'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.