THE 1969 MIRACLE METS: THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNDERDOG TEAM (25 page)

“The Roman Empire was powerful because they built
roads,” LBJ told Eisenhower. “The British controlled the seas
because they built ships. Later we were powerful because of our air
force. Now, the Soviets got control of outer space, and can drop
nuclear bombs on us, like kids droppin’ rocks from a freeway
overpass, and all I wanna know is,
how in the hell did they ever
get ahead of us?”

In the South, segregation was the law of the land,
despite the 1954
Brown vs. Board of Education
decision and
Eisenhower’s 1957 decision to use Federal troops to enforce the
integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The
civil rights movement was getting underway, led by a charismatic
young black preacher named Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. When King was
jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, Democrat Presidential candidate John
F. Kennedy courageously intervened in his release. Nixon chose not
to, fearing that it would enflame white opinion against him. JFK’s
move resulted in the appreciation and support of Dr. King and his
grateful wife, Coretta Scott King. But more important, it swung
Jackie Robinson, now a Connecticut Republican in retirement from
baseball but very active in the struggle, away from his friend and
fellow Californian Nixon, towards Kennedy.

It was the closest election in American history,
decided by two states, Illinois and Texas. In the Cook County wards
of Chicago controlled by demagogic Mayor Richard Daley, thousands
of Democrats voted twice if not more in JFK’s favor.

“Vote early, vote often,” they were told.

In Texas, Vice-Presidential candidate Johnson
controlled the “tombstone vote.” It was precisely how he had stolen
the 1948 Senate election and he was expert at it. Millions of dead
Texans “voted” Kennedy-Johnson. A common joke of the era concerned
a little girl crying. When asked what brought about her tears, she
replies that her grandfather came to town but did not see her.

“But your granddaddy’s been dead three years,” she
is told.

“I know, but he came back to vote for Lyndon
Johnson,” she replies.

All of the “fixed vote” shenanigans, managed from on
high by JFK’s brutal father, Joseph P. Kennedy (a one-time Nazi
appeaser who said of Adolf Hitler, “We can’t beat him, we might as
well do business with him”), was known by key people at the
Washington Post
. Publisher Katherine Graham and editor Ben
Bradlee were both friends and supporters of JFK. They chose not to
use the paper to investigate. 13 years later, opposed to
then-President Nixon, they did choose to use the
Post
to
investigate Watergate, resulting in Nixon’s 1974 resignation.

The events that separate Kennedy’s stealing of the
1960 election and Nixon’s resignation 14 years later are nothing
less than a star-crossed Shakespearean tale of “what ifs?”; of
“what comes around goes around”; of redemption and crazy twists of
fate; of a “Kennedy curse” that lends one to the prevailing notion
that there is a God – and a devil - and that these forces most
definitely have a hand in the affairs of man.

Eisenhower warned of the “Military Industrial
Complex” in his January 1961 farewell address, one of the most
prescient speeches in history, but the country Kennedy inherited
was innocent, at least in retrospect. Civil rights, Communism in
Southeast Asia, the “space race” and “arms race” had not yet
bubbled to the surface of the American conscience. The United
States was still essentially a “Christian nation” of church-going
nuclear families, children raised in growing suburbs, our economy
humming along in affluence while the rest of the world still
struggled to recover from World War II. Music, movies and culture
still resembled the 1950s. The encapsulation of America at that
time was the Fresno neighborhood where Charles Seaver raised his
brood. It was the America of George Lucas’s
American
Graffiti
; a Beach Boys sound track, not Jimi Hendrix;
The
Ten Commandments
, not
Easy Rider
.

Our military was considered invincible, the
conquerors of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. But there were
fissures. Los Angeles and California looked to be the future. New
York was falling apart; the Dodgers and Giants were gone, lost in
large measure because the neighborhoods they played in were
crime-riddled, devastated by “white flight.” The old school Yankees
and their country club ways were on their last legs.

In 1961, the CIA launched an ill-fated attempt to
oust Fidel Castro at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. Kennedy met Kruschev
at the Vienna summit. Kruschev sized up the young President,
determined he was a “rookie,” on his heels after the Bay of Pigs
disaster, and endeavored to engage in rampant adventurism in Asia,
Africa, Latin America, and everywhere else. It was an international
Cold War of ideas that, at that time, the Communists looked to be
winning.

If Nixon were President in 1961, he almost surely
would have ordered the U.S. planes providing air cover at the Bay
of Pigs to protect the invasion. JFK’s decision not to do so is
unquestionably the reason the operation failed. Had air power been
used, the invasion surely would have succeeded, Fidel Castro would
have been ousted, and the historical ramifications would have been
incalculable; seemingly all too the good.

That summer, the Communists erected the Berlin Wall,
dividing the totalitarian East from the free West. Kruschev may not
have gone forward with the wall if Nixon had been in office;
obviously he never tried it with Ike at the helm.

The following year, they installed nuclear weapons
in Cuba. Kennedy did not let it stand, and America prevailed in the
Cuban Missile Crisis. It was a major victory for JFK, his greatest
legacy. 1962 was the last vestige of American political innocence.
Still, Kruschev would not have tried such a bold move had Nixon
been his counterpart.

In 1963, Dr. King took the civil rights protest to
the streets. Truncheons, firehoses, snarling dogs and hatred met
them. Television cameras captured it all. The focus was now on the
South, where Alabama’s Democrat Governor George Wallace vowed to
impose “segregation now, segregation forever.” Army troops had to
protect blacks students trying to enroll at the University of
Mississippi and the University of Alabama.

In the fall, JFK gave tacit approval to a South
Vietnamese
coup d’etat
resulting in the murder of President
Ngo Dinh Diem. Historians differ on whether Kennedy was planning a
withdrawal of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, at that time still
limited mostly to advisors and the CIA. After the
coup
,
however, the situation became tenuous and America had little choice
but to try and right the situation.

On November 22, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.
To this day conspiracy theories postulate any number of scenarios,
but the “lone gunman” theory that Lee Harvey Oswald, a Communist,
killed Kennedy because he opposed Castro is the closest thing to an
“answer” available. The eventual opening of archives may or may not
shed truth on the tragedy.

Lyndon Johnson took over as President and in 1964
launched full-scale war on North Vietnam. It was the demarcation
point in American history. There is America before this event, and
all that flows from it. It further begs the “what if?” question
surrounding the Kennedy-Nixon rivalry. Had Nixon been President,
Kruschev would have likely considered him a hard-line
anti-Communist not to be trifled with. Aside from refraining from
building the Berlin Wall and installing nukes in Cuba, he probably
would not have escalated Communism into South Vietnam in such
wholesale manner.

Assuming that the Communists
did
escalate
their activities, in 1964-65 a President Nixon may well have
launched an all-out assault on Communist forces that might have
ended the conflict with American victory and freedom for the entire
country. On the other hand, it might have started World War III
with Russia and China, which President Harry Truman had endeavored
to avoid in Korea.

Kennedy’s younger brother Robert, who as Attorney
General authorized wiretaps of Martin Luther King Jr., was elected
to the U.S. Senate from New York in 1964. His younger brother,
Teddy, was now the Democrat Senator from Massachusetts. The crazy
quilt of possibilities revolving around Nixon and the Kennedy
family was only beginning to take shape. Old man Joe, the
Machiavellian string-puller who had orchestrated each political
maneuver in his son’s political careers, was forced to watch
everything in tortured silence. He was muted, seemingly by God,
when he suffered a stroke that left him in a near-vegetative
condition.

The Democrats looked to be all-powerful, sweeping to
total victory in 1964 elections for the Presidency, the Senate, the
House, and state legislatures. LBJ initiated the Great Society in
1964-65, a series of welfare, affirmative action, and civil rights
acts. The ultimate irony was that it brought millions of black
citizens into the Democrat fold, yet the party still had the Jim
Crow vote! Dixie had been all Democrat since Republican Abraham
Lincoln won the Civil War. But Johnson saw fissures.

“We’ve just handed the country to the Republican
Party,” he told aide Bill Moyers after signing the Civil Rights
Act.

The man Johnson beat so handily in 1964, U.S.
Senator Barry Goldwater (R.-Arizona), started a revolution that
indeed would make LBJ a prophet: conservatism. It found its base in
the Sunbelt; the suburbs of Orange County, California; the
wide-open spaces of the Southwest; and eventually the Bible Belt.
Goldwater supporter Ronald Reagan made a memorable TV address known
simply as The Speech, launching his political career. It would be
the palatability of Nixon and Reagan, in backlash to the Civil
Rights Act, that would have the ultimate, strange effect of
husbanding the South, as
Los Angeles Times
Pulitzer
Prize-winning sports columnist Jim Murray later wrote, “back into
the Union.” This meant the unforeseen, improbable scenario in which
Southern blacks would find equality not under Democrats but under
Republicans. The ironic beneficiary of the civil rights movement,
probably the greatest, most noble liberal effort of the
20
^th
Century, would be conservatism!

In 1964, the painful crumbling of New York City was
symbolized by a citywide blackout. During that long, hot summer,
crime and racial animosities boiled over in Harlem and the Bronx. A
militant Black Muslim, Malcolm X advocated a split from the
peaceful, non-violent methods of the Christian King.

David Halberstam wrote a book called
October
1964
, which used that year’s Cardinals-Yankees World Series as
a metaphor for a changing America. The Cardinals represented the
winning Democrats; young, urban, hip, of varying colors and ethnic
diversities. The Yankees were the Republicans; country club Wall
Streeters, mostly white. The Cardinals, like the Democrats, won
that fall. The Yankees, like the Republicans, went into a slump.
Like the GOP, the Yanks made a huge comeback years later,
establishing dominance.

In the summer of 1964, LBJ purportedly manufactured
a reason for going to war with the North Vietnamese Communists. A
disputed Naval battle took place at the Gulf of Tonkin. Johnson
used the event to drum up support for escalation. Communism was on
the rise and threatening freedom on a global scale. Red China had
split with the Soviet Union in 1957, but their brand of Communism
was every bit as virulent if not worse. It was assumed that the
Chinese were calling the shots in Hanoi, in concert with Soviet
handlers. During this period of time, the Pentagon put forward a
report on the larger issues of Communism and Vietnam.

Years later, a turncoat Defense Department advisor
named Daniel Ellsberg would distribute it to the
New York
Times
. Dubbed the “Pentagon Papers,” it blew the lid on the
Gulf of Tonkin and shed doubt on the threat of Communism. It
developed the course of Ho Chi Minh, a “freedom fighter” who worked
with U.S. forces against the Japanese in World War II and asked
President Harry Truman to help his small country earn post-war
freedom instead of French colonization. Truman chose to side with
the French allies, and Dien Bien Phu resulted. The French bugged
out, leaving America to battle Red forces in the region.

A “domino theory” was established, beginning with
the “Truman doctrine,” advocated by Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamera. This posited the notion that if one nation (Vietnam) went
Communist, the next nation (Cambodia, Laos) would go Communist,
until a whole region (Southeast Asia) fell. Long range strategists
saw an endgame in which the most important of all Third World
countries, India, teetering in between Democracy and Communism,
would fall with disastrous global consequences.

The Chinese exploded their first atomic bomb in 1964
and launched their first nuclear missile two years later. In 1966
Mao Tse-Tung instituted a 10-year reign of terror known as the
Cultural Revolution. It is estimated that some 55 million human
beings were murdered during this period. The full scale of
Communist crimes against humanity was not fully known in the
mid-1960s. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, their
archives were opened up. The Venona Project, which determined that
many of the people thought to have been wrongfully accused of
Communist affiliation and outright espionage – including
high-ranking Franklin Roosevelt aide Alger Hiss, the man Nixon went
after – were indeed guilty. Estimates vary, but this is where the
widely held figure of100 million dead came from.

While the reasons for going to war in Vietnam may
have been nebulous, self-serving and based upon narrow political
considerations of the era, the general consideration of Communist
dangers, later confirmed,
was well understood
by many
Americans. This was the overriding motive of President Johnson and
Republican Congressional hawks. The mistakes that followed have
been blamed on many of these people, with justification, but the
essential reason for fighting the war was, as President Ronald
Reagan insisted long after most called it a mistake, “noble.”