LBJ's Downfall, Nixon's Comeback

For Thursday, Nelson, ch. 5

Vietnam, the draft, and inequality

Robert McNamara to LBJ, phone conversation, 9/24/64:

It doesn’t look good, Mr. President. It’s no different, you know, than what we’ve seen here and sensed here for some time. I think the odds are we can squeeze through between now and the next several weeks. But it certainly is a weak situation. I’m going to meet tomorrow at 11:00 with Dean Rusk and Mac [Bundy] and others to reappraise it and see what we think can be done, if anything. I really don’t think there’s much we can do in the next several weeks to change the outlook. But neither do I think it’s going to completely collapse in that period.

Afterwards, though, after the election, we’ve got a real problem on our hands.

LBJ, 10/21/64:

In Asia we face an ambitious and aggressive China, but we have the will and we have the strength to help our Asian friends resist that ambition. Sometimes our folks get a little impatient. Sometimes they rattle their rockets some, and they bluff about their bombs. But we are not about to send American boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.

From Baskir & Strauss, Chance and Circumstance (Vintage, 1978).

Rise of counterculture.  Tom Wolfe:

In 1968, in San Francisco, I came across a curious footnote to the psychedelic movement. At the HaightAshbury Free Clinic there were doctors who were treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot. And how was it that they had now returned? It had to do with the fact that thousands of young men and women had migrated to San Francisco to live communally in what I think history will record as one of the most extraordinary religious experiments of all time.

The hippies, as they became known, sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start out from zero

Time, April 6, 1966: 

2/21/65: the assassination of Malcolm X

Major Riots

• 1966: Chicago, Illinois
• 1967: Tampa, Florida ; Cincinnati, Ohio; Atlanta, Georgia ; Newark, Plainfield, and New Brunswick, New Jersey; and Detroit, Michigan.
• 1968: 110 U.S. cities on April 4, 1968, the night of the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968).

Democrats:  note that the party does NOT yet choose most delegates in primaries.

• RN expected to run against LBJ
• Gene McCarthy
• Unexpectedly strong vote in NH
• Kennedy hates him
• RFK 
• Cesar Chavez
• Note how late RFK got in:  MARCH 16
• Blood feud with LBJ
• HHH  -- choice of regulars and the D electorate

Wallace as third-party

Republicans

• George Romney – brainwash
• Rocky back and forth – does not ANNOUNCE until April 30!!
• Reagan does not announce until just before convention
• Nixon
• Enters primaries
• Courts Thurmond (Nelson, p. 119)
• Reinvents himself for television
• Largely avoid the press