“January 7, 1970, dawned clear and bitterly cold, a cold that rarely comes to Mississippi. It was 16 degrees on South Main Street, the trees along the older avenues were seared and deathly, and the water in the potholes of the roads in the Negro section was frozen solid. All over Yazoo there was a cold eerie calm.”
So recorded the great Southern writer Willie Morris in his classic book “Yazoo: Integration In a Deep Southern Town,” with suitable melodrama, of the first day little black boys and girls and little white boys and girls sat together in classrooms in his Mississippi Delta hometown. The moment came fifteen years after the dawn of “Massive Resistance”: an organized conspiracy, uniting all strata of white Southern society, high and low, to defy the order of the Supreme Court to integrate its schools “with all deliberate speed.”
What happened between Brown v. Board of Education and that January day in 1970 comprises some of the most monstrous inhumanity in the cruel annals of American history. Recently, in a cover feature in the conservative Weekly Standard on his presidential ambitions, Mississippi governor and fellow Yazoo native Haley Barbour had occasion to reflect on that place, in those years. The best that can be said about his recollection is that it is not 100 percent a lie — just deeply confused, mostly wrong, and indicative above all of a cynical man who has made a lucrative career of exploiting racial trauma when it suited him, or throwing it down a memory hole when it did not; which is to say, an archetypal Dixie conservative.
Start with his account of the White Citizens Councils. They were founded in the Mississippi Delta — “The Most Southern Place on Earth,” as a 1994 history by James C. Cobb enshrined it — and represented, as one of their leaders proudly put it, “damned near a declaration of war against the United States.” In Yazoo, as Eric Kleefeld of Talking Points Memo has documented, the method was economic terror: In 1955, when 53 mostly middle class local blacks signed a petition requesting, you know, that federal law be followed, their livelihoods were crushed.
Barbour’s invocation of the Council when asked how the Yazoo schools managed to integrate without violence some fifteen years later was gratuitous and strange. In words now infamous, he replied:
“Because the business community wouldn’t stand for it. You heard of the Citizens’ Councils? Up North they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there.”
That’s richly revealing of Barbour’s willful and self-exculpating mental fog. While the Citizens Councils were born in 1954 of Brown v. Board of Education, the modern revival of the dreaded “Night Riders” of the Reconstruction Era came about in 1963 in response to President John F. Kennedy’s announcement that he was introducing legislation to integrate not just schools but all places of public accommodation. They were the new kids in town — that it to say, the competition, and low-class competition at that. Local gentry acted swiftly to preserve their monopoly on terror. In Yazoo, records historian John Dittmer in his authoritative “Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi,” the local Citizens’ Council did indeed pass a resolution excoriating the Klan — because “your Citizen’s Council was formed to preserve separation of the races, and believes that it can best serve the county where it is the only organization operating in this field.”
In places like Yazoo, the local gentry was exceedingly close-knit and nearly totalitarian in their power over the everyday life of the town — a fact Barbour’s testimony in the Weekly Standard merely confirms: Competing vigilante constabularies were intolerable threats to their droit de seigneur, as deserving of the swift fist of economic terror as any uppity nigger. (“If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there.”)
Barbours, who are descended from Mississippi’s third governor, were the heart and soul of Yazoo’s gentry, as Andrew Ferguson’s Weekly Standard profile responsibly establishes. For Haley and his kind, as a childhood friend recollected, it was “an ideal childhood…dances, parties, football, Little League, boys doing all the things boys do in a small town.” Barbour concurred: “I grew up in a town that was like a family.” One of the abiding tasks of that family’s patriarchs was defending it from outsiders contesting their right to run it in the way they saw fit — advocates and officers, that is to say, of the laws of the United States of America.
It is here that Barbour offers his most bald and sickening claims. Asked what it was like growing up at Ground Zero of the civil rights revolution, he recollected, “I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” and volunteered his recollection when “Martin Luther King came to town, in ’62. He spoke at the old fairground….I was there with some of my friends,” he said. “We wanted to hear him speak.”
King did apparently make a stop in Yazoo during a three-day tour of the Delta region in February 1962, but it was his 1966 visit to the town that is much more famous. Early that June, James Meredith — the black man whose entry to the University of Mississippi in ’62, when Barbour was 15, spurred riots that brought federal troops and the cream of the nation’s media to Barbour’s future alma mater — announced he would march “against fear” from Memphis, Tennessee, to the state capital of Jackson, Mississippi. When he crossed the border into the Magnolia State, a farmer emptied a double-barreled shotgun into his hide. In solidarity, all of the nation’s most prominent civil rights leaders, and hundreds of their followers, vowed to complete his march. It produced one of the Movement’s grandest melodramas. On June 16, at a rally in the courthouse square in Greenwood, militant Stokely Carmichael delivered his infamous “Black Power” address and cleaved the freedom movement forever more into armed versus nonviolent factions. On June 21, King detoured off the line of the march fifty miles to the east, to Neshoba County, symbolically confronting the perpetrators of a notorious murder two years before: “In this county, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner were brutally murdered. I believe in my heart that the murderers are somewhere around me at this moment.”
That utterance is significant to the case of Haley Barbour. He says the King speech he saw in ’62 was “full of people, black and white” — part of his longstanding pattern of radically distorting the degree of comity between the races in Mississippi during his youth. In fact, during Mississippi’s race revolution, when blacks and whites occupied the same space (except when the former were virtual servants and the former masters), the scene in greater or lesser degrees resembled the chaos that day in Philadelphia. This was as true in 1966 as it was in 1962. As The New York Times described the scene in Philadelphia, white “onlookers” toppled a network camera, “[s]ome 25 white men surged over the television men, swinging, and then flared in to the line of march, their eyes wide with anger,” and police didn’t intervene against the ensuing stones, bottles, clubs, and firecrackers until “[h]alf a dozen Negroes began to fight back.”
Then it was on to Yazoo.
Martin Luther King followed a speaker for the pro-violence Deacons of Defense who said, “They ain’t a redneck or a cracker in Mississippi that I’m afraid of…They ain’t gonna be enough of people to keep black people from hurting white people.” King delivered one of the greatest speeches of his soon-to-be-snuffed-out life. You can watch it at the broadcast museums in New York and Los Angeles:
“I am disturbed about a straaaaange theory that is circulating, saying to me that I ought to imitate the worst in the white man and the worse in our oppressors. Who have a specter of killing and lynching people and throwing them in rivers! It’s our oppressors! And now people are telling me to stoop down to that level, oh no! The reason that I will not do it is that I am not going to allow anybody to pull me so low as to use the very methods that perpetrate evil throughout our civilization.
“I’m sick and tired of violence.
“I’m tired of the war in Vietnam.
“I”m tired of war and conflict in the world.
“I’m tired of shooting. I’m tired of hate. I’m tired of selfishness. I’m tired of evil! I’m not going to use violence, no matter who says it.”
I am almost certain it is this scene of menace, foreboding, and transcendence that Haley Barbour is “describing” when he says, “I don’t really remember.” He elaborates, “We just sat on our cars, watching the girls, talking, doing what boys do. We paid more attention to the girls than to King.”
Which is where things get honestly creepy. I hope Haley Barbour is just making that last detail up. The menacing white mobs that gathered at the periphery of civil rights rallies in places like Yazoo City were almost exclusively male. If he truly remembers the moment through a cloud of testosterone, the imagery invokes to me the most Gothic nastiness imaginable. In “Black Like Me,” the 1961 classic in which journalist John Howard Griffith blackened his face to see how race relations worked in the South, Griffith learned through one white interlocutor “how all of the white men in the region craved colored girls. He said he hired a lot of them both for housework and in his business. ‘And I guarantee you, I’ve had it in every one of them since before they ever got on the payroll…We figure we’re doing your people a favor to get some white blood in your kids.’”
No way, not in a million years, am I accusing Haley Barbour of being like this guy. I’m making a different point. At every important turn in the story, Barbour emphasizes how little he remembers of this most intense period imaginable in his beloved home town — it really was no big deal, he insists. When he does so, this is what he is forgetting: the entire bad-faith stew of race, sex, and corrupt plutocracy — and its public repression in images of towns like “families” and happy Negroes until outsiders stirred things up — that defined his formative years. He’s a middle-aged Southern conservative. That is what his job is: to opportunistically “forget.”
What was the role of the Republican Party in all of this? In 1964, the Mississippi Republican Party changed its platform to reassure potential recruits it bought the whole package: “We feel segregation of the races is absolutely essential to harmonious racial relations and the continued progress of both races in the State of Mississippi.” (It worked: Barry Goldwater got 87 percent of the vote.) In 1965, Haley’s older brother Jeppie Barbour became one of the first among the Delta’s gentry to join the Republican Party. In 1968, with Haley as campaign manager, he became the town’s mayor. These were years when the challenge of Massive Resistance became merely bureaucratic, as Lyndon Johnson’s Department of Health, Education, and Welfare established legal guidelines to finally force Southern school districts to honor Brown v. Board of Education. The forcing didn’t work, in part because Southern Republicans, in concert with President Nixon, kept on devising new ways to stall. Finally, federal courts starting issuing draconian rulings that put the full force of federal police power behind desegregation.
Many school districts still kept fighting. Yazoo City’s newly Republican leadership, on the other hand, chose orderly retreat. This is what Haley Barbour is talking about when he claims “the business community wouldn’t stand for” anything but legal compliance. The actual field general in the struggle, however, his brother Jeppie Barbour, gave another, less sentimental explanation. The population exodus further skirmishes would have brought would have destroyed the town — and brought down the plutocrats’ fortunes right with it: “We don’t have any other choice.”
Here was the Delta Republicans’ historic task: negotiating terms of surrender to the Constitution, then reframing that Lost Cause as honorable, the better to preserve their insular plutocracy — perhaps their gravest sin in the first place — in order to integrate themselves more snugly into national and international circuits of corrupt wealth. Haley Barbour, who received his first Republican patronage job in 1970, is a true son of this confederacy. In 1991 he founded of a lobbying firm that would go on to become the second most powerful in the country in part for its work for the tobacco industry (as governor, he later proposed to dismantle the state’s program to discourage youth from using tobacco. In 1993, now RNC chair, he set up a “National Policy Forum,” which allegedly shoveled hundreds of thousands of dollars in foreign money into the 1994 and 1996 Republican campaigns. Then he provided $50,000 in seed money for the firm of Allen Raymond, which specialized in jamming opponents’ phone banks on Election Day. The next year, he became the the South’s largest electrical company’s liaison to Dick Cheney’s secret energy task force.
It goes on. In 2007, now Mississippi governor, Barbour’s friends and family were the dominant beneficiaries of $15 billion in federal aid that Governor Barbour brought to the state to take advantage of Hurricane Katrina. One of his nephews, Bloomberg reported, saw his lobbying fees more than double in the year after his uncle appointed him to a Katrina reconstruction panel. Barbour received a $25,000 a month payment as a “blind trust” from the firm. That same firm set up a corporation, New Bridge Strategies, to make what it called “big money” on Iraq reconstruction. Meanwhile, in his capacity as governor, Barbour was caught handing out one of the biggest federal contracts in the state for recovery efforts to a Republican activist married to his nephew.
And now they say he’s a presidential contender. This great big old bear of a man, you see, according to D.C. gossip Lloyd Grove, “enjoys the friendliest relations with the Washington media elite of any prospective candidate vying for the Republican monition.” Margaret Carlson calls him “genuine” and “approachable.” After all, as Grove recalls, he kept “a generous supply of Maker’s Mark in his handy RNC liquor cabinet.” It’s one old-fashioned Dixie tradition he’s managed to remember just fine.
Thomas Frank is back with another hunk of dynamite. His “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” monopolized political discussion for over a year when it came out in the summer of 2004. “The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule” should monopolize political conversation this year. It’s the first book to effectively tie the ruin and corruption of conservative governance to the conservative “movement building” of the 1970s, and, before that, the business crusade against good government going back at least to the 1890s.
Here, for example, is a splendid bit Frank pulled from the Journal of Commerce from 1928 about why it’s best for business to wreck the state: “The best public servant is the worst one. A thoroughly first-rate man in public service is corrosive. He eats holes in our liberties. The better he is and the longer he stays the greater the danger. If he is an enthusiast — a bright-eyed madman who is frantic to make this the finest government in the world — the black plague is a house pet by comparison.”
The guy who wrote that was a military contractor and former head of the national Chamber of Commerce. The genius of today’s conservative movement, however, is that it doesn’t need barons of commerce to say these things anymore. Conservatives have won over a species of the bright-eyed madmen — kids writing for college newspapers, who can call themselves “principled” conservative “idealists,” fighting the “battle of ideas” while carrying the water of corporate America.
We see the results before us. While the Bush administration “presided over one of the greatest expansions of federal spending in history, the number of federal employees actually decreased during Dubya’s term of office.” The conservative ascendency did not merely change the composition of government; they sold government off to business, piece by piece — and, of course, it was sabotage by design.
I interviewed Frank by e-mail the weekend before his book debuted. The conversation ranged from the manicured lawns of academe to South Africa; one of the things you learn in the book is that for American conservatives, the two worlds intersect in a rather perverse way. I began the interview by asking him about one of the most successful conservative activist groups of the 1980s, the United Students of America Foundation, an offshoot of the college Republicans. He has located a curious smoking gun in the receipts of their tax-deductible donations that shows the conservative youth movement as rather less idealistic than today’s Reaganauts like to remember. You wouldn’t be surprised to learn that a conservative youth group was funded by business. You might be surprised, however, to learn that it was largely funded by certain apparently random businesses like bottling companies.
Why did, of all things, bottling companies become diehard funders of the conservative youth movement?
It’s an interesting story. According to a report I unearthed from the mid-1980s, bottlers funded a certain right-wing student group because it was doing battle on campus with Public Interest Research Groups [PIRGs]. The PIRGs were then funded by student activity fees, and what they did was push for things like bottle bills in various states. Bottle bills raise the price of soda pop; bottlers were hence natural foes of PIRG.
The fascinating thing about this is the entrepreneurial angle. Campus conservatives had been trying to cut off the PIRGs’ funding for years; at some point, though, they started approaching bottlers and other companies to, essentially, hire them to defund the left. They were proselytizing for the political war.
For me, this gets at an essential aspect of conservatism: In addition to being a movement it is also an industry, a field in which entrepreneurs can prosper. The right fights the left and gets paid for it. It was a predecessor of the conservative lobbying industry and the Gingrich/DeLay Congress generally.
Just incidentally, the group that raised money to fight the PIRGs was headed by Jack Abramoff.
The next jump in the story would seem like a pretty big leap. But you show that the next stop in Abramoff’s political adventure was, of all places, South Africa.
He surfaced as the chairman of something called the International Freedom Foundation — the IFF — which had branches in Washington and in Johannesburg. They published a magazine and a bunch of newsletters, they sent out direct mail, sponsored conferences, gave out awards, the usual. Above all, though, they fought the critics of apartheid, in particular the African National Congress, Nelson Mandela’s group. Naturally they did this by accusing the critics of apartheid of being secretly pink, if not flaming red.
It’s uncomfortable to remember now, but the American right was pretty fond of the apartheid regime. Yeah, they made all the correct noises about how South Africa was moving in the right direction, how apartheid was not as bad as everyone said, but the bottom line for them was that we had to take South Africa as it was. It was too valuable an ally in the Cold War. Of course, they also shared a conspiratorial worldview with the apartheid government, making them soul mates in a larger sense.
The funny thing is, the IFF later turned out to be a project of South African military intelligence. For all its constant attacks on the left for being closet tools of the Soviet Union, the conservatives were the ones who were on the payroll of a foreign power — discreetly, of course. Abramoff and Company were, once again, fighting liberalism for pay. This was pretty big news in South Africa when it came out during the Truth and Reconciliation hearings. Not so big here.
So the IFF folded shop when apartheid ended?
Actually, just a little bit before. The apartheid government was floundering by 1992 and at some point it pulled the plug on the group’s funding. The IFF tried to struggle on for a short time on its own, but somehow that didn’t work out. As with so many right-wing groups preaching the free-market gospel, this one couldn’t make it without subsidies.
What was really fascinating about the IFF was the transformation it went through as the Cold War ended. Where once it had been a conspiracy-spotting organ of the hard right, it became libertarian. By 1991 or so it was obvious that apartheid was doomed. So the IFF’s new task, strange as it might seem, was to try to depict the apartheid system as having been an offense against markets. The IFF — a bought-and-paid-for front group of the apartheid regime, remember — declared that the only true way to post-apartheid freedom was through complete privatization and deregulation of everything. Free trade was also essential. So their magazine puffed for NAFTA. It announced state-run electric utilities to be Stalinist. It called for the privatization of oceans.
There were other groups in South Africa taking the same line, and the idea was to set the stage for a post-apartheid future in which money and business would be safe from nationalization. And they got what they wanted.
How does this all relate to the scams that landed Jack Abramoff in jail?
There are a lot of parallels between what Abramoff did for South Africa and what he did for his clients as a lobbyist, but most of them weren’t criminal. The key similarity is the concept of political entrepreneurship, of bringing market forces to bear on politics. Abramoff eventually became a lobbyist, sort of the ultimate political entrepreneur. Lobbying generally puts our relationship to our government on a paying basis, and Abramoff was one of its ablest practitioners.
Along the way, he and his pal Michael Scanlon set up a whole bunch of hollow nonprofit corporations, at least one of which called itself a “think tank.” And Abramoff continued to direct an army of pundits, particularly libertarian ones, although that’s hardly a crime. He also steered his clients’ money into the by-now-enormous conservative industry in Washington, essentially directing all sorts of advocacy groups in the war on liberalism. It’s like he had stepped into the role of the Pretoria regime, running and subsidizing a whole army of American ideologues.
It’s a striking story, even a breathtaking one, and yet it’s not one we’ve heard much about before. The media seems to shrink from confronting the outright venality of the conservative movement. You told me you did one recent interview in which the interviewer seemed to think you wrote too much like an angry blogger, and thought you were too hard on convicted bribe-taker Duke Cunningham, the former congressman. Why this discomfort with the story you’re telling?
Well, conservatives have been screaming for decades about how disrespected and downtrodden they are, and the media has finally learned the lesson. They are terrified of the famous “liberal bias” critique, and the tidal waves of criticism that will crash down on them if they examine conservatism straightforwardly. So they don’t.
What they prefer instead is to talk about “both parties,” and always to assume that everything in American politics is done simultaneously and in precisely equal measure by both sides. Believing this closes off all kinds of inquiry to you, blinds you to all sorts of not-so-subtle nuances and imbalances in the system.
There’s also the problem that the things I focus on — for example, that conservatism tends to be an organic product of business interests — are things that disturb them. Journalists might be social liberals, but there are damned few of them who are ready to scrutinize the power of business or the benevolence of markets. Or the motives of entrepreneurs, even when they call themselves “political entrepreneurs.”
My own observation, though, is that we have been living through a conservative era, that conservatives regard the state and corruption and political activity in a particular way, and that therefore these things need to be investigated. Yes, I know, the liberal era of 30 years ago had huge flaws, too, and its own pattern of corruption, its own favored groups, all of which are very, very well known. I know those things. Everyone knows them. But they happened a long time ago.
I think we need to talk about the people who are ruling us now — how they think, what they have done with the state, and why it is that a new scandal seems to erupt every goddamned week.
Earlier this month, the folks at MoveOn.org came to me with a challenge: Study the history of Congress’ efforts to halt, or at least halt the escalation of, the Vietnam War, and mine it for lessons about what Congress should do about Iraq now. They found themselves saddled with a historian deeply suspicious of using history to glibly draw battle plans for the present — but one who emerged, nonetheless, believing that this time the lessons are clear. Last Thursday, Salon ran Walter Shapiro’s article “Why the Democrats Can’t Stop the Surge.” I’ve come to a different conclusion about what Congress can or can’t do. The questions are not just: Can Congress stop the surge? Can Congress stop a war-mongering president in his tracks? The better question is what are the things Congress can accomplish just by trying to stop the escalation, boldly, and without apology?
The answer to that is: an enormous amount — and that the only thing that can guarantee Democratic political weakness in 2008 is if they abandon a strong withdrawal (or, if you prefer, “redeployment”) position.
Let’s start at the very beginning. Representatives and senators had been criticizing the creep, creep, creep of America’s escalating military involvement in Indochina at least since 1963. The hammer really started coming down, though, in February 1966 — when, a year after Lyndon Johnson began the first bombing runs over North Vietnam, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman J. William Fulbright of Arkansas called hearings questioning the entire underlying logic of the war. Americans had been doing that in the streets for some time by then. Shortly after the Senate passed the president’s 1965 $700 million military appropriation for Vietnam 88 to 3, the antiwar movement staged its first big Washington demonstration — with about 20,000 young people on the Mall. But the collective reaction of the guardians of polite opinion was a sneer. “Holiday From Exams,” the New York Times headed its dispatch.
By contrast, when Sen. Fulbright began his hearings, they stood up and took notice. All three networks covered the hearings live over six days. Thus did Americans learn from hippies like World War II hero Gen. James Gavin and George Kennan, architect of the Cold War doctrine of “containment” — who said, “If we were not already involved as we are today in Vietnam, I would know of no reason why we should wish to become so involved, and I could think of several reasons why we should wish not to,” and that victory could come only “at the cost of a degree of damage to civilian life and civilian suffering … for which I would not like to see this country responsible.”
President Johnson did not sit by idly. He directed the FBI to monitor the proceedings to find where they were echoing the so-called Communist line — and had agents study wiretaps of the Soviet Embassy for evidence of friendly congressional contact. He also may have had words with the top network brass. CBS, for one, cut away from Kennan’s testimony to return to regularly scheduled programming (“I Love Lucy” and “Andy Griffith Show” reruns). The execs defended themselves, claiming the hearings served to “obfuscate” and “confuse” the issues.
First lesson: Forthright questioning of a mistaken war by prominent legislators can utterly transform the public debate, pushing it in directions no one thought it was prepared to go.
Second lesson: Congress horning in on war powers scares the bejesus out of presidents.
The FBI was the least of it. The political threats were even worse. The next year, when Fulbright told the president at a meeting with the Senate leadership that the war was “ruining our domestic and our foreign policy,” the president’s response was a dare: Repeal the Gulf of Tonkin resolution — the authorization of force that passed 98 to 2 in 1964. “You can tell the troops to come home” — put up or shut up. What’s more, “You can tell General Westmoreland that he doesn’t know what he’s doing.” This was the same sword of Damocles that potential congressional anti-surgers feel swinging over their heads now: Any second-guessing of the chain of command, and I, the president, will blame everything bad that happens on you. It set a pattern for presidential push-backs against legislators’ assertion of their constitutional oversight power. Nixon was even worse.
In March 1968, campaigning in the Republican primary in New Hampshire, the man who would become the next president of the United States laid down his marker on Vietnam: “If in November this war is not over, I say that the American people will be justified in electing new leadership, and I pledge to you that new leadership will end the war and win the peace in the Pacific.” It was reported as if a campaign promise: A President Nixon would end the war. Nixon spent the rest of the campaign season refusing to say any more about what he meant — claiming that to do so would jeopardize President Johnson’s negotiations with the enemy.
At Nixon’s first press conference in 1969, Helen Thomas, blunt as ever, asked him, “Now that you are president, what is your peace plan for Vietnam?” His desultory answer only repeated proposals already on the table. In reality he had no “peace plan” — save for the fantasy that he could bomb the enemy so savagely that it would surrender at the negotiating table. The falseness of the presumption that the president intended to end the war expeditiously was revealed to George McGovern, the most forceful Senate dove, in an early meeting with Henry Kissinger. Why, McGovern asked the president’s national security advisor, didn’t Nixon just announce that while his predecessors Kennedy and Johnson had committed troops in good faith, subsequent events had shown that the commitment was no longer in the nation’s interest? Kissinger responded by agreeing with the premise — that the war was a mistake — but nonetheless assuring him they had no intention of withdrawing short of victory.
In March, McGovern shocked even his fellow doves by saying on the Senate floor that “the only acceptable objective now is an immediate end to the killing.” Sen. Edward M. Kennedy called his words “precipitate.” The president had recently been asked at a press conference if he “could keep American public opinion in line if this war were to go on months and even years.” He responded, “Well, I trust that I am not confronted with that problem, when you speak of years.” The New York Times reported, “Public pressure over the war has almost disappeared.” Those were the rules of the game: The president said he was ending the war. We had to trust him to do what he promised.
Of course, shortly thereafter, it was revealed that the president was secretly bombing neutral Cambodia. Shortly after that the public mind was blown by reports of the butchery of the battle at “Hamburger Hill,” in which 46 Americans died in a day — the kind of thing Americans trusted the president had put in the past. Nixon calmed things down by beginning a regular series of addresses in which he announced ever greater withdrawals of troops from Vietnam. On April 20, 1970, he made his most dramatic one yet: “The decision I announce tonight means that we finally have in sight the just peace we are seeking.” The war, he seemed to be promising, was all but over.
Ten days later he went back on TV and staggered the nation by announcing he was invading neutral Cambodia.
Another lesson: Presidents, arrogant men, lie. And yet the media, loath to undermine the authority of the commander in chief, trusts them. Today’s congressional war critics have to be ready for that. They have to do what Congress immediately did next, in 1970: It grasped the nettle, at the president’s moment of maximum vulnerability, and turned public opinion radically against the war, and threw the president far, far back on his heels.
Immediately after the Cambodian invasion Senate doves rolled out three coordinated bills. (Each had bipartisan sponsorship; those were different days.) John Sherman Cooper, R-Ken., and Frank Church, D-Idaho, proposed banning funds for extending the war into Cambodia and Laos. Another bipartisan coalition drafted a repeal of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, the congressional authorization for war that had passed 98 to 2 in 1964. George McGovern, D-S.D., and Mark Hatfield, R-Ore., were in charge of the granddaddy of them all: an amendment requiring the president to either go to Congress for a declaration of war or end the war, by Dec. 31, 1970. Walter Shapiro wrote that a “skittish” Congress made sure its antiwar legislation had “loopholes” to permit the president to take action to protect U.S. troops in the field” — which means no genuine congressional exit mandate at all. But McGovern-Hatfield had no such “loopholes.” (Of course, McGovern Hatfield didn’t pass, and thus wasn’t subject to the arduous political negotiating process that might have added them.) It was four sentences long, and said: Without a declaration of war, Congress would appropriate no money for Vietnam other than “to pay costs relating to the withdrawal of all U.S. forces, to the termination of United States military operations … to the arrangement for exchanges of prisoners of war,” and to “food and other non-military supplies and services” for the Vietnamese.
Radical stuff. Far more radical than today’s timid congressional critics are interested in going. But what today’s timid congressmen must understand is that the dare paid off handsomely. With McGovern-Hatfield holding down the left flank, the moderate-seeming Cooper-Church passed out of the Foreign Relations Committee almost immediately. Was the president on the defensive? And how. His people rushed out a substitute “to make clear that the Senate wants us out of Cambodia as soon as possible.” Two of the most hawkish and powerful Southern Democrats, Fritz Hollings and Eugene Talmadge, announced they were sick of handing blank checks to the president. A tide had turned, decisively. By the time Cooper-Church passed the Senate overwhelmingly on June 30, the troops were gone from Cambodia — an experiment in expanding the war that the president didn’t dare repeat. Congress stopped that surge. It did it by striking fast — and hard — when the iron was hottest. In so doing, it moved the ball of public opinion very far down the field. By August, a strong plurality of Americans supported the McGovern-Hatfield “end the war” bill, 44 to 35 percent.
There is, here, another crucial lesson for today: Grass-roots activism works. The Democratic presidential front-runner back then, Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine, afraid of being branded a radical, had originally proposed instead a nonbinding sense-of-the-Senate resolution recommending “effort” toward the withdrawal of American forces within 18 months. He found himself caught up in a swarm: the greatest popular lobbying campaign ever. Haverford College, which was not atypical, saw 90 percent of its student body and 57 percent of its faculty come to Washington to demonstrate for McGovern-Hatfield. A half-hour TV special in which congressmen argued for the bill was underwritten by 60,000 separate 50-cent contributions. The proposal received the largest volume of mail in Senate history. Muskie withdrew his own bill, and became the 19th cosponsor of McGovern-Hatfield.
Muskie’s sense-of-the-Senate resolution was the wrong thing to do — just as Democratic Sens. Carl Levin and Joe Biden’s sense-of-the-Senate resolution, cosponsored with Republican Chuck Hagel, is the wrong thing to do. Congressional doves, by uniting around a strong offensive — eschewing triangulation — weakened the president. McGovern-Hatfield did not pass in 1970. But the campaign for it helped make 1971 President Nixon’s worst political year (until, that is, Congress’ bold action starting in 1973 to investigate Watergate). By that January, 73 percent of Americans supported the reintroduced McGovern-Hatfield amendment. John Stennis, D-Miss., Nixon’s most important congressional supporter, now announced he “totally rejected the concept … that the President has certain powers as Commander in Chief which enable him to extensively commit major forces to combat without Congressional consent.” In April the six leading Democratic presidential contenders went on TV and, one by one, called for the president to set a date for withdrawal. (One of them, future neoconservative hero Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, differed only in that he said Nixon should not announce the date publicly.)
This was a marvelous offensive move: It threw the responsibility for the war where the commander in chief claimed it belonged — with himself — and framed subsequent congressional attempts to set a date a reaction to presidential inaction and the carnage it brought. When the second McGovern-Hatfield amendment went down 55-42 in June, it once more established a left flank — allowing Majority Leader Mike Mansfield to pass a softer amendment to require withdrawal nine months after all American prisoners of war were released. Senate doves, having dared the fight, were doing quite well in this game of inches.
Which brings us back to lesson two, above. Richard Nixon was terrified. He reached into Lyndon Johnson’s bag of tricks, calling Mansfield into the White House and reminding him that he was in the middle of negotiations on the war and on arms control. He said that if they collapsed he would go on TV, too — and blame Mansfield personally. He called in House Majority leader Carl Albert and said that if the similar resolution pending in the House succeeded he would simply scuttle the Vietnam negotiations, and blame Albert personally. The resolution lost by 23 votes.
Failure, just as Walter Shapiro says? I see a glass half full — and a strategy congressional Democrats should emulate now. The bedrock reason is the election. The election in 1972, I mean; and the election in 2008.
It sounds crazy to say it, because anyone who knows anything knows that the 1972 election was a world-historic failure for the Democrats because McGovern lost 49 states. Put aside, for now, the story of that crushing defeat. (It is a story of the most tragically inappropriate presidential nominee in history, and the unprecedentedly dirty campaign against him — the substance of Watergate.) What that colossal distraction distracts us from is that congressional doves, and Congressional Democrats, performed outstandingly in that election. Democrats gained a seat in the Senate, the McGovern coattails proving an irrelevancy. America simultaneously rejected George McGovern and voted for McGovernism: Democrats who voted twice for his amendment to demand a date certain to end the Vietnam War did extremely well. Nixon knew his fantasy of expanding the air war unto victory was over. In fact, those who saw him the morning after the election said they’d never seen him so depressed. Why? “We lost in the Senate,” he told one mournfully. He lost his mandate to make war as he wished.
We can likewise expect a similarly nasty presidential campaign against whomever the Democrats nominate in 2008. But we can also assume that he or she won’t be as naive and unqualified to win as McGovern; one hopes the days in which liberals fantasized that the electorate would react to the meanness of Republicans by reflexively embracing the nicest Democrat are well and truly past. What we also should anticipate, as well, is the possibility that the Republicans will run as Nixon did in 1968 and 1972: as the more trustworthy guarantor of peace. Ten days before the 1972 election, Henry Kissinger went on TV to announce, “It is obvious that a war that has been raging for 10 years is drawing to a conclusion … We believe peace is at hand.” McGovern-Hatfield having ultimately failed twice, its supporters were never able to claim credit for ending the war. That ceded the ground to Nixon, who was able to claim the credit for himself instead. He never would have been able to do that if he had been forced to veto legislation to end the war.
McGovern-Hatfield failed because of presidential intimidation, in the face of overwhelming public support. Nixon and Nixon surrogates pinioned legislators inclined to vote for it with the same old threats. A surviving document recording the talking points had them say they would be giving “aid and comfort” to an enemy seeking to “kill more Americans,” and, yes, “stab our men in the back,” and “must assume responsibility for all subsequent deaths” if they succeeded in “tying the president’s hands through a Congressional Appropriations route.”
But isn’t that interesting: There wouldn’t have been subsequent deaths if they had had the fortitude to stand up to the threats.
Every time congressional war critics made Congress the bulwark of opposition to a war-mongering president, they galvanized public opinion against the war. The same thing seems to be happening now. Already, the guardians of respectable opinion are sneering less; there are simply too many anti-surge bills on the table for that. The shame would be if today’s only credible antiwar party, the Democrats, squander that opportunity by failing to harness their majority, not merely for a strong showing against escalation but in favor of a position to credibly end the war.
You know that whatever the facts, the right will blame “liberals” and “Democrats” for losing Iraq; that’s as inevitable as the fact that we’ve already lost Iraq — and as inevitable as an arrogant president playing into Democratic hands by expanding the engagement (he already is). What would be inexcusable is if wobbly Democrats managed to maneuver themselves timidly into a corner that made them only the right-wing’s scapegoats — and not the champions that truly made their stand to end the war.
In 2008, the Republicans are going to have to run either amidst an electorate convinced that Republicans will be staying the course or amidst an electorate they’ve managed to bamboozle into believing “peace is at hand.” If they manage the latter, they’ll have a good chance of winning the election. But the only way they can do that is if Democrats can’t claim credit for ending it first. I hope to be able to watch the Democrats truly try to end the war; it will be glorious. Because even if they start losing votes in Congress, the president and the party that enables him can only become politically weaker by the day.
I feel bound to respect Ronald Reagan, as every American should — not least because he chose a career of public service when he could have made a lot more money doing something else, and not least because he took genuine risks for peace. (President Bush, in contrast, seems to know only how to derange the world with war.) But in the necrophiliac orgy that is now upon us, there are three messages that I — as a historian of the rise of the modern conservative movement in the 1960s, and as a reporter on the conservative regency in election year 2004 — wish that more people would hear.
The first is that if Reagan’s partisans succeed in creating an indelible memory of him as someone that everyone loved all the time, they will have won an important political struggle with consequences for today.
The second is that if his partisans succeed in minting Reagan in public memory as a repository of bedrock principle, they will have been complicit in letting forgetting win the battle against remembering — because on their own, conservative terms, Reagan was often a sellout.
And last, if they manage to make the rest of us remember Reagan as the embodiment of the kind of genial conservative even a liberal could love — a refreshing counterweight to the lunatic conservatives we have to deal with now — they will have scrambled history instead of helping to inform it. Because Reagan was always much more frightening than the sunny optimist of now-popular legend.
The Reagan memory industry has been chugging along at full steam for over a decade now, from the successful attempt to put Reagan’s name on the former National Airport in Washington to the (so far) unsuccessful ones to put his mug on the dime and Mount Rushmore. Do not mistake the deeply ideological thrust behind these campaigns. The aim is to make the notion that Reagan was the most beloved American politician ever seem self-evident — and to make the kind of militaristic, minimal-government conservatism he championed seem just as natural.
For a short period at the beginning of his presidency, after John Hinckley’s assassination attempt against him, and in the middle of his term, before the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan was indeed stratospherically popular. But averaged out over his political lifetime — Reagan first won office as governor of California in 1967, serving two terms prior to his two terms as president beginning in 1981 — Reagan’s popularity was, well, just average. Often, it was far below average.
When Reagan was governor, he worried about the “very dangerous precedent” of the state Constitution’s recall provision being exploited by “well-organized groups for political recrimination.” Yes, that’s right. Though Reagan’s latter-day acolytes led the lusty campaign to recall Democratic Gov. Gray Davis in 2003, Reagan would not have approved. And for good reason: He was the subject of two recall attempts himself. The first came in 1968, and it wasn’t hard to understand why a group of liberal organizers, working on a shoestring, were able to obtain hundreds of thousands of signatures for his ouster: His approval rating was an anemic 30 percent. (In the next few weeks you are unlikely to hear that Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan had roughly equivalent degrees of popularity during their presidencies, with Clinton’s often higher, including when both left office.)
The activists in the second recall attempt weren’t liberals, however. In 1967, Reagan, after campaigning, as he always did, as a tax cutter, passed the single largest tax hike in the history of any state up to that point. By 1971, some of his former supporters on the right had tired of what they saw as Reagan’s serial betrayals of conservative principles and launched a recall movement of their own.
We didn’t hear a lot about that movement when conservatives were dropping Reagan’s name left and right in support of their bid to run Gov. Gray Davis out of Sacramento on a rail in large part because he had … raised taxes.
Reagan’s hagiographers, having their cake, eating their cake and smearing their cake all over the historical record, have a word for the occasions when this supposedly principled man violated his principles: They call them “pragmatism.” But liberals have to give the man credit for his ability, unlike President Bush, to shift course when he was walking into a wall.
Still, it’s too easy to convert the image of Reagan the pragmatist into a Reagan who wasn’t really right wing. And from that it is but a short step to the most irritating Reagan myth of all: that he was nothing but a sunny optimist. Do not forget that he also frightened people with talk of apocalypse.
Reagan first came to public prominence as a political figure in the early ’60s. The movie actor, hard on his luck, had become a kind of roving motivational speaker for General Electric. More and more, however, as he became more and more conservative, his talks focused on politics. Much of Reagan’s stomping ground of Southern California had converted itself into a kind of McCarthyite petri dish, breeding paranoid patio dads and housewives by the thousands, each one eager and ready to find Reds beneath, beside and on top of every bed.
On any given weekend, interested citizens in Orange County could watch showings of films like “Communism on the Map” — a geopolitical melodrama in which blood- or pink-colored ink leached over country after country, sparing only Spain, Switzerland and the United States (which was covered by a giant question mark) — or find a study group assiduously poring over the organizational structure of what J. Edgar Hoover laughably called a “state within a state” — the almost nonexistent Communist Party.
Reagan soon became one of the hottest tickets on the anti-Communist lecture circuit — where sunny optimism was not the order of the day. “We have 10 years,” he would say in just about every speech. “Not 10 years to make up our mind.” (He was referring to the choice as to whether to embrace the Republican right or the march of communism, among whose avatars he numbered, in a famous 1960 letter to Richard Nixon, John F. Kennedy.) But “10 years to win or lose — by 1970 the world will be all slave or all free.”
Remember this: The hellfire never left him, and the hellfire ended up making the world a more dangerous place. As a candidate for elective office, even as president, his handlers always cleaned him up for popular consumption, but the same strange holdovers from the McCarthyite fever dreams continued to pop up in his discourse. One of his favorites was an invented quote of Lenin, popularized by the founder of the John Birch Society, to the effect that after the Reds took over Eastern Europe, they would “organize the hordes of Asia,” as Reagan said in a 1975 interview, they would move on to Latin America and “then the United States, the last bastion of capitalism, [would] fall into their outstretched hands like overripe fruit.”
Overripe words, yes, but also very characteristic of Reagan. It is a quirk of American culture that each generation of nonconservatives sees the right-wingers of its own generation as the scary ones, then chooses to remember the right-wingers of the last generation as sort of cuddly. In 1964, observers horrified by Barry Goldwater pined for the sensible Robert Taft, the conservative leader of the 1950s. When Reagan was president, liberals spoke fondly of sweet old Goldwater.
Nowadays, as we grapple with the malevolence of President Bush, it’s Reagan we remember as the sensible one. At the risk of speaking ill of the dead, let memory at least acknowledge that there was much about Reagan that was not so sensible.
Again and again as president, Reagan let it slip that he concurred with fundamentalists’ belief that the world would end in a fiery Armageddon. This did not hurt him politically. The kind of people offended by such talk had already largely abandoned the Republican Party. Those attracted by it — evangelicals who had gone overwhelmingly for fellow evangelical Jimmy Carter in 1976 — adopted Reagan, and his conservative Republicanism, as their own, and they never looked back. And in the eschatology of Cold War America, Christian apocalyptic thinking had everything to do with the assumption that the Armageddon would be a nuclear one, a confrontation with the anti-Christ bailiwick Russia, which Reagan identified in a March 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals as the “Evil Empire.”
No wonder that when, in November 1983, NATO launched a war games exercise code-named Able Archer, the Soviet Union misread its intentions as offensive and put its nuclear forces on alert, and the world came closer to ending than it ever had before.
It took this near miss — and not, certainly, the largest mass demonstration in American history, the million people who gathered in Central Park in 1982 to demonstrate for a nuclear freeze (another moment you probably won’t read about in all the Reagan eulogies) — to get Reagan thinking seriously about negotiating an arms control agreement with the Soviet Union. To his enormous credit.
But he never did make a similar peace with the “welfare queens” he fabricated out of whole cloth to push his anti-compassionate conservatism. Nor with the African Americans he insulted by launching his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were slaughtered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964. Nor with the Berkeley students demonstrating in a closed-off plaza whom he ordered tear-gassed by helicopter in 1969.
Nor, last but not least, with the tens of thousands of AIDS corpses whose disease he did not even deign to publicly acknowledge until 1987.
As the eulogies come down the pike, don’t let conservatives, once again, win the ideological struggle to determine mainstream discourse. Remember Reagan; respect him. But don’t let them make you revere him. He was a divider, not a uniter.
FILE - In this Nov. 3, 2010 file photo, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour speaks during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)(Credit: AP) 
