Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (65 page)

Kennedy, of course, won the election, which attracted a record-high turnout for a postwar presidential race (around 64 percent of the eligible electorate) and turned out to be the closest of the century. He received 49.7 percent of the vote to Nixon's 49.6 percent. His strength in populous northern states gave him a margin in the electoral college, 303 to 219.
^8l
But the swing of a few votes in a few big states, notably in Illinois (where fraud by Democratic retainers in the Chicago area helped him) could have turned the election the other way. The outcome was so tight that some of Nixon's advisers urged him to contest it. The Vice-President, though bitter about losing, chose not to take that divisive course (Republicans were also suspected of vote fraud) and conceded defeat. It remained for the experts to render the postmortems that would explain why he had lost.

There were plenty of diagnoses, no single one of which could explain all. Some Nixon loyalists blamed Eisenhower, who made no effort to hide his well-known ambivalence about Nixon. At a news conference in August he was asked for an example of a major idea of Nixon's that had been adopted by the administration. "If you give me a week, I might think of one," the President replied. "I don't remember."
⁸²
The President recognized immediately how bad that sounded and apologized to his Vice-President. But damage had been done. Moreover, Eisenhower did not campaign much until the last week, at which point he spent more time praising his own accomplishments than extolling Nixon.

Other analysts tended to blame Nixon himself. Try as he might, Nixon seemed wooden in public appearances, especially in contrast to the apparently more relaxed and much more handsome Kennedy. Appearances mattered. This was especially clear in the first of a series of televised debates, a new event in American political history. Americans who listened on the radio thought that Nixon, a trained debater since high school, had "won." The majority of the millions who watched on television, however, seemed attracted to Kennedy. Nixon had hurt his knee campaigning and had a chest cold. Refusing to apply heavy makeup, he looked haggard and unshaven, and he sounded hoarse. Kennedy, by contrast, arrived tanned from California and seemed cool and controlled. While the debate may not have changed many minds—Nixon was already losing ground in the polls and may have been behind—it lifted Kennedy from his lesser-known status as challenger. It brought dismay to many in the Nixon camp and great enthusiasm to Kennedy supporters, who fought thereafter with zest and high hopes.
⁸³

Kennedy indeed inspired fervor as the campaign neared its conclusion. At some of his rallies, groups of people—especially women—broke through barriers and ran after his car. These,
Newsweek
reported, were the "runners." Other Kennedy fans included "jumpers" who leapt up and down as his motorcade came by, "double-leapers," women who jumped together while holding hands, and "clutchers," women who crossed their arms and hugged themselves and screamed, "He looked at me! He looked at me!" Nixon usually evoked applause, but nothing like runners, jumpers, or clutchers.
⁸⁴

Many people who actually met Kennedy were almost as dazzled. They found him personally charming, magnetic, even incandescent. He was poised, handsome, youthfully energetic, and he could literally light up a room. Intellectuals and journalists responded favorably to his dry wit, irreverence, and cool, detached intelligence. Haynes Johnson, a perceptive journalist, recalled that Kennedy was "the most seductive person I've ever met. He exuded a sense of vibrant life and humor that seemed naturally to bubble up out of him."
⁸⁵
Kennedy was uncomfortable indulging for long in flights of high-sounding oratory. Yet in calling for change he appealed to the idealistic hopes of people. By any standard he was the most charismatic American politician of the postwar era, especially to women and younger people.
⁸⁶

Charisma, though important, was but part of the reason for Kennedy's narrow victory. He also made tactical decisions that at least in retrospect seem politically astute, in that they strengthened the urban-ethnic-black-southern coalition of voters that Roosevelt had fashioned in the 1930s and that had held together for Truman in 1948. One such decision was his first as the nominee: naming Johnson as his running mate. This decision amazed delegates and reporters. Johnson, a presidential candidate himself, had attacked Kennedy both before and during the convention. As Senate majority leader he had much more power than he ever would have as Vice-President. Most of Kennedy's top advisers, especially his brother Bobby, who was his campaign manager, despised Johnson, whom they considered to be a wheeler-dealer as well as a conservative. But Kennedy (and his father) decided that they wanted Johnson on the ticket in order to bolster Democratic chances in Texas, a key state, and elsewhere in the South and West. And so the offer was made.

When Johnson's friends heard of the offer, they strongly opposed the idea. But Johnson was attracted, both because he was seeking new challenges and because he was honored to be asked. Privately he accepted, and word seeped out concerning the deal. At this point liberals protested, and Bobby, thinking wrongly that Jack was reconsidering his offer, went to Johnson's suite. There he dropped hints that Johnson should pull out of the vice-presidential picture. Johnson picked up the phone to find out what Jack really wanted. Kennedy assured him that he remained the choice, and the deal later sailed through the convention. Johnson, an extraordinarily sensitive man, never forgave Bobby or forgot the insult. In the open, however, he feigned his enthusiasm for Kennedy. His presence may have protected Kennedy's margins in the South.
⁸⁷

A second key decision by Kennedy concerned his Catholicism, which led many Protestants, including Norman Vincent Peale, to question whether he ought to be President. (Martin Luther King, Sr., was another doubter.) Kennedy met the issue head-on by addressing Protestant clergymen in Houston, a center of Protestant strength. America, he said, is a nation where the "separation of church and state is absolute—where no Catholic prelate would tell the President how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote." He added, "I am not the Catholic candidate for President. . . . I do not speak for my church on public matters—and the church does not speak for me."
⁸⁸
The election results later suggested that voters divided sharply along religious lines and that Kennedy's Catholicism had hurt him more than it helped.
⁸⁹
Still, most contemporary observers agreed that Kennedy's speech at Houston managed to soften religious rhetoric for most of the campaign. Had he evaded the issue, Protestant voters might have ensured his defeat.

Another move that seems to have helped him politically were gestures that he and Bobby made in late October toward embattled blacks. When King was arrested in Georgia and sentenced to four months in jail on a minor traffic-related violation, Nixon tried quietly to intervene but said nothing in public. Jack, however, was persuaded by an aide to telephone King's wife, Coretta, to express his sympathy. At the same time, Bobby (unbeknownst to Jack) telegraphed the judge and requested King's release. The judge relented, and King got out of prison on bail. King then gave Jack full credit for what had happened. King Sr. came around, announcing, "I've got a suitcase full of votes, and I'm going to take them to Mr. Kennedy and dump them in his lap."
⁹⁰
These efforts by Bobby and Jack may have persuaded some wayward blacks who had voted Republican in 1956 to return to the Democratic camp.
⁹¹
Whatever the cause, some 70 percent of black votes went Democratic in 1960 (as opposed to perhaps 63 percent in 1956), an increase that may have turned the tide for Kennedy in several closely contested northern states, such as New Jersey, Michigan, and Illinois, as well as in Texas (all of which Eisenhower had won in 1956).
⁹²
Eisenhower later attributed the Republican defeat to "a couple of phone calls" by John and Robert Kennedy.
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S
O THE
D
EMOCRATIC COALITION
survived. This center, among others, seemed to hold in 1960. Did did it make a difference?

Many Americans later imagined that it did. Kennedy, they believed, proceeded to outline a range of new frontiers and to abandon the stodgy old politics of the 1950s. It remains difficult, however, to identify very many Americans in the immediate aftermath of the election who expected that anything very dramatic was about to happen. Conservatives insisted correctly that Kennedy had no popular mandate. Eisenhower, who deeply disliked the Kennedys, also doubted that the new administration would be able to change much. In his farewell address of January 17, 1961, he predicted instead that "an immense military establishment and a large arms industry"—a military-industrial complex—might continue to poison the wells of international relations and to dominate domestic policy. Urgently he warned the nation to be on guard.

Liberals, of course, were pleased that Nixon had lost and that the voters had returned Democratic majorities to Capitol Hill: 65 to 35 in the Senate and 263 to 174 in the House. But they, too, had difficulty interpreting the election as a triumph for significant change. Democrats in fact lost twenty seats in the House. The fact was that Kennedy had run a pragmatic, centrist campaign in which he promised to wage the Cold War more vigorously than ever. The sit-ins notwithstanding, moral issues such as civil rights seemed no more pressing to Kennedy and his advisers at the end of 1960 than they had to the majority of white Americans throughout Eisenhower's second term. There seemed little reason to anticipate that the political center would shift very much in the days to come.

15
The Polarized Sixties: An Overview

The year 1960, one historian writes, marked "the definitive end of the Dark Ages, and the beginning of a more hopeful and democratic period" that lasted until the early 1970s. Another historian calls the 1960s a modern Great Awakening which ignited a "Burned-Over Decade" of cultural change akin to the turbulent 1840s. William Braden, a contemporary observer, labeled the era an Age of Aquarius that heralded "a new American identity—a collective identity that will be blacker, more feminine, more oriental, more emotional, more intuitive, more exuberant—and, just possibly, better than the old one."
¹

Cultural conservatives witnessed these changes with disgust. The sociologist Daniel Bell was appalled by young people who were trying to "transfer a liberal life-style into a world of immediate gratification and exhibitionist display." The "counterculture," as it was called, "produced little culture, and it countered nothing." The columnist George Will later dismissed the decade as an age of "intellectual rubbish," "sandbox radicalism," and "almost unrelieved excess." Braden worried that Americans who were forging the "new identity" might be mistaking "vividness, intensity, and urgency for cultural sensitivity and responsible morality. They don't know what they like, but whatever they or their emotions like must be art—or must be right, and certainly righteous."
²

Both sides of this still acrimonious debate were correct in recognizing that unusually tumultuous events shook American life in the 1960s. Cultural and social changes seemed to accelerate rapidly in the early 1960s, to reshape public policies in the mid-1960s, and to polarize the nation in the last few years of the decade. By then the thrust of activism was dramatically shifting direction: backlash mounted rapidly against the public programs and ushered in a durable age of political conservatism in America. But the tumult of the decade nonetheless had unsettled much that Americans had taken for granted before then, including vestiges of what for lack of a better word can be called "Victorian." Thereafter, people seemed much readier to challenge authority. As Morris Dickstein, a perceptive scholar put it, "The sixties are likely to remain a permanent point of reference for the way we think and behave, just as the thirties were."
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Dickstein's view of the sixties has much to be said for it. Signs of dramatic change were gathering force even in 1960, when the sit-ins broke out in February. SNCC came to life in April. Enovid, the birth control pill, was approved by the government in May. The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), later to be the most prominent of many "New Left" protest groups, was born in June. In 1961 social change gathered new momentum. The civil rights movement entered a bloodier stage, with racists attacking "freedom riders" who sought to integrate interstate travel: between 1961 and 1965, twenty-six civil rights workers lost their lives in the South. More than any other development of the early 1960s, the civil rights revolution spurred the idealism, egalitarianism, and rights-consciousness that galvanized many other groups and challenged social relations in the United States.

The early 1960s witnessed publication of extraordinarily provocative and influential books that questioned conventional notions about American society and culture. In 1961 Jane Jacobs brought out
Death and Life of Great American Cities
, which skewered the grandiose pretensions of urban planners, and Joseph Heller published
Catch-22
, an unsubtle but hilarious and disturbing novel about the inanities of the military in World War II. It sold some 10 million copies over the next thirty years, appealing especially to opponents of the Vietnam War. Two seminal books appeared in 1962. Rachel Carson's
Silent Spring
sounded an eloquent warning against pesticides and environmental pollution. Widely acclaimed, it spurred an ecological movement that gathered considerable force by the late 1960s. Michael Harrington's
The Other America
greatly dramatized the problem of poverty in the United States, adding to pressures for governmental action.
⁴
In 1963 James Baldwin's prophetic
The Fire Next Time
alerted Americans to the likelihood of violent racial confrontation. Betty Friedan's
The Feminine Mystique
also appeared in 1963. A huge seller, it helped to launch a renaissance of feminism.

Reflecting the anti-Establishment spirit of these books, groups of protestors began to capture public attention in the early 1960s. In Michigan Tom Hayden and other young SDS radicals crafted the Port Huron Statement in 1962, a long, sometimes contradictory, but much-cited manifesto of New Left activism.
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In Mississippi that fall, James Meredith, an air force veteran, sought to become the first black person to attend the University of Mississippi. When segregationists retaliated with violence, President Kennedy had to send in the army. Also in 1962, Cesar Chavez and fellow migrant workers organized the National Farm Workers Association, thereby inspiring efforts that led to highly publicized strikes and boycotts later in the decade.
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Early in 1963 Martin Luther King staged a dramatic protest against racial discrimination in Birmingham. It provoked white violence, worldwide television coverage, and rising outrage against racism in the United States. That August King and others took part in a March on Washington that attracted some 250,000 protestors.

Other, unrelated events added to a public perception—this was important—that the times were changing with especially accelerating speed in these years. The Supreme Court shocked conservatives—and others—in 1962 by ruling that public schools in New York could not require students to recite a State Board of Regents prayer in the classroom.
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The Vatican Ecumenical Council, under the reformist leadership of Pope John XXIII, agreed to authorize use of the vernacular in parts of the Catholic mass. Traditionalists were amazed and appalled.
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The folk-singer Bob Dylan, who prophetically wrote the song "The Times They Are a-Changin'" in 1963, also brought out "Blowin' in the Wind" earlier that year. The version by Peter, Paul, and Mary, marketed in August 1963, sold 300,000 copies in two weeks and became the first protest song ever to make the Hit Parade.
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Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, having helped to celebrate the virtues of drugs such as LSD, were fired from their posts at Harvard University that spring but continued to beguile acolytes, especially among the young.

Other blows to the familiar followed in early 1964. In January the Surgeon General of the United States issued a report by eminent scientists warning of the mortal dangers of tobacco.
¹⁰
It temporarily shook some of the millions of Americans (more than one-half of adult men, more than one-third of women) who smoked.
¹¹
In the same month movie-goers began flocking to see Stanley Kubrick's film
Dr. Strangelove
.
It featured a crazed militarist, Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), who refused to rescind an insane attack order because he was convinced that the "International Communist Conspiracy" was trying to "sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids." More effectively than any other movie of the era, the movie ridiculed the excesses of the Cold War. A month later the Beatles arrived in the United States from England and became an immediate sensation; a record 67 million people watched them perform on "The Ed Sullivan Show." In March Malcolm X, a charismatic black nationalist, broke with the Nation of Islam, formed the Organization of Afro-American Unity, and set about enlisting African-Americans in northern cities.

Young people seemed especially restless at the time. Gaining confidence in 1964, when a protracted "free speech" movement at the University of California, Berkeley, aroused nationwide notice, activist students—many of them veterans of civil rights protests in the South—began to demonstrate for a range of causes.
¹²
Some raged against poverty and racial discrimination, others (especially after escalation of American involvement in Vietnam) against American foreign policies, others against the flaws of universities themselves. By no means all campuses experienced significant unrest in the 1960s. But most of the elite colleges and universities did. These attracted many of the brightest and most privileged young people among the huge and expectant baby boom cohorts that were then swarming to the campuses. "If you are not part of the solution," the idealists believed, "you are part of the problem." Their engagement reinvigorated the political and cultural Left in the United States.
¹³

These and other developments hardly added up to a coherent movement, or even a clearly visible pattern. But they came hard and fast on one another, and they received great coverage from television, which by then reached virtually all Americans, and from other sources of news that reached a more highly educated population.
¹⁴
It was in the 1960s that TV came into its own as a major force in American life, promoting a more national culture while at the same time casting its eye on profound internal divisions. Many Americans at the time indeed sensed that the times were changing, that a new if undefined
Zeitgeist
, or spirit of the times, was in the process of remaking society and culture. The restless spirit pushed with special insistence against the political center. In 1963 activists demanding racial justice forced President Kennedy to come out for civil rights legislation. Within a year and a half of Kennedy's assassination in November 1963—a shocking act that intensified the pressures for change—reformers in Congress managed to enact a spate of liberal legislation, including a "war on poverty," federal aid to education, Medicare for the aged, Medicaid for the poor, reform of immigration law, creation of the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, and two historic civil rights laws that would have seemed almost unimaginable a few years earlier.

Culturally, too, the center seemed in some disarray, especially after mid-decade. Large numbers of people, most of them young, began to find common cause in seeking relief from what they considered to be the vulgarity, impersonality, and overall dullness of middle-class culture. Some of these rebels adopted New Left political opinions, but many others resisted mainstream culture, not public policies. Millions found inspiration from rock musicians, especially (it seemed) from those who were loudly and angrily anti-authoritarian. A rock concert at a farm in Bethel, New York, in 1969 attracted some 400,000 people who wallowed happily about in the rain, some in various stages of undress and drug-induced haze, for three days. Traffic jams and police barricades prevented many thousands more from attending. "Woodstock" was the culminating event of "countercultural" celebration in the 1960s.
¹⁵

Smaller numbers of young people "dropped out" of mainstream American life to join countercultural communes. They were a tiny minority of the overall population (which rose, a little more slowly than in the 1950s, from 180.7 million to 204.9 million during the decade), but they took pride in defying conventional mores. Many openly smoked marijuana; a few experimented with harder drugs and engaged in various versions of free love. Between 1965 and 1975, when the communal movement lost momentum, some 10,000 such experiments blossomed in the country. They received lingering if sometimes snide attention from the often voyeuristic mass media.
¹⁶

Nowhere was cultural change more clear than in the realm of sexuality among young people.
¹⁷
The Pill assisted the spread of the already ascendant sexual revolution, but larger notions of personal rights and "liberation" contributed still more. So, as earlier, did agents of the consumer culture. In 1960
Playboy
introduced its "Playboy Adviser" column, which offered explicit guidance to readers seeking new and more imaginative ways of practicing sex. (By the early 1970s the magazine was regularly reaching an estimated 20 percent of adult American men.)
¹⁸
In 1962 Helen Gurley Brown wrote Sex
and the Single Girl
, a message of female sexual liberation that she later introduced to
Cosmopolitan
magazine. In 1968 Broadway staged
Hair
, a rock musical that featured frontal nudity. Actors were paid extra for disrobing. The play became a hit in New York and in many shows on the road.

By then many university parietal rules were crumbling, often without a fight from authorities. Indeed, the sexual revolution assumed an unprecedentedly open and defiant tone, especially among women, increasing numbers of whom rebelled against the "feminine mystique" of deference and domesticity.
¹⁹
Some flaunted mini-skirts, a new style that entered the United States from France in 1965, and challenged their elders by living openly in an unmarried state with men. The mid-1960s, one survey of sexual behavior concludes, represented "perhaps the greatest transformation in sexuality [the United States] had ever witnessed."
²⁰