nixonland1
ABBREVIATIONS
BPP: Berrigan Brothers Papers, Cornell University Special Collections, Ithaca, New York
CDN: Chicago Daily News
CT: Chicago Tribune
LAT: Los Angeles Times
LBJCR: “Civil Rights During the Johnson Administration, 1963–1969: A collection from the holdings of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Austin, Texas” (microfilm)
MIP: Files on the events of 1970 collected by Maurice Isserman, in possession of author
MTR: Museum of Television and Radio, New York City
NLT: Nixon Library Tapes transcribed by author, National Archives, College Park, Maryland
NYDN: New York Daily News
NYT: New York Times
NYTM: New York Times Magazine
PDP: Paul Douglas Papers, Chicago History Museum
PDP722: Douglas Papers, Part I, Box 722, 1966 folder
PPP: Public Papers of the Presidents
RNLB: Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace, Yorba Linda, California
USNWR: U.S. News & World Report
WP: Washington Post
WSJ: Wall Street Journal
PREFACE
xi In 1964, the Democratic presidential: All election tabulations from http://www.uselectionatlas.org.
xi Five years later, a pretty young: Anthony Lukas, The Barnyard Epithet and Other Obscenities: Notes on the Chicago Trial (New York: HarperCollins, 1970), 9.
xi “I’m getting to feel like”: “At War with War,” Time, May 18, 1970.
CHAPTER ONE: HELL IN THE CITY OF ANGELS
3 You might say the story starts: KTLA, “Hell in the City of Angels,” MTR.
3 KTLA’s live coverage of Watts: Interview with Terry Anzur, “Ron Fineman’s on the Record”; author interview with Terry Anzur.
4 “Let this session of Congress be known”: PPP 91, January 8, 1964. “Our Constitution, the foundation of our republic, forbids it”: PPP 446, July 2, 1964.
5 Johnson’s approval rating even among Republicans: Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001), 307. So, even, did conservative businessmen: Ibid., 309. “I’m sick of all the people”: Bill McKibben, “Reversal of Fortune,” Mother Jones, March–April 2007. Great Society speech: PPP 357, May 22, 1964.
5“crazy figures,” William F. Buckley: John Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives (New York: Touchstone, 1990), 207.
5 Clark Kerr quote: Milton Viorst, Fire in the Streets: America in the 1960s (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 277.
6 “I know that very often”: CT, letter to the editor, January 1, 1964.
6 “Iowa would go Democrat”: Philip A. Klinkner, The Losing Parties: Out-Party National Committees, 1956–1993 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 75.
6 “I doubt that there has ever been”: Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, Lyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise of Power (New York: New American Library, 1966), 483.
6 “These are the most hopeful times”: PPP 810, December 18, 1964.
6 “We have achieved a unity of interest”: PPP 2, January 4, 1965.
7 Johnson “is almost universally liked”: Editorial, Nation, January 11, 1965. Melvin Laird quote: John Kessel, The Goldwater Coalition: Republican Strategies in 1964 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), 308. A poll that month found: F. Clifton White and William Gill, Suite 3505: The Story of the Draft Goldwater Movement (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1968), 417. Should that two-thirds dominate their party’s: Lee Edwards, Goldwater: The Man Who Made a Revolution (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1995), 344.
7 One staffer, Frank Kovak: Klinkner, Losing Parties, 78.
8 Martin Luther King in Selma: Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–1965 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 575–600; James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1965 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 579–84.
8 For Judgment at Nuremberg see J. Hoberman, The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties (New York: New Press, 2003), 122. Lyndon Johnson was a man given to towering rages: Godfrey Hodgson, America in Our Time: From World War II to Nixon—What Happened and Why (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 219. LBJ, just you wait: Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963–1969 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 162.
9 “It is wrong—deadly wrong”: PPP 107, March 15, 1965. Reaction to voting-rights speech: Hodgson, America in Our Time, 220.
9 “Today, we strike away the last major shackle”: PPP 409, August 6, 1965.
9 James Reston column: “Washington: The Quiet Revolution,” NYT, August 6, 1965.
9 Background on Watts riot: Matthew Dallek, The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan’s First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics (New York: Free Press, 2000), 129–38.
11 “White Backlash Doesn’t Develop”: NYT, November 5, 1964.
11 A prominent liberal Southern: Sam Ragan, “Dixie Looked Away,” American Scholar 34 (1965).
11 “How is it possible”: Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961–1973 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 223. Los Angeles radio station KNX fired: “A Few Prized Minutes with Michael Jackson,” LAT, August 24, 2004.
11 the latest in a series of South Vietnamese: Hodgson, America in Our Time, 228; Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941–1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 170.
12 Bob Hope Christmas special: Bob Hope: The Vietnam Years, 1964–1966, Vol. 1 (Hope Enterprises, 2004). thirty-six hundred Rolling Thunder sorties: Schulzinger, Time for War, 172.
12 “one of the few Communist-free”: Interview with Daniel Ellsberg. “Few Americans will quarrel”: “This Is Really War,” NYT, July 29, 1965.
12 Early Vietnam protests: Tom Wells, The War Within: America’s Battle over Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 21–27. SDS discussed a “Kamikaze Plan”: Ibid., 44–45.
13 “Holiday from Exams”: Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 49. Wells, War Within, 63.
13 The Republican National Committee could hardly raise: Klinkner, Losing Parties, 79. “attempted gigantic political kidnapping”: WP, “Can 26 Million Be Wrong,” November 25, 1964.
13 Morley Safer report: A. J. Langguth, Our Vietnam: The War, 1954–1975 (New York: Touchstone, 2000), 385; Daniel C. Hallin, The “Uncensored” War: The Media and Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 132.
13 “Assembly of Unrepresented Peoples”: Wells, War Within, 51. Vietnam Day Committee: Ibid., 56–57. J. Edgar Hoover called them: David Farber, Chicago ’68 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 65.
14 Athens Park, Watts, meeting: KTLA, “Hell in the City of Angels”; Dallek, Right Moment, 129. Watts statistics: KTLA, “Hell in the City of Angels.”
15 The terror was compounded: Dallek, Right Moment, 130.
15 Situation reports, minute by minute: LBJCR, Reel 6.
16 Chicago riot: Mike Royko, Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago (New York: New American Library, 1971), 145. Time quoted Senator Robert F. Kennedy: “The Far Country,” Time, September 24, 1965.
17 Lyndon Johnson, petrified: Dallek, Flawed Giant, 223, 299. “People are saying that the Irish”: Interview with Representative Frank M. Clark, August 15, 1965, LBJCR, Reel 6. “What a difference between these”: Bill Boyarsky, The Rise of Ronald Reagan (New York: Random House, 1968), 116.
17 The president pulled in his legislative reins: Dallek, Flawed Giant, 299. Lyndon Johnson’s scar: New York Review of Books, May 12, 1966.
18 Nixon and Leonard Garment in Florida: Leonard Garment, Crazy Rhythm: From Brooklyn and Jazz to Nixon’s White House, Watergate, and Beyond (New York: Crown, 1997), 84.