Nixonland. Part 4

The Wednesday before the election Nixon made his endors.e.m.e.nt on national TV. Six days later, Goldwater went down in the predicted landslide. And, his enemies thanked G.o.d, Richard Nixon had gone down right there with him.

Let his enemies think it. Always give something to the mark. He He was the one with the chits it would take to get nominated in 1968. All the other Republican heavies had refused to campaign for Goldwater altogether. "There is a strong conservative wing of the Republican Party," Nixon told the was the one with the chits it would take to get nominated in 1968. All the other Republican heavies had refused to campaign for Goldwater altogether. "There is a strong conservative wing of the Republican Party," Nixon told the New York Times New York Times in a page-one interview. "It deserves a major voice in party councils, and the liberal wing deserves a party voice, but neither can dominate or dictate. The center must lead." in a page-one interview. "It deserves a major voice in party councils, and the liberal wing deserves a party voice, but neither can dominate or dictate. The center must lead."

Every side owed him something. Because all the other prominent Republicans had burned their bridges with conservatives.

Then he was off for another stature-enhancing trip to Asia. Then he played peacemaker at a contentious annual RNC meeting in January. Barry Goldwater introduced him as the man "who worked harder than any one person for the ticket....

"d.i.c.k, I will never forget it! I know that you did it in the interest of the Republican Party and not for any selfish reasons, but if there ever comes a time I can turn those into selfish reasons, I am going to do all I can to see that it comes about."

Richard Nixon smiled sanctimoniously and said there'd be no selfishness to serve-proclaiming to a standing ovation that he was here and now calling for a moratorium on presidential politicking until after the 1966 midterm elections, promising to lead by example.

Tricky d.i.c.k.

The media was so starved for someone, anyone, to anoint as a Republican heir apparent that Newsweek Newsweek put a backbench liberal congressman named John Lindsay on its cover as "the most exciting and important politician operating in America today" and called his entrance into the 1965 New York mayoral race "the first chapter in the making of the President, 1972." Nixon was still the b.u.t.t of half the political jokes cracked in the United States. His base of presidential politicking was his law office at 20 Broad Street, around the corner from the New York Stock Exchange and all the white-shoe law firms that had rejected him in 1937. Now he was one of them-sort of. put a backbench liberal congressman named John Lindsay on its cover as "the most exciting and important politician operating in America today" and called his entrance into the 1965 New York mayoral race "the first chapter in the making of the President, 1972." Nixon was still the b.u.t.t of half the political jokes cracked in the United States. His base of presidential politicking was his law office at 20 Broad Street, around the corner from the New York Stock Exchange and all the white-shoe law firms that had rejected him in 1937. Now he was one of them-sort of.

Nixon's ambiguous stature was sanctified in an April New York Times Magazine New York Times Magazine profile: "Over Nominated, Under-Elected, Still a Promising Candidate." It was predictable now, this coronation as a "new Nixon" after a loss, the systole and diastole of Nixon's political heartbeat: "He is decidedly more relaxed and mellow than he appeared in his political campaign." It was a favorite man-bites-dog feature hook in 1965: can you believe people are taking d.i.c.k Nixon seriously again? profile: "Over Nominated, Under-Elected, Still a Promising Candidate." It was predictable now, this coronation as a "new Nixon" after a loss, the systole and diastole of Nixon's political heartbeat: "He is decidedly more relaxed and mellow than he appeared in his political campaign." It was a favorite man-bites-dog feature hook in 1965: can you believe people are taking d.i.c.k Nixon seriously again?

This latest new Nixon was a man-about-town, the Times Times related-feted at a testimonial dinner at the Metropolitan Club's sumptuous edifice on Sixtieth Street, member of fancy country clubs in Westchester and Long Island, serving on the boards of old-line corporations and top-line charitable foundations (his favorite was the Boys Clubs of America, which he chaired). His daughter came out at a debutante ball. His new dog was a gray French poodle. His companions were the likes of William S. Paley of CBS; Walter Thayer, publisher of the related-feted at a testimonial dinner at the Metropolitan Club's sumptuous edifice on Sixtieth Street, member of fancy country clubs in Westchester and Long Island, serving on the boards of old-line corporations and top-line charitable foundations (his favorite was the Boys Clubs of America, which he chaired). His daughter came out at a debutante ball. His new dog was a gray French poodle. His companions were the likes of William S. Paley of CBS; Walter Thayer, publisher of the Herald Tribune; Herald Tribune; Eisenhower budget director Maurice Stans and Warner-Lambert's Elmer Bobst and Pepsi's Donald Kendall, and Robert Abpla.n.a.lp, an entrepreneur who'd made millions in aerosol spray cans, and Bebe Rebozo, a taciturn Cuban-American real estate tyc.o.o.n. Nixon dined out at the Recess Club at 60 Broad ("where he enjoys the panorama from the top floor") and the India House ("where he enjoys looking at models of old sailing s.h.i.+ps"), made the scene at Toots Shor's, hit the Metropolitan Opera and all the hottest Broadway shows ("Naturally, they have not missed Eisenhower budget director Maurice Stans and Warner-Lambert's Elmer Bobst and Pepsi's Donald Kendall, and Robert Abpla.n.a.lp, an entrepreneur who'd made millions in aerosol spray cans, and Bebe Rebozo, a taciturn Cuban-American real estate tyc.o.o.n. Nixon dined out at the Recess Club at 60 Broad ("where he enjoys the panorama from the top floor") and the India House ("where he enjoys looking at models of old sailing s.h.i.+ps"), made the scene at Toots Shor's, hit the Metropolitan Opera and all the hottest Broadway shows ("Naturally, they have not missed h.e.l.lo, Dolly! h.e.l.lo, Dolly!"), hosted dinner parties at "21," Le Pavillon, the Colony, Delmonico's. (It must all have been a trial. "I can eat in ten minutes," he boasted in 1968. "Why waste an hour or two eating?") The Times Times also dropped subtly embarra.s.sing details. He "sometimes plays on the champions.h.i.+p course at Baltusrol": because his partners were members (though he was earning more money than he ever had in his life, much more, he certainly was not also dropped subtly embarra.s.sing details. He "sometimes plays on the champions.h.i.+p course at Baltusrol": because his partners were members (though he was earning more money than he ever had in his life, much more, he certainly was not one of them one of them). Without exactly saying so, the Times Times enumerated an arriviste's lapses in taste: license plates reading enumerated an arriviste's lapses in taste: license plates reading NXN NXN, the spinet piano upon which, "without much coaxing," he "hams it up...with such songs as the staples on 'Sing Along with Mitch'" (the schmaltzy TV show in which a choir sang popular ditties while a bouncing ball lined out the lyrics at the bottom of the screen), the twelve-room Fifth Avenue town house he bought adjacent to Nelson Rockefeller's-a little too tawdry, climbing like that.

Everything was political. His job itself had roots in a chit: Mudge, Stern, Baldwin, and Todd was the first firm to take Don Kendall up on his offer to throw Pepsi's international legal work to whichever firm offered Richard Nixon a job (that repaid Nixon for having Nikita Khrushchev drink Pepsi during the 1959 Kitchen Debate visit). When a columnist wrote that Nixon spent only one day a week at the law office and the rest scheming politics, Nixon wrote each of his clients individually to say it wasn't true. In fact it was only half-true. His office-a museum of political kitsch: silver plates engraved with testimonials, commemorative gavels, keys to cities, a long walnut cabinet filled with signed photographs of heads of state in the line of sight of visitors sitting across from Nixon at the polished walnut desk-was where he did his politics. The wheelhouse of his political machine.

He brought with him his longtime secretary, Rose Mary Woods, his bureaucratic second skin (they joked she was the "fifth Nixon": Pat, d.i.c.k, Tricia, Julie, just like the Beatles), a hardscrabble, working-cla.s.s Chicago Irish girl who some said spotted the young senator as her own chance to make it to the White House. Her Rolodex big as a basketball, she typed up ingratiating notes to VIPs for "d.i.c.k"'s signature at every possible opportunity: J. Edgar Hoover, newspaper publisher Walter Annenberg, the third-world potentate Nixon had met on some 1955 Latin American tour who had suddenly taken sick.

Life, in a sense, was sweet. He was rich now, for the first time in his life. He had sent his firm's business through the roof. He traveled on a lifetime diplomatic pa.s.sport, issued to him as the former vice president, met at every stop by an emba.s.sy control officer. He could have retired placidly. But then he wouldn't be who he was.

Clients like the j.a.panese trading conglomerate Mitsui provided occasions for handy trips to Asia. He stopped by Saigon in September 1965, laying down political markers in press conferences: "For the United States to negotiate a peace agreement now which would in any way reward the Communists for their aggression would not only lead to the loss of Asia but would greatly increase the risk of World War III." A trip to Finland for some industrial clients provided occasion for an "impulsive" twenty-hour train ride to Moscow.

His domestic politics now was an exquisitely couched centrism: that Republicans accept Great Society reforms, while never "carrying them to the point of intolerable federal power and expenditure." This was the GOP soup du jour, the kind of thing his new, Franklin allies at the firm appreciated. Avowals like that helped Len Garment, a fast-talking and glad-handing Jewish former jazz musician, build a New York political network. A PR flack named Bill Safire contributed a ten-page letter on how to make a two-time loser without any fixed geographical base and a lifetime of enemies fit for an unstoppable comeback. The trick, Safire said, was cleaning up his image. Which may have been how Nixon ended up in the New York Times Magazine New York Times Magazine as such an exemplary swell. as such an exemplary swell.

Fas.h.i.+onable opinions about such things as civil liberties and the Pill and long hair were not uncommon among the young partners at a firm like Nixon, Mudge. So was familiarity with the latest discotheques and Tom Wolfe's kandy-kolored evocations of fas.h.i.+on's latest "It" girl in the Herald Tribune. Herald Tribune. It was what a certain kind of Franklin, circa 1965, was digging. The scene was tough for d.i.c.k to make. It didn't match an Orthogonian's instincts. But then, at times an Orthogonian's instincts still came in handy-as his hip new friends soon learned to their chagrin, when he next embraced the stench in the opening move of his 1968 presidential campaign. It was what a certain kind of Franklin, circa 1965, was digging. The scene was tough for d.i.c.k to make. It didn't match an Orthogonian's instincts. But then, at times an Orthogonian's instincts still came in handy-as his hip new friends soon learned to their chagrin, when he next embraced the stench in the opening move of his 1968 presidential campaign.

A speaker at an April teach-in at Rutgers University, a thirty-five-year-old history professor named Eugene Genovese, made news, proclaiming, "I am a Marxist and a socialist. Therefore, I do not fear or reject the impending Vietcong victory in Vietnam. I welcome it." American Legion types called for his hide. The board of trustees refused to fire a tenured professor for remarks made outside the cla.s.sroom. The Democratic governor, Richard Hughes, a Vietnam hawk but a civil libertarian, refused to intervene. His opponent, State Senator Wayne Dumont, was so far from being a threat that advisers were telling him to stop spending money. Then the Republican sniffed out a Nixonian opportunity. Dumont made the professor the focus of his campaign-and recruited the master to help. On October 24, Nixon joined Dumont in Morristown and made as if he were still going to school on George Smathers's talk of thespians and s.e.xagenarians.

"I do not raise the question of Professor Genovese's right to be for segregation or integration, for free love or celibacy, for Communism or anarchy-in peacetime. But the United States is at war."

(Anarchistic, multiracial Communistic orgies, in wartime, no less.) "If anyone had welcomed a n.a.z.i victory during World War II, there would have been no question about what to do. Leaders.h.i.+p requires that the governor step in and put the security of the nation above the security of the individual."

The uncouth relapse into Red-baiting set the teeth of Nixon's new pals at the Recess Club on edge-a huge setback in their work reforming his "old Nixon" image. It didn't even work. Hughes won, most New Jerseyans telling pollsters they hadn't heard of Gene Genovese. William Safire got to work on damage control, drafting a speech on academic freedom for the honorary degree Nixon had been invited to receive from the University of Rochester.

Nixon wrote a long and legalistic letter to the New York Times New York Times that he was actually arguing for the that he was actually arguing for the preservation preservation of academic freedom, "by defending the system of government which guarantees freedom of speech to individuals." And Len Garment realized something fundamental: the Franklins thought they had reformed him once and for all. But these artful dodgings between Nixons old and new were fundamental to who Nixon was-and Nixon saw this occasion to shock the respectable by sounding like a McCarthyite in New Jersey as an of academic freedom, "by defending the system of government which guarantees freedom of speech to individuals." And Len Garment realized something fundamental: the Franklins thought they had reformed him once and for all. But these artful dodgings between Nixons old and new were fundamental to who Nixon was-and Nixon saw this occasion to shock the respectable by sounding like a McCarthyite in New Jersey as an opportunity. opportunity.

"So much for their f.u.c.king sophistication!" Nixon said one day in delight at the shocked reaction of the gentlemen of the press over something or another. "Oh, I know you and the rest of the intellectuals won't like it-the men back at the firm won't like it either-but somebody had to take them on."

The "them" was quintessentially "old Nixon." In a career full of ideological inconsistencies, it may have been his most consistent position: that calls for intellectual freedom were how the holier-than-thou covered up a will to subversion. He had given a prizewinning schoolboy speech in 1929 saying exactly the same thing: "Should the morals of this nation be offended and polluted in the name of freedom of the press? In the words of Lincoln, the individual can have no rights against the best interests of society." His maiden address in the House of Representatives argued that "the rights of free speech and free press do not carry with them the right to advocate the destruction of the very government which protects the freedom of an individual to express his views." On this the deepest instincts of his psyche coincided with the soundest principles of political demagoguery: the safe political bet was in ultimately siding with those who distrusted the intellectuals, Orthogonians over Franklins-them. The Genovese issue may not have helped Dumont. It helped Nixon. It a.s.sured Republican Orthogonians that despite what they had heard, he still was one of The Genovese issue may not have helped Dumont. It helped Nixon. It a.s.sured Republican Orthogonians that despite what they had heard, he still was one of us. us. In the December Gallup poll of Republicans, Nixon was the presidential preference of 34 percent, as much as the next three names combined. In the December Gallup poll of Republicans, Nixon was the presidential preference of 34 percent, as much as the next three names combined.

Nixon had noted the teach-ins, the protests, the marches-and the gra.s.sroots revulsion these things were beginning to engender. Among the pundits, in all the right magazines, on TV, "youth" were being held up as some mystic fount of virtue, avatars of the soaring sixties, a uniquely idealistic generation midwifed by the martyr JFK. It was enough to make an Orthogonian cringe. The Times Magazine Times Magazine profile listed as Nixon's most burdensome liability the fact that no Republican could win the presidency without attracting Democrats, who made up the majority of registered voters. The idea of Richard Nixon luring Democratic voters frankly seemed unimaginable. But there were new currents to surf in the soaring sixties, based in the same kind of old resentments, new kinds of common people being put upon by new kinds of insolent and condescending Franklins-the new kind of liberal who seemed to be saying that Negroes who burned down their neighborhoods were somehow as innocent as they once considered Alger Hiss, and that college kids who spat on the flag were oh-so-much more with-it than profile listed as Nixon's most burdensome liability the fact that no Republican could win the presidency without attracting Democrats, who made up the majority of registered voters. The idea of Richard Nixon luring Democratic voters frankly seemed unimaginable. But there were new currents to surf in the soaring sixties, based in the same kind of old resentments, new kinds of common people being put upon by new kinds of insolent and condescending Franklins-the new kind of liberal who seemed to be saying that Negroes who burned down their neighborhoods were somehow as innocent as they once considered Alger Hiss, and that college kids who spat on the flag were oh-so-much more with-it than you. you.

Issues to expand the circle of Orthogonians. Even, perhaps, into the Democratic coalition itself.

CHAPTER FOUR.

Ronald Reagan.

NINETEEN SIXTY-SIX, AND W WATTS WAS THE NATION'S PREOCCUPATION. "Now and then the police cars mount the sidewalk and drive through the ruins, threading through alleyways and behind stores, their searchings darting here and there for hiding youths," the "Now and then the police cars mount the sidewalk and drive through the ruins, threading through alleyways and behind stores, their searchings darting here and there for hiding youths," the Was.h.i.+ngton Post Was.h.i.+ngton Post reported, quoting one of those youths: "They are looking at the same old places. What they don't know is that when it comes it ain't gonna be like last time." The reported, quoting one of those youths: "They are looking at the same old places. What they don't know is that when it comes it ain't gonna be like last time." The Times Times also quoted an L.A. cop: "There are a lot more guns out there. They looted every p.a.w.nshop and sports shop in the area last summer." also quoted an L.A. cop: "There are a lot more guns out there. They looted every p.a.w.nshop and sports shop in the area last summer."

The cop repeated himself: "There are a lot more guns out there."

The meaning of Watts was fiercely debated. Militant blacks spoke of an "insurgency": "I threw the firebomb right in that front window," a youngster fondly reminisced to a CBS correspondent. "I call it getting even." A group of Berkeley radicals, the Vietnam Day Committee, appropriated Watts for their manifesto: "The Los Angeles riots in the summer of 1965 are a.n.a.logous to the peasant struggle in Vietnam." Liberal technocrats reasoned, "If the Los Angeles rioting reveals the underlying weaknesses of the current federal approach to segregation, poverty, and housing, and if it stimulates some fresh thinking"-this was a Columbia professor-"it may compensate at least in part for the terrible havoc it wreaked." Fortune Fortune magazine, speaking for enlightened business opinion, counseled understanding, quoting Langston Hughes: magazine, speaking for enlightened business opinion, counseled understanding, quoting Langston Hughes: Negroes,Sweet and docile,Meek, humble, and kind:Beware the dayThey change their mind!

But the debate was dominated by the conservatives. Their spokesman was Chief William Parker, who in press conferences, like a candidate running for office, laid out the party line: it was the civil rights movement's fault. They They were the ones who preached, "You don't have to obey the law if you think it's unjust." were the ones who preached, "You don't have to obey the law if you think it's unjust." They They were the ones who forced guilt-ridden pa.s.sage of civil rights laws that "sanctified their acts." Chief Parker had provided this account of the riot's origins to Governor Brown's blue-ribbon panel studying Watts: "Someone threw a rock, and like monkeys in a zoo, they all started throwing rocks." He maintained that unless decent folks did something drastic, the monkeys would be visited even unto their own doorsteps-and for saying it was drowned in forty thousand congratulatory messages a month. were the ones who forced guilt-ridden pa.s.sage of civil rights laws that "sanctified their acts." Chief Parker had provided this account of the riot's origins to Governor Brown's blue-ribbon panel studying Watts: "Someone threw a rock, and like monkeys in a zoo, they all started throwing rocks." He maintained that unless decent folks did something drastic, the monkeys would be visited even unto their own doorsteps-and for saying it was drowned in forty thousand congratulatory messages a month.

In March there almost was another riot, sparked by a turf war between some Mexican and black kids. Over a hundred helmeted officers promptly flooded the scene and successfully sealed off the perimeter, and what the media histrionically dubbed Watts II was over before it began, but not before the ripples from this schoolyard brawl spread to Sacramento and Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.: state legislators said Governor Pat Brown's $61.5 million program responding to the first riots was now dead, and a planned White House conference on civil rights was indefinitely postponed. The Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times columnist Paul Coates described the panicked calls he was getting from readers: "My wife just called. Said she heard five was dead. And they're spreading out all over town. This time I'm gonna get me a gun." columnist Paul Coates described the panicked calls he was getting from readers: "My wife just called. Said she heard five was dead. And they're spreading out all over town. This time I'm gonna get me a gun."

At his announcement in January of his candidacy for California governor, Ronald Reagan had blamed the original Watts riot on the "philosophy that in any situation the public should turn to government for the answer." Now he denounced Governor Brown. And the New York Times New York Times-which had last taken note of the California governor's race in mid-February, commenting on how little attention the actor Ronald Reagan had been able to garner since "his dramatic and carefully rehea.r.s.ed television entry into the race" (the paper had sent its Hollywood correspondent to cover it, and he had dwelled on the living-room set with the crackling fire, and props such as the bottle Reagan waved while warning how "social tinkering had caused the layoff of 200 workers in ketchup factories")-now reported, "A withering crossfire of political accusations emerged today after Tuesday's violent outbreak." Reagan had charged that Brown had left the state despite warnings of trouble; Brown harrumphed that if he reacted to every tip he got about impending violence in Watts, he couldn't do anything else.

Brown didn't feel much need to defend himself. Surely the state would remember his political debut in the 1950s as a law-and-order district attorney, and that he was the governor who had seen to the execution of the Red Light Bandit, Caryl Chessman, after his Republican predecessors had dithered in the face of mercy pleas from everyone from Eleanor Roosevelt to Billy Graham.

Reagan's Republican primary opponent, former San Francisco mayor George Christopher, let the two fight it out among themselves. He was the primary front-runner-easily "matching oratorical skill" with Reagan, the New York Times New York Times thought, in an article enumerating Reagan's manifold defects: his toxic ties to the far right and the Goldwater campaign; the bright, young party moderates who viewed the prospect of a Governor Reagan "with something approaching horror"; his rookie mistakes. "You know, a tree is a tree, how many more do you need to look at?" he had blundered in a speech on conservation. It was at that point that the thought, in an article enumerating Reagan's manifold defects: his toxic ties to the far right and the Goldwater campaign; the bright, young party moderates who viewed the prospect of a Governor Reagan "with something approaching horror"; his rookie mistakes. "You know, a tree is a tree, how many more do you need to look at?" he had blundered in a speech on conservation. It was at that point that the San Francisco Chronicle San Francisco Chronicle reported that his campaign would soon "bottom out." George Christopher joked that if Brown knew what was good for him, he'd start working for Reagan. reported that his campaign would soon "bottom out." George Christopher joked that if Brown knew what was good for him, he'd start working for Reagan.

More or less, Brown was doing exactly that. "'Bring him on' is our motto," his press secretary had scrawled on the bottom of the January 1965 gossip item that Reagan was going to run. A young a.s.sistant was sent out to scout Reagan during one of his exploratory appearances and had not been impressed: "He will fall apart when he gets attacked from the floor and is asked leading questions, hounded, and the like....

"His attacks on LBJ and Governor Brown won't make it with those who don't think the President is a dictator and those who realize the necessity of close state and federal cooperation....

"The real issue always boils down to what Reagan would do as governor, and given the present situation and our close working relations.h.i.+p with Was.h.i.+ngton, he could do nothing."

George Christopher, a popular big-city mayor, would be hard to beat. Reagan, the know-nothing actor attacking popular government programs, would be a cinch. Thus Brown's strategy for the primary season: puff Reagan.

Pat was not the most inspiring of politicians: a "tower of Jell-O," according to the Democrats' legislative boss, Jesse Unruh. It was only what he had accomplished that was inspiring. His first legislative session, in 1959, was the most productive in California history: bold new agencies for economic development and consumer protection; top-to-bottom bureaucratic reorganization; increased social security and welfare benefits; new funding for hospitals, mental health clinics, and drug treatment; a ban on racial discrimination in hiring; ma.s.sive new funding for schools; miles upon miles of highways, rail lines, tunnels, and bridges. The next year, he successfully appropriated $1.75 billion to deliver 100 million gallons of water to Southern California by 1972. He had built 1,000 of the state's 1,650 miles of freeway; ordered up the greatest college construction boom in human history-room enough for 25 percent of high school grads to attend the greatest public university system in the world, tuition-free; had added two hundred thousand jobs. And if he hadn't done it with any particular stylishness-well, what of it? Under his touch, the biggest state in the union had blossomed into a kind of bourgeois utopia. Let the actor have at him: the middle cla.s.s knew better than to fall for that. He had built the ladder upon which they had climbed.

Reagan punditry fixated on whether his appearances in Knute Rockne, All American Knute Rockne, All American and and Bedtime for Bonzo Bedtime for Bonzo on the late show violated equal-time provisions. An editorial cartoon depicted Goldwater directing him from a prompter's box ("Perfect, Ronald...enter stage right"). Picket signs materialized reading on the late show violated equal-time provisions. An editorial cartoon depicted Goldwater directing him from a prompter's box ("Perfect, Ronald...enter stage right"). Picket signs materialized reading ELIZABETH TAYLOR FOR SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. ELIZABETH TAYLOR FOR SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. A A Was.h.i.+ngton Star Was.h.i.+ngton Star columnist recorded "the air of furtive jubilation down at La.s.sie for Governor headquarters." columnist recorded "the air of furtive jubilation down at La.s.sie for Governor headquarters." Esquire Esquire graciously allowed that the "Republican Party isn't bankrupt, or isn't that bankrupt that it has to turn to Liberace for leaders.h.i.+p." The graciously allowed that the "Republican Party isn't bankrupt, or isn't that bankrupt that it has to turn to Liberace for leaders.h.i.+p." The Christian Century, Christian Century, unchristianly, called him Borax Boy, after the sponsor of his last TV show. unchristianly, called him Borax Boy, after the sponsor of his last TV show.

Bring him on indeed.

The pundits little noted the Reagan-friendly culture wars roiling beneath the surface of the bourgeois utopia. Only recently, the drug lysergic acid diethylamide had been rhapsodized as a therapeutic miracle; its acolytes included Cary Grant. Now it brought headlines like "Girl, 5, Eats LSD and Goes Wild" and "Thrill Drug Warps Mind, Kills." Now Time Time reported in March that it had reached "the dormitories of expensive prep schools" and "has grown into an alarming problem at UCLA and on the UC campus at Berkeley." Senator Robert F. Kennedy changed a hearing scheduled on mental r.e.t.a.r.dation into an inquiry into LSD instead-one of three going on concurrently. reported in March that it had reached "the dormitories of expensive prep schools" and "has grown into an alarming problem at UCLA and on the UC campus at Berkeley." Senator Robert F. Kennedy changed a hearing scheduled on mental r.e.t.a.r.dation into an inquiry into LSD instead-one of three going on concurrently.

A group called the California League Enlisting Action Now (CLEAN) pushed an initiative forbidding judges from dismissing any p.o.r.nography case. Their ads called p.o.r.nographers masters of "Pavlov's conditioned response," responsible for an epidemic of "rape, perversion, and venereal disease." Other activists went to war on a textbook-Negro historian John Hope Franklin's Land of the Free, Land of the Free, which, their pamphlets insisted, "destroys pride in America's past, develops a guilt complex, mocks American justice, indoctrinates toward Communism, is hostile to religious concepts, overemphasizes Negro partic.i.p.ation in American history, projects negative thought models, criticizes business and free enterprise, plays politics, foments cla.s.s hatred, slants and distorts facts," and "promotes propaganda and poppyc.o.c.k." The L.A. County Board of Supervisors voted "to uphold high moral standards" by censoring an exhibition by an artist named Ed Keinholz, who said he displayed his dioramas of consumer products and mannequins in s.e.xual congress and babies without heads to comment on America's "sick society." which, their pamphlets insisted, "destroys pride in America's past, develops a guilt complex, mocks American justice, indoctrinates toward Communism, is hostile to religious concepts, overemphasizes Negro partic.i.p.ation in American history, projects negative thought models, criticizes business and free enterprise, plays politics, foments cla.s.s hatred, slants and distorts facts," and "promotes propaganda and poppyc.o.c.k." The L.A. County Board of Supervisors voted "to uphold high moral standards" by censoring an exhibition by an artist named Ed Keinholz, who said he displayed his dioramas of consumer products and mannequins in s.e.xual congress and babies without heads to comment on America's "sick society."

In the Golden State, it was a season of moral panic; and as so often, California led a national trend. The head of the nation's leading a.s.sociation of private schools released a statement worrying that "students have adopted 'terrifying' att.i.tudes toward s.e.x...for lack of a moral code." But others looked upon the same developments and judged them symptoms of cultural health. A psychiatry professor, for instance, spoke that same March at the Arizona Medical a.s.sociation in praise of the "beatniks" who were "urging the revision of some of our medieval customs," especially s.e.xual ones. A writer in the Nation Nation a.s.serted that students who dropped out of school to "find themselves" were "probably in many ways, a more promising moral resource than those who stay in." a.s.serted that students who dropped out of school to "find themselves" were "probably in many ways, a more promising moral resource than those who stay in."

More and more Americans were forthrightly a.s.serting visions of what a truly moral society would look like. Unfortunately, their visions were irreconcilable.

At their fringes, irreconcilable moralities begat violence.

In San Diego, a terrorist tossed a burning oil rag through the window of a San Diego civil rights group. In Pacific Palisades-where Ronald Reagan lived-fifty earnest kids marched back and forth in front of the high school carrying signs reading THERE IS NO SCIENTIFIC PROOF THAT LONG HAIR INHIBITS LEARNING, THERE IS NO SCIENTIFIC PROOF THAT LONG HAIR INHIBITS LEARNING, and the dean of boys dispatched the football team to break up the demonstration with what the and the dean of boys dispatched the football team to break up the demonstration with what the Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times described as "gridiron tactics." In Detroit a teenager shot his rabbi dead as one thousand congregants looked on, crying, "This congregation is a travesty and an abomination. It has made a mockery with its phoniness and hypocrisy." described as "gridiron tactics." In Detroit a teenager shot his rabbi dead as one thousand congregants looked on, crying, "This congregation is a travesty and an abomination. It has made a mockery with its phoniness and hypocrisy."

A new antiwar group surfaced, the W.E.B. Du Bois Club. Lyndon Johnson's attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach, ruled it a front for the Communist Party. Richard Nixon called it a "totalitarian organization" that chose its name (which one p.r.o.nounced "du-BOYS Club") "not unaware of the confusion they are causing among our supporters and among many other good citizens"-who might mistake it for the venerable service organization whose board he chaired: the Boys Club. In San Francisco, a right-wing terrorist burned down the Du Bois headquarters with a Molotov c.o.c.ktail. In Brooklyn, members were beaten by a mob.

Time ran a stark red sentence on its April 8 cover: "Is G.o.d Dead?" (The answer, it decided, was no, which didn't keep an angry letter-writer from fuming, " ran a stark red sentence on its April 8 cover: "Is G.o.d Dead?" (The answer, it decided, was no, which didn't keep an angry letter-writer from fuming, "Time's story is biased, pro-atheist and pro-Communist, shocking and entirely un-American.") An Oklahoma minister drummed up a movement to censure a "Southern Baptist preacher in a high government position"-White House press secretary Bill Moyers-for conduct that "brings dishonor to the work and name of our Lord Jesus Christ." Moyers's sin was getting photographed in the papers dancing the Watusi at the White House.

Then there were campuses like Berkeley-where, late in 1964, a police car rolled onto campus to dismantle a recruitment table for Mississippi voter registration that fell afoul of campus rules about where political advocacy was permitted. The squad car was promptly trapped on the main campus plaza by hundreds of students, who started climbing up on its roof and delivering inspiring speeches about the right to free speech, the necessity of defying illegitimate authority, the soul-crus.h.i.+ng blindness of the bureaucrats. Then thousands occupied the administration building. For them the "Free Speech Movement" was a moment of moral transcendence. To the man on the street-especially the man on the street never afforded the privilege of a college education-it was petulant brattishness. Then came the "filthy speech movement." That That started when a couple of angry kids sat on the Student Union steps with curses scrawled on placards. A few score kids rallied to their support. But by 1966, these few score kids had become Middle America's synecdoche for "Berkeley." "All the most vociferous of them could produce was four-letter words," Illinois's Republican Senate candidate, Charles Percy, told eighteen hundred students at the University of Illinois in a speech on the New Left's "general uncleanliness." The students gave him a standing ovation. started when a couple of angry kids sat on the Student Union steps with curses scrawled on placards. A few score kids rallied to their support. But by 1966, these few score kids had become Middle America's synecdoche for "Berkeley." "All the most vociferous of them could produce was four-letter words," Illinois's Republican Senate candidate, Charles Percy, told eighteen hundred students at the University of Illinois in a speech on the New Left's "general uncleanliness." The students gave him a standing ovation.

The outrages, all of them, felt linked: the filth, the crime, "the kids," the Communists, the imprecations against revealed religion. It all had something to do with "liberalism." Pat Brown was a "liberal." And it arrived that liberalism's enemy, Ronald Reagan, wasn't doing too poorly at all. He was providing a political outlet for all the outrages-outrages that, until he came along, hadn't seemed like political issues at all.

The a.s.sociated Press's Bill Boyarsky dropped in on Reagan's walk through the blue-collar aeros.p.a.ce suburb of Norwalk, a formless sprawl so typical, "political reporters considered the reaction of the crowds almost as sound a test of public opinion in the area as a scientific poll." The reaction was adulation. At the Lakewood Shopping Center, grinning his modest little grin, Reagan launched into remarks about the high cost of welfare. A giant crowd had a.s.sembled-in the middle of the day, on a weekday. They went wild. Norwalk was registered three-quarters Democratic. Even Reagan seemed taken a little aback. Pat Brown, forced to campaign in the primary to put down a sudden conservative challenge from Sam Yorty for the Democratic nomination, came to Norwalk later in the month. The same people heckled him so loudly reporters couldn't phone in their stories.

Martin Luther King was in Chicago. In 1956, Eleanor Roosevelt had said that if the Windy City desegregated, it would set a lovely example for the South. Mayor Daley replied that there was no segregation in Chicago. He was still proclaiming it-even though, in 1965, after d.i.c.k Gregory led silent desegregation marches past Daley's Bridgeport house, neighborhood school-girls adopted a new jump-rope chant: "I'd like to be an Alabama trooper / That is what I'd truly like to be / 'Cause if I were an Alabama trooper / I could kill the n.i.g.g.e.rs legally."

King had once believed impoverished Northern blacks would "benefit derivatively from the Southern struggle." Then he saw Chicago's endless ramshackle "Black Belt." In January he rented a four-room walk-up for his family in the Lawndale ("Slumdale") neighborhood. Reporters crowded each other on move-in day, noting the smell of urine, the single hall light, the rumors the block was controlled by gangs. It was King's last public relations triumph for months. Mayor Daley proved a more formidable opponent than any redneck Southern sheriff. He simply announced, "All of us are for the elimination of slums," sent out fifty building inspectors to make a show of a stand against tenements, and announced statistics on the death toll for rats like McNamara toting up body counts in Vietnam. Mayor Daley always beat the out-of-town liberals-like the previous year, when LBJ's education commissioner announced he might withhold federal funds from segregated schools in Chicago. The mayor called the president. Forthwith, the commissioner was fired.

By late March, King's campaign looked defeated, ready to retreat without a single accomplishment, a single dramatic confrontation. But King was devising a plan. It built off a congressional debate. President Johnson had introduced his proposed 1966 Civil Rights Act at the end of April. The measure at its center, t.i.tle IV, to outlaw housing discrimination, appeared dead on arrival. After all, whenever some city council somewhere pa.s.sed an open-housing law-even in supposedly liberal Berkeley-citizens availed themselves of whatever means of direct democracy at their disposal to crush it. And that had been before before Watts. Watts.

At committee hearings, the conservative opposition quoted liberal Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas in a 1963 decision: "The principle that a man's home is his castle is basic to our system of jurisprudence." The eighty-three-thousand-member National a.s.sociation of Real Estate Boards transformed itself into a lobbying army, trooping to Was.h.i.+ngton to testify that t.i.tle IV was an "inherently evil" measure that "would sound the death knell of the right of private property owners.h.i.+p," was an unconst.i.tutional usurpation of the marketplace, an invitation to neighborhood breakdown that would destroy the most precious a.s.set most middle-cla.s.s families possessed: the equity in their homes.

Liberals steadied their grip and harnessed their reason: hadn't conservatives said the same things during the debate over the 1964 civil rights law, and private property yet survived? And if a man leaves his castle and puts it up for sale, how could he logically claim it continued to be his castle? They pointed to t.i.tle IV as the domino that could topple the very system of racially based economic inequality itself: "Employment often depends on education," said the Democratic floor manager Manny Celler, chair of the House Judiciary Committee; "education in turn, on neighborhood schools, and housing." Clergymen testified of the imperatives of Scripture. The chairman of Time Inc. said freeing the housing market from the irrational distortions of racism would swell the nation's tax coffers. Whitney Young of the Urban League said that those revenues would immeasurably contribute to solving the very problems "attributable in substantial measure to the development of racial ghettos: crime, broken homes, racial animosity." To those who claimed it unconst.i.tutional for the federal government to interfere with the private housing market, the bill's supporters pointed out how deeply the federal government subsidized subsidized the private housing market. To those who said integration brought neighborhood breakdown, they introduced social science into the the private housing market. To those who said integration brought neighborhood breakdown, they introduced social science into the Congressional Record Congressional Record ("Old concepts about neighborhood h.o.m.ogeneity, the relations.h.i.+p of changes in value to housing supply, the price mechanism as a controlling factor in family mobility, the significance of panic-selling and block-busting techniques, and property maintenance habits of nonwhite families are being revised and are no longer supported by responsible literature in the field") and the conclusions of President Eisenhower's Civil Rights Commission that integration brought lower "rates of disease, juvenile delinquency, crime, and social demoralization." Real estate tyc.o.o.n James W. Rouse pointed out that he had made money hand over fist developing properties under open-occupancy laws, and that his fellow real estate professionals were working against their own interest when they fought federal regulation: if everyone worked under the same rules, ("Old concepts about neighborhood h.o.m.ogeneity, the relations.h.i.+p of changes in value to housing supply, the price mechanism as a controlling factor in family mobility, the significance of panic-selling and block-busting techniques, and property maintenance habits of nonwhite families are being revised and are no longer supported by responsible literature in the field") and the conclusions of President Eisenhower's Civil Rights Commission that integration brought lower "rates of disease, juvenile delinquency, crime, and social demoralization." Real estate tyc.o.o.n James W. Rouse pointed out that he had made money hand over fist developing properties under open-occupancy laws, and that his fellow real estate professionals were working against their own interest when they fought federal regulation: if everyone worked under the same rules, all all would be protected from unscrupulous "blockbusters" who intentionally exploited racial fears to lower property values. Attorney General Katzenbach thundered like a preacher, "The nation as a whole suffers when so many of its people are prevented from making the contribution they are able to make to the country's social and economic well-being." would be protected from unscrupulous "blockbusters" who intentionally exploited racial fears to lower property values. Attorney General Katzenbach thundered like a preacher, "The nation as a whole suffers when so many of its people are prevented from making the contribution they are able to make to the country's social and economic well-being."

To liberals, the law just made so much sense sense-how could it lose? They didn't understand that questions of who defined a "neighborhood" tended not to be fought out via the "responsible literature in the field" but in blood and fire-that opponents like North Carolina's Sam Ervin meant it when they said they'd resist open housing "as long as they have breath," and that reason played little role in neighborhoods where children sang ditties celebrating lynching.

Aggrieved const.i.tuents began flooding congressmen's mailboxes: "This takes away a person's rights. We are people and need someone to protect us."

"'Freedom for all'-including the white race, please!"

King's theory of civil disobedience was that confrontation between irreconcilables like these was what brought social justice. Thus his strategy to unstalemate his campaign: storm the citadels of Chicago's whites-only neighborhoods, and see what happened then.

Meanwhile the birthplace of King's doctrine of civil disobedience was disproving the newspaper editor who predicted that after 1964 elections in the South "will be decided on issues other than civil rights." Alabama's const.i.tution wouldn't let Governor George Wallace succeed himself. So he tried to ram through a const.i.tutional amendment allowing him to run for reelection. But Alabama legislators proved unwilling to give up what slim reed of power they had over the state's de facto dictator. Wallace wasn't about to quit politics; "the only thing that counts," he would tell his children at the dinner table, waxing philosophic, "is money and power." He needed a political base to run for president in 1968. So he decided to run his cancer-ridden wife, Lurleen, for governor instead and run the state from behind the scenes. One sweltering day late in April, a week before the Democratic primary, he staged one last publicity stunt. t.i.tle VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawed federal funding for any inst.i.tution practicing segregation. Administrators at two Alabama hospitals had been foolish enough to make token efforts to comply. Thus it was that, at the crack of dawn, with Wallace as witness, inmates at the state mental hospital in Mount Vernon, and the mental ward of Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa, were roused from their beds and s.h.i.+pped to the opposite inst.i.tution, 140 miles away-a show of resegregating Alabama's madmen for the delectation of his political base.

Wallace wasn't Dixie's most effective segregationist. He was just the most theatrical. "If every politician is an actor, only a few are consummately talented," Norman Mailer once wrote. "Wallace is talented." Wallace pledged to sign on as Lurleen's "adviser" at $1 a year: "I'm gonna draw the water, tote in the wood, wind the clock, and put out the cat." For anyone who dared critique the ruse, he affected disgust at the attack on the honor of Southern womanhood. Lurleen's candidacy was announced mere days after she underwent surgery for the cancer that would kill her two years later. Behind the scenes, an acquaintance reported, Wallace treated her like a "whipped dog."

It was a compet.i.tive race. Civil rights groups flooded the state with voter registration drives; not for nothing had George Wallace pleaded to Lyndon Johnson a year earlier that the Voting Rights Act was the work of "malcontents," trained "in Moscow or New York." Not for nothing did the Southern Christian Leaders.h.i.+p Conference's James Bevel tell an August 1965 convention, "There is no more civil rights movement. President Johnson signed it out of existence when he signed the voting-rights bill." Alabama's primary, under Justice Department observation in thirty-one counties, was the new law's first test. Three strong candidates joined the challenge. Lucky for George, the one he feared most, Ryan DeGraffenried, a young up-and-comer known as Alabama's JFK, died in a small-plane accident. Carl Elliot, the favorite of the Yankee pundits, pledged "a middle ground for Alabamans": he would neither "stand on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and shout, 'Never,'" nor in Negro churches "singing 'We Shall Overcome.'" The latter reference was to the contender to his left, Attorney General Richmond Flowers, who bid for the new black vote by pledging to remove the Confederate flag from the state Capitol.

The Wallaces campaigned twelve hours a day. The band would strike up "Just a Closer Walk with Thee" (Lurleen's favorite hymn, the emcee said); Lurleen would recite a 519-word text pledging "the same honesty and integrity in government that Alabamans have had in the past three years" (actually her husband ran the state on kickbacks); then George would declaim for an hour-defending the honor of the Stars and Bars ("Wherever you see the Confederate flag flying...you won't find college students taking up money for the Vietcong and giving blood to the Vietcong or burning their draft cards"); proposing Was.h.i.+ngton organize a combat brigade for "all the dirty beatniks that march in these s.h.i.+ndigs," in order to "get rid of them"; and excoriating "these big Northern newspapers having a fit because my wife is a candidate for governor," who said "we should change our image to suit some Communist Hottentot ten thousand miles from here."

In Wetumpka, up in the Appalachian foothills, he roared, "I see we got the editor of the Alabama Journal Alabama Journal here today." here today."

That would be Ray Jenkins, a critic, who had just returned from a Nieman Fellows.h.i.+p at Harvard.

"You know, he's one of them Hahhh Hahhh-verd-educated intellectuals that sticks his little finger up in the air when he sips tea and looks down his long nose at us ordinary Alabamans. I had a goat one time, and I fed him a copy of the Alabama Journal. Alabama Journal. And the poor goat died." And the poor goat died."

Ray Jenkins smiled and performed a little bow. He wasn't smiling later, when Wallace strong-armed Montgomery liquor stores into withdrawing their advertising from his paper.

Wallace never hid his national ambitions: "An Alabaman would make as good a president as somebody from New York and maybe a darn sight better than somebody somebody from Texas," he would say. "We've got support in California and Wisconsin and Maryland and all over the country." The pundits' darling, Carl Elliot, boasted of his "liberal" economic record-oblivious that in Alabama the word had become a curse. There was no more middle ground in a state where Klansmen painted "Never!" over his billboards. Richmond Flowers ran his campaign into a ditch when he pointed out that Lurleen was a high school dropout. An attorney general's lapse in chivalry was apparently more disqualification for higher office than the lack of a twelfth-grade education. His support crumbled. Lurleen won in a landslide. "It was at Selma a year ago that Wallace really won Tuesday's election," pollster Sam Lubell said his surveys showed: the federally protected march was seen even by moderates as "a show of force by some foreign occupying power." "It's rubbing salt in our wounds," he quoted one. "I've become George Wallace's man." from Texas," he would say. "We've got support in California and Wisconsin and Maryland and all over the country." The pundits' darling, Carl Elliot, boasted of his "liberal" economic record-oblivious that in Alabama the word had become a curse. There was no more middle ground in a state where Klansmen painted "Never!" over his billboards. Richmond Flowers ran his campaign into a ditch when he pointed out that Lurleen was a high school dropout. An attorney general's lapse in chivalry was apparently more disqualification for higher office than the lack of a twelfth-grade education. His support crumbled. Lurleen won in a landslide. "It was at Selma a year ago that Wallace really won Tuesday's election," pollster Sam Lubell said his surveys showed: the federally protected march was seen even by moderates as "a show of force by some foreign occupying power." "It's rubbing salt in our wounds," he quoted one. "I've become George Wallace's man."

The South was supposed to be becoming more like the rest of the country. Instead, in Georgia's gubernatorial race, polls gave a man named Lester Maddox a strong chance. His qualification for office was having chased Negroes from his Atlanta fried-chicken emporium after pa.s.sage of the Civil Rights Act with a pistol and a pickax handle. In Maryland a man named George P. Mahoney was rolling up support in Baltimore blue-collar wards by calling the Congress of Racial Equality's open-housing drive a conspiracy to flood neighborhoods with welfare cheats.

These results were a harbinger. The rest of the country was becoming more like the South. The Irish in South Boston were fighting with the ruthlessness of a street gang defending their turf against a state law mandating racial balance in schools; their leader, a genteel lady named Louise Day Hicks, won reelection to the city's school committee with a staggering 65 percent of the at-large vote. In New York, John Lindsay took steps to set up a civilian board to review complaints against the police, and the Patrolman's Benevolent a.s.sociation pledged to spend every penny in its treasury to defeat it. Barry Goldwater himself was touring the country to huge crowds, lecturing that conservatives would once again control the Republican National Convention. "G.o.d forbid," his liberal Republican Senate colleague Hugh Scott responded, in a minor breach of senatorial courtesy.

Democrats were falling to a tangle of angry factionalism over Vietnam. In October 1965, one hundred thousand citizens had marched against the war in New York. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, America's preeminent liberal anticommunist, wrote in Christianity and Crisis Christianity and Crisis in December, "We are making South Vietnam into an American colony" and "ruining an unhappy nation in the process of 'saving' it." In February, Senator William J. Fulbright, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, held six days of televised hearings in which millions of Americans heard luminaries like George Kennan, architect of the doctrine of containment, say victory in Vietnam could only come "at the cost of a degree of damage to civilian life and civilian suffering, generally, for which I would not like to see this country responsible." (CBS viewers missed Kennan's musings, the network having by then returned to its regularly scheduled reruns of in December, "We are making South Vietnam into an American colony" and "ruining an unhappy nation in the process of 'saving' it." In February, Senator William J. Fulbright, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, held six days of televised hearings in which millions of Americans heard luminaries like George Kennan, architect of the doctrine of containment, say victory in Vietnam could only come "at the cost of a degree of damage to civilian life and civilian suffering, generally, for which I would not like to see this country responsible." (CBS viewers missed Kennan's musings, the network having by then returned to its regularly scheduled reruns of The Andy Griffith Show The Andy Griffith Show-explaining that the hearings "obfuscate" and "confuse" the issue.) Small-town clergymen were marching against the war; suburban mothers were marching against the war; even soldiers were marching against the war. "The Whole Thing Was a Lie!" a Vietnam Special Forces veteran wrote in an article published in the February issue of the San Franciscobased New Left magazine Ramparts. Ramparts. Robert F. Kennedy had delivered his maiden Senate speech in 1965 urging the president to honor his brother's commitment to Vietnam, but now Was.h.i.+ngton gossip converged on the question of whether Kennedy would announce a presidential challenge to Lyndon B. Johnson on a peace platform-even as Lyndon Johnson's liberal attorney general said antiwar protesters tended "in the direction of treason." Robert F. Kennedy had delivered his maiden Senate speech in 1965 urging the president to honor his brother's commitment to Vietnam, but now Was.h.i.+ngton gossip converged on the question of whether Kennedy would announce a presidential challenge to Lyndon B. Johnson on a peace platform-even as Lyndon Johnson's liberal attorney general said antiwar protesters tended "in the direction of treason."

And then, a watershed: General Lewis B. Hershey, director of the nation's Selective Service System, announced that universities must hand over cla.s.s ranks to draft boards so they could cancel the deferments of college students with bad grades. At the Universities of Wisconsin and Chicago students took over administration buildings. SDS pa.s.sed out an alternative draft examination: "The war in South Vietnam is supposed to be part of our policy to contain Communist Chinese aggression. How many Communist Chinese troops are actively engaged in combat in Vietnam? (A) None (B) 1,000 (C) 50,000(D) 100,000 (E) 500,000." The correct answer, of course, was "(A) None." The United States, on the other hand, had 250,000 troops in Vietnam.

The premises by which the government sold the war were lies. That the government's critics were right didn't make it easier for everyone to accept them. It made it harder, more fundamentally subversive of a piety that Americans were raised to believe: that their government was worthy of trust. For most Americans the antiwar movement was horrifying-frightening out of all proportion to its actual influence. When New York suffered a huge blackout in November of 1965, two newsmen had the same simultaneous thought: "'The anti-Vietnam demonstrators have pulled something off.'"

History would remember the antiwar side's turn to violence years later, but neglected the pro-war side's, which was immediate. The first antiwar teach-in, at the University of Michigan, was interrupted by a bomb threat (so the organizers held an impromptu outdoor rally, three thousand people in twenty-degree weather). In Berkeley in October 1965, fifteen thousand militants marched from campus to "pacify" the Oakland Army Terminal. They were turned back by cordons of riot-helmeted police, but not before h.e.l.ls Angels were allowed across police lines to crack some hippie heads. In January, the same month the pro-war anthem "The Ballad of the Green Berets" sold as fast as a Beatles record, a Texas Democrat introduced a bill in the House to outlaw antiwar demonstrations.

March saw the a.s.saults against the Du Bois clubs in New York and San Francisco. A week later, in Richmond, Virginia, two pacifists who had been pa.s.sing out antiwar literature were found shot seventeen times in the back. March 26: marchers in Oklahoma City and Boston were run off by mobs; in New York, marchers held their ground against taunts of "Kill a commie for Jesus" and phone threats that "if we march, we can be a.s.sured we will all be dead by four p.m." March 31: four draft resisters were beaten by a teenage mob while police stood by and cameramen jostled for the best angles. April: the headquarters of the Berkeley Vietnam Day Committee and the offices of two radical newspapers in New York were bombed. On the afternoon of May 16, a man walked into the Detroit office of the Socialist Workers Party asking to see books about Lenin, then told the three occupants, "You're all Communists," and fired nine shots, killing one.

The barn of a pacifist communal farm in Voluntown, Connecticut, burned down (police said nothing led them to believe the fire had been set, though the farm was constantly hara.s.sed by vigilantes after a local pet.i.tion campaign failed to run the pacifists out of town). A Unitarian Church in Denver hosting a "Stop the War" meeting was vandalized with red-paint bombs. At Boston College forty-five hundred students chanting "Get off our campus!" had to be held back by mounted police from attacking protesters at a Hubert Humphrey speech. In Champaign, Illinois, leaders of peace demonstrations got stickers on their mailboxes reading, "You are in the sights of a Minuteman." In Queens, the DA seized an a.r.s.enal, to be used by the right-wing vigilante group the Minutemen in a.s.saults on "left-wing camps in a three-state area," including mortars, bazookas, grenades, trench knives, over 150 rifles, a "half dozen garroting devices," and over a million rounds of ammunition.

Richard Nixon was gearing up to run for president in a different country from the one that had apotheosized Lyndon Johnson. The only consensus was that the consensus was long gone. Some Americans still spoke of the "soaring sixties." Sargent Shriver, the Office of Economic Opportunity director, spoke of ending poverty in ten years; intellectuals preached a cybernetic revolution, "potentially unlimited output," via "systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings." Acid gurus Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, fired Harvard psychology instructors, opened a retreat "to create a new organism and a new dedication to life as art...the automobile is external child's play compared to the unleas.h.i.+ng of cortical energy." Even Ronald Reagan said it in his January 1966 TV kickoff: "Our problems are many, but our capacity for solving them is limitless." The most hopeful times since Christ was born in Bethlehem. The most hopeful times since Christ was born in Bethlehem.

Other Americans-sometimes the same Americans-were enveloped by dreads.

A social studies textbook: "In the application of biological technology-the engineering of man's biological self and his biological environment-we will face moral, ethical, psychological, and political issues, which will make those faced by the atomic scientists look like child's play."

The hottest novel: The Crying of Lot 49, The Crying of Lot 49, a dystopic vision of a world in which surveillance and conspiracy lurked beneath every surface. A new book, Edward J. Epstein's a dystopic vision of a world in which surveillance and conspiracy lurked beneath every surface. A new book, Edward J. Epstein's Inquest, Inquest, charged that every important conclusion reached by the commission of inquiry led by Chief Justice Earl Warren on President Kennedy's a.s.sa.s.sination was open to question; another, Mark Lane's charged that every important conclusion reached by the commission of inquiry led by Chief Justice Earl Warren on President Kennedy's a.s.sa.s.sination was open to question; another, Mark Lane's Rush to Judgment, Rush to Judgment, which stayed on bestseller lists for a year, wondered why commission witnesses kept dying under suspicious circ.u.mstances. which sta