3 The Triumph and Collapse of the Johnson Administration

Few presidents have entered office under more difficult circumstances than Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973; served 1963–69). Johnson had been elected as vice president along with President John F. Kennedy in 1960, and he had served for three years with the customary lack of public attention endured by American vice presidents. Then, on a fateful visit to Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, American political life changed. An assassin's bullets killed President Kennedy, and in the unsetting hours after the shooting, Johnson was sworn in as the president. When he appeared on national television that evening, he greeted a nation in deep grief over the death of one of the most beloved presidents in American history.

In some ways, Kennedy's shoes would be hard to fill. Few politicians in the twentieth century matched Kennedy's personal appeal and charm, and few were so able to inspire the American people to set aside their political differences and embrace lofty ideals about the ability of government to contribute to social justice and world peace. When it came to matters of substance, however, Kennedy had accomplished relatively little. Lacking strong backing in Congress, and without the political skills needed to push through his ambitious agenda, Kennedy died without notable accomplishments. But Johnson, a skilled political operator with years of experience in Congress, seized upon the sentimental public embrace of Kennedy's vision to push through one of the most ambitious and sweeping expansions of government power and programs in U.S. history.

Johnson's accomplishments as president were many: his vision of a "Great Society" required passage of major civil rights legislation, the use of federal funds to wage what Johnson called a "war on poverty," and important programs to support public education, housing, and jobs. Were he judged solely on the accomplishments of his first three years in office—1964, 1965, and 1966—he might well be recalled as one of the greatest American presidents. Johnson was undone, however, by the tragic unraveling of the Vietnam War (1954–75), by the rising tide of violence produced by unrest in ghettoes (areas of a city where the poorest residents live) and a growing antiwar movement, and by a conservative political backlash (reaction against the existing trend). By 1968, Johnson was so staggered by the difficulties of managing these multiple problems that he did not run for reelection. The story of Johnson's presidential career thus highlights all the promise and all the pitfalls of politics in the tumultuous 1960s.

Walking in Kennedy's footsteps: The Civil Rights Act of 1964

In 1962 and 1963, pressure built on politicians to secure the passage of a civil rights bill that would make illegal the racial discrimination (the singling out of minority groups for unfavorable treatment) that existed throughout all areas of American life. The civil rights movement was growing increasingly vocal in its calls for the federal government to secure the rights that had been guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution but ignored in reality, especially in southern states. The "Freedom Rides" of 1961 and the attacks on civil rights demonstrators ordered by Montgomery, Alabama, police chief Eugene "Bull" Connor (1897–1973) and other public officials, the forced integration of the University of Mississippi in 1962, and the famous "March on Washington" of 1963—which concluded in Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I Have a Dream" speech—helped build public support for federal protections for African Americans and other minorities. In 1963, President Kennedy began preparing such legislation, and he sent his multi-part civil rights bill to Congress just two days before his assassination. (For full coverage of the civil rights movement, see Chapter 8.)

When Johnson took office, he asked Congress to honor the memory of President Kennedy by passing his landmark legislation. The bill, now known as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, passed out of the House quickly, was presented to the Senate in February of 1964, and hit a roadblock. Southern senators, several of whom held powerful committee chairs, objected to federal civil rights legislation. They believed that states ought to be able to set their own course with regard to the desegregation of schools and other public facilities. (Desegregation was the elimination of separate facilities based on race.) For forty-seven days, senators conducted a filibuster, a legislative technique designed to delay a vote, usually through extended discussion or debate. Finally, on June 10, 1964, senators reached a compromise and passed the bill.

On July 2, 1964, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the act: it was to date the most important civil rights law in the United States since Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves during the American Civil War (1861–65). Perhaps the most important provisions in the Civil Rights Act were those forbidding all public facilities from discriminating or refusing service based on race, color, religion, or national origin. From this point forward, hotels, restaurants, service stations, bus stations, and all government-run facilities were legally required to operate with equal treatment for all. The Civil Rights Act also placed restrictions on segregation (or separation by race) in housing and education, though some school systems still found ways to provide separate facilities. Finally, it banned discriminatory practices in employment, declaring that no employer of more than twenty-five people could discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or gender. The last provision had slipped into the legislation nearly unnoticed, but it provided an important guarantor of equal employment rights for women, an issue that was just beginning to come to widespread public attention. One significant item was excluded from the act: voting rights. This key issue was not be addressed for another year.

War on poverty

In his first State of the Union address, delivered in January of 1964, Johnson announced that it was time to conduct a war on poverty. In a time of increasing prosperity for the majority of Americans, Johnson argued that it was inexcusable for nearly 20 percent of Americans to live in poverty. By the summer of that year, he signed into law the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which created a new agency, the Office of Economic Opportunity, to administer programs to help the poor. These programs included Head Start, a pre-school education program; job training programs for youths and adults; loans to companies willing to hire the unemployed; and a program called VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), a domestic version of the Peace Corps that sends youthful volunteers into U.S. communities to assist poor people. Johnson also signed into law programs to provide food stamps, extend legal counsel to the poor, and fund urban mass transit programs.

The 1964 election

The presidential election year of 1964 began with the incumbent, President Johnson, possessing nearly every advantage. Johnson had managed a near-seamless transition to power following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and he wisely leveraged Kennedy's popularity to gain passage of significant civil rights and antipoverty legislation. More importantly, Johnson began to broaden his ideas on what he would do were he reelected. He proposed a vision that drew on Kennedy's knack for encouraging Americans to look to the federal government as a tool to address long-standing social inequities. This vision, which Johnson termed the "Great Society," was first laid out in a speech at the University of Michigan on May 22, 1964, as quoted in Bruce J. Schulman's Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism:

The Great Society rests in abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. For better or worse, your generation has been appointed by history to deal with those problems and to lead America to a new age.… You can help build a society where the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the Nation. So will you join in the battle to give every citizen the full equality which God enjoins and the law requires, whatever his belief or race, or the color of his skin? Will you join in the battle to give every citizen an escape from the crushing weight of poverty?

Warren Court

When President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed California politician Earl Warren (1891–1974) to the United States Supreme Court in 1953, Eisenhower could not have known that Warren would lead one of the most influential courts in history. In fact this former district attorney and Republican politician became chief justice of the Court in 1954 and led a series of precedent-setting rulings pertaining to individual rights, religious freedom, censorship, and the rights of the accused.

Warren became the chief justice of a Supreme Court divided over its role: some justices believed that the role of the court was to actively protect the rights of individuals from intrusions by the state or federal government; other justices believed that the Court should restrain itself from ruling on any issue unless there was a clear contradiction with the U.S. Constitution. From the very beginning, Warren used his finely honed political skills to craft some of the most famous legal decisions of the twentieth century. One of the most important decisions came in 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in which the Court struck down state laws allowing "separate but equal" educational institutions; after Brown, all public education facilities were required to be racially desegregated.

The Warren Court made a series of important rulings in the 1960s. Among the most important were:

• Baker v. Carr (1962): In this case, the Supreme Court established the principle of "one man, one vote," which required that political jurisdictions at the national, state, and local levels be drawn in such a way as to assure equal representation in comparable districts. By the end of the decade, thanks to several additional clarifying rulings, virtually every election district in the United States had been redrawn.
• School Dist. of Abbington v. Schempp (1963): In this case, tried alongside a case publicized by noted atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair (1919–1995), the Court ruled that prayer in public schools violates the Constitutional separation of church and state.
• New York Times v. Sullivan (1964): In this case, the Court made it very difficult for public officials to pursue libel cases (cases that claim a person's reputation is ruined by unfavorable coverage) against newspapers or other sources of public information. This ruling was widely credited with protecting the freedom of the press.
• Miranda v. Arizona (1966): In this case, the Court ruled that individuals in police custody must be informed of their rights. This Miranda ruling not only protected the rights of individuals but made widely known the phrase beginning "You have the right to remain silent…" to millions of TV viewers who heard the Miranda warning read to suspects on crime programs.

These and many other rulings by the Warren Court were supported and appreciated by the Democratic governments of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. However, they angered many conservatives, who complained that the Supreme Court under Warren had overstepped its bounds. Richard Nixon had the opportunity to appoint a new chief justice when Warren retired in 1969. Nixon chose the conservative Warren Burger (1907–1995).

Though Johnson's vision was cloaked in classic American idealism, what it proposed was a very substantial increase in the size of government bureaucracy and in government spending. According to Frederick F. Siegel, author of Troubled Journey: From Pearl Harbor to Ronald Reagan, what Johnson proposed to do was no less than the passage of a "twenty-five-year backlog of liberal Democratic legislation on health, education, racial discrimination, and conservation that had been sitting on the rear burner" since the end of major New Deal legislation in the late 1930s, the program of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945; served 1933–45) that had been put in place to promote economic recovery and social reform.

Remarkably, Johnson was able to campaign on an extremely ambitious program of legislative change. Johnson's program was well to the left of the political center of American politics, if the "left" indicates a belief that the federal government should play a larger role in regulating the economy and should be willing to assert its authority with social issues so as to assure equality and protect civil liberties. Johnson was able to move so far left precisely because his opponent in the 1964 presidential election moved so far to the right. The Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater (1909–1998), argued emphatically that the federal government should intervene as little as possible in the free play of economic markets and that it should leave most social issues to local governments. These views alone, however, were not what doomed Goldwater's candidacy and pushed moderate voters into the Johnson camp. Rather, it was a combination of Johnson's polished political skills and Goldwater's poor campaigning and unfortunate public statements that made it possible for Johnson to dominate the election so convincingly.

Goldwater had succeeded at capturing the Republican nomination by convincing many Republicans that it was time to limit the size and scope of the federal government and to return control to state and local government. He built a coalition of white southerners who resented the federal government interfering in racial matters, western businessmen who wanted lower taxes and fewer regulations on business activity, and conservative young people who resisted the social and cultural changes sweeping American universities. He thrilled the conservative faithful in his nomination acceptance speech in July of 1964 when he proclaimed: "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue," as quoted in Robert Alan Goldberg's Barry Goldwater.

In fact, Goldwater's brand of extremism proved to be a vice that would prevent his election. Without a strong campaign staff helping him, Goldwater often made verbal mistakes when he spoke publicly. He suggested that poor people suffered from laziness and stupidity, that the eastern seaboard ought to be cut off and let float out to sea, and, infamously, that the United States should consider using atomic weapons in Vietnam. Johnson seized on these missteps and argued convincingly that Goldwater was too extreme to trust with the presidency. In one of the most dramatic political TV commercials of all time, a young girl was shown plucking the petals of a daisy, one by one, as a male voice began an urgent countdown. As the countdown reached zero, a mushroom cloud from an atomic bomb filled the screen. Then President Johnson's voice declared: "These are the stakes—to make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die." (The commercial can be viewed online at the American Museum of the Moving Image's Living Room Candidate Web site.)

In November, Americans elected Johnson by one of the biggest landslides in modern political history. Johnson received just over 61 percent of the popular vote, coming close to doubling Goldwater's total. Perhaps even more importantly, the Democrats gained thirty-seven seats in the House and two seats in the Senate, further padding their already substantial majorities. Johnson had a clear mandate for pushing his political program.

Creating a great society

Johnson had served in the United States Congress for twenty-four years, long enough to know that he did not have long to build on the positive feelings generated by his 1964 victory, and so he set quickly to work. The very first bill he introduced in Congress created programs that assured health care for the elderly and the poor. These programs—called Medicare and Medicaid, respectively—guaranteed access to adequate health care for those over age sixty-five and for those too poor to afford health insurance. The programs also pumped millions and millions of dollars into hospitals and healthcare providers, such as nursing homes and clinics, across the nation. Johnson followed the Medicare/Medicaid bills with a lot of other healthcare legislation, including programs funding immunizations, research on the handicapped and disabled, funding for a variety of healthcare facilities, and loans for students in medical professions. Before this legislation was even signed, Johnson urged the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which dramatically increased the amount of federal funding made available to public schools (which had, to this point, been funded almost entirely through local taxes).

Another essential piece of Johnson's ambitious social agenda was the elimination of obstacles placed in the way of black voters, especially in the South. Despite the protections of the Fifteenth Amendment, which declared in 1870 that voting rights could not be abridged or limited on the basis of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude," many southern states had erected barriers that kept black citizens from voting, including special taxes, tests of literacy (the ability to read), and other requirements very difficult for blacks to meet. The only way to attack those barriers was through costly legal actions. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed into law on August 6, 1965, specifically outlawed discriminatory practices in states where voter turnout in the 1964 presidential elections had been less than 50 percent of potentially eligible voters—that is, the majority of southern states. The law allowed the federal government to intervene if local officials failed to eliminate barriers to black voter registration. The results were immediate: within six months, 300,000 new African American voters were registered, and by 1970 the number of blacks registered to vote in the South had nearly doubled. Members of the civil rights movement, who had pushed first Kennedy and then Johnson to support such legislation, cheered the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as one of their most significant victories of the decade.

Johnson's Great Society also included a variety of smaller programs. These were additional programs to provide financial support for inner-city housing; public works projects in depressed rural areas, especially Appalachia; laws requiring truth in packaging and safety provisions in cars, toys, and other items commonly used by Americans; rules requiring that government decisions be made transparent to citizens through the Freedom of Information Act; and the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, organizations that channeled public funding to arts and humanities projects across the nation. There was, quite literally, something for everyone in the Great Society, and in the early twenty-first century many of these programs continued to be established parts of federal government.

Though Johnson's political skills were essential to passing such legislation, the the Great Society was also made possible by America's great prosperity. Between 1960 and 1965 the growth rate of the American economy had nearly doubled, from 2.1 percent to 4.5 percent. According to Siegel, "This 'social surplus,' the excess of revenues over expenditures, provided nearly four billion dollars a year for new public spending.… Johnson's economic advisors assured him that the unprecedented surpluses would continue indefinitely." This surplus of revenues (in excess of what budget planners had predicted) was so great that Johnson was able to increase federal spending while offering Americans a substantial tax cut. To many, it appeared that the Great Society could be built without the pain of higher taxes. As long as economic growth continued to surge, Johnson and his advisors saw no reason for pessimism. What they could not have predicted in 1964 or 1965, however, was that a distant war in Vietnam would soon claim large portions of the Johnson administration's financial and political capital. By 1967, expansion of the Great Society had been stopped and Johnson's future political prospects lay in ruins.

The politics of Vietnam

Like President Kennedy before him, Lyndon Johnson inherited from his predecessor the fact of American involvement in Vietnam, a tiny and divided country in Southeast Asia. Ever since the French withdrew from the region in 1954, the United States had been supplying money, arms, and military advisors to the South Vietnamese government. The goal of the United States was to maintain a pro-Western government in South Vietnam in the face of attempts by the communist government of North Vietnam—and by the Vietcong, a sympathetic guerilla army within South Vietnam—to unite the two Vietnams under communist rule. As Johnson began his run for the presidency in 1964, his desire was to contain the spread of Communism in Vietnam without letting this distant conflict distract him from his domestic policy goals. But he did not get his wish: the conflict quickly grew into what is generally considered America's greatest military disaster. (For full coverage of the Vietnam War, see Chapter 5.)

In the summer of 1964, twin pressures pushed Johnson into increasing U.S. involvement in Vietnam. First, North Vietnamese attacks on the South grew more persistent and effective, and U.S. military planners urged Johnson to step up aerial bombing and send additional American military advisors (the U.S. had not yet committed soldiers to combat). Second, Republican Barry Goldwater charged that Johnson was about to "lose" Vietnam to Communism. Johnson needed a way to send a message both to North Vietnam and to American voters. He found it in the Gulf of Tonkin incident. American ships patrolling in the Gulf of Tonkin, off the coast of North Vietnam, claimed that they had been fired upon by North Vietnamese torpedoes (whether missiles were actually fired has never been determined). Declaring that the United States was now the victim of North Vietnamese aggression, President Johnson asked Congress for authorization to "take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression." In a very nearly unanimous show of support, on August 7, 1964, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the United States found itself in a war against North Vietnam.

After the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed, U.S. involvement in Vietnam grew steadily. There were 23,300 American troops in Vietnam in 1964, most of them classified as advisors. Following Johnson's election in November, the number of combat troops grew steadily, to 184,300 by the end of 1965; 385,300 in 1966; 485,600 in 1967; to a high of 536,100 troops in 1968. From the very beginning of combat operations in 1965, the war did not go as hoped. Most of the fighting took place on South Vietnamese territory, against an enemy who sneaked in and out under cover of darkness and jungle. There were few traditional battles in which the United States could use its decisive advantage in firepower. Instead, the U.S. military measured its success in "body counts," tallies of enemy dead that were often inflated to create American "victories." The problem was, no one knew how many Vietcong and North Vietnamese would have to be killed to win the war.

As the war went on, problems mounted: U.S. soldiers killed civilians, and more and more of the South Vietnamese population came to support the communists. Military strategists from field commanders to generals to the president were challenged in trying to fight a determined, crafty foe. Marine platoon commander Philip Caputo, quoted in The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s, lamented: "Without a front, flanks, or rear, we fought a formless war against a formless enemy who evaporated like the jungle mists, only to materialize in some unexpected places." And all the while, the costs of waging war rose, both the costs in American lives and American dollars. By the end of the war in 1975, 45,941 soldiers had died in combat, another 10,420 had died in non-combat situations, and the United States had spent some $140 billion.

Acting Presidential: LBJ's Image Problem

Few politicians in the late 1990s and early 2000s were able to compare with John F. Kennedy in terms of personal style, appeal, and culture. Kennedy was a young, vigorous man when he was elected president, and he had a charming, beautiful wife, Jacqueline, who used her education and sophistication to make the White House a center for culture. By contrast, Kennedy's vice president and successor in office, Lyndon B. Johnson, appeared to be a crude and rough-edged politician. It was an image problem that Johnson struggled with throughout his presidency.

Johnson's background could not have been more different than the Kennedys', who had grown up surrounded by great wealth. Johnson was from a middle-class family; he attended public schools and graduated from Southwest Texas State College. As a United States congressman and later as a senator, Johnson, or LBJ, as he was often called, made a name for himself for his hard work and also for his willingness to use his folksy charm and humor to bring people over to his position. Johnson was a gregarious, friendly man who loved to tell folksy stories and off-color sexual jokes. Such traits perhaps were fine for a congressman—but they were a liability for a president.

As president, Johnson tried to appear more sober and "presidential," but when he did so critics complained that he looked stiff and awkward. His attempts to appear warm and friendly frequently backfired. Asked to pose with his dogs, he picked up the two beagles by the ears. Dog lovers wrote critical letters to newspapers and magazines. When Johnson was recovering from gallbladder surgery in 1965 he lifted his shirt to show reporters his lengthy scar and his paunchy belly. The widely published photograph brought renewed protests about his unsophisticated personal style. Johnson sometimes played up his crude reputation, as when he conducted interviews with highly educated reporters (he called them "The Harvards") while sitting on the White House toilet, or when he intentionally overdid his Texas accent.

Johnson's sometimes crude behavior was an amusing pet peeve of reporters and the public when Johnson was at the height of his popularity, as he was in 1965 and 1966. But when his troubles with Vietnam and the antiwar movement began to make him the subject of much more pointed public criticism, his personal mannerisms were emphasized by those who wanted to drive him from office.

Coming apart

Not long after Johnson sent the first combat troops to Vietnam, the first wave of a rising tide of organized protest emerged to speak out against U.S. involvement in the war. This antiwar movement grew out of a loosely organized student political movement called the New Left. The New Left first emerged in 1962 as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which announced its political position in a document called the Port Huron Statement. The SDS caused political activism on college campuses across the United States. Beginning in 1965, the SDS and a variety of other, less formally organized student groups began to direct their efforts to protesting the war.

The first major event in the American antiwar movement occurred on April 17, 1965, when more than 15,000 demonstrators met in Washington, D.C., to hear a speech by SDS president Paul Potter. Potter argued that the American government was ignoring the will of the American people and offering deceitful reasons for going to war. Over the next two years, these charges were leveled again and again as anti-war protests grew ever more frequent. In October of 1965 there were demonstrations in forty American cities; in 1966 and 1967 the demonstrations grew larger and more intense. In April of 1967, some 100,000 protestors marched in New York City, and in October of that year 35,000 marched on the Pentagon, the headquarters of the U.S. military. Increasingly, antiwar demonstrations drew from a broad spectrum of Americans, including members of the civil rights movement. (For a complete discussion of the antiwar movement, see Chapter 6.)

These protests, combined with the rising number of combat deaths and the dramatic television coverage of the war, began to have a real impact on American support for the war. Surveys showed that support for the war dropped from 61 percent in 1965, to 50 percent in late 1966, to 40 percent in the spring of 1968, and to 35 percent on the dawn of the presidential election in 1968. What began for Johnson as a way to demonstrate his resolve in opposing Communism became, by the mid-1960s, a serious political problem.

There were other pressures facing Johnson during his first term as elected president. Among the most dramatic troubles were violent urban race riots, which spread from New York City in 1964 to a number of other American cities. The riots were a reflection of rising discontentment among blacks in northern cities, who complained about the brutality of white police forces, the lack of jobs, and the poor quality of urban housing, among other concerns. In the Watts section of Los Angeles, riots raged for five days in the summer of 1965; there were forty race riots in 1966 and another 160 in the summer of 1967. In Detroit, Michigan, and Newark, New Jersey, National Guard troops had to be called out to restore order, and there was massive destruction of property. These riots, combined with the antiwar demonstrations and the increasing visibility of the hippie movement, which celebrated drug use and rock'n' roll, convinced many Americans that the United States was coming apart at the seams.

The combination of these events—the difficulties of waging war in Vietnam, antiwar protests, race riots, and a general fear of lawlessness—effectively doomed Johnson's presidency after 1966. The Republican Party gained forty-seven seats in the House of Representatives in the mid-term elections of 1966. More energetic because of its success, the party stepped up its attacks on Johnson and effectively put a halt to any further Great Society legislation. As Johnson put it in his colorful language, as quoted by Schulman, "That bitch of a war [was destroying] the woman I really loved—the Great Society."

Johnson was challenged by both the left and the right, and he had trouble governing. As the presidential elections of 1968 drew near, it became clear that several people from within Johnson's own Democratic Party were willing to challenge him for the party's nomination. By the spring of 1968, there were several contenders for the nomination (though they had not all yet entered the race): Senator Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968), the former president's younger brother; Vice President Hubert Humphrey (1911–1978); Eugene McCarthy (1916–) of Minnesota; and George McGovern (1922–) of South Dakota. With polls indicating that he would likely be defeated in the primaries (elections to choose the Democratic nominee), President Johnson made the following announcement on March 31, 1968: "I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President," as quoted in Robert Dallek's Lyndon B. Johnson: Portrait of a President. The election year politics of 1968 went on without Johnson, who departed the office a bitter and broken man.

1968: A defining year

Johnson's decision not to run for reelection was only one of many startling events that made 1968 both dramatic and historic. The year began with the Tet Offensive, a massive, two-month-long attack by combined North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces on American and South Vietnamese positions throughout the South. Though the assault was not successful in toppling the South Vietnamese government, it did shatter the U.S. government's assertion that the war was under its control and helped convince Johnson that he should not run for reelection. On February 27, 1968, in the midst of the Tet Offensive, a highly respected newsman and the host of the CBS Evening News, Walter Cronkite, expressed the opinion that "…it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate." This statement echoed the conclusion being drawn by an increasing number of Americans.

The events of the spring pushed the antiwar movement to new heights. Protestors targeted the Democratic nominating convention, held in Chicago, as the site in which to protest the ongoing war. Unlike many other demonstrations, this one did not end peacefully. Some of the most radical protestors of the antiwar movement, including the Yippies (a group of hippies committed to making dramatic political statements), gathered in Chicago, despite being warned by Chicago mayor Richard Daley (1902–1976) that his police would not tolerate trouble. For nearly the entire week of the convention, protestors and police clashed violently on the streets. On the night of the presidential nomination, police clubbed and teargassed protestors and bystanders as the crowd chanted, "The whole world is watching!" In fact, the world was, for the events were carried on live television, which also was covering the nomination of candidate Hubert Humphrey for the presidency inside the convention hall.

The dramatic scenes at the Chicago convention compounded the worries of everyday Americans that violence had become commonplace in the United States. Already that year, two prominent Americans had been assassinated: on April 4, 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee, and on June 5, 1968, Robert Kennedy was gunned down in Los Angeles while campaigning for the presidency. Both men had come out strongly against the war in Vietnam. Riots followed King's death, similar to those that flared in several American cities during the summer of 1967.

In the context of all this violence and protest, Republican presidential nominee Richard M. Nixon (1913–1994; served 1969–74) presented himself as the candidate of "law and order," and the representative of the "silent majority" of Americans who wanted to see a return to more traditional American values and lifestyle. He ran on the promise that he would extract the United States from the war in Vietnam, though he did not provide specifics. (Nixon eventually did lead the removal of troops, though he also ordered a massive intensification of bombing.) In addition, he promised to put a halt to the massive public spending that characterized the Johnson administration. Despite the unpopularity of the war, Nixon only narrowly defeated Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey, thanks in large part to an effective third-party campaign led by Alabama governor George Wallace (1919–1998). With Nixon's victory, a conservative Republican took control of the executive office. Nixon would lead a nation troubled by its lack of confidence in the government, and his own behavior in office would only deepen that distrust. (For full coverage of the conservative rise to power, see Chapter 4.)

For More Information

Books

Breuer, William B. Race to the Moon: America's Duel with the Soviets. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1993.

Burner, David. Making Peace with the 1960s. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Colbert, Nancy A. Great Society: The Story of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Greensboro, NC: Morgan Reynolds. 2002.

Dallek, Robert. Lyndon B. Johnson: Portrait of a President. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Dudley, William, ed. The 1960s. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven, 2000.

Farber, David. The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s. New York: Hill and Wang, 1994.

Farber, David, and Beth Bailey, with others. The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.

Goldberg, Robert Alan. Barry Goldwater. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.

Helsing, Jeffrey W. Johnson's War/Johnson's Great Society: The Guns and Butter Trap. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000.

Holland, Gini. The 1960s. San Diego, CA: Lucent, 1999.

Just, Ward. Reporting Vietnam: Part One: American Journalism 1959–1969. New York: Library of America, 1998.

Levy, Debbie. Lyndon B. Johnson. Minneapolis, MN: Lerner, 2003.

Moss, George. America in the Twentieth Century. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1988.

Schulman, Bruce J. Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism: A Brief Biography with Documents. Boston, MA: Bedford, 1995.

Schuman, Michael. Lyndon B. Johnson. Springfield, NJ: Enslow, 1998.

Siegel, Frederick F. Troubled Journey: From Pearl Harbor to Ronald Reagan. New York: Hill and Wang, 1984.

Witcover, Jules. 1968: The Year the Dream Died: Revisiting 1968 in America. New York: Warner Books, 1997.

Periodicals

"Message to Congress, August 5, 1964." Department of State Bulletin, Washington, D.C. (August 24, 1964).

"House Joint Resolution 1145, August 7, 1964." Department of State Bulletin, Washington, D.C. (August 24, 1964).

Web sites

"The Living Room Candidate: 1964, Johnson vs. Goldwater." American Museum of the Moving Image.www.ammi.org/livingroomcandidate/index_2000.html (accessed on June 15, 2004).

Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum.www.lbjlib.utexas.edu (accessed on June 17, 2004).

"Lyndon B. Johnson." American Presidents Life Portraits. www.americanpresidents.org/presidents/president.asp?PresidentNumber=35 (accessed on June 17, 2004).

"Lyndon B. Johnson." The White House.www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/lj36.htm (accessed on June 17, 2004).