Category Archives: John Kennedy

01/22/13

Have The 1960s Ended Yet?

300px-Pentagon_vietnam_protestsWhy do historians seem to have a need to divide history into neat eras? And then endlessly debate when those eras actually began or ended? Did the Civil War begin with the firing on Fort Sumter, or did it really start sometime before April 1861? Maybe 1854 with the border war between pro-slavery Missourians and free-state Kansans? Maybe with John Brown’s Harper’s Ferry raid? Did it really end at Appomattox? Or when Johnston surrendered? Or was Reconstruction a continuation of the Civil War?  Many historians have said that the fight for civil rights ended with the election of Hayes in 1876 and didn’t resume until the 1950s with Little Rock’s Central High. I’ve argued in earlier posts that the fight for civil rights never ended because it was never just about African-Americans.

I noted in my last post that I’ve been delving into more recent history and, lo and behold, the same question arises. When did the 1960s really start and when did they really end? A few of the books I’ve been reading attempt to answer that very question.

As the title suggests, Fire And Rain: The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, James Taylor, CSNY, And the Lost Story Of 1970 by David Browne, combines the stories of some the music industry’s biggest acts (and among my favorites) with the era’s social and political history to argue that the sixties actually did end in 1970. For a review of Fire and Rain see here.

Reading Browne’s book whet my appetite for more on those years of my youth which led me to Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland. I found Nixonland to be a fascinating read. Published in 2008, Nixonland, according to wiki, “was named one of the three best books of the year by the editors at Amazon.com and a New York Times notable book for 2008, and has been named on year-end ‘best of’ lists by over a dozen publications.” After 748 pages describing the chaos of the sixties that Perlstein argues was exploited by Richard Nixon for personal political power, Perlstein closes by asking, ”Do Americans not hate each other enough to fantasize about killing one another, in cold blood, over political and cultural disagreements? It would be hard to argue they do not. How did Nixonland end? It has not ended yet.” This is a chilling assessment. In his review of Nixonland, George Will challenged Perlstein, writing, “America has long since gone off the boil. The nation portrayed in Perlstein’s compulsively readable chronicle, the America of Spiro Agnew inciting ‘positive polarization’ and the New Left laboring to ‘heighten the contradictions,’ is long gone.” Since it’s been nearly five years since the book and the review appeared, I wonder if either writer has changed their thoughts on the subject. I highly recommend reading Nixonland, but I also suggest reading Ross Douthat’s review.

Perlstein essentially concludes with Nixon’s re-election in 1972, so the book I’m reading now seems like a natural follow-up, 1973 Nervous Breakdown by Andreas Killen. Killen argues that the 1960s really ended in 1973. The year I graduated from high school! I mentioned in my last post that I don’t remember a lot of what was happening in the 60s and 70s (and, I should probably say, not because I was high :) ) and all three of these books have contained stories that further confirm that. Killen spends several pages dissecting what was apparently the first reality tv show, An American Family. According to Killen, the show was watched by 11 million Americans. I don’t think I’d ever heard of it until reading this book. The show was apparently about a family living in Santa Barbara, California. Geographically, I wasn’t too far away, but judging by the way Killen describes this family, I was a million miles away.  I did find Killen’s description of the ending of the Vietnam War and the return of the POWs to be quite interesting. Killen wrote, “the continuing prevalence of myth, false memory, and fantasy in representations of the Vietnam War finally suggests the extent to which Americans experienced the war as a fundamental rupture in their history, indeed as a kind of crisis in the very fabric of history itself.” You could almost insert “Civil” in place of “Vietnam” in that sentence. Killen also notes that “the Vietnamese vision of history is one that, unlike its American counterpart, which is linear and progressive, sees history in cyclical terms, as part of a pattern of growth and decay.” Hmmm, have to think about that some more…

 

05/9/12

To Compromise Or Not To Compromise – That Is The Question.

 

     President John Kennedy was forced to re-evaluate what he had been taught about American history and his fundamental understanding of human behaviour following his experience with Southerners bent on keeping James Meredith from attending “Ole Miss.” (See my previous two posts.) Arthur Schlesinger wrote in Robert Kennedy and His Times:

     The Oxford crisis, most of all the military intervention, shocked the white south. It also shocked the Kennedys. They had never thought it would come to this. Their assumption in 1961 was that unreasonable problems would yield to law and reason. Ole Miss showed them how stubborn, savage, deeply rooted the problems were…They had been brought up to believe, for example, that Reconstruction was a matter of southern whites rescuing their states from ignorant and incompetent ex-slaves – the view reflected in Profiles in Courage where John Kennedy had described Thaddeus Stevens as “the crippled,  fanatical personification of the extremes of the Radical Republican movement.” Now, after reading the Mississippi legislature’s report on Oxford, he told Robert he could never take this view of Reconstruction again. “He said,” his brother recalled, “that they can say these things about what the marshals did and what we were doing…and believe it. They must have been doing the same thing 100 years ago. The next year, when Medgar Evers, Meredith’s friend and counselor, was murdered in front of his house in Jackson, the President said sadly to me, “I don’t understand the South. I’m coming to believe that Thaddeus Stevens was right. I had always been taught to regard him as a man of vicious bias. But when I see this sort of thing, I begin to wonder how else you can treat them.” 

     John Kennedy had told Congress in his first annual message, “Before my term is ended we shall have to test anew whether a nation organized and governed such as ours can endure. The outcome is by no means certain.”  

     Kennedy’s message echoed that of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address:

     Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

     In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected the first Republican President on a platform that opposed the extension of slavery into the western territories. In response, Southern political leaders began their attempts to break up the United States. Between the election in November and Lincoln’s inauguration in March 1861, there were numerous attempts to find some solution, some compromise, that would avert the nation’s grave crisis. For decades legislative compromises had been achieved that had forestalled the conflict such as the Missouri Compromise of 1821 and the Compromise of 1850. Lincoln was a great admirer of the principle architect of these compromises, Henry Clay. But Lincoln decided the time for compromise had come to an end. He wrote to William Seward on February 1, 1861:

     I say now, however, as I have all the while said, that on the territorial question — that is, the question of extending slavery under the national auspices, — I am inflexible. I am for no compromise which assists or permits the extension of the institution on soil owned by the nation.

     There are those who would argue that the result of Lincoln’s inflexibility on the subject of slavery’s extension led to the greatest Constitutional crisis in the country’s history and a war that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands and devastated large portions of the country. This interpretation of Lincoln led some historians to argue that the death of the “Great Compromiser,” Henry Clay and his contemporaries gave way to a lack of true statesmen and a “blundering generation.” This argument averred that Civil War could have been avoided through compromise. Most historians have argued against this interpretation, however, and Lincoln is generally regarded as one of the best Presidents the country has ever had.

     In 1964, Republican Presidential nominee Barry Goldwater stated:

     This is a party, this Republican Party, a Party for free men, not for blind followers, and not for conformists. Back in 1858 Abraham Lincoln said this of the Republican party – and I quote him, because he probably could have said it during the last week or so: “It was composed of strained, discordant, and even hostile elements” in 1858. Yet all of these elements agreed on one paramount objective: To arrest the progress of slavery, and place it in the course of ultimate extinction.

Goldwater, in the same speech, went on to famously say “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” Goldwater is revered by many as the father of modern conservatism. From Wikipedia:

     In 1964, Goldwater ran a conservative campaign that emphasized “states’ rights.” Goldwater’s 1964 campaign was a magnet for conservatives since he opposed interference by the federal government in state affairs. Although he had supported all previous federal civil rights legislation and had supported the original senate version of the bill, Goldwater made the decision to oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His stance was based on his view that the act was an intrusion of the federal government into the affairs of states and that the Act interfered with the rights of private persons to do or not do business with whomever they chose. All this appealed to white Southern Democrats, and Goldwater was the first Republican to win the electoral votes of the Deep South states (Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina) since Reconstruction.

     Today, long-time Republican Senator Dick Lugar, in the wake of his primary election loss, issued a public letter in which he decried the increasing extreme partisanship of our current political parties. Lugar seemingly lost his Senate seat because  his opponent was able to portray him as a compromiser. Lugar wrote:

     Too often bipartisanship [compromise] is equated with centrism or deal cutting. Bipartisanship is not the opposite of principle. One can be very conservative or very liberal and still have a bipartisan mindset.  Such a mindset acknowledges that the other party is also patriotic and may have some good ideas. It acknowledges that national unity is important, and that aggressive partisanship deepens cynicism, sharpens political vendettas, and depletes the national reserve of good will that is critical to our survival in hard times.

     A quick web search turns up numerous articles and blogposts arguing that compromise is essential to democracy. Here,  for example:

     We’ve done no greater damage in our society than to allow the word ‘compromise’ to have somehow developed a pejorative status. Compromise is the tool. It’s the human tool by which we find a way to live amongst each other, despite our differences, and not to kill each other over our differences. Compromise is the essence of what we do. Compromise is what democracy is. Without compromise, there is no democracy. When you compromise, you exercise democracy.

     Yet, as Americans we are taught as schoolchildren Patick Henry’s passionate cry, “Give me liberty or give me death!” We are taught to admire Henry’s defiant, courageous, no compromise attitude.

     So, what do we do with these conflicting messages? Is compromise good or bad? How do we know when to compromise and when to stand firm?  Furthermore, as the Kennedys discovered, it is quite difficult to compromise with those who do not want to compromise. Despite the fact that the United States is nearly 236 years old, it remains to be seen, as Lincoln and Kennedy said in their time, whether a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, organized and governed such as ours, can endure. I remain an optimist.

 

 

05/2/12

Civil War to Civil Rights; Making the Connections

    As I have noted in earlier posts, the National Park Service has committed to drawing connections between the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. This post is about those connections.    

    In January of 1961, James Meredith, believing that he had a “Divine Responsibility to break White Supremacy in Mississippi,” applied to the all-white state university. His inevitable rejection led to a lawsuit that eventually reached the U. S. Supreme Court. In September, 1962, an Alabamian, Justice Hugo Black, handed down a ruling that upheld an earlier Circuit Court ruling that Meredith must be admitted without further delay. Governor Ross Barnett responded on statewide television, “We will not surrender to the evil and illegal forces of tyranny.”

     The 37 year-old head of the U. S. Department of Justice, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, had been  supportive of Meredith’s cause almost from the beginning. The response of Governor Barnett to the Court’s ruling drew battle lines between the federal government, the Governor, and the forces of white supremacy and segregation in Mississippi. Robert Kennedy began a series of phone conversations with the Governor that delved into the relationship of the state to the federal government. At one point Kennedy pointedly said: “Governor, you are a part of the United States,” to which Barnett replied, “We have been a part of the United States but I don’t know whether we are or not.” Kennedy asked, “Are you getting out of the Union?”

     Unable to persuade the Governor that the Department of Justice intended to enforce the Court’s orders, Robert Kennedy eventually had to involve his brother, President John Kennedy. In the meantime, truckloads of white supremacists were coming into Oxford to stop Meredith from entering the University. The Kennedy administration began to worry that  a few federal marshals wouldn’t be sufficient to protect Meredith. The last thing the Kennedys wanted to do was send in troops, but even phone conversations between the President himself and the Governor did not bring about the desired results.

     At midnight Norbert Schlei of the Office of Legal Counsel came to the White House with a proclamation ordering persons obstructing justice in Mississippi to cease and disperse and an executive order federalizing the Mississippi State Guard. Kennedy took Schlei into a small study on an upper floor, sat down at a table and read the documents. After a moment he asked, “Is this pretty much what Ike signed in 1957 with the Little Rock thing?” Schlei pointed to a few refinements. Kennedy signed, snapped off the light and headed into the hall. Then he paused and rapped the table with his hand. “You know,” he said, “that’s General Grant’s table.” They said good night. As Schlei went down the stairs to tell waiting reporters what had happened, Kennedy suddenly sprinted to the top of the balustrade and called down to him, “Don’t tell them about General Grant’s table.”

    The situation in Oxford grew considerably worse, without the full knowledge of the President. Meredith and the federal officials and marshals charged with protecting him and ensuring his registration to the University, found themselves holed up in the Lyceum, under siege by an angry armed mob after the state police were withdrawn. The federal marshals fired tear gas in response to thrown bricks and bottles and gunfire. Despite reports of deaths, and injuries to themselves, they were under strict orders not to shoot except to protect Meredith’s life. The President was reluctantly asked to send in the Army, but the Army took five hours to arrive. It was a wildly harrowing night for the federal officials in Oxford and for Robert Kennedy, who felt personally responsible for the Army’s delay.

     Despite the violent resistance, Meredith was enrolled, and eventually graduated.

     When I read about President Kennedy’s reference to Grant in Arthur Schlesinger’s Robert Kennedy and His Times, I wondered what exactly his thoughts were that night in the White House. Was he thinking just about General Grant’s role in putting down the rebellion? Or was he thinking about President Grant’s efforts to bring civil rights to all Americans?