'Unprecedented Corruption & Obstruction'

Review by Bill Doughty

An era of hope and cultural transformation came to an abrupt end with a backlash of unprecedented corruption and obstruction leading to impeachment and cynicism. The president distracted a nation with a trip to Asia to break the ice with a decades-long adversary. He would collude with an enemy for political advantage. And he would use fear to win office.

That president came to power in 1968. 

Sen. Robert F. Kennedy

Nixon's glide to the presidency came after the assassination of his greatest rival for the office, Robert F. Kennedy, in June 1968, fifty years ago this month.

It took writer Richard N. Goodwin twenty years to recover from his grief of another Kennedy assassination sufficiently to publish a book about his experience in the 60s, first working with President John F. Kennedy as assistant special counsel, in the Johnson administration and then as an advisor and supporter of JFK's younger brother Robert Francis Kennedy.

"Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties" (Little, Brown and Company, 1988) is not just an illuminating and insightful history of the period, but it is also an examination of what our nation stands for: one nation, free, indivisible, led by the people, guided by the Constitution, dedicated to justice, inalienable rights and the rule of law.

"Remembering" is also, by its name, a memoir, one that opens with Goodwin's connection to Dec. 7, 1941. It was his birthday. He was ten years old.

"An aunt interrupted my tenth birthday party. The Japanese had just attacked Pearl Harbor. I barely noticed the swift dissolution of my celebration, feeling a thrill of excitement, an exultation of awareness that great events had happened. And on my birthday. On Dick Goodwin's day. Ignoring my departing friends I rushed to the radio, listened to the confused tumble of announcements, took several pieces of paper, and penciled the news of the attack across the top of a dozen sheets. I ran down the street to the corner drugstore and offered my homemade broadsheet to passing motorists at the outrageous price of five cents a copy, selling out quickly for enough money to buy six comic books."

Goodwin the Army and was in France in December 1955 when African-American Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus. He, along with Kennedy, witnessed integration of the military accelerate after the Second World War. In Goodwin's case, he saw integration already embraced in Europe. JFK, skipper of PT-109, fought for America in the Pacific against Imperial Japan's racist and expansionist military.

In 1957, the Soviet Union with Sputnik became the first nation in space, stunning the world.

"With a single, immense leap, the Soviets had undermined our confidence in the divinely bestowed preeminence of America. Voices were raised to challenge the quality of our education, our laboratories, our very way of life. Had we – we asked ourselves – become soft, complacent, begun to decline? The year I graduated law school – 1958 – newspapers were crowded with accounts of anti-American riots that, within the next two years, would spread to embassies and missions in dozens of countries. In France, a tomato was splashed into the windshield of an American tourist's car; in Morocco, a better dispute was raging over air base rentals; in Germany there were increasing outbursts of popular resentment against American GIs, who had come as occupiers and stayed on in the role of defenders against the new communist menace; in Okinawa the U.S. Air Force was under attack for appropriating highly productive land to expand air fields. 'The Ugly American,' a devastating fictional critique of American policy in Asia, written by two Americans, became a best-selling book. What had gone wrong? The liberator of World War II, the guardian of freedom, the beacon's of man's hope, was being spat on and reviled."

Richard N. Goodwin (JFK Library)

Rather than being seen as standing for justice and against oppression, Americans were then thought of "as the selfish rich aristocrats of the globe, modern imperialists who wished only to protect our own interests, indifferent to the misery and discontent of those in other lands," Goodwin writes. This was a dangerous development in the Cold War, he said: "Enmity toward America was, ultimately, in some indefinable sense, a victory for the Russians..."

Enter "malevolently deceitful" Richard M. Nixon, Eisenhower's vice president, and power-hungry prevaricator who would undermine policy toward Cuba and later subvert peace-talks with North Vietnam, leading to a lengthening of the war. Nixon, brilliantly flawed, would leverage fear to eventually win the presidency 50 years ago this year.

Goodwin provides an instructional vision of his own coming-of-age in the Cold War – serving in the Army and in the Civil Rights Movement, working for JFK and LBJ. As a speechwriter and advisor he was responsible for naming LBJ's program to help underprivileged people, "the Great Society." He actually worked to make America great, dedicating himself to civil rights, voting rights and greater equality for people regardless of race.

Goodwin believed in speaking truth to power. "One did not serve a powerful master by flattering accommodation to his views."

President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson.

In "Remembering" we are treated to behind-the-scenes stories of LBJ and JFK revealing their warts and weaknesses as well as their great strengths. Kennedy was tolerant and understanding of other world leaders. He knew they could not defy their own constituencies without losing authority and power.

"This informed tolerance was infiltrated, sometimes distorted, by his personal experience, as observer and participant, of the Second World War. The man who, as a student, had written 'While England Slept' did not intend to allow hope of peace to enfeeble our capacity to make war. The son of a notorious appeaser, personal witness to Chamberlain's folly, was not likely to withdraw before the demands of our Soviet adversary. The fighting sailor of World War II, like many of his generation, derived from his participation in American military exploits, a heightened, almost naive confidence in the country's ability to match any foe, bear any burden necessary to victory. His was a generation of winners. In toppling the formidable military empires of Germany and Japan, they had been imbued with the belief that America possessed reserves of will and strength adequate to any threat. Like many of his fellow veterans he did not fully appreciate – at first – how nuclear weapons had changed the nature and possibility of war; or that obscure, murky, and inconclusive battles within the third world could not be translated into the kind of contest between Western powers that had directed, scarred, and degraded the most bloody century in human history."

Goodwin's revelations swing from the global to the national and local.

President Kennedy inspects U.S. Coast Guard cadets.

In the book's "prelude" Goodwin describes one of JFK's first conversations in the hours after the inaugural parade of his young presidency. It was noon, January 20, 1961, and Kennedy asked, "Did you see the Coast Guard detachment?" Goodwin remembered, "Frantically I canvassed my memory of the parade. Impatiently Kennedy interrupted my efforts at recollection. 'There wasn't a black face in the entire group. That's not acceptable. Something ought to be done about it.' The observation was an order. It was a manner of command I had learned well over the brief period of my employment."

Civil rights and voting rights are causes that electrified the 60s and form the basis for the hope and change and greater equality that defined a generation. The goodness of service was tempered by the Vietnam War and by the reality that power attracted people who hoped to gain influence for personal profit. Goodwin received calls, including from at least one big-business attorney, who knew that access to the White House translated to higher fees. "But a few instances like this were enough to dispel naiveté about the ubiquity of greed, and our vulnerability to those who could contrive ways of making money from ... White House contacts."

"The hazards of openness were trivial compared to the enrichments, both of personal experience and, more substantially, of government," Goodwin writes, but he warns of the dangers of self-delusion in an insulated environment where power can corrupt and where delusions of grandeur can cloud vision. That's what happened to Richard Nixon as he corrupted, impeded and obstructed his way to a second term in office.

"It is a hallucination bred of sensory deprivation and fed by a continual stream of flattery, respectful attention, and well meant invocations of patriotic reverence. It is intensified by the natural tendency of all power – even the most democratic – to resent any impediments to its exercise. What better way to achieve this than to close oneself off from dissent or to pretend it does not even exits. The pressures toward such dangerous and misleading isolation are so powerful – so pervasive in that company town called Washington – that they can only be resisted by continual, conscious effort to reach out, personally an with a critical intelligence, to people and ideas apart from government, to the ceaseless movement of an elusively complex society. The president does not rule America. He does not even lead it, except within the limits defined by the society itself."

President Kennedy and astronaut John Glenn peer inside Friendship 7 capsule.

Goodwin contends that JFK "seemed to embody the idea of America ... the idea by which we have defined America, and, by extension, ourselves as Americans." Kennedy's "presence helped to revitalize our belief in ourselves."

"This idea contains no claim of moral superiority. Still less does it encompass the realities of American history and modern life. Our behavior has often contradicted faith, belief, and principle. But it is the American idea; forced upon us by history and certain moments of illuminating vision. It has provided us with a sense of shared worth and social purpose. Even our most unholy departures have sought justification in that idea. We may have had warlike majorities, destructive majorities, or greedy majorities, but we have never had a majority of cynics. At least until now."

Goodwin's words come from 1988, decades before Internet trolls and vulgar tweets. Goodwin lamented there was "no place for romantics in the triumphant ascendance of bureaucracy."

The "postscript" epilogue in this book begins with this "found haiku" as Goodwin describes "signs of a most troublesome decay" from the hopeful 60s to the cynical 80s:

Now the ghosts dissolve.

The tumult and the speeches

fade into silence.

This book was so good I dedicated two reviews to it; the first, posted on Father's Day, follows Goodwin's time with LBJ and his disillusionment brought about by the war in Vietnam and by the assassinations of three great men in the 1960s.



Goodwin died one month ago, May 25. His memorial service was held June 15. "Remembering America" is dedicated to his wife, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author Doris Kearns-Goodwin.

Vietnam / Remembering an American Voice

Review by Bill Doughty

By 1968 it was becoming clear to many Americans that the war in Vietnam was a terrible miscalculation. One of those Americans was a young government worker, speechwriter Richard N. "Dick" Goodwin, author of "Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties" (Little, Brown and Company, 1988)

In a chapter called "The Impossible War" Goodwin explains clearly how the war started and escalated. Ignited by JFK and turned into a bonfire by LBJ, the Vietnam War engulfed the United States and led to the election of Richard Nixon and what Goodwin called thirty years ago, "our more cynical age."

The war, which began as a legacy of World War II, escalated in earnest for the United States with "Operation Rolling Thunder" that "would be the largest sustained campaign of aerial attack in the history of warfare."

Speechwriter and adviser Dick Goodwin stands with President Kennedy.

Those Americans who were ordered to fight in Vietnam should be honored for their patriotism. What about those who ordered them? Why were warnings of involvement ignored? What about those who sought deferment from service? And how should we remember the patriotism of those who were on the right side of history and fought to end the war?

Goodwin helps provide context and understanding by describing how the war in Vietnam started. His succinct account deserves to be remembered:

At the end of World War II, after the Japanese had been driven from Indochina, the French returned to reoccupy their former colonial possessions. In 1946 – three years before Mao Tse-Tung had conquered China – Ho Chi Minh, himself a communist, organized and led the opposition to French rule. The war against the French lasted for eight years, until, in 1954 – with the collapse of the French Stronghold at Dien Bien Phu – it culminated in victory for Ho Chi Minh. Twenty-five thousand Frenchmen had perished in the futile effort to maintain a colonialism that was being ended or destroyed throughout the third world.   On the eve of defeat, the French asked President Eisenhower for direct American intervention. He refused. "Ike sent General Ridgway and me to evaluate the situation on the ground," I was later told by General James Gavin, hero of the airborne assaults that preceded the Allied invasion of Europe. "When we returned Ike asked us what we thought. Ridgway told him that intervention was a political decision, but he could give an opinion of the military situation. 'If we do go in, air strikes won't do the job. The war has to be won on the ground. To fight a ground war I would need to begin with a few divisions, building to a strength of several hundred thousand men fairly quickly. And even then I can't guarantee victory.'" If there had been any doubt in Eisenhower's mind, it was dissolved by this report from the general who had led our forces in Korea, and whose bravery, integrity and honesty of judgment were beyond question.   "No one could be more bitterly opposed to ever getting involved in hot war in the region than I am," Eisenhower said in February of 1954. "I could not conceive of a greater tragedy for America than to get heavily involved now in an all-out war in any of these regions, particularly with large units." Admittedly the United States had supplied the French with over 2.5 billion dollars of military and economic assistance, almost 80 percent of the French war effort. But the war was lost. Facts were facts. We would just have to write off our losses. Eisenhower was a realist.   In that decisive year of 1954, with the French approaching defeat and American intervention still a possibility, two men who were to direct the unfolding Asian drama of the sixties spoke in opposition to their country's involvement."No amount of American military assistance in Indochina," said Senator John Kennedy in April of 1954, "can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, 'an enemy of the people' which has the sympathy and covert support of the people."   Around the same time, Senate Minority Leader Lyndon Johnson, summoned by John Foster Dulles in a frantic effort to assure bipartisan support for an American intervention, told the secretary of state that he could not support any military action that did not have  the full support and assistance of our allies. It was, of course, an impossible condition. Our allies had no intention of companioning us into the Asian jungles. But it was shrewd politics. Johnson had not actually refused support, but he had avoided becoming an accomplice. The memory of Korea ... was still fresh...   Once the possibility of U.S. intervention was foreclosed, the game was over for France. Ho Chi Minh could not be defeated. The best the French could hope for would be a long and probably losing war of attrition against Asian multitudes. Somewhat pompously we instructed the French that no military victory was possible in Vietnam unless  "proper political atmosphere" was established. "A proper political atmosphere!" Hidden in that abstraction, its inward meaning, was the key to French failure and to failures yet to come. Effective opposition to communist insurgency could come only from a people who had a stake in their own society, faith in their own future, a sense of allegiance, an identity of interests with their own government – enough so that they would fight and risk their lives for its preservation. The French commanded no such loyalty and belief, and neither, in the end, did we or the governments we selected and sustained.

Marines in South Vietnam. (National Archives)

Goodwin shows how Kennedy and Johnson may have used Eisenhower's promise of continued "commitment" to South Vietnam. That commitment deepened when one million Catholics fled the North and in the face of a communist insurgency that threatened the South, itself a "virtual fiefdom, run for the benefit of an oligarchy, its population and, ultimately, its government hostage to a military establishment fed and strengthened by U.S. aid." Kennedy increased the numbers of "advisers" sent to Southeast Asia by the hundreds, deepening the commitment substantially.

"Kennedy's policy was doomed," Goodwin writes. "And it was also dangerous. By increasing the number of American advisers from six hundred to around sixteen thousand, the Americanization of Vietnam was accelerated, the likelihood that Americans would come under attack was increased, and the credibility of the government in Saigon – the perception of its independence – was undermined, increasing the ability of the Vietcong to attract adherents for their 'war of liberation.'"

But the decision to transform the war, to escalate, to fully engage in ground combat, was President Johnson's. The decision would destroy his presidency.

Johnson committed more and more American troops into Vietnam. "By April of 1967 the number was well over half a million," Goodwin writes. "And the horror of it was that almost everyone knew that the war was unwinnable – except for a president of the United States and the few ambitious, limited men who shared and served to fortify his disastrous self-deception."



The Constitution was designed by the framers to prevent the disaster that was the Vietnam War. Goodwin quotes Founder James Madison:

"In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men," wrote Madison, "the greatest difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions."

Goodwin contends that beginning in 1965 those "auxiliary precautions were taken down, with Congress ignorant and "rendered virtually impotent," no longer a strong check on the power of the executive branch, and even the advisers and special assistants "excluded from the councils of decision" except those who told the president what he wanted to hear.

Goodwin writes, "And finally the wisdom of Madison was wholly discarded for that far more ancient maxim of Saint Matthew's Gospel that 'He that is not with me is against me,' forgetting that an admonition to follow God through an act of faith had no relevance to mortal leaders whose acts are to be judged by reason and secular conviction."

Evacuating a casualty in a South Vietnam swamp. (National Archives)

We get a disturbing look at the corruption of power and how the war affected the President's conduct. "My conclusion that Lyndon Johnson experienced certain episodes of what I believe to have been paranoid behavior is based purely on my observation of his conduct during the three years I worked for him."

In 1968 there were  545,000 American troops in Vietnam. That same year both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. Richard Nixon was elected president.

Vietnam Veterans, like my dad, who had served their nation and followed orders were vilified and unappreciated. Cynicism deepened as the 60s ended. Gifted writer Goodwin, who died last month at 86, encouraged us to remember and reflect.

To Tell the Truth, Mr. President

Review by Bill Doughty

Autocratic dictators lie.

So said President Harry S. Truman, American everyman leader-philosopher.

"The dictators of the world say that if you tell a lie often enough, why people, will believe it," Truman wrote, as quoted in Jon Meacham's insightful "The Soul of America" (Random House, 2018). "Well, if you tell the truth often enough, they'll believe it and go along with you," Truman wrote.

Our previous Navy Reads post shows some of the ways the Navy was influential in history – an unintended subtext in Meacham's book. This blogpost focuses on Truman's and other leaders' roles, especially during the Cold War, when democracy was threatened by a politician who sought to divide people with fear, hate and intolerance: Wisconsin's Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.

Using fear, religion and his version of patriotism, McCarthy spewed the conspiracy theory of a deep state with communists behind every tree. Meacham reports McCarthy's words: "'Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity,' McCarthy told the Ohio County Republican Women's Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, on Thursday, February 9, 1950."

McCarthy reveling in headlines about himself.

McCarthy "exploited the privileges of power and prominence without regard to its responsibilities; to him politics was not about the substantive but the sensational," Meacham writes. "A master of false charges, or conspiracy-tinged rhetoric, and of calculated disregard for conventional figures (from Truman and Eisenhower to [Gen. George C.] Marshall), McCarthy could distract the public, play the press, and change the subject – all while keeping himself at center stage."

"McCarthy was an opportunist, uncommitted to much beyond his own fame and influence."

"How he loved the story of himself as a brave warrior, a story that dominated the newspapers of the day. McCarthy needed the press, and the press came to need McCarthy. He was fantastic copy, a real life serial. The twists and turns of the McCarthy saga meant more bylines for the reporters, more exciting headlines for the editors, and, given the subject matter – alleged infiltration of the government of the United States by a fatal foe – more copies sold for the owners. Radio and television amplified McCarthy's impact."

He manipulated the media and news cycles and kept the spotlight on himself. He advocated for banning books by authors such as Dashiell Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon" and "The Thin Man" because of the author's leftist leanings.

McCarthy and Cohn

According to McCarthy's own New York attorney, Roy M. Cohn, who ultimately turned on his boss by reflecting about McCarthy: "He was impatient, overly aggressive, overly dramatic. He acted on impulse. He tended to sensationalize the evidence he had ... He would neglect to do important homework and consequently would, on occasion, make challengeable statements," Cohn said.

"He saw the dramatic political opportunities connected with a fight on Communism. McCarthy was gifted with a sense of political timing," Cohn added. "Sometimes he misjudged, but on balance his sense of what made drama and headlines was uncommonly good."

Sen. Margaret Chase Smith

Allied against McCarthy were Eleanor Roosevelt, who compared McCarthy's tactics to "hitlerism"; Winston Churchill, who called for defending "the Anglo-American tradition of fair play"; Maine's Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith, who said McCarthy created "a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national suicide and everything that we Americans hold dear"; editor Palmer Hoyt, who told his reporters to call out lies when statements were "demonstrably false"; reporter Edward R. Murrow, who said, "We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men"; and (former Army captain) Truman, who believed in telling the truth in plain English.

"On Thursday, March 30, 1950, at a press conference at his Florida retreat in Key West – where Truman could indulge his fondness for Hawaiian shirts, bourbon and poker – the president told the assembled journalists exactly what he believed, 'I think the greatest asset that the Kremlin has is Senator McCarthy,' Truman said ... The net effect of the McCarthyite campaign,Truman said, was to undermine confidence in the country in a time of cold war. 'To try to sabotage the foreign policy of the United States,' he said,'is just as bad in this cold war as it would be to shoot our soldiers in the back in a hot war."

Young Navy war hero Sen. John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert F. Kennedy aligned themselves with McCarthy in the early 1950s and later regretted it. RFK even served as a young lawyer on McCarthy's staff.

McCarthy tried to associate himself with a hero of naval history when his adversaries spoke out against him:

"In the early 1950s legions of people were entranced by McCarthy's Manichaean vision of life. He spoke in the starkest of terms, savoring superlatives. Everything was dramatic, contentious, perilous: So few things, McCarthy implied, stood between American freedom and Communist slavery. But one of those things – perhaps the most important of them – was McCarthy himself, who quoted John Paul Jones: 'I have just begun to fight.'"

Eisenhower failed to take on McCarthy when he became president, but he did address the nation about resisting fear. "His April 1954 speech about fear, which falls about midway between these landmarks (of his speeches about D-Day landings and warning about the 'military-industrial complex') ... described the disposition necessary to survive life in an age of strain and uncertainly.'"

Department of Army attorney Welch and Sen. McCarthy in Senate hearing."Have you no sense of decency?"

McCarthy's downfall came after Eisenhower's speech on fear, Murrow's public denunciation and an event that occurred in Congress involving the U.S. Army and Roy M. Cohn, when McCarthy seemed to slander and call into question the integrity of an army lawyer.

"In an iconic moment, the counsel for the army, Joseph N. Welch, attacked the senator, who had clumsily attempted to impugn the loyalty of a young lawyer on Welch's team. 'Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your selfishness,' Welch told McCarthy. 'Little did I dream you would be so reckless and cruel to do injury to that lad ... I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty I would do so. I like to think that I am a gentle man, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me.' McCarthy blundered forward and took up the theme again. Welch was ready and struck with force. 'You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? You have done enough. Have you left no sense of decency?'"

President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Sen. Prescott Bush

Meacham points out that even after the wind left McCarthy's sails, he still had a base support within the country, with 34 percent still backing him. It took a Senate censure to finally evaporate his power. Among those senators who spoke in favor of censure was a senior senator from Connecticut, Prescott Bush, father of President George H. W. Bush and grandfather of President George W. Bush.

"When Joe McCarthy died at Bethesda Naval Hospital on Thursday, May 2, 1957, he was once more the center of attention," Meacham writes. "'Years will pass before the results of his work can be objectively evaluated,' Vice President Nixon said, 'but his friends and many of his questions will not question his devotion to what he considered to be the best interests of his country.'"

Meacham's book serves a tray of rich appetizers from history. He reveals how Americans have survived division and dissension, how we've been able to vanquish real threats to our democracy and live up to our ideals set forth by the nation's founders. We're left hungry to learn more, and fortunately we have a list of books and authors from Meacham, both in the chapters and in the extensive bibliography, all of which contributed in some way to the soul.

For example:

Garry Wills's "Inventing America"

The works of Thomas Jefferson, Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, St. Augustine, Shakespeare, Ulysses S. Grant, Frederick Douglass, Emerson and Thoreau

Corey Robin's "Fear: the History of a Political Idea"

Jacob A. Riis's "How the Other Half Live"

Sinclair Lewis's "It Can't Happen Here"

Nathaniel West's "A Cool Million"

Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings"

Robert Penn Warren's "Segregation" and "The Legacy of the Civil War"

John Lewis's "Walking with the Wind"

Authors: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Alexis de Tocqueville, Stephen Ambrose, Taylor Branch, W.E.B. Dubois, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Eric Foner, Chris Matthews, Theodore C. Sorensen, Thomas Aquinas, Barbara Tuchman, David McCullough and Fareed Zakaria, among scores of others.

Meacham dedicates the book to fellow historians Evan Thomas and Michael Beschloss. "They are reassuring, selfless, and kind."

"The Soul of America" is a recent #1 New York Times bestseller, supplanted this week by Navy veteran Senator John McCain's "The Restless Wave" (Simon and Schuster, 2018).

In closing, we share these words from Thomas Paine, quoted early in Meacham's book: "As in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king."

Remembering the thoughts of Truman and Paine: Dictators and kings who think they have absolute power lie. The law – based on the Constitution, the support of the American people and the better angels of our nature – stands for truth.