Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (100 page)

What especially bothered many of those who joined the backlash against welfare was that their own children seemed to be tempted by the same "degraded" values that were luring the "leeches" on the dole. Many Americans in the younger generation, they believed, were demanding instant gratification. Worse, they thought, these young people were insubordinate, lacking either appreciation for or understanding of the sacrifices of their parents. A Jewish businessman remembered, "My old man gave me a handtruck when I was nine, down in the garment district. He said to me, 'Here, go to work!'" Not so with young people in the 1960s, he complained; "nobody wants to work or wait for anything."
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Fear of violent crime greatly intensified these feelings of backlash. Polls increasingly showed that Americans considered "crime in the streets" to be the nation's number one problem. Family break-up, illegitimacy, and crime, they were certain, went hand-in-hand.
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Blacks, the vast majority of whom were law-abiding, were among the Americans who worried about these trends. They were affected more than any other group, for most violent crime in the cities was black-on-black. A resident of a crime-ravaged low-income apartment complex in Washington articulated such feelings: "I would like to say I'm black and I'm proud. But I can't say that so easily because I'm not proud of what black people are doing to each other in this building." She added, "When we first moved in, I would go down the hall and wash off things that had been written on the walls. Now I'm afraid to go out into the halls."
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White working-class people, however, seemed loudest and angriest about crime. Many, of course, lived near the most run-down sections of cities. Like the black woman in Washington, they feared for their safety. They normally blamed young black men—whose rates of arrest for violent crimes and drug-dealing were far higher than those of whites—so much so, indeed, that the rates could not be entirely explained away as reflections of racial prejudice on the part of police: a homicide, after all, was a homicide. Some of these whites labored to control their feelings. A Jewish woman explained, "I guess I don't really hate the blacks. I hate that they make me look over my shoulder." Other whites, however, were more open. "You can't walk . . . anywhere," a resident of Brownsville in Brooklyn exploded. "It's because these people don't know how to live. They steal, they got no values. They say it's history, but that's bullshit. It's not history, it's the way they live. They live like animals."
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Whites like this angrily rejected the argument that black people deserved special consideration because of their long history of being oppressed. Many did not consider themselves to be prejudiced. They insisted that they supported the right of all people to equal opportunity, still a most hallowed American political ideal. But they hotly resented being dismissed as "racists" by privileged integrationists—"limousine liberals"—who lived in lily-white suburbs. And they drew a firm line against special treatment to protect or advance minority groups as groups.
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Liberal-dominated agencies such as the EEOC, they complained, were moving toward "reverse discrimination." One white man asked, "Who will pay the Jews for two thousand years of slavery? Who will compensate the Italians for all the ditches they dug?" Another exclaimed, "What happened four hundred years ago, all those whites who whipped them and beat them, are we responsible for it? I don't even have anything to do with slavery. What's past is past."
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T
HESE MANIFESTATIONS OF BACKLASH
—against family breakup, illegitimacy, welfare, crime, riots, black activists, anti-war demonstrators, long-haired hippies, government programs that favored minorities, elitists, liberals generally—exposed a major development of the mid-1960s: rapidly rising polarization along class, generational, and racial lines. The backlash represented considerably more than white racism, which polls suggested was less intense than in the past. It also affirmed the behavior and the moral standards of traditional ways. It exposed a fragmentation of society and culture that seemed if anything to grow in the next thirty years.

The rising numbers of people who became part of the backlash did not much perceive themselves as part of an organized movement. Particularly at first, they tended to express local grievances arising from tensions in their neighborhoods. But they also worried about larger forces that threatened them. Increasingly, they used the word "squeeze" to capture their plight. From the bottom they felt squeezed by blacks and other minorities who were demanding special rights and privileges. From the top they felt pressed by the more affluent and powerful, including their superiors at work. Public employees, indeed, went out on strikes in record numbers in 1967. Other workers felt "blue-collar blues": there were more work stoppages in 1968 than in any year since 1953.
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These feelings of squeeze provoked an often bitter rage that rested in part on unabating class and ethnic identifications.
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Backlash also threatened the Democratic party. This had been apparent as early as the 1964 and 1966 elections, and it grew more ominous as the presidential election of 1968 approached. Many Americans blamed Johnson and the Democratic party not only for mismanaging the Vietnam War but also for creating the social turmoil that disturbed the nation after 1965. They especially resented liberals—permissive, patronizing, hypocritical, and sanctimonious do-gooders who reproved them for their resistance to the claims of minorities and assorted trouble-makers. (A conservative, it was said, was a liberal who had been mugged; a liberal was a conservative who hadn't been mugged—yet.) In an increasingly fragmented and polarized society these angry people were a political force to be reckoned with.

22
The Most Turbulent Year: 1968

January 30, 1968, was the first day of Tet, a festive holiday in Vietnam that marked the beginning of the lunar year. Americans in Vietnam hoped for some respite from the fighting. But at 2:45 that morning a team of NLF sappers blasted a hole in the wall that surrounded the American embassy in Saigon. Racing into the compound, they tried but failed to smash through the heavy door at the entrance to the embassy. They then took cover behind large concrete flowerpots and assailed the building with rockets. Military police fired back at them in a fight that lasted until 9:15 in the morning. All nineteen of the enemy were either killed or badly wounded. Five Americans and a South Vietnamese civilian employee lost their lives. A reporter described the scene as "a butcher shop in Eden."
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The attack on the embassy formed part of a much broader military plan, elements of which had already been launched outside of Saigon, that came to be known as the Tet offensive. Starting in late 1967 Hanoi had intensified pressure on towns and bases in the central highlands of South Vietnam and along the demilitarized zone, and especially on the marine garrison at Khe Sanh near the border with Laos. Top units of the NLF began at the same time to infiltrate major cities. American and South Vietnamese troops fought back and inflicted heavy casualties on the enemy forces. General Westmoreland devoted special effort to protecting Khe Sanh, a beleaguered outpost which he feared might otherwise become a second Dienbienphu. Hanoi launched these assaults in part to make the United States and South Vietnam reduce their forces in Saigon and other major cities, thereby exposing themselves to the attacks at the opening of Tet.

Within a few hours of the battle at the embassy, the enemy forces assailed a large number of targets in South Vietnam, including five major cities, sixty-four district capitals, thirty-six provincial capitals, and fifty hamlets. President Thieu declared martial law, thus conceding that there were then no secure areas in the South. Johnson tried to minimize the dangers, likening the situation to the previous year's riot in Detroit—"a few bandits can do that in any city."
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But the United States and South Vietnam had to stage a major counter-offensive to overcome the enemy. Battles raged for the next three weeks, killing perhaps 12,500 civilians and creating a million refugees. Some of the fighting was bloody indeed. It took twenty-five days of heavy artillery and air bombardment to reconquer the old Vietnamese capital of Hue, which was reduced to a "shattered, stinking hulk, its streets choked with rubble and rotting bodies." Fighting there killed some 5,000 enemy troops, untold numbers of civilians, 150 American marines and 350 South Vietnamese soldiers. When Americans re-entered the city, they found 2,800 bodies buried in mass graves. They were people slaughtered by the enemy as suspected collaborators with the South. The victors retaliated by assassinating suspected Communists.
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When the battles subsided, Westmoreland declared that the United States and the South Vietnamese had inflicted devastating losses on the attackers. "The enemy exposed himself by virtue of his strategy and he suffered heavy casualties," he said. This was in fact the case. The Tet offensive failed in the end to take cities away from South Vietnamese control or to unleash a general revolt (as Hanoi may have hoped to do) against the government in Saigon. Thanks to heavy bombing, the United States also managed to repel the attacks on Khe Sanh, killing many thousands of enemy soldiers in the process. Rough estimates of overall casualties during the three weeks following Tet conclude that North Vietnamese and NLF battle deaths reached 40,000, compared to 2,300 South Vietnamese and 1,100 Americans. It took Ho Chi Minh and General Giap more than two years to compensate for the fearful losses that they had sustained in Tet and its aftermath.
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Rarely, however, has "victory" been so costly. The initial thrusts of the Tet offensive, especially the breaching of the embassy wall, convinced already skeptical Americans that Johnson, Westmoreland, and other administration officials had been lying all along. Critics of Johnson were all the angrier about being deceived because of the publicity blitz that LBJ and Westmoreland had conducted in late 1967. After Tet it was as clear as could be that there was no "light at the end of the tunnel," as Westmoreland had maintained at that time.
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Indeed, the shock from Tet greatly intensified an adversarial relationship that had been developing between the media and the State since the mid-1960s. For many in the media the credibility gap, a chasm after Tet, was never to be bridged thereafter.
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The reaction of CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite, the most widely admired television newsman in the nation, served for many at the time. Until then Cronkite, like other newscasters, had tried to maintain an "objective" stance. That had normally required him to report what Johnson, Westmoreland, and other administration officials released, without overt editorial comment. When Cronkite heard of the Tet offensive, however, he was furious, the more so because he sensed that television reports on the war had misled the American people. "What the hell is going on?" he is supposed to have snapped. "I thought we were winning the war!" Cronkite journeyed to Vietnam to see the situation for himself. When he returned, he reported on February 27, "It seems more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate." Cronkite was but one of many in the media—and elsewhere—who were disbelieving. The columnist Art Buchwald, a humorist, went further. Westmoreland's claim of American victory, he wrote, was like Custer saying at Little Big Horn, "We have the Sioux on the run. . . . Of course we still have some cleaning up to do, but the Redskins are hurting badly and it will only be a matter of time before they give in."
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The disillusion of newsmen like Cronkite later led pro-war commentators to blame the press for misinterpreting what had happened after Tet and for failing to make it clear that American and South Vietnamese forces had prevailed in the field. They are right that America's successful military retaliation seemed to get lost amid the domestic recriminations that followed Tet. They are also correct to observe that some reporting during this anxious period was both disturbing and shocking. None was more so than the vivid coverage of an execution by the chief of the South Vietnamese police of an enemy officer on a Saigon street. An AP photographer and two television camera crews captured the execution, a slightly sanitized version of which was thereupon shown on two television networks in the United States. Anti-war Americans pointed to the gory killing as proof of their contention that the war in Vietnam was immoral.
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Critics were wrong, however, to maintain that the media were thereafter heavily negative about the war. The credibility gap notwithstanding, many reports on the conflict in Vietnam continued to convey a sense of progress in the fighting. Pro-war observers were also in error to argue that the media following Tet greatly altered public opinion in the United States about the war. What the reports probably did do at that time was to reflect and intensify popular doubts that had been rising, primarily because of discouraging casualty figures in 1966 and 1967, for some time.
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These doubts centered not so much on the wisdom of fighting the war, which a small majority still seemed to believe in, as on LBJ's handling of it. Public approval of Johnson's conduct of the conflict, already low at 40 percent following his public relations blitz in November, fell to 26 percent in the immediate aftermath of Tet.
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What Tet did more generally was to deepen the mood of gloom that was already growing profound in the United States. It was the first of a near-numbing series of blows in 1968 that bashed what hopes remained for healing the fragmentation and polarization that had been widening since 1965. After 1968, in many ways the most turbulent year in the postwar history of the United States, there was no turning back to the higher hopes that liberals had had in 1964 and early 1965.

T
HE RESPONSE TO THE
T
ET OFFENSIVE
by Wheeler, Westmoreland, and other military leaders in Vietnam was to ask for 206,000 additional American troops, half of them to be sent by the end of the year, in addition to the 525,000 or so who were already there. Such an effort was thought to require mobilization of the reserves. The details of the request, of course, were secret, but rumors of military calls for further escalation seeped out. Johnson, although shaken by the reaction to Tet, was not moved by popular disgruntlement to back off from American commitments. Nor, however, did he warm to the idea of further increases in American troop levels, which would have been perilous politically. He therefore turned the request over to advisers.

At this point, however, he encountered serious doubts from within his administration, and especially from Clark Clifford, who replaced McNamara as Defense Secretary on March 1. Truman's former aide, since 1949 a Washington attorney and unofficial adviser to Democratic Presidents, had opposed escalation of the war in 1965 but had then—like virtually all American experts on foreign and military policies—supported Johnson's course as the best way to preserve a non-Communist South Vietnam. When Clifford received the request for more troops, he ordered a review of the war. He asked Pentagon officials, "Does anyone see any diminution in the will of the enemy after four years of our having been there, after enormous casualties and after massive destruction from our bombing?" No one perceived any lessening of the enemy's will to fight. Clifford, moreover, was persuaded by leading Establishment figures, among them Dean Acheson and Averell Harriman, that Westmoreland's request would severely threaten America's financial standing in the world. Leading business figures at the time questioned the capacity of the nation, which was then facing a gold drain, to escalate further. Many of these doubters were coming to believe that the war was damaging America's ability to meet its strategic commitments in Europe, where national security interests were paramount. For all these reasons Clifford counseled against significant escalation.

Instead, he recommended to Johnson on March 4 that the United States send over a token force of 22,000 and that LBJ call up an undetermined number of reserves. Clifford further urged that Thieu and Ky be pushed into assuming greater responsibility for the war. This was a recommendation for what later became known as Vietnamization: the South Vietnamese would carry more of the burden, the United States less. Johnson, reassured by the ferocious American counter-attack at that time, was inclined to accept these cautious recommendations but delayed taking action for the time being.
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By then the volatile state of popular opinion at home may have begun to affect the President, who as always avidly followed the polls. Especially worrisome to him was the outcome of the first presidential primary, in New Hampshire on March 12. Although Johnson's name was not on the ballot, party regulars had launched a write-in campaign for him. When the votes were counted, however, he had won only 49 percent of the Democratic turnout. Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, a strong opponent of the war who had challenged him for the Democratic presidential nomination in January, not only received 42 percent, a stunning figure against an incumbent President, but also won more delegates than Johnson did to the Democratic National Convention that summer. A majority of McCarthy's voters, polls later discovered, were hawks who blamed Johnson for not winning the war. At the time, however, the vote was interpreted as a sign of left-of-center anti-war sentiment. It was surely anti-Johnson. When New York senator Robert Kennedy, whom Johnson loathed, announced his own candidacy on March 16, pressure intensified on LBJ to make some conciliatory moves. This pressure, combined with the gold crisis and the improving military situation, seems to have induced Johnson on March 22 formally to accept Clifford's relatively moderate recommendations.

Clifford, meanwhile, kept seeking more data. On March 26 and 27 he convened many foreign policy experts—dubbed "the wise men" by contemporaries—to help him with further recommendations. The wise men included Acheson, until then a renowned hawk on the war, Maxwell Taylor, another hawk, George Ball, McGeorge Bundy, Matthew Ridgway, Henry Cabot Lodge, and others. Most of them had been called in to advise the administration in November, at which time they had supported the President. This time they looked more carefully at the new data. Some, like Taylor, emerged from this process to urge backing for West-moreland. Most of the wise men, however, were deeply upset by what they found. They concluded that the enemy could match whatever force the United States threw into the arena of battle. Bundy observed that Vietnam was a "bottomless pit." Clifford commented, "There are grave doubts that we have made the type of progress we had hoped to have made by this time. As we build up our forces, they build up theirs. . . . We seem to have a sinkhole. . . . I see more and more fighting with more and more casualties on the US side and no end in sight to the action."
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Johnson bridled when Clifford and others relayed the pessimism of the wise men to him. "These establishment bastards have bailed out," he is supposed to have said.
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Confronted with such opinion, however, he made some conciliatory moves that he had been considering earlier. Within the next few days he accepted the advice of Rusk, who had recommended that the United States call a partial bombing halt in North Vietnam. Johnson also signified his readiness to engage in peace talks with the North Vietnamese and chose Harriman as America's representative in the event that the North Vietnamese agreed to talk.