1965
“Days of Our Lives”, “Never Too Young”,
“A Time For Us”,
“The Moment of Truth” and “The Nurses”
Poor Lyndon. He wanted so much to be able to step out of Kennedy’s shadow, and into the spotlight as one of America’s greatest Presidents. He might have made it, too, if a tiny, backward nation, half way around the world hadn’t shot him right in his Achilles’ heel. Play “word association” with any Boomer. The answer for LBJ is Vietnam. But, contrary to popular contemporary Boomer thinking, Johnson wasn’t a complete idiot. Kennedy had taught him that, in modern America, the President’s image matters more to the public than the real man or his actions. Lyndon waited patiently for his turn, and now carefully molded his media reflection. LBJ leveled with a group of reporters on January 10, 1964: “If you play along with me, I’ll play along with you. I’ll make big men of you. If you play it the other way, I know how to play it both ways, too, and I know how to cut off the flow of news, except in handouts.” Lyndon had already written the scenario for his presidency, and those lowly newsboys better not mess it up. But, sadly, even the President of the United States cannot write history in advance.
Act One of Johnson’s script actually worked. He looked good on TV during his State of the Union Message on January 8th, as he declared the War on Poverty and civil rights to be the major issues of the day. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act on July 2nd, and Lyndon signed it in a televised ceremony the same day. By the end of the year, 70% of Americans polled declared that LBJ was doing a good job, and only 10% said he sucked.
But, the curtain barely rose on Act Two when an unexpected character from another story walked right out on to center stage. On January 2nd, Martin Luther King, Jr., just back from picking up his Nobel Peace Prize in Sweden, pointed out that a law, such as the Civil Rights Act, is only a law if it is enforced. That line wasn’t in Johnson’s script. Martin was improvising! Lyndon had made a big show out of a Southern president signing the new-and-improved Emancipation Proclamation, and yet, not much had changed. Black adults were now guaranteed the right to vote, but local officials, especially in the South, blocked their registration with absurd “competency” tests and illegal voting taxes. King decided to expose the system at Selma, Alabama… the site of the Confederacy’s last stand at the end of the Civil War. Bigots there still fiercely protected their divine White Rights a century later. Most of the Caucasian adults in the town were registered to vote, but only about 3% of the African Americans.
During the past decade, coverage of a civil rights demonstration such as King’s would have been buried on the back pages of your local newspaper, but now, in 1965, “mobile” TV news crews finally lived up to their name. Cameras quickly reached the scene, capturing all the action: local police brutally unleashing bullwhips, night sticks, tear gas, fire hoses and attack dogs against unarmed demonstrators, of every race, including religious leaders and many women and children. A proud sheriff described the fine work of his men on network television, “You just gotta know how to treat them niggars.” The images outraged viewers, and instantly, Selma became a national problem demanding an immediate solution. Governor Wallace refused to protect the protestors, which forced Johnson (reluctantly) to send in the National Guard.
LBJ, however, didn’t hesitate to send teenage Boomer boys to the opposite side of the planet to protect a tiny third world country’s right to be ruled by an unpopular puppet government. As King planned a march from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery on March 8th, the first American combat troops (3,500 Marines) landed in Danang, South Vietnam on Johnson’s orders. The event received only a brief sound bite on the network news, as did the first “teach-in” protest at the University of Michigan on March 25th, as did violent anti-USA demonstrations in Latin America, Europe and Africa a month earlier during heavy bombing of North Vietnam by the United States. These vague reflections would soon gain significance as they crystallized and magnified into the form of Lyndon’s Monster of the Id.
Vietnam loomed as the most threatening event in the lives of Boomers for the next decade. Ten million boys (out of thirty) served in the Armed Forces, more than three million saw duty in Vietnam, 58,000 died in action and hundreds of thousands returned maimed for life. Every Boomer was touched by the war.
The government recognized the plus side: the glut of Boomer teens did not affect the unemployment rates. Lyndon hired them. As the number of kids turning eighteen increased month by month (beginning in mid-1964), so did the draft quotas and the numbers of teens sent the combat zone. The only problem with this plan was the staggering cost of the war. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara estimated on April 26, 1965, that the price had surpassed $1.5 billion annually and continued to rise. Vietnam siphoned off enormous chunks of federal money from LBJ/JFK’s domestic social programs, such the War on Poverty, enforcing Civil Rights, urban renewal and improving education, all of which Lyndon promised in his State of Union message. Now, he reneged, and many of the hopes and dreams that he and JFK stirred up in good faith, became blatant lies.