Johnson was haunted by a sense of illegitimacy. Even at the height of his popularity in 1964, he had considered dropping out of the presidential race. Now, as he approached his 1,036th day in office-the last day JFK served-his popularity was dropping week by week. It didn"t take much for a man like Nixon to probe LBJ"s deepest anxieties. Many of those anxieties he shared.
They shared a need to humiliate, but a horror of being humiliated-and that nagging sense that the worst humiliations always, always always came at the hand of some d.a.m.ned Kennedy or another. Pundits spoke of a "Kennedy wing" of the Democratic Party, complete with shadow cabinet of exiled JFK aides. "If Lyndon thinks he"s in trouble, if Lyndon thinks he needs Bobby on the ticket to win," Nixon said one morning on the came at the hand of some d.a.m.ned Kennedy or another. Pundits spoke of a "Kennedy wing" of the Democratic Party, complete with shadow cabinet of exiled JFK aides. "If Lyndon thinks he"s in trouble, if Lyndon thinks he needs Bobby on the ticket to win," Nixon said one morning on the Today Today show, "he"ll sugarcoat him, swallow him, and regurgitate him later." He was reminding Johnson that his political future might just rely on his greatest political enemy. "I don"t know what it means," Nixon said at a Fort Lauderdale auditorium, "but the sign outside says, "Nixon Tonight-Wrestling Next Week." I"d suggest coming back. It"ll be Bobby versus Lyndon." show, "he"ll sugarcoat him, swallow him, and regurgitate him later." He was reminding Johnson that his political future might just rely on his greatest political enemy. "I don"t know what it means," Nixon said at a Fort Lauderdale auditorium, "but the sign outside says, "Nixon Tonight-Wrestling Next Week." I"d suggest coming back. It"ll be Bobby versus Lyndon."
That was the sound of d.i.c.k hitting Lyndon over the head with a chair.
The shared Kennedy anxiety betokened others: over their provincial backgrounds, the hair-trigger sensitivity to those who would remind them of it, the cruel delight their Georgetown betters took at the yokels" ill-mannered missteps. One of Johnson"s worst such humiliations came in 1964, when cameras caught him lifting up his beagle by the ears. So Nixon described Johnson"s relationship with Congress thus: Lyndon "barks and it barks. He tells it to roll over and it rolls over. He tells it to play dead and it plays dead. He doesn"t even have to pick it up by the ears."
They shared a public reputation as unprincipled, and a self-image as statesmen. After the 1963 James Garner picture The Wheeler Dealers, The Wheeler Dealers, about a Texas hustler who goes East to strike it big in New York, Johnson got tagged with a hated nickname. That was the sore Nixon rubbed when he said the president was working with "a stacked deck" and that "the country hasn"t won a hand since he started to deal." about a Texas hustler who goes East to strike it big in New York, Johnson got tagged with a hated nickname. That was the sore Nixon rubbed when he said the president was working with "a stacked deck" and that "the country hasn"t won a hand since he started to deal."
And above all, they shared a bone-deep obsession with control, terror whenever the world proved uncontrollable. And what the commander in chief controlled the least was Vietnam. Nixon knew how hopeless it was in Vietnam. He knew that Johnson knew it, too, but could never say so publicly. Forced to act presidential, Johnson could only sit there and stew while Nixon rubbed his nose in it: that we had to escalate to prevent World War III; that if we escalated, we might start World War III.
Nixon was. .h.i.tting Johnson with the same chair every time he mentioned inflation. Inflation was something a president could little control in the best of circ.u.mstances. Because of his need to dissemble about Vietnam, Johnson could control it less than ever. Since spring, his economists had been telling him that increased military spending, coming on top of record-breaking prosperity in the civilian economy, made an inflationary spiral almost a certainty unless he pushed through a quick tax hike. But to acknowledge he needed a tax hike was to acknowledge that the situation in Vietnam was an emergency. The notion that the nation could afford both Vietnam and the Great Society-"guns and b.u.t.ter"-was the central organizing principle of his presidency. Which is why Nixon hyped high prices as often as he did. He was planting a kind of rhetorical time bomb. He knew inflation would accelerate soon enough.
In the middle of August the interest rates banks paid depositors were edging toward their legal limit, 5.5 percent; banks began curtailing loans. There were whispers of a financial panic. A twenty-eight-year-old Phoenix mother, outraged at the price of bread, took out a four-line cla.s.sified ad calling for a protest. Five thousand housewives responded. Her movement soon had chapters from Connecticut to California. Reminding the president of this gra.s.sroots groundswell, and pairing it in the same sentence with Vietnam, was Nixon"s way of reminding LBJ how little control he had over anything at all.
Nixon harped on one more matter in every speech: that the loudest voices opposing the president on Vietnam came from the president"s own party-people like Senator Fulbright, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, who spoke of America as a "sick society" rotted through with the "arrogance of power which has afflicted, weakened, and in some cases destroyed great nations in the past." The junior senator from New York insisted publicly that he was still with the president on Vietnam. But at every Georgetown c.o.c.ktail party, conversation circled around to when Bobby would put his widening differences with the president on record.
Nixon knew how much pressure it put on a man to lie consistently. He knew that Lyndon Johnson was given to towering rages. Maybe, just maybe, he could push LBJ into displaying one in public. And then Richard Nixon would be the one who looked presidential.
CHAPTER SEVEN.
Batting Average.
NIXON"S GENERAL-ELECTION TOUR STEPPED OFF S SEPTEMBER 13 WITH a luncheon of the Overseas Press Club in D.C. He said the president might soon "find it necessary to announce a substantial increase in our forces in Vietnam" and that he "owes it to the American people to come clean and tell them exactly what his plans are"-"now, and not after the election." A reporter asked if Nixon was calling Johnson a liar. Nixon replied with a stealthy blow to the presidential kneecap: no, but that Johnson "may not have thought this thing through" given the pressure he was under, "losing popularity because of the loss of some "dove" support among Democrats." a luncheon of the Overseas Press Club in D.C. He said the president might soon "find it necessary to announce a substantial increase in our forces in Vietnam" and that he "owes it to the American people to come clean and tell them exactly what his plans are"-"now, and not after the election." A reporter asked if Nixon was calling Johnson a liar. Nixon replied with a stealthy blow to the presidential kneecap: no, but that Johnson "may not have thought this thing through" given the pressure he was under, "losing popularity because of the loss of some "dove" support among Democrats."
Nixon hit Ohio: Columbus, Athens, and a "Republican Jamboree" in Cincinnati. Then over the border to Kentucky, where he said that unless prices stopped rising, "the major issue in 1968 could well be President Johnson"s recession.... The leadership gap we have in Washington now in foreign policy and in dealing with inflation is because we have a one-party Congress that will go all the way with LBJ.... What we need now in order to restore the greatness of America is to increase the members of the Republican Party-the loyal opposition-in Congress."
(This was masterly Nixonian aural illusion: leadership gap leadership gap sounded like sounded like credibility gap, loyal opposition credibility gap, loyal opposition raised McCarthyite red flags about Democratic raised McCarthyite red flags about Democratic dis disloyalty.) "Any nation that insists on trading with the enemy should have all its foreign aid cut off right now."
(Red meat to sate the conservatives, and further agita for the president: Nixon knew the nation"s diplomat in chief could not and would not do any such thing.) Thence to Denver, then Davenport, then Salt Lake City.
The ritual was always the same. A press conference beforehand. Men moved away the bulky podium, the better for his audience to see that the master spoke without notes. Introduction by a local dignitary. A dramatic entrance down a flower-strewn gauntlet laid out by the Republican lady auxiliaries, his head lowered in false modesty as the electrified thousands roared in welcome. The review of the dais ("The best group of candidates I"ve seen in twenty years of coming to Colorado"). The insinuating speech, hands balled over his stomach, his jaw working upward and downward-thought Garry Wills, Esquire Esquire magazine"s mordantly brilliant political correspondent, "like Charlie McCarthy"s." magazine"s mordantly brilliant political correspondent, "like Charlie McCarthy"s."
Geographically, the itinerary felt random. Politically, it was anything but. He received over a thousand speaking invitations a month. The ones he chose were triangulated with scientific precision. The New York Times New York Times"s John Herbers reviewed the crazy-quilt itinerary and concluded Nixon was campaigning "in districts where races are close." The failure of discernment was profound. It was the opposite: he was campaigning in traditionally Republican districts where a Democratic congressman had won in 1964 on Lyndon Johnson"s coattails, but was likely to be swept out in the conservative backlash.
For instance, Iowa"s First District. A five-term Republican, Fred Schwengel, was running to recover the seat he"d lost to a young political-science professor from the Bronx named John Schmidhauser. One day, Representative Schmidhauser appeared at a farm bureau meeting, prepared for a grilling on the Democrats" agricultural policies. The questions, though, were all on rumors that Chicago"s Negro rioters were about to engulf Iowa in waves, traveling, for some reason, "on motorcycles." The liberal political-science professor was as vulnerable as a sapling. Hence Nixon"s visit to Davenport. Nixon visited Iowa as often as he could. Despite the old joke about Iowa going Democratic when h.e.l.l goes Methodist, five of its seven congressional seats belonged to freshman Democrats. Now that farmers were afraid that Martin Luther King would send Negro biker gangs to rape their children, the Republican restoration was inevitable.
Come November, Richard Nixon could remind the New York Times New York Times that what these districts had in common was that Richard Nixon had campaigned there. He could reap credit for making water flow downhill. The that what these districts had in common was that Richard Nixon had campaigned there. He could reap credit for making water flow downhill. The new new Nixon-the one who didn"t bait liberal Democrats on law and order-would have saved his party from Armageddon. He would leapfrog the compet.i.tion, the oh-so-glamorous GOP liberals that the likes of the Nixon-the one who didn"t bait liberal Democrats on law and order-would have saved his party from Armageddon. He would leapfrog the compet.i.tion, the oh-so-glamorous GOP liberals that the likes of the Times Times kept puffing up, and become the presidential nominee. kept puffing up, and become the presidential nominee.
In Gallup"s poll of the Republican faithful at the start of 1966, Nixon was ahead by twenty-three points. Michigan governor George Romney sat fourth. But Romney was the one all the pundits were picking-or, if Romney stumbled, a Senator Chuck Percy, or Nelson Rockefeller if he wanted it, or perhaps Oregon"s Republican dove Mark Hatfield or Pennsylvania"s Governor Scranton or New York mayor John Lindsay. The quality they were said to have in common was "charisma"-"Kennedyesque" charisma. To the talking heads on the Sunday panel shows, it was obvious: the man who went into the showdown with Lyndon Johnson would have to be a TV star. It simply couldn"t couldn"t be Nixon. The logic of the times demanded it. be Nixon. The logic of the times demanded it.
This new political science had a prophet, and his name was Marshall McLuhan-"the new spokesman of the electronic age," as the blurb to his 1964 magnum opus, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, called him. A key hinge of that book"s argument that "the medium is the message" was his exegesis of the Kennedy-Nixon debates. He thought Nixon resembled the railway lawyer in westerns "who signs leases that are not in the best interests of the folks in the little town.... Without TV, Nixon had it made." The influence of TV had only accelerated in the eight years since. That was how, in defiance of all the doughy-faced bald men whose const.i.tuencies returned them to Congress year after year, in defiance of the presidential landslide won in 1964 by the jug-eared, poky-voiced Texan, pundits proclaimed with such confidence that 1968 would be the year of "Republican Camelot." called him. A key hinge of that book"s argument that "the medium is the message" was his exegesis of the Kennedy-Nixon debates. He thought Nixon resembled the railway lawyer in westerns "who signs leases that are not in the best interests of the folks in the little town.... Without TV, Nixon had it made." The influence of TV had only accelerated in the eight years since. That was how, in defiance of all the doughy-faced bald men whose const.i.tuencies returned them to Congress year after year, in defiance of the presidential landslide won in 1964 by the jug-eared, poky-voiced Texan, pundits proclaimed with such confidence that 1968 would be the year of "Republican Camelot."
The politicians they lionized were antipoliticians-"mavericks" who talked straight, directly to the people, over and around the grubby old exigencies of partisan machinery. George Romney was the template: a Republican who"d won in a Democratic state, who got into politics running a nonpartisan commission to reform Michigan"s antiquated const.i.tution, a familiar face on TV from his days as CEO of American Motors deriding the Big Three"s "gas guzzlers." Percy"s political debut was in a.s.sembling a panel of disinterested experts to charter a new Republican agenda for 1960 beyond the partisan cliches of the past, a panel modeled on the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation"s Special Studies Project of the mid-1950s. Scranton-dubbed upon his inauguration in 1963 as "the first Kennedy Republican"-got into politics pioneering public-private partnerships to refurbish the dying industrial town that bore his family"s name. John Vliet Lindsay (his 1965 campaign motto, borrowed from a line from a pundit"s column, was "He is fresh and everyone else is tired") was seen as the epitome of the antimachine politician-the matinee idol always on the front page of the Times Times walking the streets of Harlem, working over a pair of bongos, saving New York from social chaos by the pure force of his charisma. walking the streets of Harlem, working over a pair of bongos, saving New York from social chaos by the pure force of his charisma.
All were independently wealthy ("A man needs money to address the people over and around party structure," Garry Wills sardonically observed). All shared a social network (Percy"s future son-in-law was a Rockefeller; Romney"s presidential advisers were borrowed from Rockefeller"s staff) with the Alsops and Lippmanns and Harrimans of the world. No evidence existed for these pundits" conviction that by the intervention of virtuous and public-spirited men like themselves, politics could at last become enlightened. No evidence, that is, save the echo chamber their intimacy with one another helped produce. They were men who hardly noticed the ideological ground shifting beneath their feet.
When John Lindsay, the very liberal Republican congressman from Manhattan"s "Silk Stocking" district, ran for mayor against Abraham Beame in 1965, his posters had him leading a brood of smiling black kids, handsome as a movie star-"Kennedyesque." Journalists from Italy, Peru, England, Denmark, rushed to cover him. "Where Beame symbolized a shabby yesterday, John Lindsay symbolizes a brighter tomorrow," editorialized the World-Telegram and Sun. World-Telegram and Sun. The The Herald Tribune Herald Tribune practically made its last year of publication an adjunct of his campaign; the liberal Republicans of the Ripon Society rhapsodized that he was "the first leader his party has given our generation." One of his campaign flyers pictured him erect at a debate podium, six feet four inches tall, his two opponents flanking him in chairs, with the legend "Will the real liberal please stand up?" practically made its last year of publication an adjunct of his campaign; the liberal Republicans of the Ripon Society rhapsodized that he was "the first leader his party has given our generation." One of his campaign flyers pictured him erect at a debate podium, six feet four inches tall, his two opponents flanking him in chairs, with the legend "Will the real liberal please stand up?"
The other opponent was fringe candidate William F. Buckley. At Buckley"s luncheon with the New York Times New York Times editorial board, the magazine editor was asked, "Do you realize that as a practical matter your candidacy...is likely to result in a grave setback to the fortunes of New York by depriving the city of a Lindsay administration?" editorial board, the magazine editor was asked, "Do you realize that as a practical matter your candidacy...is likely to result in a grave setback to the fortunes of New York by depriving the city of a Lindsay administration?"
Lindsay triumphed; the Times Times predicted Shangri-la: "The thorough research and thoughtfulness that went into the writing of position papers during his campaign," they editorialized, "will stand him in good stead now." New York"s fortunes proved grave nonetheless. His inauguration coincided with a nearly biblical disaster: a two-week subway and bus strike. Oblivious, Lindsay went on the radio and declared New York "Fun City." It was followed by a nurses" strike. And then a new subway fare, the first since 1953. And the city"s first income tax. "A Long Six Months for Lindsay," read a July 4, 1966, predicted Shangri-la: "The thorough research and thoughtfulness that went into the writing of position papers during his campaign," they editorialized, "will stand him in good stead now." New York"s fortunes proved grave nonetheless. His inauguration coincided with a nearly biblical disaster: a two-week subway and bus strike. Oblivious, Lindsay went on the radio and declared New York "Fun City." It was followed by a nurses" strike. And then a new subway fare, the first since 1953. And the city"s first income tax. "A Long Six Months for Lindsay," read a July 4, 1966, New York Times New York Times op-ed. op-ed.
Part of his crusade to break apart the city"s ossified bureaucracies was taking on the NYPD-largely seen by the coalition of liberal professionals, minorities, young idealists, philanthropic Establishment Republicans, and college-educated middle-cla.s.s Jews that elected Lindsay as clannish, racist, and corrupt. They were seen rather differently by white ethnics in the outer boroughs, hoping against hope for a financial break that would finally let them escape to the suburbs. To them, the New York City Police Department was their only defense against a city becoming a jungle. Over the previous decade, the murder rate had doubled. Robberies and thefts nearly tripled, despite 35 percent more cops on the streets.
One of Lindsay"s campaign promises on law and order was a Civilian Complaint Review Board. The police were, were, after all, corrupt; a 1964 investigation had traced gambling graft all the way up to the department"s elite forty-eight-man "watchdog" group. Law-abiding ghetto residents carried receipts for every possession with them so as not to be accused of stealing them. The cops had lost the confidence of the public, Lindsay said; restoring trust between the police and the community would make it easier to fight crime together-or so he reasoned. Policemen disagreed. The idea of liberal bureaucrats second-guessing their work was, according to their commissioner, Michael Murphy, "a calculated ma.s.s libel of the police." Lindsay replaced Murphy with a commissioner loyal to him, Howard Leary. Some saw Lindsay as deliberately breaking the cops as a rival, working-cla.s.s, Catholic power center. "All cops are sc.u.m," one of Lindsay"s appointees was reported to have said. after all, corrupt; a 1964 investigation had traced gambling graft all the way up to the department"s elite forty-eight-man "watchdog" group. Law-abiding ghetto residents carried receipts for every possession with them so as not to be accused of stealing them. The cops had lost the confidence of the public, Lindsay said; restoring trust between the police and the community would make it easier to fight crime together-or so he reasoned. Policemen disagreed. The idea of liberal bureaucrats second-guessing their work was, according to their commissioner, Michael Murphy, "a calculated ma.s.s libel of the police." Lindsay replaced Murphy with a commissioner loyal to him, Howard Leary. Some saw Lindsay as deliberately breaking the cops as a rival, working-cla.s.s, Catholic power center. "All cops are sc.u.m," one of Lindsay"s appointees was reported to have said.
In May, Leary handed down General Order No. 14, officially establishing the Civilian Complaint Review Board. Its membership was announced: the president of the New York Society for Ethical Culture, the acting director of the Puerto Rican Development Congress, the former president of the Catholic Interracial Council-the kind of panjandrums called "limousine liberals" for all the times they were seen on the news getting into limousines after some civic function or another. The president of the Patrolmen"s Benevolent a.s.sociation, John Ca.s.sese, snapped, "I am sick and tired of giving in to minority groups with their whims and their gripes and shouting." The New York Civil Liberties Union denounced Ca.s.sese"s "thinly veiled racism."
Then during the riot in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York in July, cops were sent in with orders not to use their nightsticks. The PBA got 96,888 signatures to get a referendum on the November ballot to dissolve the Civilian Complaint Review Board. The law required them to get only 30,000.
Both sides opened bustling campaign offices. Ca.s.sese of the PBA opened theirs with a speech recalling how his boys had handily put down the riot in Harlem in 1964-while supposedly, Rochester and Philadelphia had burned near to the ground. "Why? Because they have review boards there.... Communism and Communists are mixed up in this fight. If we wind up with a review board, we"ll have done Russia a great service.... The doctrine of the Communist Party is to knock out religion and break the spirit, as well as create confusion in the police department, cause chaos, and interrupt the public function."
The liberal coalition organized to fight to keep the review board couldn"t have been more delighted with the opposition, its laziness with the facts (Rochester and Philadelphia had fared no worse than Harlem in 1964) and their Red-baiting. They called their opposition "a coalition of right-wing groups-the Conservative Party, the fascist National Renaissance Party, the John Birch Society, and the American Legion allied with the PBA against the forces of reason and civic leadership in this city." The facts were on their side, and that was enough: of the 113 cases the CCRB had investigated since June, disciplinary action had been recommended in only three of them. Trumpeted Commissioner Leary, "It has certainly strengthened the spirit of cooperation between the police and the public."
It all just made so much sense sense-just as the facts the liberals had marshaled in hearings for the 1966 civil rights bill and its open-housing t.i.tle had made so much sense.
Which, the same week Commissioner Leary spoke, was resoundingly thumped in the Senate.
The pro-review-board liberals" billboards read DON"T BE A "YES" MAN FOR BIGOTRY, VOTE "NO." DON"T BE A "YES" MAN FOR BIGOTRY, VOTE "NO." Boasted their spokesman, "Before this campaign is over, people will feel ashamed to do anything but vote against this referendum." They couldn"t lose. Boasted their spokesman, "Before this campaign is over, people will feel ashamed to do anything but vote against this referendum." They couldn"t lose.
In California, Pat Brown was trying the same strategy, isolating his opposition as an extremist fringe-just as Barry Goldwater"s supporters were isolated as an extremist fringe. It worked about as well as it did for Brown in California. "The police of New York like William Buckley," the liberal journalist d.i.c.k Schaap had written after the National Review National Review editor"s quixotic mayoral campaign in 1965. "He lost only in the real world." Since then Schaap had cowritten a series on New York"s crime epidemic: "Cab drivers rest iron bars on the front seat next to them," he reported. "The weapons were justified." The world had changed. The ground was shifting. editor"s quixotic mayoral campaign in 1965. "He lost only in the real world." Since then Schaap had cowritten a series on New York"s crime epidemic: "Cab drivers rest iron bars on the front seat next to them," he reported. "The weapons were justified." The world had changed. The ground was shifting.
September 17: incredible, astonishing news from a lakeside suburb of Chicago. The Senate candidate"s wife, Lorraine Percy, was awakened at 5 a.m. by the sound of breaking gla.s.s. She witnessed a man bludgeoning her beautiful twenty-one-year-old stepdaughter, Valerie, to death. The only clues were an opening cut in a pane of gla.s.s, barefoot prints on the beach, fingerprints. This was the kind of awful, brutal, monstrous crime you expected to hear about once in a generation. But this summer there had already been the Richard Speck murders and the Texas Tower shootings. Chuck Percy wouldn"t appear in public again until October 5. His surrogates, however, ground on, intimating that all all voters risked Valerie Percy"s fate under Democratic rule. On September 20, Gerald Ford, the gentle man who had risen in the House because he had no enemies, spoke at the Illinois State Fair on Republican Day and said Democrats were "the party with the big riots in the streets. How long are we going to abdicate law and order-the backbone of any civilization-in favor of a soft social theory that the man who heaves a brick through your window or tosses a firebomb into your car is simply the misunderstood and underprivileged product of a broken home?" voters risked Valerie Percy"s fate under Democratic rule. On September 20, Gerald Ford, the gentle man who had risen in the House because he had no enemies, spoke at the Illinois State Fair on Republican Day and said Democrats were "the party with the big riots in the streets. How long are we going to abdicate law and order-the backbone of any civilization-in favor of a soft social theory that the man who heaves a brick through your window or tosses a firebomb into your car is simply the misunderstood and underprivileged product of a broken home?"
The busing panic broke out in Congress. On September 27, a riot broke out in San Francisco. "There is no rationale for these riots," an agonized Pat Brown lamented. "We have forty thousand jobs in California unfulfilled, but these people are not equipped to handle them. They have yet to learn their ABC"s, and then they have to learn how to deal with the sophisticated complexities of industry. It"s going to take years." Ronald Reagan had his own rationale: San Francisco went up in flames because Brown hadn"t "profited at all from the experience of Watts and has done nothing to forestall future disturbances in other trouble spots." And in New York City, Mayor Lindsay started canva.s.sing the outer boroughs for civilian review. A typical stop was in Flatbush, Brooklyn. He was interrupted by a housewife"s shriek: "Why do you always kowtow to the coloreds?"
The antiCivilian Complaint Review Board campaign canva.s.sed with TV commercials: "The addict, the criminal, the hoodlum: only the policeman stands between you and him." Its brochures showed pictures that looked like wartime Dresden: "This is the aftermath of a riot in a city that had a civil review board." The pro-review-board forces went hunting for prime billboard s.p.a.ce, but it had all already been snapped up by the PBA-a white woman in a white raincoat walking in the night: "The Civilian Review Board must be stopped. Her life...your life...may depend on it." Then they won their most important endors.e.m.e.nt: Barry Gray, America"s first radio call-in host. He was famous throughout the five boroughs for saying what others were afraid to say aloud. In the 1950s it was that Joe McCarthy was a blackguard. Now it was that New York "will become an asphalt jungle" if the review board remained. Lindsay started limiting his campaigning to voter registration drives in black neighborhoods. He couldn"t alight anywhere else without getting heckled.
It shocked him. It shouldn"t have. When he had campaigned in some of these same neighborhoods in 1965, young white men carried SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL POLICE SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL POLICE signs, and he was guarded by cops wearing orange signs, and he was guarded by cops wearing orange BUCKLEY FOR MAYOR BUCKLEY FOR MAYOR b.u.t.tons. The resistance was never taken as evidence of a lack of popular will that might cripple the kind of reforms he had in mind. "The city is beset with extremists of a dangerous kind" was how Lindsay explained-dismissed-it, as his const.i.tuency swaddled themselves in self-righteousness. "The policeman"s inner world is bound by "us" and "them," the latter being all punks or potential criminals at best," the b.u.t.tons. The resistance was never taken as evidence of a lack of popular will that might cripple the kind of reforms he had in mind. "The city is beset with extremists of a dangerous kind" was how Lindsay explained-dismissed-it, as his const.i.tuency swaddled themselves in self-righteousness. "The policeman"s inner world is bound by "us" and "them," the latter being all punks or potential criminals at best," the New York Times Magazine New York Times Magazine helpfully explained. The helpfully explained. The World Journal Tribune World Journal Tribune published an essay ent.i.tled "Why Cops Behave the Way They Do." It told the story of a cop who pa.s.sed an art gallery in the hippie precincts of the Lower East Side "filled with paintings of what appeared to be female genitalia" and did the only thing his worldview would permit him: he went in and started arresting everyone in sight. "All a cop can swing in a milieu of marijuana smokers, interracial daters, and h.o.m.os.e.xuals is a nightstick." published an essay ent.i.tled "Why Cops Behave the Way They Do." It told the story of a cop who pa.s.sed an art gallery in the hippie precincts of the Lower East Side "filled with paintings of what appeared to be female genitalia" and did the only thing his worldview would permit him: he went in and started arresting everyone in sight. "All a cop can swing in a milieu of marijuana smokers, interracial daters, and h.o.m.os.e.xuals is a nightstick."
Pathetic opponents, went the thinking, obviously easy to defeat.
Some liberals were beginning to come to terms with these forces by which they were being blindsided. An AP reporter opened up his notebook as the governor flew to the riot scene in San Francisco: "slowly realizing the immensity of the blow his campaign had suffered," the reporter wrote, "Brown looked out the window.... He was slumped in his favorite seat, toward the front of the plane, his coat off. Finally, he talked of the riots, puzzled as to why they happened in "the most affluent nation in the world." He also talked about how he was now disliked by Negroes as well as whites. He had met with fifty Negro leaders recently, he recalled, and "all they would say was, "You sold us out, Gov."""
The next day, Ronald Reagan was on the cover of Time, Time, looking young and handsome. looking young and handsome.
Richard Nixon turned south on September 29. The name "Maddox" was on every tongue: St. Lester of the Blessed Ax Handle had just won the Georgia Democratic gubernatorial runoff. Martin Luther King responded, "I am afraid of what lies ahead of us. We could end up with a full-scale race war in this country." Atlanta"s conscience-stricken liberal congressman Charles Longstreet Weltner announced that he would give up his House seat rather share a ticket with Maddox.
Nixon finessed the situation with his usual insinuating delicacy. At the New Southern Hotel in Jackson, Tennessee, he reminded his audience that he had supported Brown v. Board of Education, Brown v. Board of Education, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but that he would not condone "mob rule" by "any" group-knowing that to the people in front of him "mob rule" referred to black people carrying picket signs, though up North he could claim he also meant Dixie vigilantes. Then, after baiting the president for his "complete failure" to lower the rate of black unemployment, he promised Southern Republicans would run nonracial campaigns. "In building this party of the future in the South, one of the foundation stones will be a new concept of states" rights," Nixon said in Columbia, South Carolina. "The old concept was to use states" rights as an instrument of reaction, whereas Republicans view these rights as instruments of progress." It was Democrats who fielded "racial demagogues." the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but that he would not condone "mob rule" by "any" group-knowing that to the people in front of him "mob rule" referred to black people carrying picket signs, though up North he could claim he also meant Dixie vigilantes. Then, after baiting the president for his "complete failure" to lower the rate of black unemployment, he promised Southern Republicans would run nonracial campaigns. "In building this party of the future in the South, one of the foundation stones will be a new concept of states" rights," Nixon said in Columbia, South Carolina. "The old concept was to use states" rights as an instrument of reaction, whereas Republicans view these rights as instruments of progress." It was Democrats who fielded "racial demagogues."
The New York Times New York Times was impressed. "Tanned, fit, relaxed, he moves swiftly from town to town, parrying questions about his political future with his left, throwing hard rights and combination punches at the Democrats," John Herbers wrote in the Week in Review, reporting as news Nixon"s declaration that the racial issue was "a dead horse," missing the point that Southern politics had always followed this good-cop/bad-cop pattern: Bubba-baiters who decried "mongrelization" with tobacco-spitting rage; and gentlemen who spoke of states" rights in sonorous tones as a crucial component of regional uplift, as Nixon just had. was impressed. "Tanned, fit, relaxed, he moves swiftly from town to town, parrying questions about his political future with his left, throwing hard rights and combination punches at the Democrats," John Herbers wrote in the Week in Review, reporting as news Nixon"s declaration that the racial issue was "a dead horse," missing the point that Southern politics had always followed this good-cop/bad-cop pattern: Bubba-baiters who decried "mongrelization" with tobacco-spitting rage; and gentlemen who spoke of states" rights in sonorous tones as a crucial component of regional uplift, as Nixon just had.
Nixon kept on hounding the president on the twinned time bomb of Vietnam and inflation. LBJ had just met with governors and implored them not to make any new bond issues, so as to hold down inflation. The media reported-and the White House furiously denied-that this was because he was going to spend $10 billion more than announced in Vietnam in 1967.
Then, the president announced that he was traveling to six countries in Asia in the middle of October for a "peace offensive" that would culminate in a multilateral meeting with South Vietnam"s Prime Minister Ky and other Asian leaders in Manila.
For Nixon, this development was poised between peril and opportunity. Johnson might be maneuvering to pull a peace rabbit out of his hat on the eve of the congressional elections. On the second day of the president"s sojourn in Asia, as it happened, Vermont"s seventy-four-year-old Republican senator, George Aiken, wondered whether the best way to get out of the Vietnam mess wasn"t just to "declare victory and go home." For years the president"s friend Richard Russell had been advising him much the same. It was one of the tracks Johnson was working on in Manila. So Nixon began laying the groundwork to defuse its effect. In his syndicated column he said, "From diplomats in Tokyo to members of the President"s own party in Washington"-not by d.i.c.k Nixon, mind you-"the question is being posed: Is this a quest for peace or a quest for votes?" Arriving in Greensboro, North Carolina, Nixon wielded the forgotten cudgel of "an Asian conference to solve this Asian war," the chances of which he claimed the president"s trip might sabotage.
"He has put politics ahead of policy so many times that leaders of both parties on Capitol Hill are publicly asking today whether-in going to the Far East-he is even playing politics with world peace," Nixon said in Wilmington. He noted a comment by UN amba.s.sador Arthur Goldberg that the United States was prepared to halt the bombing of North Vietnam "the moment we are a.s.sured privately or otherwise that this step will be answered promptly by a corresponding de-escalation from the other side." "If Mr. Goldberg"s naive proposal-still outstanding-is accepted by Hanoi," Nixon rumbled, "we will have repeated the great blunder in the Truman administration during the Korean War. It was during the period of truce that American units sustained two-thirds of our dead and wounded during the war."
(References to Korea and 1952: always handy for gashing Johnsonian flesh.) Then Nixon flashed the reddest meat of all, McCarthy stuff: Goldberg"s speech "returns American diplomacy to the naive days of Yalta, Tehran, and Potsdam, the days of the secret agreement based solely on the Communist promise."
In Chicago on October 8, Nixon said, "I"m not going to judge the conference at this point because it must be judged by what it produces"-then he judged it: "a grandstand play for votes.... There have been many firsts in the Johnson administration but this is the first time a president may have figured the best way to help his party is to leave the country."
On the ninth the Orioles swept the Dodgers in the World Series in four, and so, according to ancient political lore, now that the boys at the bar wouldn"t have baseball to talk about, campaign season began in earnest. Nixon went to London Mills, Illinois, home of Johnson freshman Gale Schisler, thence to Sheboygan, Wisconsin, the bailiwick of freshman John Abner Race. Then he broke from the campaign trail to spend two weeks preparing with Len Garment for a reargument before the Supreme Court in the case of Time Inc. v. Hill Time Inc. v. Hill-his fall bid for the always-important Franklin vote on Wall Street and Capitol Hill.
Nixon didn"t talk about law and order in Chicago, though he was campaigning for John Hoellen, the Chicago alderman who"d launched his strong bid to defeat Roman Pucinski for Congress by arguing Martin Luther King should have been thrown in jail. Nixon didn"t have to mention the backlash, for an announcement had just come from RNC headquarters that it was official Republican policy. "GOP Will Press Racial Disorders as Election Issue," the New York Times New York Times reported, noting one of the speakers, President Eisenhower, had declaimed against "deliberate riots engendered for no purpose except to hurt the rest of us. Republicans ought to take the strongest possible position and pledge to remove this curse." reported, noting one of the speakers, President Eisenhower, had declaimed against "deliberate riots engendered for no purpose except to hurt the rest of us. Republicans ought to take the strongest possible position and pledge to remove this curse."
Whereas, in 1964, Eisenhower had said that if politicians "began to count on the "white backlash," we will have a big civil war."
Perhaps that war was coming. In Milwaukee, members of the Youth Council of the NAACP, whose office had been firebombed in August, outfitted themselves in military fatigues, christened themselves the Commandoes, and guarded their clubhouse with a shotgun. The Republican state attorney general challenger promptly sent a telegram to the inc.u.mbent: "I am shocked that the NAACP has formed a Hitler-like group that would apparently take the law into their own hands." He didn"t ask for an injunction against the armed Klansman posted outside the Waukesha home of their grand dragon.
Republicans simultaneously coordinated a push on Nixon"s favorite issue. The media was reporting that supermarkets had begun shortening their hours now that housewives" boycotts were cutting into their business. So Republican candidates posed for the cameras pushing grocery carts. The Republican Congressional Campaign Committee printed "Great Society Play Money" (a pair of Texas longhorns over a worried-looking LBJ: "Progress Is a Shrinking Dollar"). Paul Douglas complained in every speech that there wasn"t wasn"t an inflation problem: wages had raced ahead of inflation every year since Kennedy was inaugurated. A frank GOP official explained to a reporter why they were making the nonissue an issue nonetheless: "Barry Goldwater and Ed Brooke"-the Negro Republican running for the Senate in Ma.s.sachusetts-"can speak on inflation with equal conviction." an inflation problem: wages had raced ahead of inflation every year since Kennedy was inaugurated. A frank GOP official explained to a reporter why they were making the nonissue an issue nonetheless: "Barry Goldwater and Ed Brooke"-the Negro Republican running for the Senate in Ma.s.sachusetts-"can speak on inflation with equal conviction."
Claims that Republicans would whip inflation mitigated the embarra.s.sment that they were actually counting on victory by abandoning the mantle of Abraham Lincoln. Charles Percy went on CBS"s Face the Nation Face the Nation and said that while he still supported the "principle" of open housing, he disagreed with Senator Douglas on one thing: including "single-family dwellings" would be "an unpa.s.sable and unenforceable" attack on property rights. "Right now, we aren"t ready to force people to accept those they don"t want as neighbors," he said in tones of rue. Douglas stiffened his spine: "I am for open occupancy. I believe in equal opportunity of every man and woman. I do not intend to switch or to equivocate." and said that while he still supported the "principle" of open housing, he disagreed with Senator Douglas on one thing: including "single-family dwellings" would be "an unpa.s.sable and unenforceable" attack on property rights. "Right now, we aren"t ready to force people to accept those they don"t want as neighbors," he said in tones of rue. Douglas stiffened his spine: "I am for open occupancy. I believe in equal opportunity of every man and woman. I do not intend to switch or to equivocate."
Handbills started appearing in Chicago"s Bungalow Belt: OUR SLOGAN: "Your Home is your castle-Keep it that way by Voting STRAIGHT REPUBLICAN.VOTE STRAIGHT REPUBLICAN IF YOU ARE:AGAINST-violence, riots, and marches in the streets;AGAINST-disregard for law and order;AGAINST-The 3 Rs of today-Riots, Rape & Robbery....Did Mayor Daley make a secret deal with Martin Luther King to stop the marches until after the election?...This is your chance to show where you stand on FORCED HOUSING.... Renters, as well as homeowners, would be effected for the law applies everywhere, including the suburbs. WHERE WOULD YOU GO TO BE SAFE?The only way to stop this program is by you, your family, and neighbors voting Republican on November 8th.
Vote Republican to preserve home and hearth, vote Democratic to surrender them: the understanding was now implicit. "Backlash in Jersey Is Favoring Case," the New York Times New York Times reported of the Garden State"s inc.u.mbent liberal senator, "simply because he is a Republican although he was singled out for praise this week by the National a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Colored People" as a "frontier fighter for civil rights." reported of the Garden State"s inc.u.mbent liberal senator, "simply because he is a Republican although he was singled out for praise this week by the National a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Colored People" as a "frontier fighter for civil rights."
President Johnson spoke to the United Nations on October 7, then ducked into his bubble-top limousine ahead of the antiwar picketers chanting a new slogan: "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" Then he began a tour before the Democratic faithful. "Glad to see you," he cried from his loudspeaker before jumping out impromptu style, just as he used to do on the campaign trail, in 1964, to shake hands with the commuters whose right-of-way his motorcade blocked. He was entering one of his manic phases.
Before thirty thousand screaming fans in Newark, he opened with a favorite ritual: calling the roll of the people"s champions on the dais beside him: "The leader and the dean of your delegation, a fighter for immigration reform-a leader in the field of human rights! My supporter-Pete Rodino!
"The sponsor of the Arts and Humanities Act...that greaaaaat greaaaaat progressive-Frank Thompson! progressive-Frank Thompson!
"The energetic congressman who gave us the Vocational Rehabilitation Act, and my supporter-Dominick Daniels!"
Johnson launched into the topic of his address: the opposing party.
"A great man once said, "In the Democratic Party, even the old seem young.""
And the people before him roared, because they were Democrats.
"But in the Republican Party even the young seem old!"
The president was feeling his oats. He turned his attention to an old adversary, "the New York lawyer," "a consistently poor political prophet," who once said, "This is the last time the press will ever kick me around.
"And who is kicking who or what around?...
"Fooling the people has become the name-of-the-game for a good many Republicans in Congress," Johnson said, craning out his neck. "They have no constructive programs to fight inflation. They have no program to ease racial tensions. They don"t know what to do about crime in the streets, or how to end the war in Vietnam. But they do know that if they can scare people, they may may win a few votes!" win a few votes!"
Five days later he repeated the old Democratic ritual of ethnic obeisance on Columbus Day. The theme was an appeal to his audience"s better angels.
At the banquet of the Italian-American Professional and Businessman"s a.s.sociation in downtown Brooklyn: "It hasn"t been too many years since Italian-Americans have felt the raw pain of discrimination here in America.... Italians, of all people, understand and practice the cardinal American virtue: fairness to all, regardless of race." At the monument to explorer Giovanni da Verrazano on Staten Island: "We have stopped asking people these days..."Where were you born?" Now all we want to know is "What-can-you-do? What-can-you-contribute?" "What-can-you-do? What-can-you-contribute?" In Staten Island: " In Staten Island: "Afraid! Afraid! Afraid! Republicans are afraid of their own shadows, and they are afraid of the shadow of progress. But the only thing most Americans are afraid of are Republicans!" He was having so much fun that he ordered his advance men to go forth and firm up plans for a closing-weekend cross-country tour. Maybe he could stanch his party"s projected losses yet. Republicans are afraid of their own shadows, and they are afraid of the shadow of progress. But the only thing most Americans are afraid of are Republicans!" He was having so much fun that he ordered his advance men to go forth and firm up plans for a closing-weekend cross-country tour. Maybe he could stanch his party"s projected losses yet.
But if Lyndon Johnson"s triumph in 1964 was convincing the nation that he was the moderate and the Republicans were the extremists, now Republicans were winning the battle the same way. Johnson understood this and was rather desperately trying to turn the Republicans back into the scary party. In the event, he overreached. And Richard Nixon, who had been trying to bait the president into personally attacking him for months, was ready to pounce.
In Delaware the president launched into a soaring liberal litany. "In the first 174 years before I became president, eighty-eight Congresses pa.s.sed only six education bills. Since November 1963 Congress has pa.s.sed not six bills as the first eighty-eight Congresses did, but eighteen education bills for the benefit of your children.... In 1960, the last Republican administration appropriated $841 million for health; this year this Congress will spend not $841 million but $8 billion 200 million...ten times as much for health. Twice as much for education in all the history of government.... Food and recreation and income and education and nursing homes and defense and that spells out what the Democratic Party stands for: that spells friend. friend."
Then he wound up with no mean bit of fearmongering himself. A GOP vote on November 8, he said-a line not in his prepared remarks-"could cause the nation to falter and fall back and fail in Vietnam."
At that, Richard Nixon pounced.
Nixon released a statement the next morning from Nixon, Mudge ent.i.tled "Playing Politics with Peace." It was cla.s.sic Nixon: courting sympathy for getting attacked in a fight you yourself had started.
"Yesterday, in Wilmington, Delaware, President Johnson said that a vote for the Republicans could cause the nation to "falter and fall back and fail in Vietnam."
"This is a vicious, unwarranted, and partisan a.s.sault upon the Republican Party that has given President Johnson the support for the war that his own party has denied him.... With this insensitive attack, President Johnson has gravely jeopardized the bipartisan backing he should have when he goes to Manila....
"It has been the President"s party that has harboured those who have counseled appeas.e.m.e.nt of Communist aggression in Vietnam.
"It has been the 25 Democratic senators and 90 Democratic congressmen whose cries for peace at any price have given heart to Hanoi and thus has been directly responsible for encouraging the enemy, prolonging the war, and lengthening the risk of American casualties. The Republican Party has not failed America. The only failure has been President Johnson"s. He is the first president in history who has failed to unite his own party in a time of war."
It was clearer now, the markers Nixon had been laying down since spring. Now that he was the president"s debating partner on Vietnam, his meaning in the upcoming election had been framed in terms most favorable to himself: as protector of American unity and strength in a time of war. "I predict that the President"s shocking attempt during this past week to play domestic politics with international peace," Nixon concluded, "will cost him congressional seats at home and will gravely weaken his voice as the spokesman for all Americans in Manila."
The president, in Pennsylvania to consecrate a soaring Catholic shrine to Polish-Americans before crowds as far as the eye could see, told the story of Tadeusz Kosciuszko"s manumission of his slaves, of the first Polish immigrants arriving in Jamestown and going on a work stoppage when the English colonists disenfranchised them as "foreigners." He concluded, "When I leave tomorrow, I shall say that my purpose will not be to accomplish any miracles, but to tell the people of the countries that I visit that the best way to judge America"s foreign policy is to look at our domestic policy." He had just signed seven conservation bills, and the bills to create a Department of Transportation, a Child Nutrition Act, and a higher minimum wage for the District of Columbia. Then he jetted off to Asia to try to settle up a war, as the New York Times New York Times headlined a big front-page package "In Tight Races Backlash Vote May Mean Victory." It quoted a "high White House source" that this was the number one issue in the campaign. Lee Hamilton, an Indiana freshman Democrat, described what it was like to defend his civil rights record at the local taverns: headlined a big front-page package "In Tight Races Backlash Vote May Mean Victory." It quoted a "high White House source" that this was the number one issue in the campaign. Lee Hamilton, an Indiana freshman Democrat, described what it was like to defend his civil rights record at the local taverns: ""Haven"t we done enough for the Negro?" someone will ask.... That"s where they begin calling me names."
Nixon had two weeks to lay siege to a damaged president who, in Asia unable to defend himself, would just get angrier and angrier as he learned of the attacks.
Johnson visited the six "third country" nations whose sixty thousand troops in Vietnam let Americans call their force there an "alliance." He claimed to be saving Asia from Communism, but several Asian appearances had to be cut short or canceled because of protests. In Canberra, Australia, he was stalked by a drunken mob.
At the Manila summit, Johnson said everyone at the table was an "equal among equals," united in their determination "that aggression must fail." He referred to the protesters: "I have seen their banners that say "We want peace." And I say, "So do I." I have seen their banners that say "I hate war," and I say, "So do I." But I would also like to say to those men and women, those young people carrying those signs, "You brought the banners to the wrong person. Take your banners to Hanoi, because there is where the decision for peace hangs in the balance."" At least that was the part of the meeting Bill Moyers related to the waiting reporters. Delicate discussions had gone on, too, though they could not have gone too well.
Then Johnson disembarked for a stunt, surprising thousands of a.s.sembled U.S. servicemen at Cam Ranh Bay in South Vietnam.
One wonders how much comfort it provided. The soldiers had flown in at the start of their tours on commercial airliners; avoiding the spectacle of fleets and fleets of troop transports was one of the ways the government disguised and sanitized the scale of the American buildup. (The landing pattern no tourist had ever experienced: a short, sharp cut downward to avoid potential VC ground fire.) They emerged into heat like a blast furnace, a smell that most remarked was disgusting, looked out at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, the second busiest airport in the world, and wondered why they had been told at boot camp that this war was just a skirmish. They got on buses covered in wire mesh to protect them from the debris thrown by the people they were supposed to be saving. The first briefing at the base: "Be alert from this moment, and don"t trust n.o.body with slanted eyes."
Support personnel outnumbered combat troops by five or ten to one, though "you could be in the most protected s.p.a.ce...and still know that your safety was provisional," Vietnam correspondent Michael Herr wrote; "you heard so many of those stories it was a wonder anyone was left alive to die in firefights and mortar rocket attacks." The hazards reserved for infantry made nightmares seem tame: humping the boonies in swamp water up to the waist on search-and-destroy missions or through elephant gra.s.s that cut like razors; catching malaria; catching diseases the army surgeon general barely had names for yet (melioidosis, which killed a fourth of its victims in days, but could lie dormant for six years, and was caught from the mud kicked up by helicopter blades). The soldiers" job was to lure the enemy, which they did once out of every twenty-one or so patrols; "then the twenty-first time, zap, zap, zap, you get hit-and Victory Charlie fades into the jungles before you can close with him." Units competed to see who could chalk up the biggest "box scores"; a lucky soldier might notch enough "confirmed kills" for a bonus five days of R&R. ("What he seeks and what he does in his five days is as various as American youth itself," Time Time wrote of the typical R&R trip to Bangkok or Singapore-though wrote of the typical R&R trip to Bangkok or Singapore-though Time Time didn"t mention the GI folklore about prost.i.tutes with razor blades hidden in their pudenda or children with explosives strapped to their stomachs.) didn"t mention the GI folklore about prost.i.tutes with razor blades hidden in their pudenda or children with explosives strapped to their stomachs.) Back at base, they lived side by side with Vietnamese who lived off scavenged waste in dwellings constructed from flattened beer cans and C-ration tins, the same stuff they also used to make into b.o.o.by traps, packing them with explosives from the 5 percent of U.S. ordnance that turned out to be duds. Then it was back to the inferno, perhaps to watch a buddy catch a "bouncing betty," a particularly heinous sort of pressure-release mine that popped into the air and exploded at waist level, or to see a buddy wasted by a sniper who emerged from an underground hole, then disappeared (a seventy-five-mile tunnel system would be discovered directly beneath Twenty-fifth Infantry Division headquarters).
This was the reality Richard Nixon was playing political games with. This was the reality that Lyndon Johnson was descending upon for an election-season photo op.
"There are some who may disagree with what we are doing here, but that is not the way most of us feel and act when freedom and the nation"s security are in danger," their president told the soldiers. "We know you are going to get the job done. And soon, when peace can come to the world, we will receive you back in your homeland with open arms, with great pride, and with great thanks."
He circulated through the throng, backslapping, telling the boys to "nail the c.o.o.nskin to the wall." Then he flew home to an electorate itching to nail liberal hides to the wall. As for Nixon, all those incendiary words he"d been laying down since January, so carefully chosen to make the president explode-now he lit the fuse.
In late October the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee sent out a tape to GOP House candidates to use in their campaigning from a speech LBJ gave to a farm audience in Iowa in June in which he said folks "ought to vote Republican." Edited out were the words of context: that you ought to vote Republican if you thought "wages were getting too high." For once, it appeared the Republican Party was doing Richard Nixon"s dirty work instead of the other way around. Or maybe not. The chair of the RCCC, Representative Bob Wilson of San Diego, was a Nixon operative.
Nixon returned to his circuit of temporarily Democratic congressional districts: Kalamazoo on October 25 (Johnson"s 1967 tax increase "will trigger a recession that will wipe out all economic gains of the past ten years"); Jerry Ford"s Grand Rapids (Nixon said the Asia trip was the president"s attempt "to cushion the fall of Election Day"); then Oregon (where he finessed the awkward fact that he was endorsing a dove for Senate, Mark Hatfield, by noting that he had imposed a "moratorium" on mentioning Vietnam while the president was in Asia). Then he flew to Spokane in a chartered jet. You could fly there next to him, for a $150 donation.
He said that if the war was still ongoing in 1968, it would represent a "great tragedy for the United States." That a candidate might "yield to temptation" and propose "hasty solutions not serving peace." In Boise he noted that China had just announced the launching of a missile that could carry a nuclear warhead and said that made it all the more imperative for LBJ to bring "diplomatic, economic, and military" pressure to end the war by 1968," or we would be "running an immense risk of World War III." Maybe, just maybe, he concluded, Johnson"s time in the Far East would help him better understand the war and persuade more Democrats to support it. Then he repaired to the Boise Hotel, where he had time to reflect on how dangerous a game he was playing. What if LBJ did did pull off something spectacular in Manila? pull off something spectacular in Manila?