Ripper J. American Stories: Living American History. Volume 2: From 1865
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IN LOVE AND WAR: 1961–1969
13
In Love and War: 1961–1969
Lyndon B. Johnson (left) and Martin Luther King Jr. (right)
(Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
239
AMERICAN STORIES
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Big Dreams
On November 8, 1966, people whose television sets were tuned to NBC
launched themselves into outer space along with Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock,
Lieutenant Uhura, Bones (the doctor), and all the rest of the crew of the star-
ship Enterprise, “its five-year mission . . . to boldly go where no man has
gone
before.” Enter angelic voices “ooh-oohing” at the stars. Cut to the flash
of light from the twin propulsion systems of the USS Enterprise as it winks
out of sight, bound for a beautiful future somewhere far, far away. Star Trek
was written by Gene Roddenberry
, but it was created by the 1960s.
Theoretically, everyone in the United States was aboard the beeping and
flashing deck of the Enterprise. With America deep in the midst of its own
shame
and glory—with the Vietnam War heating up, President John F. Ken-
n
edy three years dead of an assassin’s bullets, civil rights leaders divided over
methods of peace and violence, homosexuals stepping out into public and
proclaiming pride, Native Americans and Latino-Americans demonstrating
for their rights—maybe it took an interracial, interplanetary crew blasting
away from all the craziness on Earth to give proper perspective to the best
parts of the American Dream.
In 1962, Kennedy had challenged the nation to put a man on the moon.
But with the Apollo space program mired in problems—including a January
1967 flash fire that killed a flight crew during a routine on-ground training
mission—the starship Enterprise seemed to be the collective fantasy needed
to keep spirits high.
W
ith equally lofty ambition, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil
Rights Act (which Kennedy had proposed) in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act
in 1965—both monumental in their pledge of federal support for civil rights
that had been till then no more substantial than thin dried ink. Although both
the space program and the civil rights program faced monumental challenges,
racism proved a more stubborn foe than the difficulties of extraterrestrial rock-
etry
. In 1964, in Selma, Alabama, only 2 percent of African-Americans were
able to register for the vote. Regardless of new laws, many white southerners
continued to resist integration and other forms of equality in despicable, ugly
ways. During the “Freedom Summer” of 1964, when civil rights workers,
including hundreds of primarily white college students from the North, con-
v
erged in Mississippi to register African-Americans to vote, violence engulfed
the region. Most memorably, two northern whites—Michael Schwerner and
Andrew Goodman—and one black man from Mississippi, James Chaney,
were kidnapped by Ku Klux Klansmen, tortured, murdered, and buried. A
visiting physician who examined Chaney’s recovered corpse said that in his
long career he had never seen a body as badly ruined as Chaney’s except when
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IN LOVE AND WAR: 1961–1969
corpses had been pulled from car or airplane crashes. And at the Democratic
National Convention that year, when delegates from the new, 60,000-strong
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) tried to participate, white
southern Democrats laid down an ultimatum that amounted to racist blackmail:
either the MFDP delegates would be ignored or segregationist Democrats
would leave the party and thereby steal President Johnson’s base in Congress.
The MFDP was composed of African-Americans who had registered during
Freedom Summer, and now their own nominal parent organization refused to
seat them. With television cameras rolling, a sharecropper and descendant of
slaves named Fannie Lou Hamer sat at a table in the convention hall and told
how she had been driven off her land in 1962 after daring to register and how
she had later been arrested (essentially for being black) after attending a civil
rights workshop. The arresting officer kicked her in the stomach before shoving
her into a patrol car and then into a jail cell. Then, Hamer recounted:
[I]t wasn’t too long before three white men came to my cell. One of these
men was a State Highway Patrolman and he . . . said, “We’re going to make
you wish you was dead.”
I was carried out of that cell into another cell where they had two Negro
prisoners. The State Highway Patrolman ordered the first Negro to take the
blackjack. The first Negro prisoner ordered me, by orders from the State
Highway Patrolman, for me to lay down on a bunk bed on my face. And I
laid on my face, the first Negro began to beat me.
And I was beat by the first Negro until he was exhausted. I was holding
my hands behind me at that time on my left side, because I suffered from
polio when I was six years old.
After the first Negro had beat until he was exhausted, the State Highway
Patrolman ordered the second Negro to take the blackjack.
The second Negro began to beat and . . . I began to scream and one white
man got up and began to beat me in my head and tell me to hush.
One white man, my dress had worked up high, he walked over and pulled
my dress—I pulled my dress down and he pulled my dress back up . . .
All of this is on account of we want to register, to become first-class
citizens. And if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question
America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave,
where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hooks because our
lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings,
in America?
1
History and tradition still had the South by the throat. But out in space, in a
future cut loose from the past, no federal laws or marshals were there to stop
the first interracial kiss in television history between Kirk and Uhura—he the
AMERICAN STORIES
242
white captain, she the black communications officer. That is what stories are
for sometimes: to show us who we can be.
Then
there was the “prime directive” handed down to the space trekkers
aboard the Enterprise. Whenever they encountered an alien civilization, Kirk
and
crew were instructed not to unduly interfere, not to introduce advanced
technologies that might alter or even ruin a thriving and ancient culture. The
Enterprise crewmembers could fire their photon torpedoes and lay down
a barrage of laser beam fire when necessary, but their best moments came
from diplomacy and negotiated respect with whatever planet full of wrinkly
faced humanoids they found. This grander purpose of peace was a modern
allegory. The crew of the Enterprise could escape Earth but they could not
escape
being human. Wherever they went, conflict waited for them. And just
about every species had the same capacity to kill. This was the Cold War in
space. Gene Roddenberry, having fun all the way, was doing his best to raise
people’s consciousness.
By June 1969, when the last of the eighty episodes aired, Star Trek’s
universal popularity had spread through the living-room temples of Trek-
kies
implanted like alien invaders in every town and city. Trekkies looked
like normal people, but they wanted to speak Klingon and plot a utopian
revolution of logic, reason, and pointy ears—all inspired by a low-budget
show with props that looked more like wobbly cardboard than space metal.
The dream was what mattered. Besides, reality was catching up with fiction:
six months earlier, three American astronauts on Apollo 8 had been in and
out of a moon orbit, and July 20, 1969, was only a month away, when Neil
Armstrong would set his white boot onto the powdery surface of the moon
and proclaim, “That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.”
Humans really were star trekking, and it seemed that Spock’s extraterrestrial
Vulcan salutations, “Live long and prosper” and “Peace and long life,” might
really come true. In mid-August, on Max Yasgur’s farm in Woodstock, New
York, young people gathered to bask in the beat of Janis Joplin’s wail, Joan
Baez’s folk, the Grateful Dead’s transcendent space riffs, and Jimi Hendrix’s
guitar licks. On a mere 600 acres, about 400,000 tripped-out freaks, sober
collegians, and other happy fans waded through rain and mud, smoked bushels
of pot, and coexisted peacefully with the neighboring farmers who helped
feed and water the legions of love. If humans could tear free from gravity and
soar some 238,000 thousand miles away, the thinking went, surely poverty,
inequality, and strife could be overcome.
As in space, so on earth: at solemn moments of goodbye, Leonard Nimoy’s
character Spock flashed the Vulcan salute, a kind of spaceman’s peace sign and
handshake in one, his whole hand turned into a V; flower children—the baby
boomer college kids who wanted to “make love, not war”—flashed their own
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IN LOVE AND WAR: 1961–1969
two-fingered V for peace at cameras, cops, and each other. The V-for-peace
became so common that Robert F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy’s younger brother,
used it during his 1968 presidential campaign on the night he told a mostly black
audience in Indianapolis that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot to death by a
white man. Kennedy cautioned calm, expressed his grief, and shared a line from
an ancient Greek playwright. “My favorite poet,” he said into the microphone,
“was Aeschylus. He once wrote: ‘Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will,
comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’”
2
He then offered the peace
sign in parting. The “Establishment” was being co-opted by the counterculture,
and the crowd in Indianapolis did stay calm even as rioting engulfed other cities
throughout the nation. There was reason to hope.
Gene Roddenberry’s vision of a harmonized human future squared with the
mystic awe felt by television viewers when Apollo 8 astronauts beamed back
narrated color photos of Earthrise over the moon’s horizon. In the vastness
of dark space, Earth floated blue, a minuscule ball of color and life bobbing
in the abyss. The perspective of distance made people feel close. The Soviets
posted congratulations to America in a state-run newspaper right after Apollo
8 made its splashy return into the Pacific. Maybe even Cold War competition
could be healthy and dif
ferences bridged.
But in 1968, two months after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination,
Robert Kennedy also was gunned down, right after winning the California
presidential primary on a platform dedicated to social justice and peace. En-
tropy
, anger, and fear were trying to strangle love and hope. As Kennedy’s
funeral train chugged eastward, tens of thousands of mourners spontaneously
gathered along the tracks, holding signs proclaiming, “Bobby, we love you.”
In Vietnam in January 1968, during the Vietnamese lunar New Year, Tet,
communist forces attacked more than 100 sites and installations across the
country (including the U.S. embassy), shocking the public into a realization
that the United States most definitely was not about to “win” in Vietnam, as
the administration and military leaders had been saying for three years. In
Chicago, riots erupted between demonstrators and Mayor Richard Daley’s
police squads during the Democratic National Convention. Daley had more
than 6,000 police and federal army troops at his disposal, including about
1,000 operatives from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Once more, but not for the last time,
men with badges and clubs battered unarmed demonstrators. The whole na-
tion
watched on television in stunned disbelief. Faith and trust seemed to be
leaking away. Good people kept dying, and the goodness they invoked in the
hearts of a confused nation started to seem as impossibly distant as the alien
civilizations Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock had visited.
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244
By presenting himself as the beacon of “law and order,” the Republican
candidate for president, Richard Nixon, used disturbances like the one in Chi-
cago
to get elected. Six years later, in 1974, Nixon would resign from office
to avoid impeachment by Congress concerning his role in one foul disgrace
after another. From the White House, Nixon spent six years consolidating
a Republican grasp on national political power while simultaneously and
illegally indulging his own paranoia and hunger for control. Nixon ordered
the Internal Revenue Service to pester political opponents. His appointed
henchmen illegally used funds from the Committee to Reelect the President
to pay former government agents to break into the offices of a psychiatrist
who had treated Daniel Ellsberg, the man who released the Pentagon Papers,
which
revealed previous presidents’ lies concerning the war in Vietnam. And
Nixon ordered the same team of “plumbers” to break into and bug the head-
quarters
of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in
Washington, DC, in 1972, hoping the “intelligence” gathering might provide
him with nasty details that could help him get reelected. After he resigned
from office (the only president to do so), his successor, Gerald Ford, gave
Nixon a blanket pardon before congressional inquiries could sift through
the reams of evidence and determine whether to bring Nixon to trial for his
alleged crimes. No wonder Star Trek reruns became more and more popular
year after year. Captain Kirk was an ethical chief executive motivated by (an
admittedly brash) sense of responsibility, not by secrecy, lies, and paranoia
like the chief executive in the White House.
“Still crazy after all these years”:
Castr
o, Kennedy, and Khrushchev
In 1962, humans did not blow up planet Earth. In 1962, humans were, how-
ever
, afraid that they might blow up planet Earth. The fear seemed reasonable
enough. The Soviet Union, under its unpredictable, cue-ball-headed leader,
Nikita Khrushchev, had resumed atmospheric nuclear testing. Not wanting to
appear a thermonuclear weakling, President Kennedy ordered the resumption
of atmospheric nuclear testing as well. Kennedy and Khrushchev were play-
ing
Russian-American roulette with loaded hydrogen bombs and spreading
radioactive waste around the globe in the process. Khrushchev seemed like
a nutty wildcard who enjoyed bluster and threats that he might really mean.
He once yelled at one of Kennedy’s cabinet-level secretaries about America’s
hypocrisy; while U.S. atomic warheads ringed the Soviet Union from Turkey
to West Germany, Kennedy was carping about a few surface-to-air missiles
lately installed in Cuba. Khrushchev bellowed at the secretary, “Let’s not talk
about using force; we’re equally strong . . . we can swat your ass.”
3
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IN LOVE AND WAR: 1961–1969
Although Europe appeared to be the likeliest dirt patch for a major show-
down between communists and capitalists since the close of the Korean War
in 1953, Fidel Castro, a bearded revolutionary in olive green, had changed the
equation in 1959 by overthrowing the military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista
in Cuba. Though Castro was not originally a communist, he was brutal, and a
series of bumpy incidents with the United States pushed him into Khrushchev’s
Soviet embrace. Plus, Fidel’s younger brother, Raul, was already a communist.
The Castro brothers ran with a good friend and fellow revolutionary, Ernesto
“Che” Guevara, an Argentine doctor who diagnosed the United States with
a case of imperialism and prescribed communist revolution as the antidote.
Guevara had been in Guatemala in 1954 when CIA-funded, -trained, and -led
paramilitary forces had violently overthrown a democratically elected govern-
ment.
He witnessed the start of an American-installed, right-wing, repressive
government that led to civil war and 200,000 Guatemalan deaths by 1996,
“mostly civilian lives, with an estimated 80 percent of those deaths caused
by the U.S.-trained military.”
4
Che Guevara had real reason to see the United
States as an interfering, destructive force in Latin America.
From the outset, Fidel Castro’s relationship with the United States had
been strained. In 1958, the United States had supplied Batista’s forces
with weapons, and in return Castro’s followers had taken U.S. Marines
hostage. The crisis had been resolved peacefully, but it established a shaky
basis for friendship once Fidel Castro took control in January 1959. Also,
during the fighting against Batista’s forces, Castro had obtained weapons
from communist Czechoslovakia with the Kremlin’s okay.
5
Lines were be-
ing drawn. Then, in April 1959, while the American public was enjoying
Castro’s rumpled-bandit look during his hotdog-eating, public-relations
tour of the States, President Eisenhower refused to meet with Castro and
went golfing instead. More problematic for U.S.-Cuban relations than that
diplomatic snub was Castro’s decision to nationalize foreign-owned busi-
n
esses in Cuba, most of which were U.S. corporate property. When Castro
offered to buy the properties at the devalued rates previously claimed by
companies like United Fruit, American enchantment with Castro eroded.
Over a series of months, the United States slowed its purchases of Cuban
sugar, and Castro signed an oil deal with the Soviets. Eisenhower broke
off all relations with Castro in January 1961, just as John Kennedy was
preparing to enter the White House. In this as with so much else, Kennedy
inherited unresolved problems. Fidel Castro was originally a nationalist,
not a communist. He had wanted to empower Cubans, but the schemes and
fears of Soviets, Americans, and his own advisers had convinced him that
in order to nationalize, he would have to communize. What is more, Castro
never showed any reluctance when it came to stifling opposition at home.
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246
Castro’s supporters overlooked the political executions and imprisonments
he ordered. U.S. observers paid close attention.
In 1960, with Eisenhower’s approval, the CIA began training about 1,400
Cuban exiles to invade their homeland in hopes of inciting a counterrevolution
to oust Castro. The plan relied on presidential willingness to use the U.S. Air
Force to bomb Cuba in preparation for the invasion. Just before assuming the
presidency, Kennedy learned about the plan and decided to go ahead with it,
though he had serious doubts. On April 15, 1961, U.S. bombers disguised as
part of the Cuban Air Force struck lamely at Cuban airfields, destroying only
three planes. Nobody in the world was deceived by the paint job on the U.S.
bombers, and critical responses were instantaneous. So President Kennedy
temporarily grounded the bombers, which might have made a difference
for the 1,310 exile-commandos who landed the next day at the Bay of Pigs,
not far from Havana. The Bay of Pigs invasion was a short-term disaster for
Kennedy, a coup for Khrushchev, and the final inducement for Castro to go
indelibly communist.
W
ithin days of the debacle, a humbled but honest Kennedy went on national
television and assumed complete responsibility for what had happened. His
approval ratings shot up above 70 percent. The whole experience convinced
him that he should not bow to the pressure of U.S. military leaders, most of
whom had been urging him to continue the bombings on April 15 and 16.
Kennedy’s choice to be his own man paid off well in October 1962.
After Castro pronounced Cuba a socialist country, and after it was obvi-
ous
that the United States and Cuba were not going to be good neighbors,
Khrushchev decided to help his new ally by sending Castro sixty nuclear-
capable missiles, some medium-range, others able to reach as far as Maine
or the Panama Canal. The missiles, nuclear warheads, 40,000 accompany-
ing
soldiers and engineers, and launch equipment were shipped to Cuba on
innocuous-looking freighters beginning in July 1962. Given the increasing
commerce between Cuba and the Soviet Union, the ships themselves were
no cause for concern. But photo images delivered by American U-2 spy
planes told a different, more chilling tale. Misguided by the logical nonsense
of nuclear deterrence, the United States and the Soviets were following a
natural progression to the point of near disaster, partly to test the mettle and
resolve of the opponent, partly because each leader had to appear strong to
his conservative constituency, partly because that is what happens eventually
when a nation has a weapon: it gets brandished.
Ever
since 1957, American pilots had been flying U-2 spy planes over en-
e
my territory, a genuine flouting of international law. The plane itself, basically
a glorified glider, looked like a tiny needle suspended between seventy-foot
thin wings. American designers had thought the planes would remain above
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IN LOVE AND WAR: 1961–1969
the range of Soviet or Chinese missiles, but in 1960, a U-2 was shot down
near Sverdlovsk in Russia. The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, decided not to use
his poison pin (a last-ditch suicide capsule), and he was captured, convicted
in a Soviet court, and used as proof that the Americans were not playing fair.
Eisenhower responded that, laws or no laws, the utter destructive force of
nuclear weapons necessitated spying. Even so, the U.S. military scaled back
its U-2 missions, and by summer 1962, the planes were not flying over Cuba,
though flights soon resumed.
In September 1962, rhetoric over Cuba between Kennedy and Khrushchev
heated. Both leaders made public declarations that all necessary measures
would be taken to safeguard their relative interests. They also exchanged
private letters full of bewildered language, each accusing the other of turning
up the temperature unnecessarily. Although always handsome and collected
in public, John F. Kennedy had suffered excruciating back pain for years, and
at times like these, his personal physicians concocted all sorts of remedies,
including five hot showers daily and dangerous injections of methamphet-
amines
directly into his knotted back muscles. Three billion people were sit-
ting
on his shoulders. The world’s fate literally rested on choices that could
easily be wrong. For all their posturing, neither of the superpowers’ leaders
wanted war. Still, with new evidence pouring into the White House, Kennedy
finally ordered new U-2 flights. He had to know if Khrushchev was or was not
placing nuclear warheads off the coast of Florida on the island of a dictator
against whom Eisenhower had issued assassination orders. (In fact, through
CIA intercessors, Eisenhower had dealt with senior members of the Mafia,
hoping one of their boys in Cuba could poison, stab, or strangle Commandante
Castro.) A marked man cornered on his home turf was not someone whom
Kennedy wanted to have access to the power of the gods.
By
October 16, Kennedy had irrefutable photographic evidence of missile
placements throughout Cuba. “Oh shit! shit! shit!” moaned Robert Kennedy,
who was privy to all meetings as U.S. attorney general.
6
The crisis was on.
Kennedy needed to figure out why the missiles had been placed on Cuba.
He
thought they had something to do with the delicate negotiations ongoing
between the United States, West Germany, and the Soviet Union about the fate
of West Berlin: that encircled half-city of a million people whom Kennedy
had promised to defend even unto the obliteration of all of them. In 1961, with
East German citizens streaming into West Berlin—all the essential doctors,
engineers, and other professionals—Khrushchev had ordered the Berlin Wall
to be built across the middle of the city, not to keep out the capitalists, but to
keep in the unhappy communists. The whole project was really a statement
about how poorly communism was working, but Kennedy denounced it all
the same. Believing that Khrushchev wanted some new accord over Berlin,