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The Stormy Sixties,
1960-1968
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And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your
country can do for you-ask what you can do for
your country.
President fohn F. Kennedy, 1961
Prologue: Youthful President John
F. Kennedy launched his administration with
high hopes and great vigor. Young people seemed particularly attracted to the
tough-minded yet idealistic style of Kennedy's presidency. Yet Kennedy's record in
office, before his tragic assassination in 1963, was spotty. He presided over a
botched invasion of Cuba in 1961 and in the same year took the first fateful steps
into the Vietnam quagmire . In 1962 he emerged victorious from a tense standoff
with the Russians over the emplacement of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Sobered by this
brush with the prospect of nuclear holocaust, Kennedy initiated a new policy of realistic accommodation with the Soviets-while the Soviets, determined never again
to be so humiliated, began a massive military buildup. At home, the black revolution, led most conspicuously by Martin Luther King, Jr. , exploded. Lyndon Johnson,
ascending to the presidency after Kennedy's death, won election in his own right in
1964 and promptly threw his support behind the cause of civil rights. In a remarkable burst of political leadership, Johnson persuaded the Congress to pass a vast
array of social welfare legislation, known collectively as the Great Society programs.
But Johnson's dreams for a happier America were blasted by the mounting unpopularity .of the war in Vietnam, which had drawn half a million U.S. troops by the
mid-1960s. Bedeviled by the Vietnam problem, Johnson withdrew from the 1968
presidential race, paving the way for the election of Richard Nixon.
A. The Cuban Missile Crisis ___________________
I. President Kennedy Proclaims
a "Quarantine" ( 1962)
After the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, the United States watched Castro 's
Cuba for further trouble. Officials in Washington knew that the Soviet Union was
1
Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: john F Kennedy: 1962 (Washington, D.C.: National
Archives and Records Service, 1963), pp. 807-808 (October 22, 1962).
464
A . Tbe Cuban Missile Crisis
465
sending Castro immense quantities of weapons, which Moscow repeatedly claimed
were defensive.* In mid-October 1962, high-flying U.S. spy planes returned with startling photographic evidence that Soviet technicians were installing about forty nuclear missiles with a striking range of about twenty-two hundred miles. Rather than
forewarn Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow, Kennedy quietly consulted with
members of Congress and then went on radio and television with a bombshell address that caught the Soviets offguard. In this excerpt, what options did he leave for
himself if the initial "quarantine" should fail? What were the risks in Kennedy 's
strategy? Were they worth it?
Acting, therefore, in the defense of our own security and of the entire WesteJin
Hemisphere, ... I have directed that the following initial steps be taken immediately:
First: To halt this offensive buildup, a strict quarantine on all offensive military
equipment under shipment to Cuba is being initiated. All ships of any kind bound
for Cuba from whatever nation or port will, if found to contain cargoes of offensive
weapons, be turned back. This quarantine will be extended, if needed, to other
types of cargo and carriers. We are not at this time, however, denying the necessities
of life, as the Soviets attempted to do in their Berlin blockade of 1948.
Second: I have directed the continued and increased close [aerial] surveillance
of Cuba and its military buildup ....
Tbird: It shall be the policy of this Nation to regard any nuclear missile
launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by
the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the
Soviet Union.
Fourth: As a necessary military precaution, I have reinforced our base at Guantanamo [Cuba], evacuated today the dependents of our personnel there, and ordered additional military units to be on a standby alert basis.
Fifth: We are calling tonight for an immediate meeting of the Organ of Consultation under the Organization of American States, to consider this threat to hemispheric security and to invoke Articles 6 and 8 of the Rio Treaty in support of all
necessary action . ... Our other allies around the world have also been alerted.
Sixth: Under the Charter of the United Nations, we are asking tonight that an
emergency meeting of the Security Council be convoked without delay to take action against this latest Soviet threat to world peace. Our resolution will call for the
prompt dismantling and withdrawal of all offensive weapons in Cuba, under the supervision of U.N. observers, before the quarantine can be lifted.
Seventh and finally: I call upon Chairman Khrushchev to halt and eliminate this
clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace and to stable relations
between our two nations. I call upon him further to abandon this course of world
domination, and to join in an historic effort to end the perilous arms race and to
transform the history of man.
·
*The Soviets were correct in the sense that so-called offensive weapons aimed at the United States were
defensive in that they would deter an invasion of Cuba.
466
Chapter 38
The Stormy Six ties, 1960-1968
2. Premier Khrushchev Proposes
a Swap ( 1962)
During the tense six days after Kennedy 's proclamation of a "quarantine," Soviet
technicians in Cuba worked feverishly to emplace the missiles. A number of approaching Soviet merchant ships, presumably loaded with "offensive" weapons,
turned back. Several, not canying such cargoes, were allowed to reach Cuba.
Premier Khrushchev, at first disposed to give some ground in a letter of October 26
to Kennedy, took a tougher stand in the following message of October 27 and
proposed a swap. The U.S. missiles in Turkey were so obsolete that two months earlier President Kennedy had given orders for their withdrawal, but they were still
there. He and his advisers felt that to remove them, as Khrushchev asked, on an exchange basis would weaken the morale of Turkey, the eastern anchor of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Was Kennedy right to risk nuclear incineration for the sake of Turkey? How much plausibility was there in Khrushchev's
proposal?
Our purpose has been and is to help Cuba, and no one can challenge the humanity of our motives aimed at allowing Cuba to live peacefully and develop as its
people desire. You want to relieve your country from danger and this is understandable. However, Cuba also wants this. All countries want to relieve themselves
from danger.
But how can we, the Soviet Union and our government, assess your actions
which, in effect, mean that you have surrounded the Soviet Union with military
bases, surrounded our allies with military bases, set up military bases literally around
our country, and stationed your rocket weapons at them? This is no secret. Highplaced American officials demonstratively declare this. Your rockets are stationed in
Britain and in Italy and pointed at us. Your rockets are stationed in Turkey.
You are worried over Cuba. You say that it worries you because it lies at a distance of 90 miles across the sea from the shores of the United States. However,
Turkey lies next to us. Our sentinels are pacing up and down and watching each
other. Do you believe that you have a right to demand security for your country and
the removal of such weapons that you qualify as offensive, while not recognizing
this right for us? ...
That is why I make this proposal: We agree to remove those weapons from
Cuba which you regard as offensive weapons . We agree to do this and to state this
commitment in the United Nations. Your representatives will make a statement to
the effect that the United States, on its part, bearing in mind the anxiety and concern
of the Soviet state, will evacuate its analogous weapons from Turkey. Let us reach
an understanding on what time you and we need to put this into effect.
After this, representatives of the U.N. Security Council could control on-the-spot
the fulfillment of these commitments.
2
Department of State Bu lletin 47 (November 12, 1962): 742.
A. The Cuban Missile Crisis
467
3. Kennedy Advances a Solution ( 1962)
President Kennedy skillfully avoided an argument over a missile swap by ignoring
his opponent's suggestion. Referring to Khrushchev 's more promising letter of the previous day, he advanced the following proposals on October 2 7. The tension was
building up, and an air strike against Cuba was scheduled for three days later, before the nuclear missiles could become fully operative. In this letter, what restrictions
was Kennedy prepared to place on the United States?
Dear Mr. Chairman:
I have read your letter of October 26th with great care and welcomed the statement of your desire to seek a prompt solution to the problem. The first thing that
needs to be done, however, is for work to cease on offensive missile bases in Cuba
and for all weapons systems in Cuba capable of offensive use to be rendered inoperable, under effective United Nations arrangements.
Assuming this is done promptly, I have given my representatives in New York
instructions that will permit them to work out this weekend-in cooperation with
the Acting Secretary General and your representative-an arrangement for a permanent solution to the Cuban problem along the lines suggested in your letter of October 26th. As I read your letter, the key elements of your proposals-which seem
generally acceptable as I understand them-are as follows:
1) You would agree to remove these weapons systems from Cuba under appropriate United Nations observation and supervision; and undertake, with suitable
safeguards, to halt the further introduction of such weapons systems into Cuba.
2) We, on our part, would agree-upon the establishment of adequate arrangements through the United Nations to ensure the carrying out and continuation of
these commitments-(a) to remove promptly the quarantine measures now in effect
and (b) to give assurances against an invasion of Cuba. I am confident that other
nations of the Western Hemisphere would be prepared to do likewise.
If you will give your representative similar instructions, there is no reason why
we should not be able to complete these arrangements and announce them to the
world within a couple of days.
[The next day, October 28, 1962, Khrushchev consented to Kennedy 's terms,
and a great sense of relief swept over the world. Kennedy himself had privately reckoned that the odds in favor of a nuclear blowup ran as high as fifty-fifty.}
4. The Soviets Save Face ( 1962)
The Soviets, claiming that they had achieved their objective of preventing an invasion of Cuba, gathered up and (ostensibly) shipped home their forty-two nuclear
missiles. The United States in truth had won only a partial diplomatic victory. Thousands of Soviet workers stayed behind, and Castro remained defiant with Soviet
3Department
4Translation
University.
of State Bulletin 47 (November 12, 1962): 743.
copyright 1962 by Tbe Current Digest of the Soviet Press, published weekly at The Ohio State
468
Chapter 38
Tbe Stormy Sixties, 1960-1968
weapons and backing. In the following selection, the official Soviet newspaper Izvestia put the best possible face it could on the diplomatic setback. What gains for Soviet
diplomacy did it claim were achieved?
The threat to peace was created by hostile, adventurist schemes aimed at the
very existence of the Cuban Republic. The Soviet Union could not disregard Cuba's
predicament in the face of the imperialistic provocations. Our country, fulfilling its
international duty, came to the fraternal assistance of the Cuban people, and in
these troubled days of the provocational aggravation ... it has stood, stands, and
will continue to stand firmly with Cuba.
The contemplated scheme of aggression against Cuba was built upon a very
shaky foundation, but the danger with which Cuba was threatened was not thereby
diminished. The pretext that was advanced in the U.S.A. for action against Cuba
was the presence of Soviet weapons in Cuba that the United States termed "offensive." These weapons were depicted as representing a "threat" to America and the
whole Western Hemisphere, although neither Cuba nor the Soviet Union was threatening the United States with its actions, while at the same time extremist, militant circles in the U.S. revealed ... a desire to end the independence of the Cuban Republic.
In that tense moment the Soviet government, which had displayed the utmost
self-control, calm and firmness, took speedy and efficient action to prevent the outbreak of the imminent conflict and thereby preserve universal peace.
The progression of events showed that the far-seeing , wise course of the Soviet
government was the only correct one in the situation that had developed and led in
a short time to the start of the normalization of the situation and the creation of conditions in which the interests of universal peace and of the ... integrity of the
Cuban Republic will be assured.
The decisive step of the Soviet Union-which foiled the aggressive plans of an
attack on Cuba and deprived the authors of these plans of a reason and pretext for
military action-was the indication that appropriate measures were being taken
to stop the build-up in Cuba of objectives depicted by the United States as threatening American security, to dismantle these objectives and return them to the Soviet Union.
This step by the Soviet government was made possible as a result of the
statement made by U.S. President Kennedy in his message of Oct. 27 to N. S.
Khrushchev. The message states that there will be no attacks on Cuba, no
invasion, not only on the part of the United States but on the part of the other
countries of the Western Hemisphere as well, if the weapons termed "offensive"
by the U.S.A. are shipped out of Cuba.
Thus reason and wisdom prevailed. At present, all conditions exist for the total
elimination of the conflict and for further efforts toward the strengthening of peace
and security. All honest people, anxious over the fate of peace, render their due to
our Communist Party, to the Soviet government and to Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev
for the fact that the forces of aggression and war have been restrained and reason
in international relations has prevailed over folly.
These days telegrams are being received in Moscow, in the Kremlin, from all
corners of the globe. They express the impassioned voices of people of good will,
conveying their support of the peace-loving position of the Soviet Union ....
B . President johnson 's Great Society
469
B. President johnson's Great Society _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __
I. Michael Harrington Discovers
Another America ( 1962)
Some books shape the course of history. Michael Harrington 's The Other America,
published in 1962, was such a book. It shook middle-class Americans out of their
complacent assumption that the problem ofpoverty had been solved in their country.
With reasoned yet passionate argument, Harrington forcefully documented the existence of an "invisible" America populated by hopelessly impoverished people. Tbe
book's millions of readers-many of them idealistic young peopl~helped form the
political constituency that made possible the johnson administration 's War on
Poverty in the late 1960s. U7ho are the poor people Harrington describes? U7hy are
they "invisible"? U7hat does Harrington identify as historically new about their condition? Are the problems he describes now resolved?
There is a familiar America. It is celebrated in speeches and advertised on television and in the magazines. It has the highest mass standard of living the world has
ever known.
In the 1950's this America worried about itself, yet even its anxieties were products of abundance. The title of a brilliant book was widely misinterpreted, and the
familiar America began to call itself "the affluent society."* There was introspection
about Madison Avenue and tail fins; there was discussion of the emotional suffering
taking place in the suburbs. In all this, there was an implicit assumption that the
basic grinding economic problems had been solved in the United States. In this theory the nation's problems were no longer a matter of basic human needs, of food,
shelter, and clothing. Now they were seen as qualitative, a question of learning to
live decently amid luxury.
While this discussion was carried on, there existed another America. In it dwelt
somewhere between 40,000,000 and 50,000,000 citizens of this land. They were
poor. They still are ....
The millions who are poor in the United States tend to become increasingly invisible. Here is a great mass of people, yet it takes an effort of the intellect and will
even to see them ....
There are perennial reasons that make the other America an invisible land.
Poverty is often off the beaten track. It always has been. The ordinary tourist
never left the main highway, and today he rides interstate turnpikes . He does not go
into the valleys of Pennsylvania where the towns look like movie sets of Wales in
the thirties. He does not see the company houses in rows, the rutted roads (the poor
always have bad roads whether they live in the city, in towns, or on farms) , and
everything is black and dirty. And even if he were to pass through such a place by
1
Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from
Tbe Other America: Poverty in the United States by Michael Harrington. Copyright © 1962, 1969, 1981 by
Michael Harrington.
•see the selection by John Kenneth Galbraith on p . 453.
470
Chapter 38
The Stormy Sixties, 1960-1968
accident, the tourist would not meet the unemployed men in the bar or the women
coming home from a runaway sweatshop.
Then, too, beauty and myths are perennial masks of poverty. The traveler comes
to the Appalachians in the lovely season. He sees the hills, the streams, the foliagebut not the poor. Or perhaps he looks at a run-down mountain house and, remembering Rousseau rather than seeing with his eyes, decides that "those people" are
truly fortunate to be living the way they are and that they are lucky to be exempt
from the strains and tensions of the middle class. The only problem is that "those
people," the quaint inhabitants of those hills, are undereducated, underprivileged,
lack medical care, and are in the process of being forced from the land into a life in
the cities, where they are misfits ....
Now the American city has been transformed. The poor still inhabit the miserable housing in the central area, but they are increasingly isolated from contact with,
or sight of, anybody else. Middle-class women coming in from Suburbia on a rare
trip may catch the merest glimpse of the other America on the way to an evening at
the theater, but their children are segregated in suburban schools. The business or
professional man may drive along the fringes of slums in a car or bus, but it is not
an important experience to him. The failures, the unskilled, the disabled, the aged,
and the minorities are right there, across the tracks, where they have always been.
But hardly anyone else is.
In short, the very development of the American city has removed poverty from the
living, emotional experience of millions upon millions of middle-class Americans. Living out in the suburbs, it is easy to assume that ours is, indeed, an affluent society....
It is a blow to reform and the political hopes of the poor that the middle class
no longer understands that poverty exists. But, perhaps more important, the poor
are losing their links with the great world. If statistics and sociology can measure a
feeling as delicate as loneliness ... , the other America is becoming increasingly
populated by those who do not belong to anybody or anything. They are no longer
participants in an ethnic culture from the old country; they are less and less religious; they do not belong to unions or clubs. They are not seen, and because of that
they themselves cannot see. Their horizon has become more and more restricted;
they see one another, and that means they see little reason to hope ....
Here is the most familiar version of social blindness: "The poor are that way because they are afraid of work. And anyway they all have big cars. If they were like
me (or my father or my grandfather), they could pay their own way. But they prefer
to live on the dole and cheat the taxpayers. "
This theory, usually thought of as a virtuous and moral statement, is one of the
means of making it impossible for the poor ever to pay their way. There are, one
must assume, citizens of the other America who choose impoverishment out of fear
of work (though, writing it down, I really do not believe it). But the real explanation
of why the poor are where they are is that they made the mistake of being born to
the wrong parents, in the wrong section of the country, in the wrong industry, or in
the wrong racial or ethnic group. Once that mistake has been made, they could
have been paragons of will and morality, but most of them would never even have
had a chance to get out of the other America.
There are two important ways of saying this: The poor are caught in a vicious
circle; or, The poor live in a culture of poverty.
B. President johnson 's Great Society
471
In a sense, one might define the contemporary poor in the United States as
those who, for reasons beyond their control, cannot help themselves. All the most
decisive factors making for opportunity and advance are against them. They are
born going downward, and most of them stay down. They are victims whose lives
are endlessly blown round and round the other America.
Here is one of the most familiar forms of the vicious circle of poverty. The poor
get sick more than anyone else in the society. That is because they live in slums,
jammed together under unhygienic conditions; they have inadequate diets, and cannot get decent medical care. When they become sick, they are sick longer than any
other group in society. Because they are sick more often and longer than anyone
else, they lose wages and work, and find it difficult to hold a steady job. And because of this, they cannot pay for good housing, for a nutritious diet, for doctors. At
any given point in the circle, particularly when there is a major illness, their prospect
is to move to an even lower level and to begin the cycle, round and round, toward
even more suffering ....
what shall we tell the American poor, once we have seen them? Shall we say to
them that they are better off than the Indian poor, the Italian poor, the Russian poor?
Thar is one answer, but it is heartless. I should put it another way. I want to tell
every ~ell-fed and optimistic American that it is intolerable that so mariy millions
should be maimed in body and in spirit when it is not necessary that they should
be. My standard of comparison is not how much worse things used to be. It is how
much better they could be if only we were stirred ....
These, then, are the strangest poor in the history of mankind.
They exist within the most powerful and rich society the world has ever known.
Their misery has continued while the majority of the nation talked of itself as being
"affluent" and worried about neuroses in the suburbs. In this way tens of millions of
human beings became invisible. They dropped out of sight and out of mind; they
were without their own political voice.
Yet this need not be. The means are at hand to fulfill the age-old dream: poverty
can now be abolished. How long shall we ignore this underdeveloped nation in our
midst? How long shall we look the other way while our fellow human beings suffer?
How long?
2. President johnson Declares
War on Poverty ( 1964)
.~~
Tbe United States in the 1960s continued to present appalling contrasts in wealth.
An official government report in 1964 declared that one-fifth of the families in the
country-9.3 million in all-"enjoyed" annual incomes of less than $3,000. Under
President Kennedy, Congress made a modest beginning at relieving poverty by passing several laws providing for self-help and job retraining. President johnson threw
his full weight behind the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which a Democratic
2
Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. johnson, 1963-1964 (Washington, D.C.:
National Archives and Records Service, 1965), vol. 1, pp. 376-377 (March 16, 1964).
472
Chapter 38
Tbe Stormy Sixties, 1960-1968
Congress approved and implemented with an initial appropriation of $94 7.5 million . This legislation included provisions for a job Corps that would provide training
for unskilled young men and women, aid for education, and a domestic Peace
Corps to work with Native Americans and other disadvantaged groups. In a part of
his message to Congress, the president made the following plea. Was he convincing in
his argument that these heavy outlays would in the long run help the taxpayer?
I have called for a national war on poverty. Our objective: total victory.
There are millions of Americans-one fifth of our people-who have not
shared in the abundance which has been granted to most of us, and on whom the
gates of opportunity have been closed.
What does this poverty mean to those who endure it?
It means a daily struggle to secure the necessities for even a meager existence.
It means that the abundance, the comforts, the opportunities they see all around
them are beyond their grasp.
Worst of all, it means hopelessness for the young.
The young man or woman who grows up without a decent education, in a broken home, in a hostile and squalid environment, in ill health or in the face of racial
injustice-that young man or woman is often trapped in a life of poverty.
He does not have the skills demanded by a complex society. He does not know
how to acquire those skills. He faces a mounting sense of despair which drains initiative and ambition and energy . .. .
The war on poverty is not a struggle simply to support people, to make them
dependent on the generosity of others.
It is a struggle to give people a chance.
It is an effort to allow them to develop and use their capacities, as we have
been allowed to develop and use ours, so that they can share, as others share, in the
promise of this nation.
We do this, first of all, because it is right that we should.
From the establishment of public education and land grant colleges through
agricultural extension and encouragement to industry, we have pursued the goal of
a nation with full and increasing opportunities for all its citizens.
The war on poverty is a further step in that pursuit.
We do it also because helping some will increase the prosperity of all.
Our fight against poverty will be an investment in the most valuable of our
resources-the skills and strength of our people.
And in the future, as in the past, this investment will return its cost manyfold to
our entire economy.
If we can raise the annual earnings of 10 million among the poor by only $1,000
we will have added 14 billion dollars a year to our national output. In addition we
can make important reductions in public assistance payments which now cost us
4 billion dollars a year, and in the large costs of fighting crime and delinquency, disease and hunger.
This is only part of the story.
Our history has proved that each time we broaden the base of abundance, giving more people the chance to produce and consume, we create new industry,
higher production, increased earnings and better income for all.
B. President johnson 's Great Society
473
Giving new opportunity to those who have little will enrich the lives of all the rest.
Because it is right, because it is wise, and because, for the first time in our history, it is possible to conquer poverty, I submit, for the consideration of the Congress and the country, the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964.
The Act does not merely expand old programs or improve wh<:l.t is already
being done.
It charts a new course.
It strikes at the causes, not just the consequences of poverty.
It can be a milestone in our one-hundred-eighty year search for a better life for
our people.
3. War on the Antipoverty War ( 1964)
President johnson 's antipoverty scheme aroused the dogs of criticism, especially
among conservatives. They declared that it was contrived to catch votes; that it
would undermine individual initiative; that it would inject big government into private affairs; that it was socialistic; that it was a revival of Franklin Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps; and that it would burden taxpayers. In truth, the cost of
keeping a high school dropout in one of the fresh-air training camps was estimated
to be about three times that of keeping a student in Harvard University. The executive editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer here speaks out plainly against some of the
weaknesses of the scheme. What are his most telling points?
The political astuteness of President Johnson is nowhere better illustrated than
by his proposal described as the "antipoverty program" or the "war on poverty. " It
has more than a faint odor of hokum about it, but its implications are that anyone
bold enough to question or peer deeply into it must be in favor of poverty-and
that's politically and socially disastrous.
The present level of extravagance in the American uppercrust, affluence in the
middle class, and considerable comfort even in the lower pay brackets is so widely
taken for granted these days that a campaigner against poverty has to hunt around
for groups and areas to help ....
But there are increasingly large numbers of Negro dropouts from high school
and teenage unemployment. And small farmers who can't seem to get ahead. And
inhabitants of "Appalachia, " the mountains where coal mining has gone to pot.
These are areas with average incomes of $3,000 a year or under. They've got to be
saved from themselves by the Federal .Government. Hence, the "war on poverty," a
colorful phrase much favored by newspapers, TV, and radio.
There's really no war on anything. The Johnson proposal is an attempt to sop
up some unemployed }~ens by giving them jobs in conservation camps, to lend
some money to the hardscrabble farmers, to produce some loan help for college
students-and, just as important, add some new bureaucrats to the payroll.
The objective is good, particularly the movement of dropouts from the street corner to the forest. But the only way to solve the Appalachia problem is to transplant
3 "A
Poke at Poverty Hokum" by Philip W. Porte r, Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 28, 1964, reprinted by
permission.
,...........--
474
Chapter 38
Tbe Stormy Sixties, 1960-1968
whole families and villages to places where there are jobs-but they won't leave. And
lending money to marginal farmers is fruitless; the quicker they give up small uneconomical "family" units, and try to earn money elsewhere, the better off they'll be.
Some individuals will be helped, no doubt. The politicians have something new
to promise. But eradicating all poverty is about as unlikely an attainment as entering
the Kingdom of Heaven, which our grandmothers talked so much about.
The objective, though vague and built of goober feathers, is good. But will it
work on those of low mentality who are not educable, or those who lack desire to
improve themselves? And in reverse, is it really needed by the determined individual, the man already moonlighting to go to law school, or waiting tables to pay for
college?
Has the Horatio Alger, Jr., concept, the bootblack who became a tycoon, vanisped completely? Andrew Carnegie built a fortune from little. So did Henry Ford.
Lyndon Johnson himself started from scratch ....
But today, the Federal Government has got to get into the act. And anyone who
asks questions or objects is automatically a stinker.
[Tbe war against poverty, although it improved the quality of life for many underprivileged Americans, fell far short of the roseate forecasts of its sponsors. Tbe war
in Vietnam began to siphon away billions of dollars, and the national budget could
not fully support both wars. Bureaucratic bungling, political favoritism, and outright graft combined to bring the antipoverty program into considerable disrepute
and to undermine its nobler purposes.}
C
TheB~ckRev~utionErup~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I. Rosa Parks Keeps Her Seat ( 1955)
'Jim Crow," or government-enforced segregation of the races-in schools, buses,
restaurants, and other public places-defined life in the South from the late nineteenth century to the end of World War II. But in the post-war era, blacks began to
protest against the petty humiliations and gross inequalities of the jim Crow regime.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, an officer in the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), boarded a bus in her
hometown ofMontgomery, Alabam(l, to return home after her day 's work as a seamstress. Tbe only seat available was in the "whites only" section. She sat down, refused
to move, and was arrested for violating the city's segregation laws. Her simple gesture
touched off a 381-day boycott of the Montgomery bus system by black citizens, led to
a Supreme Court ruling in November 1956 that segregation in public transportation
facilities was illegal, and helped to launch the civil-rights career of Martin Luther
King, Jr., then a charismatic young pastor in Montgomery 's Dexter Avenue Baptist
Church. Why did this episode prove so powerful in capturing the imagination of
blacks and whites alike?
1
"Rosa L. Parks," from My Soul is Rested by Howell Raines, copyright © 1977 Howell Raines . Used by permission of G. P. Putnam's Sons, a division of Penguin Group (USA), Inc.
C. The Black Revolution Erupts
475
Rosa L.Parks
I had had problems with bus drivers over the years, because I didn't see fit to
pay my money into the front and then go around to the back. Sometimes bus
drivers wouldn't permit me to get on the bus, and I had been evicted from the bus.
But as I say, there had been incidents over the years. One of the things that made
this get so much publicity was the fact the police were called in and I was placed
under arrest. See, if I had just been evicted from the bus and he hadn't placed me
under arrest or had any charges brought against me, it probably could have been
just another incident.
I had left my work at the men's alteration shop, a tailor shop in the Montgomery
Fair department store, and as I left work, I crossed the street to a drugstore to pick
up a few items instead of trying to go directly to the bus stop. And when I had finished this, I came across the street and looked for a Cleveland Avenue bus that apparently had some seats on it. At that time it was a little hard to get a seat on the
bus. But when I did get to the entrance to the bus, I got in line with a number of
other people who were getting on the same bus.
As I got up on the bus and walked to the seat I saw there was only one vacancy
that was just back of where it was considered the white section. So this was the seat
that I took, next to the aisle, and a man was sitting next to me. Across the aisle there
were two women, and there were a few seats at this point in the very front of the
bus that was called the white section. I went on to one stop and I didn't particularly
notice who was getting on the bus, didn't particularly notice the other people getting on. And on the third stop there were some people getting on, and at this point
all of the front seats were taken. Now in the beginning, at the very first stop I had
got on the bus, the back of the bus was filled up with people standing in the aisle
and I don't know why this one vacancy that I took was left, because there were
quite a few people already standing toward the back of the bus. The third stop
is when all the front seats were taken, and this one man was standing and when
the driver looked around and saw he was standing, he asked the four of us, the
man in the seat with me and the two women across the aisle, to let him have those
front seats.
At his first request, didn't any of us move. Then he spoke again and said, "You'd
better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats." At this point, of
course, the passenger who would have taken the seat hadn't said anything. In fact,
he never did speak to my knowledge. When the three people, the man who was in
the seat with me and the two women, stood up and moved into the aisle, I remained
where I was. When the driver saw that I was still sitting there, he asked if I was
going to stand up. I told him, no, I wasn't. He said, "Well, if you don't stand up, I'm
going to have you arrested." I told him to go on and have me arrested.
He got off the bus and came back shortly. A few minutes later, two policemen
got on the bus, and they approached me and asked if the driver had asked me to
stand up, and I said yes, and they wanted to know why I didn't. I told them I didn't
think I should have to stand up. After I had paid my fare and occupied a seat, I
didn't think I should have to give it up. They placed me under arrest then and had
me to get in the police car, and I was taken to jail and booked on suspicion, I believe.
...------------------------------ ~ -~ -~ ·~ - - ~ ·~ - -
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Chapter 38
The Stormy Sixties, 1960-1968
The questions were asked, the usual questions they ask a prisoner or somebody
that's under arrest. They had to determine whether or not the driver wanted to press
charges or swear out a warrant, which he did. Then they took me to jail and I was
placed in a celL In a little while I was taken from the cell, and my picture was made
and fingerprints taken. I went back to the cell then, and a few minutes later I was
called back again, and when this happened I found out that Mr. E. D. Nixon and Attorney and Mrs. Clifford Durr had come to make bond for me.
In the meantime before this , of course ... I was given permission to make a
telephone call after my picture was taken and fingerprints taken. I called my home
and spoke to my mother on the telephone and told her what had happened, that
I was in jail. She was quite upset and asked me had the police beaten me. I told
her, no, I hadn't been physically injured, but I was being held in jail, and I wanted
my husband to come and get me out. ... He didn't have a car at that time, so he had
to get someone to bring him down. At the time when he got down, Mr. Nixon
and the Durrs had just made bond for me, so we all met at the jail and we went
home ....
2. Students Sit in for Equality ( 1960)
On February 1, 1960, four black college students sat down at the whites-only lunch
counter at the Woolworth s store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and tried to order
something to eat. Tbe black waitress rifused to serve them: "Fellows like you make our
race look bad, "she said. "Tbat's why we can 't get anyplace today, because ofpeople like
you, rabble-rousers, trouble-makers . ... So why don't you go on out and stop making
trouble?" But the students rifused to move, and sat themselves into the history books.
Though the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) had used similar tactics against segregation since its founding in 1942, the students at Greensboro had never heard of
CORE's sit-ins; theirs was a spontaneous gesture, undertaken without forma/leadership
or preparation. Tbeir example touched off a wave of similar protests against segregation across the South, including one in Portsmouth, Virginia, in which Edward Rodman, then a high-school student, participated. What motivated him? What gave him
encouragement?
Edward Rodman
Our story here in Portsmouth, Virginia, begins on February 12, Lincoln's Birthday. Several girls decided to observe the occasion by staging a sit-in, in sympathy
with the students of North Carolina. So after school, the first sit-in of Portsmouth's
history took place. There was no violence, but no one was served. We sat until the
lunch counter at Rose's Variety Store closed.
Our group was a loosely knit collection of high school students, each with the
same ideal: equality for all. Frankly speaking, that is about all we had in common.
We were lacking organization, leadership, and planning.
By February 15, our numbers had increased considerably. We demonstrated at
2
Reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group from Freedom Ride by James
Peck. Copyright © 1962 by James Peck; renewed 1990 by the Executors of the Estate of James Peck.
C. The Black Revolution Ernpts
477
two stores at the Shopping Center. Again we met no obstruction-only a few hecklers, whose worst insults we passed off with a smile. Things were looking good. The
newspaper and radio reporters were there getting our story.
Our spontaneous movement was gaining momentum quickly. We were without
organization; we had no leader and no rules for conduct other than a vague understanding that we were not to fight back. We should have known the consequences,
but we didn't.
I was late getting to the stores the following day, because of a meeting. It was
almost four P.M. when I arrived. What I saw will stay in my memory for a long time.
Instead of the peaceful, nonviolent sit-ins of the past few days, I saw before me a
swelling, pushing mob of white and Negro students, news photographers, TV cameras, and only two policemen. Immediately, I tried to take the situation in hand. I did
not know it at the time, but this day I became the sit-in leader.
I didn't waste time asking the obvious questions, "Who were these other Negro
boys from the corner?" "Where did all the white hoods come from?" It was obvious.
Something was going to break loose, and I wanted to stop it. First I asked all the
girls to leave, then the hoods. But before I could finish , trouble started. A white boy
shoved a Negro boy. The manager then grabbed the white boy to push him out and
was shoved by the white boy. The crowd followed. Outside the boy stood in the
middle of the street, daring any Negro to cross a certain line. He then pulled a car
chain and claw hammer from his pocket and started swinging the chain in the air.
He stepped up his taunting with the encouragement of others. When we did not
respond, he became so infuriated that he struck a Negro boy in the face with the
chain. The boy kept walking. Then, in utter frustration, the white boy picked up a
street sign and threw it at a Negro girl. It hit her and the fight began. The white
boys, armed with chains, pipes, and hammers, cut off an escape through the street.
Negro boys grabbed the chains and beat the white boys. The hammers they threw
away. The white boys went running back to their hot rods. I tried to order a retreat.
During the fight I had been talking to the store manager and to some newspapermen. I did not apologize for our sit-in-only for unwanted fighters of both races
and for their conduct. Going home, I was very dejected. I felt that this outbreak had
killed our movement. I was not surprised the following day when a mob of three
thousand people formed. The fire department, all of the police force , and police
dogs were mobilized. The police turned the dogs loose on the Negroes-but not on
the whites. Peaceful victory for us seemed distant.
Next day was rainy and I was thankful that at least no mob would form. At
ten A.M. I received a telephone call that was to change our whole course of action.
Mr. Hamilton, director of the YMCA, urged me to bring a few students from the original sit-in group to a meeting that afternoon. I did. That meeting was with Gordon
Carey, a field secretary of CORE. We had seen his picture in the paper in connection
with our recent campaign for integrated library facilities and we knew he was on
our side. He had just left North Carolina where he had helped the student sit-ins. He
told us about CORE and what CORE had done in similar situations elsewhere. I decided, along with the others, that Carey should help us organize a nonviolent, direct
action group to continue our peaceful protests in Portsmouth. He suggested that an
all-day workshop on nonviolence be held February 20.
478
Chapter 38
The Stormy Sixties, 1960-1968
Reverend Chambers organized an adult committee to support our efforts. At the
workshop we first oriented ourselves to CORE and its nonviolent methods. I spoke
on "Why Nonviolent Action?" exploring Gandhi's principles of passive resistance
and Martin Luther King's methods in Alabama. We then staged a sociodrama acting
out the right and wrong ways to handle various demonstration situations. During
the lunch recess, we had a real-life demonstration downtown-the first since the
fighting. With our new methods and disciplined organization, we were successful in
deterring violence. The store manager closed the counter early. We returned to the
workshop, evaluated the day's sit-in, and decided to continue in this manner. We
established ourselves officially as the Student Movement for Racial Equality.
Since then, we have had no real trouble. Our struggle is not an easy one, but we
know we are not alone and we plan to continue in accordance with our common
ideal: equality for all through nonviolent action.
3. Riders for Freedom ( 1961)
In December 1960, in the case of Boynton v. Virginia (364 U.S. 454), the U.S.
Supreme Court declared that segregation in waiting rooms and restaurants serving
interstate bus passengers was in violation of the Interstate Commerce Act. On this
narrow but firm legal base, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) decided to
mount a dramatic protest against segregation: two racially mixed busloads of volunteers would travel from Washington, D.C., through the deepest South. "Our intention, " CORE director james Farmer declared, "was to provoke the southern
authorities into arresting us and thereby prod the justice Department into enforcing
the law of the land. " On May 4, 1961, after graphic and realistic rehearsals of the
harassment and beatings they expected to receive, seven blacks and six whites set out
from Washington on their fateful "Freedom Ride. " The two selections below describe
what happened. The first statement is by CORE director james Farmer; the second is
by Hank Thomas, one of the riders. Did the Freedom Riders achieve their objectives?
Were their tactics justified? What was the federal government's role at this stage of the
civil rights movement? Was the attitude of whites uniform throughout the South?
james Farmer
I was impressed by the fact that most of the activity thus far had been of local
people working on their local problems-Greensborans sitting-in in Greensboro
and Atlantans sitting-in in Atlanta-and the pressure of the opposition against
having outsiders come was very, very great. If any outsider came in ... , "Get that
outside agitator." ... I thought that this was going to limit the growth of the Movement. ... We somehow had to cut across state lines and establish the position that
we were entitled to act any place in the country, no matter where we hung our hat
and called home, because it was our country.
We also felt that one of the weaknesses of the student sit-in movement of the
South had been that as soon as arrested, the kids bailed out. ... This was not quite
3 "James
Farmer" and "Hank Thomas," from My Soul is Rested by Howell Raines, copyright© 1977 Howell
Raines. Used by permission of G. P. Putnam's Sons, a division of Penguin Group (USA), Inc.
C. The Black Revolution Erupts
479
Gandhian and not the best tactic. A better tactic would be to remain in jail and to
make the maintenance of segregation so expensive for the state and the city that
they would hopefully come to the conclusion that they could no longer afford it. Fill
up the jails, as Gandhi did in India, fill them to bursting if we had to. In other words,
stay in without bail.
So those were the two things: cutting across state lines, putting the movement
on wheels, so to speak, and remaining in jail, not only for its publicity value but for
the financial pressure it would put upon the segregators. We decided that a good
approach here would be to move away from restaurant lunch counters. That had
been the Southern student sit-in movement, and anything we would do on that
would be anticlimactic now. We would have to move into another area and so we
decided to move into the transportation, interstate transportation ....
It would be necessary, he decided, to violate custom and local law to focus attention on the federal laws barring discrimination in interstate transportation. He
knew that in 1946 the Supreme Court had ruled against segregated seating on interstate buses, and in 1960, against segregated terminal faciliti~s. Tbe rulings were
uniformly ignored throughout the South .
So we, following the Gandhian technique, wrote to Washington. We wrote to
the Justice Department, to the FBI, and to the President, and wrote to Greyhound
Bus Company and Trailways Bus Company and told them that on May first or May
fourth-whatever the date was,* I forget now-we were going to have a Freedom
Ride. Blacks and whites were going to leave Washington, D.C., on Greyhound and
Trailways, deliberately violating the segregated seating requirements and at each
rest stop would violate the segregated use of facilities. And we would be nonviolent, absolutely nonviolent, throughout the campaign, and we would accept the consequences of our actions. This was a deliberate act of civil disobedience .... **
Did justice try to head you off?
No, we got no reply. We got no reply from Justice. Bobby Kennedy, no reply. We
got no reply from the FBI. We got no reply from the White House, from President
Kennedy. We got no reply from Greyhound or Trailways. We got no replies. [Laughs]
He recruited an interracial group of thirteen and brought them to W(lshington
for a week's training.
We had some of the group of thirteen sit at a simulated counter asking for coffee. Somebody else refused them service, and then we'd have others come in as
white hoodlums to beat 'em up and knock them off the counter and club 'em
around and kick 'em in the ribs and stomp 'em, and they were quite realistic, I must
say. I thought they bent over backwards to be realistic. I was aching all over.
[Laughs] And then we'd go into a discussion as to how the roles were played,
whether there was something that the Freedom Riders did tpat they shouldn't have
done, said that they shouldn't have said, something that they didn't say or do that
*May 4.
**Before beginning the Salt March, Gandhi sent a letter of warning to British authorities, although he did
not outline the specifics of his strategy.
480
Chapter 38
The Stormy Sixties, 1960-1968
they should have, and so on. Then we'd reverse roles and play it over and over
again and have lengthy discussions of it.
I felt, by the way, that by the time that group left Washington, they were prepared for anything, even death, and this was a possibility, and we knew it, when we
got to the Deep South.
Through Virginia we had no problem. In fact they had heard we were coming,
Greyhound and Trailways, and they had taken down the For Colored and For
Whites signs, and we rode right through. Yep. The same was true in North Carolina.
Signs had come down just the previous day, blacks told us. And so the letters in
advance did something.
In South Carolina it was a different story .... John Lewis started into a white
waiting room in some town in South Carolina* ... and there were several young
white hoodlums, leather jackets, ducktail haircuts, standing there smoking, and they
blocked the door and said, "Nigger, you can't come in here." He said, "I have every
right to enter this waiting room according to the Supreme Court of the United States
in the Boynton case."**
They said, "Shit on that." He tried to walk past, and they clubbed him, beat him,
and knocked him down. One of the white Freedom Riders ... Albert Bigelow,*** who
had been a Navy captain during World War II, big, tall, strapping fellow, very impressive, from Connecticut-then stepped right between the hoodlums and John Lewis.
Lewis had been absorbing more of the punishment. They then clubbed Bigelow and
finally knocked him down, and that took some knocking because he was a pretty
strapping fellow, and he didn't hit back at all. [They] knocked him down, and at this
point police arrived and intervened. They didn't make any arrests. Intervened.
Well, we went through the rest of South Carolina without incident and then to
Atlanta, Georgia, and there we met with Dr. King. We called him and told him we
were coming, and he had dinner with us and wished us well. Went to Albany first
and then Atlanta. And when we were in Atlanta-my father by the way, was in
Freedman's Hospital here in Washington with cancer, and I got word just about two
hours before the buses left Atlanta that my father had died, and I had to go back
and bury him. My mother insisted until her death five years later that my father
willed his death at that time, willing the timing of it because he had my schedule. I
had talked with him here in Washington during our training session, when he was
in the hospital before I left, and told him what we were going to do, and he said,
"Well, that's an interesting idea and I hope you survive it. " He said, "I think the most
dangerous part of it will be through Barna," as he put it, "and Mississippi. There,
somebody will probably take a potshot at you, and I just hope they miss." And my
mother says that every morning he would take out my itinerary and look at it and
say, "Well, now, let's see where Junior is today." And he was relaxed about it until I
got to Atlanta, and he says, "Oh, tomorrow he goes through Barna."
He died, and she says that he willed the timing of it to bring me back. It's
apocryphal I'm sure. At any rate I had to return then to bury him and informed the
*Rock Hill.
**The 1960 Supreme Court case outlawing segregated facilities at bus terminals.
***Despite his military background, a Quaker pacifist. He was best known for sailing the yacht Golden
Rule into an atomic testing area in the Pacific as a protest against nuclear warfare.
C. The Black Revolution Erupts
481
Freedom Riders that I would rejoin them as soon as I had gotten this family obligation out of the way. I must confess that while I felt guilty leaving, there was also a
sense of relief at missing this leg of the trip, because all of us were scared. There
was one reporter who was one of the Freedom Riders at this stage, and that was
Simeon Booker of Johnson publications, jet and Ebony. Simeon had come to me
just before I got the telegram telling me of my father's death, or the phone call, and
he said, "Jim, you know, I've decided that you are the only Freedom Rider I can outrun. So what I'm going to do is stick with you on this trip, and I figure it's the fellow
bringing up the rear who's gonna get caught. " [Laughs]
Hank Thomas
The Freedom Ride didn't really get rough until we got down in the Deep South.
Needless to say, Anniston, Alabama, I'm never gonna forget that, when I was on the
bus that they threw some kind of incendiary device on.
He was on the .first of two buses to cross into "Barna. " When it pulled into the
depot at Anniston, a Klan hotbed about sixty miles from Birmingham, the bus was
surrounded by white men brandishing iron bars. Anniston police held them back
long enough for the bus to reach the highway again, but about six miles outside
town the pursuing mob caught up.
I got real scared then. You know, I was thinking-I'm looking out the window
there, and people are out there yelling and screaming. They just about broke every
window out of the bus .... I really thought that that was going to be the end of me.
How did the bus get stopped?
They shot the tires out, and the bus driver was forced to stop .... He got off, and
man, he took off like a rabbit, and might well have. I couldn't very well blame him
there. And we were trapped on the bus. They tried to board. Well, we did have two FBI
men aboard the bus. All they were there to do were to observe and gather facts, but
the crowd apparently recognized them as FBI men, and they did not try to hurt them.
It wasn't until the thing was shot on the bus and the bus caught afire that everything got out of control, and ... when the bus was burning, I figured ... [pauses] ...
panic did get ahold of me. Needless to say, I couldn't survive that burning bus. There
was a possibility I could have survived the mob, but I was just so afraid of the mob
that I was gonna stay on that bus. I mean, I just got that much afraid. And when we
got off the bus ... first they closed the doors and wouldn't let us off. But then I'm
pretty sure they realized, that somebody said, "Hey, the bus is gonna explode," because it had just gassed up, and so they started scattering then, and I guess that's the
way we got off the bus.* Otherwise, we probably all would have been succumbed by
*John Patterson, then governor of Alabama, maintains that he and his public safety director, Floyd Mann,
were indirectly responsible for the Freedom Riders' getting off the burning bus: "Floyd recommended
that we send a state plainclothes investigator to Atlanta to catch the bus and ride with the Freedom Riders, and we did. Now this has never been reported that I know of in any paper... . We sent a man named
E. L. Cowling .... He went over to Atlanta and caught the bus, and he was on the bus when they came
to Anniston .... So Cowling walked up to the door of the bus and drew his pistol and backed the crowd
away from the bus and told them that if anybody touched anybody he'd kill them. And he got the Freedom Riders off the burning bus. That's true. "
~
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Chapter 38
The Stormy Sixties, 1960-1968
the smoke, and not being able to get off, probably would have been burned alive or
burned on there anyway. That's the only time I was really, really afraid. I got
whacked over the head with a rock or I think some kind of a stick as I was coming
off the bus.
What happened in Anniston after the bus was attacked?
We were taken to the hospital. The bus started exploding, and a lot of people
were cut by flying glass. We were taken to the hospital, most of us, for smoke
inhalation.
By whom?
I don't remember. I think I was half out of it, half dazed, as a result of the
smoke, and, gosh, I can still smell that stuff down in me now. You got to the point
where you started having the dry heaves. Took us to the hospital, and it was incredible. The people at the hospital would not do anything for us. They would not.
And I was saying, "You're doctors, you 're medical personnel. " They wouldn't. Governor Patterson got on statewide radio and said, "Any rioters in this state will not receive police protection." And then the crowd started forming outside the hospital,
and the hospital told us to leave. And we said, "No, we're not going out there," and
there we were. A caravan from Birmingham, about a fifteen-car caravan led by the
Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, came up from Birmingham to get us out.
Without police escort, I take it?
Without police escort, but every one of those cars had a shotgun in it. And Fred
Shuttlesworth had got on the radio and said-you know Fred, he's very dramatic"I'm going to get my people. " [Laughs] He said, "I'm a nonviolent man, but I'm going
to get my people." And apparently a hell of a lot of people believed in him. Man,
they came there and they were a welcome sight. And each one of 'em got out with
their guns and everything and the state police were there, but I think they all realized that this was not a time to say anything because, I'm pretty sure, there would
have been a lot of people killed.
Tbe black drivers were openly carrying guns?
Oh, yeah. They had rifles and shotguns. And that's how we got back to Birmingham ... . I think I w as flown to New Orleans for medical treatment, because
still they were afraid to let any of us go to the hospitals in Birmingham, and by that
time-it was what, two days later-I was fairly all right. I had gotten most of the
smoke out of my system.
No one received any attention in the hospital in Anniston?
No, No. Oh, we did have one girl, Genevieve Hughes, a white girl, who had a
busted lip. I remember a nurse applying something to that, but other than that, nothing. Now that I look back on it, man, we had some vicious people down there,
wouldn't even so much as treat you. But that's the way it was. But strangely enough,
even those bad things then don't stick in my mind that much. Not that I'm full of
love and goodwill for everybody in my heart, but I chalk it off to part of the things
C. The Black Revolution Erupts
483
that I'm going to be able to sit on my front porch in my rocking chair and tell my
young'uns about, my grandchildren about.
Postscript: That same day, Mother's Day, May 14, 1961, the second bus escaped
the mob in Anniston and made it to Birmingham. At the Trailways station there,
white men armed with baseball bats and chains beat the Freedom Riders at will for
about fifteen minutes before the first police arrived. In 1975 a former Birmingham
Klansman, who was a paid informant of the FBI at the time, told the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence that members of the Birmingham police force had
promised the Klansmen that no policemen would show up to interfere with the beatings for at least fifteen minutes. In 1976 a Birmingham detective who refused to be
interviewed on tape told me that account was correct-as far as it went. The detective said that word was passed in the police department that Public Safety Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor had watched from the window of his office in City Hall
as the crowd of Klansmen, some brandishing weapons, gathered to await the Freedom Fighters. Asked later about the absence of his policemen, Connor said most of
them were visiting their mothers.
4. Martin Luther King,jr., Writes from
a Birmingham jail ( /963)
The year 1963 marked the one hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, yet millions ofAfrican Americans remained enchained by racism. Although
racial prejudice was a national curse, it worked most viciously in the South, the ancient homeland of slavery. Nearly a decade after the Supreme Court's desegregation
order, fewer than 10 percent of black children in the South attended classes with
white children. The problem was especially acute in Birmingham, Alabama, the
most segregated big city in the United States. Segregation was the rule in schools,
restaurants, restrooms, ballparks, libraries, and taxicabs. Although African Americans were nearly half the city's residents, they constituted fewer than 15 percent of
the city's voters. More than fifty cross-burnings and eighteen racial bombings between 1957 and 1963 had earned the city the nickname of "Bombingham " among
blacks. Thus Birmingham was a logical choice-and a courageous one- as the site
of a mass protest by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. , and his Southern Christian
Leadership Conference. Arrested during a protest demonstration on Good Friday,
1963, King penned the following letter from jail, writing on scraps ofpaper smuggled
to him by a prison trusty. He was responding to criticism from eight white Alabama
clergymen who had deplored his tactics as "unwise and untimely"-though King
throughout his life preached the wisdom of nonviolence. W'hy does King believe that
African Americans could wait no longer for their civil rights? How does he view himself in relation to white "moderates" and black extremists?
4
"Martin Luther King, Jr. Writes from a Birmingham Jail," from Why We Can 'tWait, April16, 1963. Reprinted
by arrangement with the Estate of Martin Luther King Jr., c/ o Writers House as agent for the proprietor
New York, N.Y. Copyright© 1963 Martin Luther King Jr, copyright renewed 1991 Caretta Scott King.
484
Chapter 38
The Stormy Sixties, 1960-1968
My Dear Fellow Clergymen:
•
•
•
You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that
brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest
content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and
does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are
taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city's white
power structure left the Negro community with no alternative ....
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by
the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage
in a direct-action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not
suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the
word "Wait! " It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait"
has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."
We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given
rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining
political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a
cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the
stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs
lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim;
when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, and even kill your black
brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro
brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society;
when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you
seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in
her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward
white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is
asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you
take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when
you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy"
(however old you are) and your last name becomes "John, " and your wife and
mother are never given the respected title "Mrs. "; when you are harried by day and
haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance,
never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer
resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when
the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into
the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience ....
C. The Black Revolution Erupts
485
You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I began thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing
forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency, made up in part of
Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, are so drained of self-respect
and a sense of "somebodiness" that they have adjusted to segregation; and in part of
a few middle-class Negroes who, because of a degree of academic and economic
security and because in some ways they profit by segregation, have become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred,
and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various
black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and bestknown being Elijah Muhammad's Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro's frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made
up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible "devil."
I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate
neither the "do-nothingism" of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the
black nationalist. For there is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest.
I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of
nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle.
If this philosophy had not emerged, by now many streets of the South would, I
am convinced, be flowing with blood. And I am further convinced that if our white
brothers dismiss as "rabble-rousers" and "outside agitators" those of us who employ
nonviolent direct action, and if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in
black-nationalist ideologies-a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare ....
I wish you had commended the Negro sit-inners and demonstrators of Binningham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its real
heroes. They will be the James Merediths,* with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that
characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro
women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman in Montgomery, Alabama,
who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: "My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest." They will be
the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and
a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and
willingly going to jail for conscience' sake. One day the South will know that when
these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality
standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values
in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great
*Escorted by four hundred federal marshals and three thousand federal troops, James Meredith was the
first black student to enroll at the historically all-white University of Mississippi in 1962. Four years later,
he was wounded by gunfire while leading a voter-registration drive in Mississippi.
486
Chapter 38
Tbe Stormy Sixties, 1960-1968
wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence ... .
Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood,
Martin Luther King, jr.
5. President johnson Supports Civil Rights ( 1965)
Prompted largely by the mass outpouring of sentiment inspired by Martin Luther
King, jr., Congress passed a major Civil Rights Act in 1964. It prohibited discrimination in most public places, forbade employers or unions to discriminate on the basis
of race, and created an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to provide enforcement. Yet King and other black leaders were determined not to rest until they
had secured federal legislation protecting the right of African Americans to vote.
Once again, King chose Alabama as the stage for demonstrations designed to force
the johnson administration 's hand. On March 7, 1965, demonstrators marching
from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital at Montgomery were brutally beaten and
dispersed by state troopers and hastily deputiz ed "possemen. " Millions of Americans
witnessed the violent assault on television, and within days hundreds of clergy of all
faiths had poured into Selma to aid King. One of them, a Boston Unitarian minister,
died after having been clubbed by a gang of white hooligans. Tbe pressure on Washington to act mounted to irresistible proportions, and on March 15 President johnson addressed Congress and the nation, as follows, to plead for a voting rights bill.
Although johnson had in fact tried to discourage King from marching in Alabama,
he now threw the full moral and legal weight of his office behind the cause of black
voting rights. In what broader context does he try to see the civil rights movement?
How do his personal feelings and experiences influence his political action?
Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, Members of the Congress:
I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy.
I urge every member of both parties, Americans of all religions and of all colors,
from every section of this country, to join me in that cause.
At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.
There, long-suffering men and women peacefully protested the denial of their
rights as Americans. Many were brutally assaulted. One good man, a man of God,
was killed.
There is no cause for pride in what has happened in Selma. There is no cause for
self-satisfaction in the long denial of equal rights of millions of Americans. But there
is cause for hope and for faith in our democracy in what is happening here
tonight. . . .
. . . [R]arely in any time does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself.
Rarely are we met with a challenge, not to our growth or abundance, our welfare or
5Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B . j ohnson, 1965, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C. :
National Archives and Records Service, 1966), pp. 281-287.
C. The Black Revolution Erupts
487
our security, but rather to the values and the purposes and the meaning of our
beloved Nation.
The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue. And should we
defeat every enemy, should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still
be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation.
For with a country as with a person, "What is a man profited, if he shall gain the
whole world, and lose his own soul?".. .
This was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded with a purpose.
The great phrases of that purpose still sound in every American heart, North and
South: "All men are created equal"- "government by consent of the governed"- "give
me liberty or give me death. "....
Those words are a promise to every citizen that he shall share in the dignity of
man. This dignity cannot be found in a man's possessions; it cannot be found in his
power, or in his position. It really rests on his right to be treated as a man equal in
opportunity to all others. It says that he shall share in freedom, he shall choose his
leaders, educate his children, and provide for his family according to his ability and
his merits as a human being.
To apply any other test-to deny a man his hopes because of his color or race,
his religion or the place of his birth-is not only to do injustice, it is to deny America and to dishonor the dead who gave their lives for American freedom.
The Right to Vote
Our fathers believed that if this noble view of the rights of man was to flourish,
it must be rooted in democracy. The most basic right of all was the right to choose
your own leaders. The history of this country, in large measure, is the history of the
expansion of that right to all of our people.
Many of the issues of civil rights are very complex and most difficult. But about
this there can artd should be no argument. Every American citizen must have an equal
right to vote. There is no reason which can excuse the denial of that right. There is no
duty which weighs more heavily on us than the duty we have to ensure that right.
Yet the harsh fact is that in many places in this country men and women are
kept from voting simply because they are Negroes.
Every device of which human ingenuity is capable has been used to deny this
right. The Negro citizen may go to register only to be told that the day is wrong, or
the hour is late, or the official in charge is absent. And if he persists, and if he manages to present himself to the registrar, he may be disqualified because he did not
spell out his middle name or because he abbreviated a word on the application.
And if he manages to fill out an application he is given a test. The registrar is the
sole judge of whether he passes this test. He may be asked to recite the entire Constitution, or explain the most complex provisions of State law. And even a college
degree cannot be used to prove that he can read and write.
For the fact is that the only way to pass these barriers is to show a white
skin ....
In such a case our duty must be clear to all of us. The Constitution says that no
person shall be kept from voting because of his race or his color. We have all sworn
an oath before God to support and to defend that Constitution. We must now act in
obedience to that oath.
488
Chapter 38
The Stormy Sixties, 1960-1968
Guaranteeing the Right to Vote
Wednesday I will send to Congress a law designed to eliminate illegal barriers
to the right to vote ....
This bill will strike down restrictions to voting in all elections-Federal, State,
and local-which have been used to deny Negroes the right to vote.
This bill will establish a simple, uniform standard which cannot be used, however ingenious the effort, to flout our Constitution.
It will provide for citizens to be registered by officials of the United States Government if the State officials refuse to register them.
It will eliminate tedious, unnecessary lawsuits which delay the right to vote.
Finally, this legislation will ensure that properly registered individuals are not
prohibited from voting ....
To those who seek to avoid action by their National Government in their own
communities; who want to and who seek to maintain purely local control over elections, the answer is simple:
Open your polling places to all your people.
Allow men and women to register and vote whatever the color of their skin.
Extend the rights of citizenship to every citizen of this land ....
We Shall Overcome
But even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in
Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of
America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.
Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is
all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.
And we shall overcome.
As a man whose roots go deeply into Southern soil I know how agonizing
racial feelings are. I know how difficult it is to reshape the attitudes and the structure of our society.
But a century has passed, more than a hundred years, since the Negro was freed.
And he is not fully free tonight. ...
The time of justice has now come. I tell you that I believe sincerely that no force
can hold it back. It is right in the eyes of man and God that it should come. And
when it does, I think that day will brighten the lives of every American.
For Negroes are not the only victims. How many white children have gone uneducated, how many white families have lived in stark poverty, how many white
lives have been scarred by fear, because we have wasted our energy and our substance to maintain the barriers of hatred and terror?
So I say to all of you here, and to all in the Nation tonight, that those who appeal to you to hold on to the past do so at the cost of denying you your future .
This great, rich, restless country can offer opportunity and education and hope
to all: black and white, North and South, sharecropper and city dweller. These are
the enemies: poverty, ignorance, disease. They are the enemies and not our fellow
man, not our neighbor. And these enemies too, poverty, disease and ignorance, we
shall overcome ....
C. The Black Revolution Erupts
489
The Purpose of This Government
My first job after college was as a teacher in Cotulla, Texas, in a small MexicanAmerican school. Few of them could speak English, and I couldn't speak much
Spanish. My students were poor and they often came to class without breakfast,
hungry. They knew even in their youth the pain of prejudice. They never seemed to
know why people disliked them. But they knew it was so, because I saw it in their
eyes. I often walked home late in the afternoon, after the classes were finished ,
wishing there was more that I could do. But all I knew was to teach them the little
that I knew, hoping that it might help them against the hardships that lay ahead.
Somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its
scars on the hopeful face of a young child.
I never thought then, in 1928, that I would be standing here in 1965. It never even
occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I might have the chance to help the sons
and daughters of those students and to help people like them all over this country.
But now I do have that chance-and I'll let you in on a secret-! mean to use
it. And I hope that you will use it with me ....
6. A Conservative Denounces Black Rioters ( 1965)
With the passage of the Voting Rights Act in the summer of 1965, the civil rights
movement seemed to stand triumphant, and the johnson administration seemed at
last to have fulfilled the promises of emancipation made a century earlier. But the
moment of satisfaction was brief just five days after President johnson signed the
Voting Rights Act, a rampaging riot swept through the black Los Angeles ghetto of
Watts, leaving some thirty-four persons dead. Moderates were shocked and disillusioned; conservatives were angry. They turned their rage on African American leaders like Martin Luther King. In the following selection, Dr. Will Herberg, a noted
conservative intellectual of the day, denounces the Watts rioters and blames King for
their actions. Is his assessment of King 's role fair?
The country is still reeling from the shock of what happened in Los Angeles. Six
days of "racial" rioting, of violence uncontrolled and uncontrollable. Thousands of
Negroes running wild, burning, destroying, looting, spreading from the Negro section outward, on a scale that made a senior officer of the National Guard, which
finally quelled the rioting, describe it as veritable insurrection.
The fury of hatred and violence revealed in these six dreadful days has engendered a profound uneasiness through every part of the country. How could it have
happened? After all, Los Angeles is not the Congo--or is it?
Of course, the politicians and the professional bleeding hearts immediately
began to mumble the tired old phrases about "poverty" and "frustration ," as though
nobody was, or ever had been, poor or frustrated except the Los Angeles Negroes.
(The living standards and conditions of life of the Negroes in Los Angeles, bad as
they are, would have seemed something near to heaven to most of the immigrants
who came to this country in earlier years.) . ..
6National
mission.
Review 17 (September 7, 1965): 769-770. 150 E. 35th Street, New York, N.Y. 10016. By per-
490
Chapter 38
The Stormy Sixties, 1960-1968
Internal order is the first necessity of every society. Even justice is secondary to
order, because without order there can be no society and no justice, however partial
and fragmentary ....
But the internal order of a community, which is so primary and precious to it, is
always precarious ....
It is preserved by force-by the naked force of police ... but more immediately
by the force of custom and respect for constituted authority. It is these two-custom
and respect for constituted authority-that do the everyday work of maintaining
order and security. When these are weakened or destroyed, hell breaks loosewhether it is in the Congo or in Los Angeles, whether it is Negroes or whites who
do the devil's work. ...
This internal order is now in jeopardy; ~nd it is in jeopardy because of the doings of such highminded, self-righteous "children of light" as the Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King and his associates in the leadership of the "civil rights" movement. If you
are looking for those ultimately responsible for the murder, arson, and looting in Los
Angeles, look to them: they are the.guilty ones, these apostles of "non-violence."
For years now, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his associates have been deliberately undermining the foundations of internal order in this country. With their
rabble-rousing demagoguery, they have been cracking the "cake of custom" that
holds us together. With their doctrine of "civil qisobedience," they have been teaching
hundreds of thousands of Negroes-particularly the adolescents and the childrenthat it is perfectly all right to break the law and defy constituted authority if you are
a Negro-with-a-grievance; in protest against injustice. And they have done more
than talk. They have on occasion after occasion, in almost every part of the country,
called out their mobs on the streets, promoted "school strikes," sit-ins, lie-ins, in explicit violation of the law and in explicit defiance of the public authority. They have
taught anarchy and chaos by word and deed-and, no doubt, with the best intentions-and they have found apt pupils everywhere, with intentions not of the best.
Sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind. But it is not they alone who reap it, but we
as well; the entire nation.
It is worth noting that the worst victims of these high-minded rabble-rousers are
not so much the hated whites, but the great mass of the Negro people themselves.
The great mass of the Negro people cannot be blamed for the lawlessness and violence in Harlem, Chicago, Los Angeles, or elsewhere. All they want to do is what decent people everywhere want to do: make a living, raise a family, bring up their
children as good citizens, with better advantages than they themselves ever had.
The "civil rights" movement and the consequent lawlessness has well-nigh shattered
these hopes; not only because of the physical violence and insecurity, but above all
because of the corruption and demoralization of the children, who have been lured
away from the steady path of decency and self-government to the more exhilarating
road of "demonstrating"-and rioting. An old friend of mine from Harlem put it to
me after the riots last year: "For more than fifteen years we've worked our heads off
to make something out of these boys. Now look at them-they're turning into
punks and hoodlums roaming the streets."
Shall we wreak our wrath upon such "punks" and "hoodlums," the actual rioters, and allow those ultimately responsible, the Martin Luther Kings, the inciters to
law-defiance in the name of "conscience," to go immune in their self-righteousness?
D. Vietnam Troubles
491
They stand horrified at the rioting and violence. But isn't it all the handiwork of the
demons they themselves raised? They are the guilty ones-despite the best intentions.
If they have any conscience left besides that which they use as justification for the
violation of law, let them search it now.
D. Vietnam Troubles ______________________
I. The Joint Chiefs of Staff Propose
a Wider War ( 1964)
U.S. involvement in Vietnam went back at least as far as 1950, when President Truman began aiding the French in their effort to suppress a nationalist insurgency in
their Indochinese colony. Despite U.S. help, the French forces collapsed in 1954. An
international conference in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1954 divided Vietnam at the
17th parallel and called for elections in all of Vietnam in 1956. Tbe elections were
never held, primarily because the government in South Vietnam, encouraged by the
United States, feared that the communists in the North, led by Ho Chi Minh, would
score a massive victory. President Eisenhower pledged in 1954 to provide military assistance to the government of South Vietnam, and by the end ofEisenhower's term in
office about seven hundred U.S. "advisers" were helping to bolster the Vietnamese
military. President Kennedy thus inherited a risky but limited commitment to South
Vietnam . Meanwhile, communist-led nationalist forces, abetted by the communist
regime in North Vietnam, were stepping up the pressure on the shaky South Vietnamese government in Saigon. A bloody military coup in late 1963 brought a new,
apparently tougher government to Saigon, setting the stage for increasing U.S. involvement. A few months later, General Maxwell D. Taylor, the chairman of the joint
Chiefs of Staff, sent the following memorandum to Secretary of Defense Robert S.
McNamara, proposing intensified U.S. military actions in Vietnam. What reasons
does he offer for such actions? How persuasive are his reasons?
1. National Security Action Memorandum No. 273 [NSAM 273] makes clear the
resolve of the President to ensure victory over the externally directed and supported
communist insurgency in South Vietnam. In order to achieve that victory, the Joint
Chiefs of Staff are of the opinion that the United States must be prepared to put
aside many of the self-imposed restrictions which now limit our efforts, and to
undertake bolder actions which may embody greater risks.
2. The Joint Chiefs of Staff are increasingly mindful that our fortunes in South Vietnam are an accurate barometer of our fortunes in all of Southeast Asia. It is our view
that if the U.S. program succeeds in South Vietnam it will go far toward stabilizing the
total Southeast Asia situation. Conversely, a loss of South Vietnam to the communists
will presage an early erosion of the remainder of our position in that subcontinent.
3. Laos, existing on a most fragile foundation now, would not be able to endure
the establishment of a communist-or pseudo neutralist-state on its eastern flank.
1
Pentagon Papers, New York Times edition (1971), pp. 274-277.
492
Chapter 38
The Stormy Sixties, 1960-1968
Thailand, less strong today than a month ago by virtue of the loss of Prime Minister
Sarit would probably be unable to withstand the pressures of infiltration from the
north should Laos collapse to the communists in its turn. Cambodia apparently has
estimated that our prospects in South Vietnam are not promising and, encouraged
by the actions of the French, appears already to be seeking an accommodation with
the communists. Should we actually suffer defeat in South Vietnam, there is little
reason to believe that Cambodia would maintain even a pretense of neutrality.
4. In a broader sense, the failure of our programs in South Vietnam would have
heavy influence on the judgments of Burma, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan, Taiwan, the Republic of Korea, and the Republic of the Philippines with respect to U.S.
durability, resolution, and trustworthiness. Finally, this being the first real test of our
determination to defeat the communist wars of national liberation formula, it is not
unreasonable to conclude that there would be a corresponding unfavorable effect
upon our image in Africa and in Latin America.
5. All of this underscores the pivotal position now occupied by South Vietnam
in our world-wide confrontation with the communists and the essentiality that the
conflict there would be brought to a favorable end as soon as possible ....
6. The Joint Chiefs of Staff are convinced that, in keeping with the guidance in
NSAM 273, the United States must make plain to the enemy our determination to see
the Vietnam campaign through to a favorable conclusion ....
7. Our considerations, furthermore, cannot be confined entirely to South Vietnam. Our experience in the war thus far leads us to conclude that, in this respect,
we are not now giving sufficient attention to the broader area problems of Southeast Asia. The Joint Chiefs of Staff believe that our position in Cambodia, our attitude toward Laos, our actions in Thailand, and our great effort in South Vietnam do
not comprise a compatible and integrated U.S. policy for Southeast Asia. U.S. objectives in Southeast Asia cannot be achieved by either economic, political, or military
measures alone. All three fields must be integrated into a single, broad U.S. program
for Southeast Asia. The measures recommended in this memorandum are a partial
contribution to such a program.
8. Currently we and the South Vietnamese are fighting the war on the enemy's
terms. He has determined the locale, the timing, and the tactics of the battle while
our actions are essentially reactive. One reason for this is the fact that we have
obliged ourselves to labor under self-imposed restrictions with respect to impeding
external aid to the Viet Cong. These restrictions include keeping the war within the
boundaries of South Vietnam, avoiding the direct use of U.S. combat forces, and limiting U.S. direction of the campaign to rendering advice to the government of Vietnam. These restrictions, while they may make our international position more readily
defensible, all tend to make the task in Vietnam more complex, time-consuming,
and in the end, more costly. In addition to complicating our own problem, these
self-imposed restrictions may well now be conveying signals of irresolution to our
enemies-encouraging them to higher levels of vigor and greater risks. A reversal of
attitude and the adoption of a more aggressive program would enhance greatly our
ability to control the degree to which escalation will occur. It appears probable that
the economic and agricultural disappointments suffered by Communist China, plus
the current rift with the Soviets, could cause the communists to think twice about
undertaking a large-scale military adventure in Southeast Asia.
D . Vietnam Troubles
493
9 . .. . It is our conviction that if support of the insurgency from outside South
Vietnam in terms of operational direction, personnel, and material were stopped completely, the character of the war in South Vietnam would be substantially and favorably altered. Because of this conviction, we are wholly in favor of executing the covert
actions against North Vietnam which you have recently proposed to the President. . . .
10. Accordingly, the Joint Chiefs of Staff consider that the United States must
make ready to conduct increasingly bolder actions in Southeast Asia; specifically as
to Vietnam to:
a. Assign to the U.S. military commander responsibilities for the total U.S. program in Vietnam.
b . Induce the Government of Vietnam to turn over to the United States military
commander, temporarily, the actual tactical direction of the war.
c. Charge the United States military commander with complete responsibility
for conduct of the program against North Vietnam.
d. Overfly Laos and Cambodia to whatever extent is necessary for acquisition
of operational intelligence.
e. Induce the Government of Vietnam to conduct overt ground operations in
Laos of sufficient scope to impede the flow of personnel and material southward.
f. Arm, equip, advise, and support the Government of Vietnam in its conduct of
aerial bombing of critical targets in North Vietnam and in mining the sea approaches
to that country.
g. Advise and support the Government of Vietnam in its conduct of large-scale
commando raids against critical targets in North Vietnam.
h. Conduct aerial bombing of key North Vietnam targets, using U.S. resources
under Vietnamese cover, and with the Vietnamese openly assuming responsibility
for the actions.
i. Commit additional U.S. forces, as necessary, in support of the combat action
within South Vietnam.
j. Commit U.S . forces as necessary in direct actions against North Vietnam ....
2. President johnson Asserts His War Aims ( 1965)
On August 2-4, 1964, two U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin were reportedly fired
on by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. President johnson, concealing the fa ct that the
destroyers had been engaging in provocative raids on North Vietnam, used the incident to secure from Congress a sweeping mandate for U.S. military interoention (the
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution). Then, in February 1965, Viet Gong guerrillas attacked a
U.S. base at Pleiku, .South Vietnam, and johnson seized the occasion to begin an
enormous escalation of the U.S. military presence in Southeast Asia. He ordered virtually continuous bombing of North Vietnam and sharply increased the number of
U.S. troops in South Vietnam (to nearly 200,000 by the end of 1965). On April 7,
1965, in a major address at johns Hopkins University, johnson set forth his reasons
for the increasing U.S. commitment. just two weeks earlier, the assistant secretary of
defense for international security affairs had noted in a private memorandum that
2
Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ly ndon B . j ohnson (Washington , D.C.: National
Archives and Records Service, 1966) , p. 395.
494
Chapter 38
The Stormy Sixties, 1960-1968
U.S. war aims were "70%-to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat (to our reputation as a
guarantor)) 20%-to keep South Vietnam (and the adjacent) territory from Chinese
hands) 10%-to permit the people of South Vietnam to enjoy a better, freer way of life.
Also-to emerge from crisis without unacceptable taint from methods used. Not-to
'help a friend. J" Was johnson 's speech consistent with that thinking?
.. . Why are we in South Viet-Nam?
We are there because we have a promise to keep. Since 1954 every American
President has offered support to the people of South Viet-Nam. We have helped to
build, and we have helped to defend. Thus, over many years, we have made a national pledge to help South Viet-Nam defend its independence.
And I intend to keep that promise.
To dishonor that pledge, to abandon this small and brave nation to its enemies,
and to the terror that must follow, would be an unforgivable wrong.
We are also there to strengthen world order. Around the globe from Berlin to
Thailand are people whose well-being rests in part on the belief that they can count
on us [to honor some forty defensive alliances] if they are attacked. To leave VietNam to its fate would shake the confidence of all these people in the value of an
American commitment and in the value of America's word. The result would be increased unrest and instability, and even wider war.
We are also there because there are great stakes in the balance. Let no one think
for a moment that retreat from Viet-Nam would bring an end to conflict. The battle
would be renewed in one country and then another. The central lesson of our time
is that the appetite of aggression is never satisfied .. ..
Our objective is the independence of South Viet-Nam and its freedom from attack. We want nothing for ourselves-only that the people of South Viet-Nam be allowed to guide their own country in their own way.
We w ill do everything necessary to reach that objective and we will do only
what is absolutely necessary.
3. The British Prime Minister Criticizes
U.S. Bombing ( 1965)
Operation Rolling Thunder-large-scale bombing raids on North Vietnam-evoked
worldwide criticism in 1965. Even U.S. allies grew restive. On june 3) 1965, British
Prime Minister Harold Wilson sent the following cable to President johnson) gently
but firmly taking issue with U.S. policy in Vietnam. What did Wilson find most
objectionable?
I was most grateful to you for asking Bob McNamara [secretary of defense] to
arrange the very full briefing about the two oil targets near Hanoi and Haiphong
that Col. Rogers gave me yesterday . . ..
I know you will not feel that I am either unsympathetic or uncomprehending of
the dilemma that this problem presents for you. In particular, I wholly understand the
deep concern you must feel at the need to do anything possible to reduce the losses
3Pentagon
Papers, New York Times edition (1971), pp . 448-449.
D. Vietnam Troubles
495
of young Americans in and over Vietnam; and Col. Rogers made it clear to us what care
has been taken to plan this operation so as to keep civilian casualties to the minimum.
However, ... I am bound to say that, as seen from here, the possible military
benefits that may result from this bombing do not appear to outweigh the political
disadvantages that would seem the inevitable consequence. If you and the South
Vietnamese Government were conducting a declared war on the conventional pattern ... this operation would clearly be necessary and right. But since you have
made it abundantly clear-and you know how much we have welcomed and supported this-that your purpose is to achieve a negotiated settlement, and that you
are not striving for total military victory in the field, I remain convinced that the
bombing of these targets, without producing decisive military advantage, may only
increase the difficulty of reaching an eventual settlement. ...
The last thing I wish is to add to your difficulties, but, as I warned you in my
previous message, if this action is taken we shall have to dissociate ourselves from
it, and in doing so I should have to say that you had given me advance warning and
that I had made my position clear to you ....
Nevertheless I want to repeat ... that our reservations about this operation will
not affect our continuing support for your policy over Vietnam, as you and your
people have made it clear from your Baltimore speech onwards. But, while this will
remain the Government's position, I know that the effect on public opinion in this
country-and I believe throughout Western Europe-is likely to be such as to reinforce the existing disquiet and criticism that we have to deal with.
4. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara
Foresees a Stalemate ( 1965)
Despite intense air attacks on North Vietnam and swelling contingents of U.S. troops,
the United States and its South Vietnamese allies made little headway in Vietnam. At
home, conservative critics demanded that the military be given a free hand to deliver
a knockout blow to the communist forces. The government's policy, however, was to
increase its application of force only in carefully measured increments. In an assessment of the war effort in December 1965, Secretary of Defense RobertS. McNamara suggested one reason for this policy of cautious escalation. What did he see as
the greatest restraint on U.S. ability to raise the stakes in Vietnam?
... We believe that, whether or not major new diplomatic initiatives are made,
the U.S. must send a substantial number of additional forces to VN [Vietnam] if we
are to avoid being defeated there. (30 Nov program; concurred in by ]CS [Joint
Chiefs of Staff])
IV. Prognosis assuming the recommended deployments
Deployments of the kind we have recommended will not guarantee success.
Our intelligence estimate is that the present Communist policy is to continue to
prosecute the war vigorously in the South. They continue to believe that the war
will be a long one, that time is their ally, and that their own staying power is superior
to ours. They recognize that the U.S. reinforcements of 1965 signify a determination
4
Pentagon Papers, New York Times edition (1971) , pp. 489-490.
496
Chapter 38
Ybe Stormy Sixties, 1960-1968
to avoid defeat, and that more U.S. troops can be expected. Even though the Communists will continue to suffer heavily from GVN [government of Vietnam] and U.S.
ground and air action, we expect them, upon learning of any U.S. intentions to augment its forces, to boost their own commitment and to test U.S. capabilities and will
to persevere at higher level of conflict and casualties (U.S. KIA [killed in action] with
the recommended deployments can be expected to reach 1000 a month).
If the U.S. were willing to commit enough forces-perhaps 600,000 men or
more-we could ultimately prevent the DRV/ VC [Democratic Republic of Vietnam / Viet Cong] from sustaining the conflict at a significant level. When this point
was reached, however, the question of Chinese intervention would become critical.
(We are generally agreed that the Chinese Communists will intervene with combat
forces to prevent destruction of the Communist regime in the DRV. It is less clear
whether they would intervene to prevent a DRV/ VC defeat in the South.) The intelligence estimate is that the chances are a little better than even that, at this stage,
Hanoi and Peiping would choose to reduce the effort in the South and try to salvage
their resources for another day; but there is an almost equal chance that they would
enlarge the war and bring in large numbers of Chinese forces (they have made certain preparations which could point in this direction).
It follows, therefore, that the odds are about even that, even with the recommended deployments, we will be faced in early 1967 with a military standoff at a
much higher level, with pacification still stalled, and with any prospect of military
success marred by the chances of an active Chinese intervention ....
5. Secretary McNamara Opposes
Further Escalation (1966)
By the end of 1966 Vietnam was beginning to look like a bottomless pit into which the
United States was dumping precious money and more precious men. Secretary of Defense McNamara, one of the original architects of US. involvement, was among the first
high-level officials to grow disenchanted with the course of the war. In his report to the
president, given here, he records his increasingly pessimistic assessment of US. prospects
in Southeast Asia. Such views did not endear him to President johnson, who clung to
the hope that the United States could salvage some kind of victory from the Vietnam
quagmire, and McNamara soon resigned. But when military men in the spring of 1968
requested an additional 200, 000 troops for Vietnam, johnson at last drew the line. He
put a ceiling on US. troop commitments and withdrew from the 1968 presidential race
so as to pursue peace more effectively. For johnson, it was too little, too late. There was
no peace in 1968 (the war dragged on five more years), and his party lost the White
House in that year to the Republican candidate, Richard M. Nixon. Nixon soon announced a policy of "Vietnamization "-increasing the role of the Vietnamese in their
own war, while simultaneously decreasing the US. role. In what ways does McNamara s 1966 report foreshadow Nixon's approach? Why was McNamara pessimistic?
What was his view of the bombing operation over North Vietnam?
5Pentagon
Papers, New York Times edition (1971) , pp. 542-551.
D. Vietnam Troubles
497
1. Evaluation of the situation. In the report of my last trip to Vietnam almost
a year ago, I stated that the odds were about even that, even with the thenrecommended deployments, we would. be faced in early 1967 with a military standoff at a much higher level of conflict and with "pacification" still stalled. I am a little
less pessimistic now in one respect. We have done somewhat better militarily than I
anticipated. We have by and large blunted the communist military initiative-and
military victory in South Vietnam the Viet Cong may have had in mind 18 months
ago has been thwarted by our emergency deployments and actions. And our program of bombing the North has exacted a price.
My concern continues, however, in other respects. This is because I see no reasonable way to bring the war to an end soon. Enemy morale has not broken-he
apparently has adjusted to our stopping his drive for military victory and has
adopted a strategy of keeping us busy and waiting us out (a strategy of attriting our
national will). He knows that we have not been, and he believes we probably will
not be, able to translate our military successes into the "end products"-broken
enemy morale and political achievements by the GVN [government of Vietnam]. ...
Pacification is a bad disappointment. We have good grounds to be pleased by
the recent elections, by [President] Ky's 16 months in power, and by the faint signs of
development of national political institutions and of a legitimate civil government.
But none of this has translated itself into political achievements at Province level or
below. Pacification has if anything gone backward. As compared with two, or four,
years ago, enemy full-time regional forces and part-time guerrilla forces are larger; attacks, terrorism and sabotage have increased in scope and intensity; more railroads
are closed and highways cut; the rice crop expected to come to market is smaller; we
control little, if any, more of the population; the VC [VietCong] political infrastructure
thrives in most of the country, continuing to give the enemy his enormous intelligence advantage; full security exists nowhere (not even behind the U.S. Marines' lines
and in Saigon); in the countryside, the enemy almost completely controls the night.
Nor has the Rolling Thunder program of bombing the North either significantly
affected infiltration or cracked the morale of Hanoi. There is agreement in the intelligence community on these facts ....
In essence, we find ourselves-from the point of view of the important war (for
the complicity of the people)-no better, and if anything, worse off. This important
war must be fought and won by the Vietnamese themselves. We have known this
from the beginning. But the discouraging truth is that, as was the case in 1961 and
1963 and 1965, we have not found the formula, the catalyst, for training and inspiring them into effective action.
2. Recommended actions. In such an unpromising state of affairs, what should
we do? We must continue to press the enemy militarily; we must make demonstrable progress in pacification; at the same time, we must add a new ingredient forced
on us by the facts . Specifically, we must improve our position by getting ourselves
into a military posture that we credibly would maintain indefinitely-a posture that
makes trying to "wait us out" less attractive. I recommend a five-pronged course of
action to achieve those ends.
a. Stabilize U.S. force-levels in Vietnam. It is my judgment that, barring a dramatic change in the war, we should limit the increase in U.S. forces in SVN [South
498
Chapter 38
The Stormy Sixties, 1960-1968
Vietnam] in 1967 to 70,000 men and we should level off at the total of 470,000
which such an increase would provide .... *
b. Install a barrier. A portion of the 470,000 troops-perhaps 10,000 to
20,000-should be devoted to the construction and maintenance of an infiltration
barrier. Such a barrier would lie near the 17th parallel-would run from the sea,
across the neck of South Vietnam (choking off the new infiltration routes through
the DMZ [demilitarized zone] and across the trails in Laos. This interdiction system
(at an approximate cost of $1 billion) would comprise to the east a ground barrier
of fences, wire, sensors, artillery, aircraft and mobile troops; and to the west-mainly
in Laos-an interdiction zone covered by air-laid mines and bombing attacks pinpointed by air-laid acoustic sensors ....
c. Stabilize the Rolling Thunder program against the North. Attack sorties in
North Vietnam have risen from about 4,000 per month at the end of last year to
6,000 per month in the first quarter of this year and 12,000 per mopth at present.
Most of our 50 percent increase of deployed attack-capable aircraft has been absorbed in the attacks on North Vietnam. In North Vietnam, almost 84,000 attack sorties have been flown (about 25 percent against fixed targets), 45 percent during the
past severi months .... I recommend, as a minimum, against increasing the level of
bombing of North Vietnam and against increasing the intensity of operations by
changing the areas or kinds of targets struck.
Under these conditions, the bombing program would continue the pressure and
would remain available as a bargaining counter to get talks started (or to trade off in
talks). But, as in the case of a stabilized level of U.S. ground forces, the stabilization
of Rolling Thunder would remove the prospect of ever escalating bombing as a factor complicating our political posture and distracting from the main job of pacification in South Vietnam.
At the proper time, as discussed ... below, I believe we should consider terminating bombing in all of North Vietnam, or at least in the Northeast zones, for an indefinite period in connection with covert moves toward peace.
d. Pursue a vigorous pacification program ....
3. The prognosis. The prognosis is bad that the war can be brought to a satisfactory conclusion within the next two years. The large-unit operations probably
will not do it; negotiations probably will not do it. While we should continue to pursue both of these routes in trying for a solution in the short run, we should recognize
that success from them is a mere possibility, not a probability. [Emphasis in original.]
T~e solution lies in girding, openly, for a longer war and in taking actions immediately which will in 12 to 18 months give clear evidence that the continuing costs
and risks to the American people are acceptably limited, that the formula for success
has been found, and that the end of the war is merely a matter of time. All of my recommendations will contribute to this strategy, but the one most difficult to implement is perhaps the most important one-enlivening the pacification program. The
odds are less than even for this task, if only because we have failed consistently since
1961 to make a dent in the problem. But, because the 1967 trend of pacification will,
*Admiral Sharp has recommended a 12/ 31/ 67 strength of 570,000. However, I believe both he and General Westmoreland recognize that the danger of inflation will probably force an end 1967 deployment
limit of about 470,000. [Footnote in the original.)
D. Vietnam Troubles
499
I believe, be the main talisman of ultimate U.S . success or failure in Vietnam, extraor-
dinary imagination and effort should go into changing the stripes of that problem . . . .
6. The Soldiers' War ( 1966)
Hundreds of thousands of young Americans served in Vietnam; more than fifty
thousand lost their lives there during the decade-long conflict (it was the United
States' longest war). Much of the fighting was not conventional warfare, with frontlines and well-identified foes facing one another. Instead, the Americans faced guerrilla adversaries and their civilian supporters, who were indistinguishable from the
'friendly" South Vietnamese. In the absence of a defined front, there was no "rear,"
and U.S. troops often felt themselves to be adrift in a hostile sea of treacherous enemies. Brutality was inevitable in this kind of environment. Two wartime letters from
U.S. servicemen follow. What opinion did the writers have of the war? of their own
role in it? of antiwar protesters at home?
Dear Mom, ...
Yesterday I witnessed something that would make any American realize why
we are in this war. At least it did me. I was on daylight patrol. We were on a hill
overlooking a bridge that was out of our sector. I saw a platoon of Vietcong stopping traffic from going over the bridge. They were beating women and children
over the head with rifles, clubs, and fists. They even shot one woman and her child.
They were taking rice, coconuts, fish, and other assorted foods from these people.
The ones that didn't give they either beat or shot. I think you know what I tried to
do. I wanted to go down and kill all of those slant-eyed bastards. I started to and it
took two men to stop me. Those slobs have to be stopped, even if it takes every last
believer in a democracy and a free way of life to do it. I know after seeing their
brave tactics I'm going to try my best. So please don't knock [President] Johnson's
policy in Vietnam. There is a good reason for it. I'm not too sure what it is myself,
but I'm beginning to realize, especially after yesterday ....
Love,
Bill
How are the people taking to the war in Portland? I've read too much ... about
the way some of those cowardly students are acting on campuses. They sure don't
show me much as far as being American citizens. They have the idea that they are
our future leaders. Well, I won't follow nobody if he isn't going to help fight for my
freedom.
A few weeks ago, I had the chance to talk with some Marines who had come to
Okinawa for four (lousy) days of leave. They were more than happy because they
had been fighting for six months with no let-up. We sat in a restaurant all the time,
and I wish I could have taped it on my recorder. What they had to say would have
had an impact on the people back home . One showed me where he had been shot.
I asked if it hurt, and he didn't feel it. Not until after he got the--- that shot him.
He was more angry than hurt. They told me of some of their patrols and how they
would be talking to a buddy one minute and watch him die in the next. Or wake up
6G!enn
Munson, ed., Letters from VietNam (New York: Parallax Publishing Co., 1966), pp. 104, 118.
500
Chapter 38
The Stormy Sixties, 1960-1968
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in the morning and see a friend hung from a tree by hooks in his armpits with parts
of his body cut and shoved into his mouth. From what they said, the Vietcong aren't
the only ruthless ones. We have to be, too. Have to. You'd be surprised to know that
a guy you went to school with is right now shooting a nine-year-old girl and her
mother. He did it because if they got the chance they would kill him. Or throwing a
Vietcong out of a helicopter because he wouldn't talk.
One guy (who had broke down and cried) said that his one desire is to get
enough leave to go home and kick three of those demonstrators in a well-suited
place and bring him back. I tell you, it's horrible to read a paper and see our own
people aren't backing you up.
501
D. Vietnam Troubles
7. The Dilemma of Vietnam ( 1966)
By 1966, many Americans were agonizing about their country's involvement in
Southeast Asia, and a bitter argument over the Vietnam War was intensifying. In the
following image, from the Chicago Sun-Times, renowned cartoonist Bill Mauldin
ridiculed both the pro-war and antiwar factions . Was his criticism fair? What is the
cartoonist's own view of the war? What policy choices other than escalation and
withdrawal were there?
The Strategists
7 Bill
Mauldin © the Chicago Sun-Times; 1966.
502
E. The Politics
Chapter 38
The Stormy Sixties, 1960-1968
of Protest in the
1960s _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __
I. Students for a Democratic Society Issues
a Manifesto ( 1962)
Tbe civil rights struggle and the continuing Cold War inspired many young people
who came of age in the 1960s to take a radically critical look at U.S. society-even
before the worsening Vietnam imbroglio made radical disenchantment almost fashionable among the young. One of the earliest and most thoughiful expressions of this
incipient youthful radicalism was the Port Huron Statement, drafted by Tom Hayden and adopted by the fledgling Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), then in a
relatively moderate phase of development, at its national convention at Port Huron,
Michigan, in 1962. Tbis statement later proved enormously influential in shaping
the political views of many young activists. What aspects of the U.S. situation does it
.find most deplorable? How truly "radical" are the sentiments it expresses?
We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now
in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.
When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country
in the world; the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred by modern war, an
initiator of the United Nations that we thought would distribute Western influence
throughout the world. Freedom and equality for each individual government of, by,
and for the people-these American values we found good, principles by which we
could live as men. Many of us began maturing in complacency.
As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to
dismiss. First, the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized
by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry, compelled most of us from silence to
activism. Second, the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of
the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract "others" we knew more directly because of our common peril, might die at
any time. We might deliberately ignore, or avoid, or fail to feel all other human problems, but not these two, for these were too immediate and crushing in their impact,
too challenging in the demand that we as individuals take the responsibility for encounter and resolution.
While these and other problems either directly oppressed us or rankled our
consciences and became our own subjective concern, we began to see complicated
and disturbing paradoxes in our surrounding America. The declaration "all men are
created equal ... " rang hollow before the facts of Negro life in the South and the
big cities of the North. The proclaimed peaceful intentions of the United States contradicted its economic and military investments in the Cold War status quo.
We witnessed, and continue to witness, other paradoxes. With nuclear energy
whole cities can easily be powered, yet the dominant nation-states seem more likely
to unleash destruction greater than that incurred in all wars of human history. Al1
From the Port Huron Statement. Reprinted by permission of Tom Hayden, a founding member of Students for a Democratic Society and principal author of the Port Huron Statement. He was elected to the
California legislature in 1982.
E. Tbe Politics of Protest in the 1960s
503
though our own technology is destroying old and creating new forms of social organization, men still tolerate meaningless work and idleness. While two-thirds of mankind
suffers undernourishment, our own upper classes revel amidst superfluous abundance. Although world population is expected to double in forty years, the nations
still tolerate anarchy as a major principle of international conduct and uncontrolled
exploitation governs the sapping of the earth's physical resources. Although mankind
desperately needs revolutionary leadership, America rests in national stalemate, its
goals ambiguous and tradition-bound instead of informed and clear, its democratic
system apathetic and manipulated rather than "of, by, and for the people."
Not only did tarnish appear on our image of American virtue, not only did disillusion occur when the hypocrisy of American ideals was discovered, but we began
to sense. that what we had originally seen as the American Golden Age was actually
the decline of an era. The worldwide outbreak of revolution against colonialism and
imperialism, the entrenchment of totalitarian states, the menace of war, overpopulation, international disorder, supertechnology-these trends were testing the tenacity
of our own commitment to democracy and freedom and our abilities to visualize
their application to a world in upheaval.
Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living. But we are a minority-the vast majority of our people regard
the temporary equilibriums of our society and world as eternally functional parts. In
this is perhaps the outstanding paradox: we ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet
the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative to the present. Beneath the reassuring tones of the politicians, beneath the common opinion that
America will "muddle through, " beneath the stagnation of those who have dosed
their minds to the future, is the pervading feeling that there simply are no alternatives, that our times have witnessed the exhaustion not only of Utopias, but of any
new departures as well. Feeling the press of complexity upon the emptiness of life,
people are fearful of the thought that at any moment things might be thrust out of
control. They fear change itself, since change might smash whatever invisible framework seems to hold back chaos for them now. For most Americans, all crusades are
suspect, threatening. The fact that each individual sees apathy in his fellows perpetuates the common reluctance to organize for change. The dominant institutions are
complex enough to blunt the minds of their potential critics, and entrenched enough
to swiftly dissipate or entirely repeal the energies of protest and reform, thus limiting human expectancies. Then, too, we are a materially improved society, and by our
own improvements we seem to have weakened the case for further change.
Some would have us believe that Americans feel contentment amidst prosperitybut might it not better be called a glaze above deeply felt anxieties about their role in
the new world? And if these anxieties produce a developed indifference to human affairs, do they not as well produce a yearning to believe there is an alternative to the
present, not [that] something can be done to change circumstances in the school, the
workplaces, the bureaucracies, the government? It is to this latter yearning, at once the
spark and engine of change, that we direct our present appeal. The search for truly
democratic alternatives to the present, and a commitment to social experimentation
with them, is a worthy and fulfilling human enterprise, one which moves us and, we
hope, others today. On such a basis do we offer this document of our convictions and
analysis: as an effort in understanding and changing the conditions of humanity in the
504
Chapter 38
The Stormy Sixties, 1960-1968
late twentieth centmy, an effort rooted in the ancient, still unfulfilled conception of
man attaining determining influence over his circumstances of life.
2. Young Americans for Freedom Makes
a Statement ( 1960)
Meeting at the Sharon, Connecticut, home of conservative activist and National Review publisher William F. Buckley, ]r., in September 1960, a group of college students
drafted the following statement ofprinciples as the founding charter of Young Americans for Freedom. YAP became a rallying point for young conservatives through the
tumultuous 1960s and provided organizational support for the eventual conservative Republican resurgence that culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan in
1980. In what ways do the ideas in the following "Sharon Statement" resemble those
in the manifesto of Students for a Democratic Society (see the previous document)?
In what ways do they differ? How might one account for the subsequent political
fates of the two ideologies and the two groups?
The Sharon Statement
Adopted by the Young Americans for Freedom in conference at Sharon, Conn.,
September ~11 , 1960
In this time of moral and political crisis, it is the responsibility of the youth of
America to affirm certain eternal truths .
We, as young conservatives, believe:
That foremost among the transcendent values is the individual's use of his
God-given free will, whence derives his right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force;
That liberty is indivisible, and that political freedom cannot long exist without
economic freedom;
That the purposes of government are to protect these freedoms through the
preservation of internal order, the provision of national defense, and the administration of justice;
That when government ventures beyond these rightful functions, it accumulates
power which tends to diminish order and liberty;
That the Constitution of the United States is the best arrangement yet devised
for empowering government to fulfill its proper role , while restraining it from the
concentration and abuse of power;
That the genius of the Constitution-the division of powers-is summed up in
the clause which reserves primacy to the several states, or to the people, in those
spheres not specifically delegated to the Federal Government;
That the market economy, allocating resources by the free play of supply and
demand, is the single economic system compatible with the requirements of personal freedom and constitutional government, and that it is at the same time the
most productive supplier of human needs;
2
Reprinted from National Review, September 24, 1960, p. 173 by permission of the publisher.
E. The Politics of Protest in the 1960s
505
That when government interferes with the work of the market economy, it
tends to reduce the moral and physical strength of the nation; that when it takes
from one man to bestow on another, it diminishes the incentive of the first, the integrity of the second, and the moral autonomy of both;
That we will be free only so long as the national sovereignty of the United
States is secure; that histmy shows periods of freedom are rare, and can exist only
when free citizens concertedly defend their rights against all enemies;
That the forces of international Communism are, at present, the greatest single
threat to these liberties;
That the United States should stress victory over, rather than coexistence with,
this menace; and
That American foreign policy must be judged by this criterion: does it serve the
just interests of the United States?
3. A War Protester Decides to Resist the Draft ( 1966)
No other issue did more to breed disenchantment among young people in the 1960s
than the Vietnam War. As revelations spread about the deepening U.S. involvement
there, and as the government in Washington proved increasingly unable to justify
the conflict to the American public, countless people, especially college youths, expressed their disaffection. For many young men of draft age, their relationship with
the Selective Service System became both a political and a moral issue. One young
man who decided to resist the draft was David Harris, a former Boy of the Year from
Fresno, California, and, in 1966, president of the student body at Stanford University. With his friend Dennis Sweeney-who a decade and a half later would be convicted of murdering former congressman Allard K. Lowenstein, another antiwar
activist-Harris helped to organize a draft-resistance movement among college students. In the following passage, Harris describes his own decision to become a draft
resister. (He would later spend nearly two years in a federal penitentiary as a consequence.) What were his motives? Was he justified in reaching his decision?
The more we learned about the war, the worse it seemed. Late in July, Cooley
Street attended a lecture by a Canadian journalist who had just returned from North
Vietnam. Dennis and the Channing Street group were at the lecture as well. *
With what amounted to only a fledgling air defense system, explained the journalist, North Vietnam had no hope of turning the American Force back. Theoretically,
strategic air power destroys the enemy's industrial, logistic, and transportation systems, but North Vietnam possessed little centralized industry and only a rudimentary
transportation system. Consequently, the target increasingly became the population
itself. The American strategy's starting point was a calculation by Defense Department planners that it took only two Vietnamese to deal with one of their dead countrymen, but one wounded required five. Mass woundings, it was assumed, would tie
3Dreams
Die Hard: Tbree Men 's journey Through the Sixties by David Harris, pp. 146-148. Copyright
© 1982 by David Harris. Reprinted by permission of St. Martin's/ Marek, New York.
*Cooley and Channing are two streets in the Palo Alto, California, area where Harris and other antiwar activists lived in the 1960s.
506
Chapter 38
The Stormy Sixties, 1960-1968
the enemy's hands, and the American arsenal had developed wounding devices in
great variety.
The CBU 46 was a small explosive package stuffed with hundreds of one-inch
steel darts, each shaped with fins , designed to "peel off" the outer flesh, make "enlarged wounds," and "shred body organs" before "lodging in the blood vessels." They
were dropped a thousand at a time from 30,000 feet. The BLU 52 was 270 pounds of
"riot control" chemical that induced vomiting, nausea, and muscle spasms, occasionally fatal to old people and children. The M-36 was an 800-pound casing containing
182 separate "incendiary bomblets," the most horrendous of which were manufactured from phosphorus, commonly lodging in the flesh and continuing to burn for as
long as fifteen days, causing its victims' wounds to glow with an eerie green light.
The two antipersonnel weapons then in most common use were versions of the
BLU 24/ 26. The "pineapple bomb" was the earliest model. A yellow cylinder, it contained 250 steel ball-bearing pellets packed around an explosive charge. On impact,
its pellets fired out horizontally. A batch of a thousand pineapples would cover an
area the size of four football fields, leaving anything above ground level a casualty.
The "guava bomb" was the pineapple's successor. Gray and round, it doubled the
number of pellets and had a fuse that let it either explode at a set altitude or on impact. Since it fired its pellets diagonally instead of on the horizontal, the Guava also
fired into the holes where people might be hiding.
After the program was over, we all decided to proceed to a place we called End
of the World Beach. It was the edge of a causeway supporting the eastern approach
to the Dumbarton Bridge, where beer bottles, old tires, two-by-fours, tennis shoes,
condoms, dead fish , and seaweed were strung out for half a mile. It captured the
devastation still haunting everyone's thinking. At one point, Dennis and I stood next
to each other, staring across the refuse at the blinking lights of civilization on the
other side of the bay.
Without looking at Dennis, I spoke up.
"You know," I said, "those bastards have got to be stopped."
When I turned to Sweeney, he was nodding his head like he knew exactly what
I meant.
Three weeks later I sat at my typewriter and wrote local Draft Board 71 in
Fresno, California, a letter "To whom it may concern." I enclosed a Selective Service
classification card indicating that the bearer, David Victor Harris, possessed a student
deferment. The letter informed my draft board that I could no longer in good conscience carry the enclosed document or accept the deferment it signified. It was a
privilege I found unwarranted for any student. It also signified tacit assent on my
part for both the task the Selective Service System was performing and the power it
had assumed over my life. Being even implicitly a party to the destruction of Indochina was not part of my plans. If they ordered me for induction, I warned them,
I would refuse to comply.
I feel as though I have explained that act of defiance a million times in the intervening years without ever quite capturing it. The repetition eventually burdened
my explanation with a shell of distance and matter-of-factness that distorts what I
did. It was an act of wonderment and impulse, taken in the calmest and most practical frame of mind. I was prepared to abandon what seemed a promising future
and pit myself against the war one on one, believing I would redeem my country
E. The Politics of Protest in the 1960s
507
and realize myself in the process. It seemed that to do anything else would have dishonored both. There was nothing matter-of-fact or distant about it that August. I
took my life in my hands and it was the bravest I have ever been. It was also, I
think, the most right. That I have never doubted. Times change and I am no longer
the same person, but my past and I are still directly related.
I remember mailing that letter at the mailbox next to the neighborhood store,
scuffing along in the dust at the road edge, wearing Levis, moccasins, and a brown
khaki work shirt. My moustache had become a full beard and my hair covered the
top of my ears. I was both frightened and exhilarated. The last barrier was down.
Henceforth, I was my own soldier advancing in my own kind of war.
My adrenaline didn't diminish until long after midnight. Lying in my bed, I pictured the penitentiary as a very cold and lonely place that I planned to endure for
the sake of us all.
4. Stewart Alsop Senses the End
of an Era ( 1970)
Stewart Alsop (1914-1974), along with his brother joseph, was among the most famous and influential American journalists of his day. A veteran of World War II
and a staunch cold warrior, he was a member of the generation that had survived
the Great Depression, defeated the Nazis and the japanese, ridden the fabulous wave
ofpostwar prosperity, and held the Soviets at bay in the post- World War II years. His
was also a generation that was deeply disillusioned by the protests over the Vietnam
War and the emergence of the counterculture in the 1960s. His brother joseph used
a remark of Stewart's as the title of his autobiography, I've Seen the Best of It (1992),
a phrase that captured the two journalists ' sense that the country had taken a turn
for the worse in the 1960s. In Stewart Alsop's editorial that follows, what does he see
as the principal ill ajjlicting American society in the 1960s? Were WASPs (an
acronym for White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) the only elite threatened by the cultural
and political upheavals of the decade? Did the 1960s really witness a fundamental
shift in American values?
In a recent Harper's, Peter Schrag had an interesting piece-"The Decline of the
Wasp." He made the point that the era has ended when this country was dominated
intellectually and politically by a small minority of people with Anglo-Saxon names.
The point is valid, and important, politically and in other ways.
The Nixon Administration is a Waspish administration, but it is RotarianWaspish. The Eastern Ivy League Wasps, whose special preserve was the making of
foreign policy, have almost wholly faded from the Washington scene. The old Wasp
elite, in fact, is dying and it may be dead.
The Wasp elite was never the only American elite, of course. The United States
used to be managed by a kind of network of elites. But the other elites seem to be
dying too. The church-centered, Irish-dominated Catholic elite is moribund-the
4Stewart
Alsop, "The Disintegration of the Elite, " from Newsweek, June 8, 1970. Copyright 1970 by Stewart Alsop. Reprinted by permission of the Stewart J.D . Alsop Trust.
,...-------------------------------------- ------ - -508
Chapter 38
· • - - - - ~ · - - · --
The Stormy Sixties, 1960-1968
authority of the church, which used to hold politicians and movie magnates in thrall,
is fading, as even the priests defy their bishops.
The authority of "Our Crowd," the Zionist-oriented Jewish elite, is also much
reduced-a symbol of its weakening is the anti-Zionism of many young Jewish radicals. The Negro elite, which once acted as a racial bridge, is enfeebled too-its
three pillars, the church, the NAACP, and the Urban League, are dismissed by Y.Oung
blacks as havens for Uncle Toms.
Yet the decline of the Wasp elite is the most important development politically,
for it is the central elite. Like Charles II, it has been an unconscionable time a-dying.
The decline began in the Depression, when a midget sat in]. P. Morgan's lap, and
when, in the pictures of Richard Whitney entering the paddy wagon on his way to
Sing Sing, the Porcellian Club emblem was clearly visible on the properly buttoned
waistcoat.*
Still, even in that era, foreign policy was safely in the hands of a couple of undoubted elitists-Franklin Roosevelt and Sumner Welles. Under that distinctly non-Ivy
League Wasp, Harry Truman, the Wasp elite enjoyed a kind of Indian summer. Foreign policy was made in those days by such elitists as Dean Acheson (Yale), Averell
Harriman (Yale), James Forrestal (Princeton), Robert Lovett (Yale), Charles Bohlen
(Harvard), George Kennan (Princeton), and Paul Nitze (Harvard).t
McCarthyism was basically an assault on the Wasp elite-it was no accident that
Senator McCarthy chose Dean Acheson, whose mustache provided the perfect symbol of Eastern elitism, as his principal target. The assault was beaten back, but the
Wasp elite never fully recovered its old dominance of foreign policy.*
With a few exceptions (the Dulles brothers, Christian Herter, Thomas Gates) the
Eisenhower regime was dominated by the Rotarian-Wasps, not the Eastern elitists.
President Kennedy always gave the Wasp elite a hearing-McGeorge Bundy was its
principal voice-but those really close to the throne, aside from the clan, were
Kennedy's fellow Catholics of the Irish Mafia. In the Johnson and Nixon eras the decline of the Wasp elite has been rapid and is now almost totaP
There may be a factor in the decline which has been overlooked. This is the
collapse of Great Britain as a world power. The collapse occurred suddenly and
*In a notorious publicity stunt in the 1930s, a photographer contrived to have a midget sit in banker]. P.
Morgan's lap and then quickly snapped a photograph of Morgan's astonished reaction. The episode typified the ridicule and contempt showered upon the former "titans of industry" in the midst of the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression. Richard Whitney was the former president of the New York
Stock Exchange, a respected Wall Street banker, and a pillar of the northeastern elite establishment until
he was convicted in 1938 of grand larceny charges for fraudulent stock dealings. He had belonged to the
exclusive Porcellian Club as a Harvard undergraduate .
tsumner Welles was undersecretary of state in the Franklin Roosevelt administration. Dean Acheson
served as Harry Truman's secretary of state. Averell Harriman was for a time ambassador to the Soviet
Union. James Forrestal served as secretary of the navy and then as the first secretary of defense. Robert
Lovett, Charles Bohlen, George Kennan, and Paul Nitze were all prominent government officials in the
early Cold War era.
*Joseph McCarthy was the senator from Wisconsin who accused numerous government officials of having pro-communist sympathies (see p. 434) .
§Allen Dulles was the long-time director of the CIA. His brother John Foster Dulles served as Dwight
Eisenhower's secretary of state, as, briefly, did Christian Herter. Thomas Gates was secretary of defense in
the Eisenhower administration. McGeorge Bundy, a former Harvard dean, was John F. Kennedy's national
security adviser.
E. Tbe Politics of Protest in the 1960s
509
completely immediately after the Suez disaster in 1956, when Harold Macmillan sent
a cable to his old friend President Eisenhower: OVER TO YOU. The meaning was clear:
Britain was opting out as a world power.*
The collapse of Britain as a world power had a curious effect on the Wasp elite
in this country. In its period of foreign-policy dominance, the Wasp elite was
molded in about a dozen preparatory schools and three universities. Education in
these institutions was patterned on the British model, and it was permeated by
Anglophilia.
The archetypical forcing ground for the Wasp elite in its heyday was Groton
School, which produced such elitists as Franklin Roosevelt and Sumner Welles,
those non-biodegradable elder statesmen Acheson and Harriman, and whole slews
of Bundys, Morgans, Whitneys, Dillons, lesser Roosevelts, and so on. Education at
Groton was an indoctrination in British culture and British attitudes-a boy was
stuffed to the gills with English history and literature while American history and literature were passed over as though they scarcely existed.
The result of this kind of education was a sort of love-hate complex. Franklin
Roosevelt, very typically, combined a rather naive anti-colonialism with a profound
and instinctive Anglophilia. The basic assumption of the Wasp elite was that Britain,
while arrogant and capable of burning down the White House, was (a) a great
world power, and (b) a power on which the United States could rely in time of trouble. These were the basic assumptions of American foreign policy, from the Federal
period right through to 1956. Suez knocked them into a cocked hat.
It was as though an irritating but powerful parent had turned quite suddenly into
a lean and slippered pantaloon. Britannia, instead of ruling the seas, produced the
Beatles and Carnaby Street. The British collapse contributed in a subtle and unmeasurable but real way to the erosion of self-confidence of the Wasp elite. It wrecked
their whole system of thinking about the world, and even about themselves.
This erosion of confidence has had something, and perhaps quite a lot, to do
with the erosion of authority which is the most pervasive and significant phenomenon in American life today. Pat Moynihan was remarkably foresighted when he
warned President Nixon before he took office that "all the major domestic problems
facing you derive from the erosion of the authority of the institutions of American
society."t
The Wall Street journal, in a brilliant editorial, maintained that "the source of
the pathology is in the elite, " which has failed in its duty "to supply the bonds that
hold together diverse and potentially competing factions." But perhaps the trouble
is not that the elite has failed, but that it has ceased to exist. Because the Wasp elite,
in a predominantly Wasp country, was the keystone of the arch, the other elites have
collapsed with it.
The Wasp elite was quite often arrogant and quite often wrong, and the lesser
elites-the Catholic elite especially-could be parochial and even reactionary. But
our present situation suggests that it may be better to have an arrogant or reactionary
*Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt in 1956 in a controversy over the control of the Suez Canal.
They expected American support, but President Eisenhower did not give it to them.
toaniel Patrick Moynihan, later a Democratic senator from New York, was a domestic policy adviser to
Richard Nixon.
510
Chapter 38
The Stormy Sixties, 1960-1968
elite than no elite at all. For a society without a self-respecting and respectcommanding elite is a society without authority, and a society without authority is
one short step away from becoming an authoritarian society.
Thought Provokers
1. Was the Cuban missile crisis a turning point in the Cold War? Who actually "won" the
2.
3.
4.
5.
confrontation over the missiles? Was President Kennedy's diplomacy in the crisis courageous or foolhardy?
In what ways was Lyndon Johnson an innovative political leader? What did the Great Society program owe to the New Deal? Can the United States afford the kinds of programs
that Johnson dreamed of?
Was Martin Luther King, Jr. , a "radical"? Would there have been a civil rights movement
in the 1950s and 1960s without him? What motivated the sit-ins and Freedom Rides?
What did they accomplish? King took part of his inspiration from the nonviolent tactics
of Mohandas Gandhi's campaign for independence in India. What conditions are necessary for nonviolence to succeed as a political technique? Who deserves more credit for
the civil rights advances of the 1960s, Martin Luther King or Lyndon Baines Johnson?
Why did the United States become involved in Vietnam? Why did it fight the war in the
gradually escalating way that it did? Why did the war last so long? In what ways did the
Vietnam imbroglio alter the U.S. role in the world?
Why did a radical movement well up in the 1960s? How truly radical was it? What legacy
have the 1960s movements left behind? Are the issues on which they focused dead?
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