiance of the faculty's successful pet.i.tion not to offer him an honorary degree (he lied that "since leaving the office of vice president it has been my policy not to accept honorary degrees"), aped Reagan: "If we are to defend academic freedom from encroachment we must also defend it from its own excesses."

The president's new education commissioner, Harold Howe II, spoke at Va.s.sar. He said the next civil rights battles would be fought in the suburbs and urban middle-cla.s.s bungalow belts-"in quiet communities, in pleasant neighborhoods."

Louise Day Hicks, the school-committee member who had become a political superstar in Boston fighting to make sure no integration battles were won in her her const.i.tuents' pleasant neighborhoods, rose to speak at a high school in the ghetto neighborhood of Roxbury. "A foul enemy of ours has been brought into this place!" a parent cried, rushing the stage, taking the microphone. "If this were a synagogue, would you have invited Hitler?" const.i.tuents' pleasant neighborhoods, rose to speak at a high school in the ghetto neighborhood of Roxbury. "A foul enemy of ours has been brought into this place!" a parent cried, rushing the stage, taking the microphone. "If this were a synagogue, would you have invited Hitler?"

Sargent Shriver, at Illinois Wesleyan, said Vietnam might be liberalism's front line, but "our slums, ghettos, and economically depressed areas are the rear," and we "must not win the war in Vietnam and lose the battle we are fighting in Watts, Harlem." That only pointed up the impossible contradiction dividing the liberal movement, as evinced at the graduations at Amherst and NYU-where, protesting speaker Robert McNamara, architect of this "liberal" war, liberal students walked out.

Arthur Schlesinger, speaking at Smith, said the acrimony between pro-and antiwar forces would force upon us a new dawn of McCarthyism: "The situation is worse, because fifteen years ago, liberals were determined to maintain rational discussion."

John Steinbeck p.r.o.nounced himself horrified by the "fallout, drop-out, cop-out insurgency of our children and young people, the rush to stimulant as well as hypnotic drugs, the rise of narrow, ugly, and vengeful cults of all kinds, the mistrust and revolt against all authority-this in a time of plenty such as has never been known," the pa.s.sing of a nation in which "the rules were understood and accepted by everyone." Horrified also was the advertising agency Deutsch & Shea, which took out a full-page ad in the New York Times New York Times worrying that to the cla.s.s of '66, "business has become a dirty word": worrying that to the cla.s.s of '66, "business has become a dirty word": "Isn't it time to say the things that need to be said about business and industry and the way things really are?

"Now?

"Before we lose another generation?"

The valedictorian at Columbia, on the other hand, said "protests and demonstrations against social injustice were as important to a student's overall education as cla.s.swork."

They called this the "generation gap": a magazine feature-writer's fancy phrase for the screaming matches that were breaking out across dinner tables around the country. The cultural war within which Ronald Reagan thrived was enveloping the nation.

CHAPTER FIVE.

Long, Hot Summer.

A MAIN FRONT IN THE NEW MAIN FRONT IN THE NEW A AMERICAN CONFLAGRATION WAS RACIAL. By the end of June, a young man named Stokely Carmichael, and a doctrine called Black Power, doused it with gasoline. By the end of June, a young man named Stokely Carmichael, and a doctrine called Black Power, doused it with gasoline.

Early in the year a young, black Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activist registering voters in Tuskegee, Alabama, stopped at a gas station for some cigarettes, asked the clerk to point him to the bathroom, and was told to use the one for coloreds out back. "Haven't you heard of the Civil Rights Act?" Sammy Younge snapped back. The clerk replied by shooting him in the head.

This sort of thing made younger civil rights activists wonder about the wisdom of the nonviolence preached by Martin Luther King. It was an old argument, watched nervously in the national press ever since 1961 when a former marine and North Carolina NAACP official named Robert Williams called for armed cadres to protect demonstrators on Second Amendment grounds. Rejection of nonviolence tended to come of an organic process: heartening civil rights gains would be followed by corrosive disappointments; disillusionment set in, calling for increasingly spectacular acts, a spiral of militancy. "If we can't sit at the table," SNCC executive director James Forman had said at a 1965 ma.s.s meeting in Montgomery, "let's knock the f.u.c.king legs off."

Few had lived the process more intimately than Forman's intense and brilliant twenty-four-year-old comrade Stokely Carmichael. Stokely had grown up in the Bronx watching white people humiliate his idealistic Trinidadian father-and seeing his father, the more he was humiliated, profess ever more faith in the American dream. In 1960, Stokely headed South after reading about the Woolworth lunch-counter sit-ins. The next year on the Freedom Rides he was beaten and went to jail for the first of twenty-six times. In 1964, after Lyndon Johnson seated the "regular" white Mississippi delegation at the Democratic convention instead of the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Stokely's commitment to ordinary politics ended for good. "This proves," he cried, "the liberal Democrats are just as racist as Goldwater." The next year he watched police beat demonstrators outside his Selma hotel-room window. He started screaming. He couldn't stop. He had a nervous breakdown that lasted two days.

Then 1966 was rung in with the blood of Brother Younge. The day after his funeral, SNCC's chairman, John Lewis, read out a statement at a press conference: "The murder of Samuel Younge in Tuskegee, Alabama, is no different than the murder of peasants in Vietnam, for both Younge and the Vietnamese sought, and are seeking, to secure the rights guaranteed them by law.... We are in sympathy with, and support, the men in this country who are unwilling to respond to a military draft which would compel them to contribute their lives to United States aggression in Vietnam in the name of the 'freedom' we find so false in this country."

Reporters' jaws began dropping. This was nothing less than a categorical break with the best president for civil rights since Abraham Lincoln. Whitney Young of the Urban League and Roy Wilkins of the National a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Colored People, mainstream Negro leaders, distanced themselves in horror. Julian Bond, a SNCC activist who had won election to the Georgia legislature with 82 percent of his district's votes, was asked if he supported Lewis's statement. "Sure, I support it," he said-at which his fellow legislators labeled him a traitor and barred him from being sworn in.

Lurleen Wallace's victory seemed to render Sammy Younge's martyrdom vain. "You don't imitate white politics because white politics are corrupt," Carmichael p.r.o.nounced. "Negroes have to view themselves as colonies, and right now is the time for them to quit being white men's colonies and become independent." SNCC's next convention kicked out John Lewis for being too moderate. "We need someone who can grab Lyndon Johnson by his b.a.l.l.s and tell him to kiss our a.s.s," one delegate said. "We need someone who can stand up to Dr. King and tell him the same thing." Lewis's replacement was Stokely Carmichael. His first move was to withdraw SNCC from the historic White House civil rights conference in June to protest America's repression "of the Third [nonwhite] World." The brackets were the New York Times New York Times's, explaining a baffling new Marxisant Marxisant locution. locution.

Tuesday, June 7, was primary day in Mississippi, same as in California. The previous Sunday, James Meredith, decked out in a pocket protector and a pith helmet, set out on a quixotic 220-mile march from Memphis to Jackson, refusing the protection of federal marshals, to convince black voters it was safe to go to the polls. He crossed the border of the state whose university he had integrated in 1962. A farmer emptied a double-barreled shotgun into his hide. Early, inaccurate reports from the AP had it that he died. "Meredith Regrets He Was Not Armed," the New York Times New York Times announced the next morning. announced the next morning.

At first the effect on a fast-dividing civil rights movement seemed salvific. All factions flocked to Meredith's bedside and pledged to complete Meredith's march, even Stokely Carmichael. The first day, police shoved the a.s.sembled leaders off the highway and onto the shoulder; they fell together, arm in arm. SNCC's Cleveland Sellers was facedown in the mud. Carmichael leapt for one of the officers. Martin Luther King held him back. Carmichael, chastened, promised that he, too, would march in the name of nonviolence.

The march grew day by day. Of that civil rights legislation that no one was giving a chance, the Washington Post Washington Post said, "Meredith's sacrifice might spur the bill to swift enactment." Donations to King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference had been tapering off: the left was turning their dollars to the fight against the Vietnam War. So the onrushing unity was especially heartening to King. It felt, again, like Selma: nonviolence on the march. said, "Meredith's sacrifice might spur the bill to swift enactment." Donations to King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference had been tapering off: the left was turning their dollars to the fight against the Vietnam War. So the onrushing unity was especially heartening to King. It felt, again, like Selma: nonviolence on the march.

Stokely, however, was playing an entirely different game. He hoped to heighten, not salve, the mounting contradictions within the civil rights movement.

In negotiations over the march's manifesto, he insisted on savaging the president of the United States. Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young quit in disgust, playing into Carmichael's hands: with the moderates out of the picture, he worked to take over. For a few more days the squabbles stayed private, the images heroic. On June 9, an old man fell from a heart attack. And still they marched. They didn't have tents to sleep in at night. And still they marched. Byron de la Beckwith, the murderer of Medgar Evers, acquitted by a Mississippi jury though his fingerprints were on the murder weapon, followed them in his pickup truck, dandling a shotgun on his knee. And still they marched. Mississippi drew down twenty of the twenty-four officers it had detailed to protect the marchers from violence. And still they marched-united.

Until, that is, June 16. One thousand marchers swung into the Black Belt town of Greenwood, one of the places where SNCC had aggressively sought to register penniless sharecroppers. As soon as Stokely Carmichael set foot in town, he was arrested. The next day, a rally was organized to celebrate his release.

He mounted the speaker's platform, eyes wide. "This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested," he began. "I ain't going to jail no more."

The SNCC militants had been testing out a phrase among one another. Americans of African descent were known as "Negroes." SNCC militants had begun to call one another "black," the word Malcolm X had used: its starkness carried a militant charge. As did how they wore their hair: naturally kinky, covering the scalp, rather than cut short and greased down and straightened (they called the style the "natural"-the other way was phony; or the "Afro"-the other way was European). They also began telling one another that to call theirs a "freedom" movement was wishy-washy; what they really needed was power. power.

Thus the phrase Stokely Carmichael now debuted-the phrase that signaled a civil war within the civil rights movement.

"We want black power black power!"

Some in the crowd: "That's right." "That's right."

"We want black power!"

"That's right!"

"That's right. We want black power, and we don't want to be ashamed of it. We have stayed here, and we have begged begged the president. We have the president. We have begged begged the federal government. That's all we've been doin'-beggin', beggin'. It's time we stand up and take over. Every courthouse in Mississippi ought to be burned down tomorrow to get rid of the dirt in there!" the federal government. That's all we've been doin'-beggin', beggin'. It's time we stand up and take over. Every courthouse in Mississippi ought to be burned down tomorrow to get rid of the dirt in there!"

CBS cut to the crowd. Some were clearly startled. Others looked transported. It was the day a House subcommittee had referred the civil rights bill to the full Judiciary. Now the TV filled with images of Stokely Carmichael, in black shirt, sungla.s.ses, and a tie leading marchers like a drill sergeant in his new chant with his fist in the air. The new phrase was capitalized: Black Power. Black Power. The fist in the air became known as the "Black Power salute." Moderates tripped over themselves to repudiate the formulation-"a reverse Hitler, a reverse Ku Klux Klan," said Roy Wilkins. United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther was denied a speaking spot at the June 28 closing rally in Jackson. Charles Sim of the Deacons for Defense was not. He "has a long arrest record not connected with civil rights activities," the The fist in the air became known as the "Black Power salute." Moderates tripped over themselves to repudiate the formulation-"a reverse Hitler, a reverse Ku Klux Klan," said Roy Wilkins. United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther was denied a speaking spot at the June 28 closing rally in Jackson. Charles Sim of the Deacons for Defense was not. He "has a long arrest record not connected with civil rights activities," the Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times noted. They also reported that SNCC had desecrated an American flag. noted. They also reported that SNCC had desecrated an American flag.

The other main front in America's domestic civil war was yoked to events nine thousand miles away-where, in the hours between June 29 and June 30, Vietnam time, American planes began raining fire on fuel depots in densely populated areas near Hanoi and Haiphong. The next week, at the LBJ Ranch, the president gave a rosy status report: 86 percent of the enemy's known fuel-storage capacity had been taken out; the most recent troop surge "has been forceful and it has been effective"; hearts and minds were being won in South Vietnam via six hundred thousand new acres of irrigated land distributed to landless peasants, thirteen thousand new village health stations, ten thousand new students in U.S.-sponsored "vocational training" cla.s.ses.

What he did not mention: North Vietnam maintained enough dispersed petroleum capacity to be virtually unaffected; the flow of men and materiel down the Ho Chi Minh Trail was undiminished; and the contingency he had risked to achieve these nugatory results-an errant bomb hitting some Russian ship and dragging the USSR into the war-had inspired him to confide to his daughter, "Your daddy may go down in history as having started World War III."

Lying about Vietnam: it was now a Washington way of life. The lies started with the war's ontological premise. We were supposed to be defending a "country" called "South Vietnam." But South Vietnam was not quite a country at all. Vietnamese independence fighters had begun battling the French since practically the day they stopped fighting side by side in World War II. In 1954 they fought their colonial overlords to a final defeat at the stronghold of Dien Bien Phu. It was the first military loss for a European colonial power in three hundred years. Though these stalwarts, the Vietminh, now controlled four-fifths of the country's territory, at the peace conference in Geneva they made a concession: they agreed to administer an armistice area half that size, demarcated at the seventeenth parallel (but for some last-minute haggling, it would have been the eighteenth). A government loyal to the French would administer the lands to the south. The ad hoc demarcation was to last twenty-four months, at which time the winner of an internationally supervised election in 1956 would run the entire country.

Instead, the division lasted for nineteen years. The reason was the United States, which saw to it the reunification election never took place. American intelligence knew that Ho Chi Minh, the Communist leader of the independence fighters, would have won 80 percent of the vote. The seventeenth parallel was read backward as an ordinary international boundary. If "North Vietnam" crossed it, they'd be guilty of "aggression." Meanwhile, the CIA launched a propaganda campaign to depopulate North Vietnam, whose sizable Catholic population was shipped to "South Vietnam" via the U.S. Seventh Fleet. There, they found themselves part of a citizenry that had no reason for being in history, culture, or geography; even as the U.S. pretended-then came to believe-they were a brave, independence-loving nation of long standing. Actually the great city in the South, Saigon, had been France's imperial headquarters. There, France had crowned a figurehead emperor at the tender age of twelve. During World War II, Emperor Bao Dai had collaborated with Vichy France and the j.a.panese. This was the man the South Vietnamese were supposed to venerate as the leader of their independent nation.

He was replaced by someone worse: a wily hustler named Ngo Dinh Diem. In 1952, Diem engineered a presidential election between himself and the emperor, with the help of U.S. government advisers, and "won" 98.2 percent of the vote. He then revived the guillotine as punishment for anyone "infringing upon the security of the state." His favorite rebuff to an insult from a political opponent was "Shoot him dead!" His sister-in-law Madame Nhu, who served as his emissary abroad, told Americans the last thing her family was interested in was "your crazy freedoms." This was the government to which the United States would now ask its citizens to pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. Diem was not a Communist. And that, said America, made him a democrat.

Ho Chi Minh had no special beef with the United States. He liked to quote the Declaration of Independence; on the march to Hanoi during World War II, his forces called themselves the Viet-American Army; after the war, Ho sent telegrams to President Truman offering an independent Vietnam as "a fertile field for American capital and enterprise." (Truman never answered.) The French reconquered Vietnam with what was practically an American mercenary force: 78 percent of the French army's funding came from the United States. More hawkish Americans lobbied for direct intervention; Richard Nixon, after his visit in 1953, advised Eisenhower that two or three atomic bombs would do the trick. Ho Chi Minh's supporters in South Vietnam began their guerrilla war in 1960. It led to a kind of Cold War nervous breakdown. Falter in Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson claimed in 1964, and "they may just chase you into your own kitchen."

Absurdities were propounded as gospel truth: that to interdict the flow of men supposedly pouring forth down the Ho Chi Minh Trail from North Vietnam was to make the Vietcong insurgency stop (but by March of 1966, 216,400 U.S. forces were in South Vietnam, and 13,100 North Vietnamese troops). That bringing pain to North Vietnam through bombing raids would make the insurgency stop (instead it only made North Vietnam more determined). That diplomatic pressure on China and the Soviet Union-LBJ called them the enemy's "two big brothers"-could make the insurgency stop. (But neither ever sent troops, or could tell the fiercely nationalistic insurgency what to do, and noncommunist countries sent almost as many merchant ships to North Vietnam as the Soviets.) That we could eventually arm and inspirit the South Vietnamese to defend themselves from Ho Chi Minh. (But first they had to be convinced Ho Chi Minh was an enemy. One U.S. adviser knew the effort was sunk the day he walked into his first peasant hut and saw side by side pictures of Ho and John F. Kennedy.) The Saigon government was reckless and corrupt. The South Vietnamese army was a joke (one top officer was a double agent). Their main skill was antagonizing the local peasantry. Same, in fact, with American GIs. America's war aim in Vietnam was supposed to be to win the allegiance of its people to the government we preferred. The bra.s.s called that "winning hearts and minds." The acronym-WHAM-was all too apt. To warn VC, combat battalions took to nailing severed enemy ears to trees. Helicopter door gunners mowed down suspiciously placed figures wearing "black pajamas," what the VC wore instead of proper uniforms. Problem being, Vietnamese farmers wore black pajamas, too. One of the main methods to protect the farmers was to exile them at gunpoint to refugee camps-from villages to whom their ties were so spiritually deep their ancestors' umbilical cords were buried there.

The insurgency only grew. It grew of the efforts to stop it, an infernal machine.

It was not as if American leaders hadn't been warned. It was "the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy," the World War II hero Omar Bradley had first observed in 1951. Such sage warnings tended to be ignored. When Undersecretary of State George Ball began criticizing the commitment to South Vietnam in the early 1960s, he was shut out of meetings. He managed to b.u.t.tonhole the president nonetheless. "Within five years," he said, "we'll have three hundred thousand men in the paddies and jungles and never will find them again. That was the French experience." JFK came back, "George, you're just crazier than h.e.l.l." Ball indeed misjudged: the actual number of troops at the end of 1966 was 385,300.

The 1964 Special National Intelligence Estimate predicted the South Vietnamese army would never never be an effective fighting force. Johnson's most trusted friend in the Senate, Richard Russell, reminded him that the consensus of the intelligence agencies was that bombing the North would be little more effective. Get out, and get out quickly, Russell advised. "I can't see anything but catastrophe for my country." be an effective fighting force. Johnson's most trusted friend in the Senate, Richard Russell, reminded him that the consensus of the intelligence agencies was that bombing the North would be little more effective. Get out, and get out quickly, Russell advised. "I can't see anything but catastrophe for my country."