Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (101 page)

On March 31 Johnson appeared on prime-time television to announce these decisions. They were important in that they marked—after three years—a tacit, though not binding, admission of the failure of continued escalation. But they did not represent much change in the policies he had been pursuing since late 1967. Rather, they were tactical moves aimed primarily at calming down domestic dissent. When Hanoi surprised him by responding favorably to the idea of peace talks, Harriman was sent to Paris, which was chosen as the site for the effort, in May. But an impasse quickly developed. Hanoi demanded that the United States cease all bombing. Johnson, fearing that this would jeopardize American troops, insisted that Hanoi agree to cut back its military activity in the South. Bombing continued, and talks went nowhere. Peace in Vietnam seemed farther away than ever.
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United States military effort actually intensified during this time. Indeed, Johnson cut back the bombing in the North only because he had become convinced that it was not doing much good and because bad weather was in any case expected to hamper missions over the northern part of North Vietnam in the near future. Meanwhile, the United States stepped up bombing of enemy resources in the South. In March and April the United States conducted the largest search and destroy missions in the history of the war. It then launched an Accelerated Pacification Program to secure as much of the countryside as possible in the event of serious negotiations. Finally, it greatly increased military aid to Saigon, pushing up the force level of the Army of South Vietnam from 685,000 to 850,000.

Johnson did add a big surprise in his televised speech on March 31. Waiting until the end of his address, he paused, then added. "There is division in the American home now . . . and holding the trust that is mine, as President of all the people, I cannot disregard the peril to the . . . prospect for peace. . . . I do not believe that I should devote an hour a day of my time to any personal partisan course. . . . Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for President."

Why Johnson took this step, which astonished many who heard him, was not altogether clear. But it was not because he feared to lose his fight for renomination. Although McCarthy and Kennedy were challenging him boldly, they stood little chance of securing the party's endorsement against an incumbent President. Rather, Johnson seems to have decided not to run again because he was tired, both physically and emotionally, and because he knew he had lost his political capacity to get things done. By stepping aside he hoped to bring a little more harmony to a populace that was already badly fragmented by disputes over the war, race relations, and the many other contentious issues that had inspired backlash in the previous two years.

O
NLY FOUR DAYS LATER
, on April 4, a high-powered bullet from a sniper's rifle badly damaged whatever hopes Johnson and others still retained for a softening of racial polarization in the United States. It shattered the jaw of Martin Luther King as he stood on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had been supporting striking black sanitation workers seeking recognition of a union. King's presence in Memphis was characteristic of the still non-violent efforts he had been making since 1965 to promote economic justice for the masses of the black poor in the cities. The bullet, which killed him, did much to destroy chances for non-violent leadership on behalf of social justice for blacks.
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News of King's murder frightened Congress into passing Johnson's open housing bill within the week.
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But nothing could arrest the rage that overwhelmed many black Americans. On the night of the killing rioting erupted in Washington, where looters and arsonists destroyed white-owned stores (and black tenements above them) in black sections of the city. Nine people were killed in rampaging that followed. Riots damaged more than 130 other cities, causing property damage estimated at more than $100 million. Police arrested 20,000 people. A total of forty-six people, all but five of them blacks, died in the wave of violence.
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Violence and extremism, indeed, seemed ubiquitous in April and May of 1968. Overseas it afflicted Paris, where left-wing students took over the Latin Quarter, collaborated with factory workers, and ultimately brought down the government of Charles de Gaulle. In Czechoslovakia rebels of the "Prague Spring" revolted against Communist rule, only to be overwhelmed in August by Soviet tanks. Riots engulfed the Free University in West Berlin. Bloody confrontations between students, workers, and authorities convulsed Tokyo, Bologna, Milan, and Mexico City, site of the Olympic games that fall. The widespread outbursts, most of them student-inspired, and the violent repression that they often evoked from police, unnerved political leaders throughout the industrialized world.
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In the United States militant students also threatened the status quo, mainly on a few of the most prestigious university campuses. What happened at Columbia University in late April set the stage. Mark Rudd, a passionate admirer of Ché Guevara who had recently returned from a trip to Cuba, led defiant student protestors against a variety of alleged misdeeds by a rather hapless university administration. These sins included the support of classified war research and indifference to the needs of nearby black residents of Harlem. Dispensing with civility, Rudd wrote an open letter to university president Grayson Kirk in which he quoted LeRoi Jones, "Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up." In the prolonged confrontations that followed, approximately 1,000 students (of 17,000 in all at the university)—some of them spearheaded by Rudd and the SDS, others by militant blacks—managed to seize five university buildings and to rifle files in the president's office. They ran up red flags atop two of the buildings and festooned the walls of offices with portraits of Marx, Malcolm X, and Ché Guevara. After six days of occupation, police were called in at 2:30 in the morning. Their response exposed the backlash that energized working-class Americans who raged at the protests of the privileged. Swinging clubs, the police tore into the students. More than 100, plus some police, were injured. A total of 692 people were arrested. The university virtually shut down, to the dismay of thousands of non-demonstrating students and faculty.
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The conflict at Columbia was the most violent and uncivil battle to that time; it received enormously wide publicity; and it encouraged a host of struggles at other campuses, most of them between 1968 and 1970. It has been estimated that there were 150 violent demonstrations (and many more that were non-violent) on American campuses, including many of the most prestigious ones, in the 1968–69 academic year alone. A few of the protests rivaled Columbia's, notably a demonstration at Cornell in 1969, where black students brandishing guns and sporting bandoliers of ammunition forced concessions from the university administration. Other student protestors jostled faculty and staff, vandalized libraries, disrupted classes, and—in a second episode at Columbia in the spring of 1968—burned years of research notes by a faculty member.
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Like the demonstrators at Cornell, students "won" some of these battles. President Kirk, for instance, resigned, and most of the student protestors there were not disciplined for the damage or disruption they had caused. Universities introduced changes giving student groups a somewhat larger role in decision-making on campus. Curricula were broadened, usually to the accompaniment of greater choice of courses and fewer requirements. Black Studies programs began to proliferate. Most important, the unrest of 1968 greatly heightened the rights-consciousness of students. From then on, many university administrators and faculty moved with caution lest they provoke campus uprisings.

Whether the curricular changes were "reforms," of course, sparked loud and lasting debate. Many parents and professors lamented the decline of "general education." A number of new courses introduced to pacify protestors lacked academic rigor. Other Americans, including a few professors who were themselves members of the Left, were appalled at what they considered the arrogance and play-acting of the demonstrators, who seemed to be emulating the theatrics of on-the-street agitators and Third World revolutionaries. The historian Eugene Genovese, a leading Marxist scholar, branded the students as "pseudo-revolutionary middleclass totalitarian."
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William O'Neill, another historian, observed wryly that many universities prior to the rise of student unrest had at least required hard work and discipline—training for life in the real world. In some of the post-protest universities, he lamented, "The Protestant ethic gave way to the pleasure principle in college but not in life."
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Reactions such as these reflected a widespread sense among Americans that the students were spoiled brats.
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Black activism off the campuses aroused equally contentious emotions. Following King's assassination, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, King's most trusted aide, tried to pick up the fallen banner by pressing ahead with a plan that King had endorsed before his death—a Poor People's March on Washington. Abernathy hoped to stimulate national action against poverty among blacks. The result of the march, however, proved embarrassing to Abernathy and co-leaders. Attempting to dramatize the plight of the poor, organizers built a shantytown, Resurrection City, on the mall in Washington. But construction was hurried and shoddy, leaving early arrivals in mid-May without adequate power, water, or sanitation facilities. Heavy rains created seas of mud. The number who braved conditions to live there never exceeded 2,500 and usually totaled around 500. Picketers of government buildings aroused little attention. Activists representing Mexican-Americans and Indians—the march was to be a multi-ethnic effort—clashed with Abernathy and other black organizers, whom they accused of trying to dominate the proceedings. Some of the marchers smashed windows and tossed one another into fountains.

The debacle of the Poor People's March ended only in late June when police dispersed the last few residents of Resurrection City. By then virtually everyone involved was glad that the struggle had ended. The failure was partly one of disorganization. But it was mainly a reflection of the times. Many whites had responded enthusiastically in 1963 to the March on Washington, which had dramatized the goals of the civil rights bill then under consideration. By 1968, however, the black agenda focused much more directly on poverty and racial discrimination in the North. Whites were much less supportive of demands such as these, especially amid the backlash following rioting in the cities. Reflecting such feelings, Congress did nothing.
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Black militants were so divided and demoralized for the remainder of 1968 that they commanded little attention, especially by contrast to the previous few years, in the media. Eldridge Cleaver, having published
Soul on Ice
early in March, remained sporadically in the news as a presidential candidate for the California-based Peace and Freedom party, but once he fled into exile, surfacing for a time in Cuba, he attracted support from only a few on the fringes. With SNCC, CORE, and the Black Panthers in virtually total disarray, no black organization—not even the still active NAACP—came close to filling the void left by the assassination of King.

By far the most widely noticed black protest in these months broke out at the Olympic games in October. Two of America's many top athletes at Mexico City were Tommie Smith, gold medal winner in the 200 meters, and John Carlos, who finished third in the race. Both, like many on the national track team, were African-Americans. Before they ascended the stand to receive their medals, they rolled up their sweat pants to reveal black socks, and they displayed protest buttons on their chests. On the stand they bowed their heads and raised black-gloved fists in a black-power salute. Their gesture of defiance, televised throughout the world, brought international attention to the cause of racial justice. For many athletes the protest became a defining moment; they could never again ignore the political and racial dimensions of sports.
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Smith and Carlos, however, lost in the short run. Officials of the United States Olympic Committee suspended them from the team and banned them from the Olympic village. White politicians denounced them for their lack of patriotism. Moreover, some black athletes feared to stand with them. This was in part because they had a lot to lose if they defied white America—look what had happened to Muhammad Ali! The boxer George Foreman, a black man, walked around the ring waving a small American flag after knocking out a Russian challenger to win the gold medal in the heavyweight division at Mexico City. In the United States, O. J. Simpson, winner of the Heisman Trophy as college football's best player, had refused to join the Black Student Union at the University of Southern California, the predominantly white school where he had played. Asked for his reaction to the defiance of Smith and Carlos, he commented, "I respect Tommie Smith, but I don't admire him."
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A
LL THESE EVENTS OF
1968—anguished responses to Tet, the assassination of King, riots in the cities, confrontations on campus, the further spread of black-power ideology and of ethnic consciousness—heightened the fragmentation and polarization that had come to light in the previous two years. They also inflamed a presidential campaign that became in many ways the most heated of the twentieth century.
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