It’s 4 August, 1964. President Lyndon Johnson is preparing for the Democratic National Convention, where he is expected to be nominated by acclamation. Even though the party and nation are still grieving the death of President John Kennedy, Johnson has made his mark on the nation’s history. Kennedy’s legislative agenda, which had been stalled in Congress at the time of his death, has been swiftly advanced by Johnson, who had been the most effective Senate Majority Leader in American history before becoming Vice President. Just one month ago Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law, finally extending full citizenship rights to African-Americans and other minorities. Kennedy’s tax cut bill had passed earlier in the year, lowering the top marginal tax rate from 90% to 70%. Johnson’s popularity is riding at 70%, and he’s chortling in glee as the Republican nominee, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, continues to dig himself and his party into a hard right-wing grave.
It’s always good to look over one’s shoulder when things are going exceptionally well, and had Johnson been more of a introspective man, he might have taken a long, hard look over his shoulder on 4 August, 1964. Two events, separated by 12,000 miles, would come to define and haunt Johnson’s presidency, with both events transpiring on that fateful date.
In Mississippi the bodies of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were found buried in a earthen dam. These three men were part of Freedom Summer, which was voter registration drive for African Americans who lived in Mississippi. In 1964 Mississippi had one of the highest concentrations of African American residents, but not one African American office holder. The KKK and local law enforcement maintained a reign of terror in the state, intimidating and/or killing any African American who dared to exercise the rights guaranteed to every American citizen under the Constitution. Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner had disappeared in June of 1964 after being pulled over for speeding by a Mississippi state trooper. The discovery of their bodies showed just how far the KKK and other racist elements would go to suppress African American citizenship rights in Mississippi, despite the passage and signing of the Civil Rights Bill.
On the other side of the globe in the Gulf of Tonkin, two USN destroyers, USS Maddox and Turner Joy, were on what was known to the public as a routine patrol. In reality the destroyers were in the Gulf of Tonkin to elicit a response from North Vietnamese coastal defense units. On 2 August 1964 Maddox and Turner Joy had a minor skirmish with North Vietnamese torpedo boats, and Maddox sustained extremely minor damage. On 4 August both ships radioed CINCPACFLT headquarters in Hawaii that they were under attack again. After an exhaustive examination of the events, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara telephoned President Johnson to inform him that the attack of 4 August probably didn’t happen, but by the time of that call, it was too late to reel in Johnson’s famous temper and sense of being taken advantage of by an adversary, so he ordered air strikes against the North Vietnamese torpedo boat port facilities. In his mind this “aggression” was on the same level as Mao winning the Chinese civil war in 1949, which had made China into a Communist dictatorship, and which had fueled the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy and the Republican Party had turned the “loss” of China into a cudgel to beat the Democratic party nearly to death in the 1950s. Johnson had been in the Senate during those years, and he knew how long it had taken his party to recover from McCarthy’s withering attacks that had made the Democrats appear to be “soft” on Communism. After the air strikes Johnson got Congress to pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which empowered him to use force to deter any further Communist aggression in Vietnam. The resolution passed overwhelmingly in both chambers.
Two events, separated by 12,000 miles, and both occupying the mind of one of the most skilled politicians in American history. Two events that would come to define the 1960s in America and that would also come to bookend the Johnson presidency: civil rights and the war in Vietnam. At this point in history, there are about 20,000 American advisors in Vietnam, doing their best to encourage the Saigon government to devote more energy to fighting the Communist insurgency than trying to either undermine the current kleptocracy in Saigon or mounting yet another coup. Inside the United States African Americans and their allies were fighting to ensure that the full weight of the Constitution applies to all citizens, no matter their skin color.
What if President Johnson had chosen to ignore Vietnam and to put the full weight and prestige of his office behind civil rights and economic equity in 1964?
We will never know what would have happened had Johnson chosen the alternative path and focused on the domestic rather than the foreign events of 4 August 1964, but we do know this. The discovery of those bodies in that dam enraged a large portion of younger African Americans who were not satisfied with the peaceful protests and marches led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Less than year after those bodies were discovered, Stokely Carmichael, a former King acolyte, coined the phrase “Black Power”. In August of 1965 a massive riot erupted in the Watts area of Los Angeles. This was the first of the “long hot summers” that would come to mark the 1960s. When Johnson got the first reports of the Watts riots, his uncanny political instincts kicked in. He accurately predicted that Democratic governor Pat Brown, who had defeated Richard Nixon in the 1962 gubernatorial contest, would lose in 1966. Johnson also predicted that Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon would campaign on law and order, gaining back the suburban voters who had broken for Johnson and the Democrats in 1964. While the bodies of the Freedom Summer workers were discovered in Mississippi, and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights bills were designed primarily to address the apartheid conditions in the South, the riots that shook the Johnson presidency all occurred in Northern cities, where economic and housing segregation consigned African-Americans to ghettos with little, if any, chance for achieving the ever elusive American Dream. When Dr. King went to Watts after the riots had died down, he was appalled at the destruction, but he was more appalled by the sense of gleeful resignation he saw in the faces of the Black men and women he talked to. When King pointed out that they had burned down their own neighborhood, one man answered, “yeah, but now they have to listen to us.” That statement may have been the spark that ignited King’s broadening of the civil rights movement to include urban poverty. In 1966 he and Ralph Abernathy took their campaign to Chicago in an effort to overturn that city’s racist housing policy. The level of violence and hatred King faced in Chicago prompted him to quip, “the people of Alabama need to come up here to learn how to hate.” Johnson understood the need for creating economic opportunity for those living in the inner cities, which is why he created the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1965, and appointed Robert Weaver, the first African-American cabinet member, as its first head. The Watts explosion and King’s march in Chicago should have spurred LBJ to be even more proactive in addressing poverty and economic opportunity, but by 1966 Johnson was consumed with Vietnam, focusing more and more of his attention and political acumen on a war that couldn’t be won without massive American intervention and occupation, which was something he was adamantly opposed to. If he had concentrated his energy on a true war on poverty across the entire United States instead of war to prop up a kleptocratic dictatorship in Southeast Asia, we could be living in a far different country. Three years after Watts exploded Johnson was reduced to peering at a model of the Marine base at Khe Sanh, which was under siege, while the Viet Cong tore through numerous cities in South Vietnam during the Tet Offensive. By March of 1968 an exhausted President Johnson addressed the nation on a partial bombing halt in Vietnam and the beginning of peace talks, along with the shocking announcement that he would not be a candidate for re-election that fall. Such are the consequences of fighting the wrong war in the wrong place.
President Johnson and National Security Advisor Walt Rostow-Feb 1968