Ali had changed his name from Cassius Clay, which he said was a “slave name,” when he became a Black Muslim, in 1963. The Black Muslims, Black Power, and especially the increasingly visible Black Panthers, who advocated violence, robberies, and shoot-outs with the police, were frightening to white people. The flames in black ghettos the summer before had for many been the final blow. King said that Black Power advocates such as Stokely Carmichael provided white people with the excuse they needed. “Stokely is not the problem,” King said. “The problem is white people and their attitude.”
For the ruling Democrats, the response to urban violence was a growing threat. An aide to Vice President Hubert Humphrey told
Time
magazine, “Another summer of riots could really sink us next fall.” King opposed Johnson and had no loyalty to the Democrats, but he had more far-reaching fears of this so-called backlash. “We cannot stand two more summers like last summer without leading inevitably to a right-wing takeover and a fascist state,” King said.
On January 12, President Johnson gave his State of the Union address. Never before in history had the annual address received so much television coverage. Not only did all three networks and the new National Educational Television station, the forerunner of PBS, carry the speech, but all four set aside time after the address to have guests come on and discuss what had just been heard. CBS canceled
Green Acres, He and She,
and
The Jonathan Winters Show
for its unprecedented two and one half hours of coverage. NBC sacrificed a
Kraft Music Hall
special starring Alan King and
Run for Your Life
to give two hours of coverage. ABC postponed its drama
Laura
developed by Truman Capote as a star vehicle for Jackie Kennedy’s sister, Lee Bouvier Radziwell. For the analysis that preempted Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor, CBS had Senate minority leader Everett Dirksen. But the most extensive analysis was by NET, which had started the new trend by devoting more than three hours to the 1967 State of the Union address. For the 1968 speech, they put no time limit on their coverage, a concept unheard of in commercial television, and lined up such stars as Daniel Patrick Moynihan; Carl Stokes, the black mayor of Cleveland; and economist Milton Friedman.
If the speech was a barometer for the direction the country was turning, the news was not good for liberalism. The Great Society, Johnson’s catchphrase for the extensive list of social programs that were supposed to define his presidency, was mentioned only once. The audience of Congress, cabinet members, and top-ranking military greeted the speech with the appropriate periodic applause that always seasons these events. According to
Time
magazine, the president was interrupted by applause fifty-three times, although it reported no genuine enthusiasm to most of these outbursts. The one prolonged standing ovation came when Johnson said, “The American people have had enough of rising crime and lawlessness in this country.”
In place of new social programs, Johnson announced the Safe Streets Act, a new narcotics law with more severe penalties for the sale of what had become a campus favorite, LSD. He also called for gun control legislation to stop “mail order murder,” which was the only statement in the fifty-minute speech that received applause from Senator Robert Kennedy.
Johnson responded to Hanoi’s offer of talks—on condition that the United States cease bombing and other hostile acts—by saying, “The bombing would stop immediately if talks would take place promptly and with reasonable hopes that they would be productive.” He then angrily recalled the enemy’s violation of the New Year’s truce, adding, “And the other side must not take advantage of our restraint as they have done in the past.” This was an important point, since there were calls for another cease-fire for the upcoming Vietnamese New Year, Tet.
A Gallup poll released two days after the speech showed more people seeing Johnson as hawkish than saw either Nixon or Reagan that way. In a time when politicians were divided more commonly into doves and hawks, for peace or for war, than into Democrats and Republicans, this was significant. Both Nixon and Reagan had been regarded as unelectable, and one of the reasons had been their hawkishness.
In a
New York Times Magazine
article titled “Why the Gap Between LBJ and the Nation?” Max Frankel suggested that Johnson’s problem was not so much that he handled the media badly, but that he was just not convincing:
But the measure of Mr. Johnson’s trouble is not only Vietnam—perhaps not even Vietnam. It is his failure to persuade much of the country of his own deep belief that his war policy is right. Were he to succeed, his critics, even in the opposition, might at least respect the genuineness of his purpose. As it is, a great many of them seem to have concluded that he is beyond rational debate, merely afraid to concede a “mistake” or too timid to risk retreat. . . . He rehearses many of his public performances and studies some afterward. He has tried every combination of television lighting known to theatrical science and uttered every genre of political address.
Frankel quoted the president comparing himself to the Boston Red Sox’s spectacular slugger Ted Williams. Despite all his records and considerable accomplishments, when Ted Williams stepped up to the plate fans often booed. “They’ll say about me,” Johnson explained, “I knock the ball over the fence—but they don’t like the way he stands at the plate.” The
Times
ran a follow-up letter to the editor signed by five members of the history department at Cornell:
On the other hand, there are similarities between the men that the President evidently chose to overlook: (1) Boston fans booed Williams not because of his stance but because he seldom delivered in the clutch; (2) Williams’s problems were often caused by rudeness, immaturity and unsportsmanlike conduct with the public and the press; (3) Williams could never make a hit in left field either; (4) when faced with a new obstacle, like the Boudreau shift, Williams never chose to outsmart it but insisted on escalation to right field.
The day after the address, Martin Luther King, the most reluctant to denounce the war of all the civil rights leaders, called for a massive march on Washington in early February to protest “one of history’s most cruel and senseless wars.”
“We need to make clear in this political year, to congressmen on both sides of the aisle and to the president of the United States, that we will no longer tolerate, we will no longer vote for men who continue to see the killings of Vietnamese and Americans as the best way of advancing the goals of freedom and self-determination in Southeast Asia.”
Traditionally the first day of Congress is a perfunctory one, but the start of the second session of the Ninetieth Congress in mid-January was marked by five thousand women, many dressed in black, marching and singing in protest over the war in Vietnam. They were led by eighty-seven-year-old Jeanette Rankin, the first woman member of Congress.
On January 21 a concert called “Broadway for Peace 1968,” billed as “the greatest array of stars ever,” was to have one performance at New York’s Philharmonic Hall. Among those contributing their time to the event were Harry Belafonte, Leonard Bernstein, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Eli Wallach, Carl Reiner, Robert Ryan, Barbra Streisand, and one of the biggest television stars of the year, Tommy Smothers. The proceeds went to the campaigns of antiwar senatorial and congressional candidates, many of whom were on hand to meet their supporters after the program.
Even Wall Street was turning against the war. The brokerage house Paine Webber, Jackson, and Curtis was running full-page newspaper ads explaining why peace was in the interest of investors and “the most bullish thing that could happen to the stock market.”
Four days after the State of the Union address, Robert Kennedy attended the annual black-tie dinner of the Rochester, New York, Chamber of Commerce and asked for a show of hands for or against pursuing the war. About seven hundred were opposed. Only about thirty to forty hands indicated approval of war policy.
Yet Johnson was still considered the front-runner for the election in November. The January Gallup poll showed 48 percent approving of the way he handled his job, continuing an upward trend since a low of 38 percent the previous October. The day after his address, with only eight weeks to New Hampshire’s opening primary election, pro- and anti-Johnson Democratic pundits agreed with those in the Republican Party that the president would probably beat Eugene McCarthy by a margin of 5 to 1.
The same day as Johnson’s speech, as though ordered by Johnson himself, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, after ten days of the heaviest fighting of the war, stopped all ground combat. The U.S. military guessed that the enemy was gathering fresh troops and supplies. The Selective Service announced that a total of 302,000 men would be drafted into the army in 1968, an increase of 72,000 over 1967.
Since American democracy imposes no limits on a citizen’s delusions of grandeur, there is always this question: If you were invited to the White House, would you give the president a piece of your mind, thereby publicly displaying bad manners, or would you be nice and waste the opportunity?
In January 1968, Eartha Kitt, a small and delicate-looking black cabaret singer, who had built her career in trendy Paris Left Bank clubs of the late 1950s, was confronted with such a decision when the president’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson, invited her to a “ladies’ lunch” at the White House. In conjunction with the president’s newly outlined concerns, the topic was “What Citizens Can Do to Help Insure Safe Streets.” Some fifty women were seated in the yellow-walled family dining room, ten to a table, with matching gold-rimmed plates and gold cutlery. The meal went from crab bisque to Lady Bird’s favorite peppermint dessert. Woman after woman, mostly from privileged white backgrounds, spoke about their theories of the causes of street crime. But the fifty sat in stunned silence as Kitt leaned against the podium and said in her distinct porcelain voice, “You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. They rebel in the street. They will take pot and they will get high. They don’t want to go to school because they’re going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam.”
Different reporters were leaked slightly different versions of the encounter. In the
Time
magazine version she said, “No wonder the kids rebel and take pot—and in case you don’t understand the lingo that’s marijuana.”
After a moment of silence, Mrs. Richard J. Hughes, wife of the Democratic governor of New Jersey, said, “I feel morally obligated. May I speak in defense of the war?” She said her first husband had been killed in World War II and that she had eight sons, one an air force veteran. “None wants to go to Vietnam, but all will go, they and their friends.” She added that none of her sons smoked marijuana, and the guests, somewhat relieved, applauded while Kitt stared at her with arms folded.
Mrs. Johnson, noticeably pale, some said on the verge of tears, stood up and walked to the podium, somewhat in the way a good hostess would hurry to a trouble spot at a cocktail party to smooth it over, and politely suggested, “Because there is a war on—and I pray that there will be a just and honest peace—that still doesn’t give us a free ticket not to try to work for better things such as against crime in the streets, better education, and better health for our people. Crime in the streets is one thing that we can solve. I am sorry I can’t speak as well or as passionately on conditions of slums as you, because I have not lived there.”
Kitt, the daughter of South Carolina sharecroppers, who as a teenager supported her family from a Harlem sweatshop, explained, “I have to say what is in my heart. I have lived in the gutters.”
Mrs. Johnson, with candor and remarkable grace, replied, “I am sorry. I cannot understand the things that you do. I have not lived with the background you have.”
And there it was, America in microcosm—the well-intentioned white liberals unable to comprehend black anger. Everyone wanted to comment on the widely reported incident, many applauding Kitt’s courage, many appalled by her rudeness. Martin Luther King said that although the singer was the First Lady’s guest, it was “a very proper gesture” because it “described the feelings of many persons” and that the “ears” of the Johnsons are “somewhat isolated from expressions of what people really feel.”
Gene Roberts was removed from his beloved civil rights beat at
The New York Times
in the beginning of 1968 and reassigned to Saigon. Compared to civil rights, the Vietnam story seemed quiet. “I thought I had left the action.” In Washington he got a round of briefings from the U.S. government. At the CIA briefing he asked if a recent battle had been a victory. The CIA official said, “There are six good reasons to consider this a victory.” He went through the six reasons. Roberts then asked, “Is there any reason to consider it a defeat?”
“There are eight good reasons to consider it a defeat,” the official replied, and he listed them.
At the White House, Roberts was briefed by a top-ranking member of the administration whose identity he promised not to expose. “Forget the war,” he was told. “The war is over. Now we have to win the peace. The thing to keep your eye on is”—and he said this as though revealing a secret code—“IR8 rice.”
“What?”
“IR8 rice!” The U.S. government had done large-scale experiments and found that IR8 rice had two high-yield crops a year. This, he assured Roberts, was the big story in Vietnam at the moment.
Roberts arrived in Saigon shortly after the Western New Year and started asking about IR8 rice. No one had heard of it. Finally, he learned that a rice festival was being held in the most secure province of South Vietnam. In fact, it was an IR8 rice festival. Crude bleachers were set up in the small rural village. In a corner, several farmers were squatting on their haunches, chewing on long blades of grass. All over the world farmers cluster and chew on grass. Roberts, who grew up in a farming area, recognized the scene and decided that a chat with these farmers would probably be worthwhile. He walked over with his translator and squatted by them.