Review: The Glory and the Dream

The Glory and the Dream by William Manchester
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

 In the Glory and the Dream William Manchester springs open a great time capsule of a book- a huge, abundant popular history of the United States from 1932 to 1972. The "time capsule" feel is emphasized with collage-like chapter introductions and an imagined souvenir shelf conclusion. Things really get interesting with the rise and downfall of McCarthy told more succinctly and interestingly than in Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies. That is the success of this narrative history: an engrossing review of pivotal decades. 

The opening is mostly of course The Great Depression. Hoover handed FDR this headache:

...America's patience was running out. So was its cash. On St. Valentine's Day 1933- -Hoover was singing his swan song at ten o'clock that evening before the Republican National Committee - the nation's banking system began its final collapse. That afternoon Governor William A. Comstock of Michigan had received an urgent telephone request to join a conference of bankers in downtown Detroit, and he had been there ever since. Detroit's Union Guardian Trust Company was in straits. If it failed it would probably take every other bank in the city with it, and the financiers were asking Comstock to declare banking moratorium throughout Michigan. At mid- a night he agreed, drove to the state capitol at Lansing, and issued a proclamation closing the state's 550 banks for eight days. He called it a holiday. In Washington, Hoover scribbled a letter to FDR; he was so distraught that he misspelled his successor's name on the envelope. The President- elect was becoming accustomed to jolts (the week before, an unemployed bricklayer had shot at him and fatally wounded Mayor Cermak of Chicago), and this communication was among the more outrageous. He read it carefully and then called it "cheeky." It was certainly that. Hoover said flatly that the country was afraid of what the new administration might do. In the name of patriotism (and of "confidence") he demanded that Roosevelt publicly promise not to change government programs. The out- going President was fully aware of what he was asking; to Senator David A. Reed of Pennsylvania he wrote, "I realize that if these declarations are made by the President-elect, he will have ratified the whole major program of the Republican administration; that is, it means the abandonment of go percent of the so-called new deal." He had already told friends he thought FDR an amiable lightweight. Now he was treating him as a fool. When the declarations were not forthcoming, he changed his mind again; to Henry Stimson he said that Roosevelt was "a madman."

The President-elect would certainly have been of doubtful sanity had he associated himself with Hoover's policy, for by then it was clear that under that policy the entire country was going stone broke...

Of course, some things grew even during this time, such as the reach of Fa. Coughlin, originally an FDR booster"

...he broke with Roosevelt. The New Deal became the "Jew Deal." The President was "a liar," an "anti-God"; in a Cincinnati speech Coughlin advocated the elimination of FDR by "the use of bullets." This was too much for West- brook Pegler, a Catholic layman and admirer of European strong men; in his column he wrote that federal investigators of subversion should have treated Coughlin just as they were treating Earl Browder, instead of tip- toeing "around him for fear he would cry up a holy war." H

It wasn't too much for Mrs. Dilling, whose list of powerful Communists included Senator Borah, Chiang Kai-shek, Eleanor Roosevelt, H. L. Mencken, and Mahatma Gandhi. It didn't offend James True, inventor of the "kike-killer" (Pat. No. 2,026,077), a short rounded club made in two sizes (one for ladies). It didn't offend Joe McWilliams, the soapbox Führer, or Lawrence Dennis, the intellectual of the radical right. Most interesting of all, no reproaches were found in the Hearst press. "Whenever you hear a prominent American called a 'Fascist,' " Hearst declared, "you can usually make up your mind that the man is simply a LOYAL CITIZEN WHO STANDS UP FOR AMERICANISM." Beginning in November 1934, Hearst sent reporters disguised as students into college classrooms, to trap teachers in unconventional comments. Nobody wanted to change the American economic system, he said, except for "a few incurable malcontents, a few sapheaded college boys, and a few unbalanced college professors."

Considering the tens of millions who were reading and listening to incendiary remarks, it is not surprising that some of them reacted violently. Between June 1934 and June 1935 the American Civil Liberties Union noted "a greater variety and number of serious violations of civil liberties" than in any year since the World War, and the ACLU records were incomplete, owing to the suspension of all constitutional guarantees in the state of Louisiana.

If Father Coughlin was the propaganda minister of Depression extremism, Senator Huey Pierce Long Jr. was universally acknowledged as its leader. The radio priest had the audience, but he preached nihilism. Dr. Townsend, who had become their ally, could count ten million followers, but he didn't know how to get things done. Huey Long, the consummate politician, had everything: constituents, a program, and an intuitive sense of when and how to seize power. He was the only antagonist who genuinely frightened Franklin Roosevelt.

FDR had his hands full trying to realize his New Deal vision.

Clearly the New Deal was on its last legs. The two Hundred Days periods had just about exhausted the administration's legislative creativity; the few presidential measures which hadn't passed contravened the growing conservatism in the country. Reforming zeal was nearly dead on the Hill. Only a man with Roosevelt's extraordinary gift for leadership could have held his huge, amorphous coalition together in November 1936. Next time only a war would keep it intact. The South was its weak link, and the conservative bloc fused in the Court reform fight was developing stronger ties each month.

Congressman Martin Dies of Texas, chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, explained that it would be incorrect to identify the bloc as southern, because it had "the support of nearly all small-town and rural congressmen." Its enemies, he continued, were "the men from the big cities which ... are politically controlled by foreigners and transplanted Negroes," whose "representatives have introduced insidious influences into the New Deal."

Of course a review of WWI leads to a lot of interesting tidbits:

... This propaganda campaign turned out some classic films - including Casablanca, which some regard as the greatest movie of all time - and one immortal stratagem, which was so successful that it has been used by political movements ever since.

It was invented by a Belgian refugee named Victor de Laveleye. Like Charles de Gaulle, de Laveleye made daily shortwave broadcasts to his countrymen telling them to keep stiff upper lips. One evening late in 1940 he suggested that they chalk the letter V (for victoire) in public places to show their confidence in an ultimate Allied triumph and create a nuisance for the Nazis. It became the most popular symbol since the introduction of the crucifix. V was an astonishingly versatile letter. In Serbian it stood for vitestvo (heroism), in Czech vitzstvi (victory), and in Dutch vrijheid (freedom). The BBC began introducing its programs beamed to the continent with the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, three dots and a dash - the Morse code symbol for V. In the occupied countries the did-dit-dit-dah was used to knock on doors, blow train whistles, honk car horns, and fetch waiters. People waved to one another with two stretched fingers of the hand. In restaurants, cutlery was arranged in Vs. Stopped clocks were set at five minutes past eleven, and crayoned Vs were every- where, even in the private toilets of German officers. Goebbels tried to steal the thunder by insisting the symbols all represented Viktoria, complete triumph for Hitler, but no one, not even Germans, believed him. Then the craze leaped the Atlantic. Rhinestone V brooches were on sale in department stores, and at Tiffany's you could get a quite good one, set in diamonds, for $5,000...

Probably because of the aspect of my own pivotal decade, some things jumped out to me as seemingly relevant. For instance, the Bricker Amendment: the collective name of a number of slightly different proposed amendments to the United States Constitution considered by the United States Senate in the 1950s. None of these amendments ever passed Congress. Each of them would require explicit congressional approval, especially for executive agreements that did not require the Senate's two-thirds approval for treaty. They are named for their sponsor, conservative Republican Senator John W. Bricker of Ohio, who distrusted the exclusive powers of the president to involve the United States beyond the wishes of Congress. The American entry into World War II led to a new sense of internationalism opposed by many conservatives and Bricker Amendment was one outcome.

On the other side of WWII, we had the Eisenhower Doctrine, a policy enunciated by Eisenhower on January 5, 1957, within a "Special Message to the Congress on the Situation in the Middle East". Under the Eisenhower Doctrine, a Middle Eastern country could request American economic assistance or aid from U.S. military forces if it was being threatened by armed aggression. Eisenhower singled out the Soviet threat in his doctrine by authorizing the commitment of U.S. forces "to secure and protect the territorial integrity and political independence of such nations, requesting such aid against overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by international communism." The phrase "international communism" made the doctrine much broader than simply responding to Soviet military action. A danger that could be linked to communists of any nation could conceivably invoke the doctrine.

Clearly it was no time for a Secretary of State to speak extemporaneously. His staff had therefore given him a thick folder of marked-up drafts. "But in the end," he writes in his memoirs, without further explanation, "I put the drafts aside and made the speech from a page or two of notes." For his audience he retraced the same defensive perimeter MacArthur had drawn ten months earlier, before the fall of China had altered the political picture in Washington: from the Aleutians to Japan, to the Ryukyus, to the Philippines. “So far as the military security of other areas in the Pacific is concerned,” he added - and here he obviously had Formosa and South Korea in mind - "it must be clear that no person can guarantee these areas against military attack. Should such an attack occur," he declared, "the initial resistance" must come from "the people attacked." If they proved to be resolute fighters, he vaguely concluded, they were entitled to an appeal under the charter of the United Nations.

To the end of his life Acheson would bitterly deny that he had given the green light for aggression in South Korea by excluding it from the defensive perimeter. But when he told the Press Club that the United States was waiting "for the dust to settle" in China and added that America's line of resistance ran "along the Aleutians to Japan and then goes to the Ryukyus," the Communists could only conclude, as they did, that the United States was leaving people northwest of the Korea Strait to fend

It was not like Acheson to misinterpret American policy, and in fact he had not done so. Like MacArthur the previous March, he had ruled out U.S. participation in an Asian land war. American intentions change, however. Hitler had failed to appreciate that, and as a consequence he had been destroyed. Now Stalin was repeating the error. The Soviet leader was dictating North Korean war plans (at this point Mao wasn't even advised of them) and he took Acheson at his word. The day after the secretary's Press Club speech Jacob Malik, the Russian representative at the United Nations, walked out on the Security Council because it had refused to reject the Chinese Nationalists and welcome emissaries from the new main- land regime. Stalin was putting the Americans on notice. From his point of view, the timing was perfect. The United States was drafting a Japanese peace treaty without consulting Moscow. Since V-J Day the Russians had been hoping that Washington would give them a free hand in Korea. In George Kennan's opinion, "When they saw it wasn't going to work out that way, they concluded: 'If this is all we are going to get out of a Japanese settlement, we had better get our hands on Korea fast before the Americans let the Japanese back in there.'"

It is interesting to me that it seems some decades have nerd love, others jock love.

Edward Teller also spoke up. Though still a pariah among most of his fellow physicists, Teller remained a brilliant and prescient scholar. His Pentagon friends pointed out that in last April's issue of Air Force magazine, six months before the first beep, he had gloomily written: "Ten years ago there was no question where the best scientists in the world could be found here in the U.S.... Ten years from now the best scientists in the world will be found in Russia." In the Soviet Union, he had pointed out, science was almost a religion; its ablest men were singled out and treated as a privileged class while their underpaid American colleagues lacked status in their society and could offer few incentives to bright protégés. His appeal for respect for the dignity of scientific inquiry was well taken. The number of cartoons about mad scientists dropped sharply. There were also fewer jokes about them. And it was extraordinary how quickly the word egghead dropped out of the language.

There is so much fascinating detail about the awkward and tragic interplay between JFK and the intelligence agencies.

...Allen Dulles bluntly put it to him: either he approved the plan or he would be refusing to allow freedom- loving exiles to deliver their homeland from a Communist dictatorship, encouraging Cuba to undermine democratic governments throughout Latin America, and creating an ugly '64 campaign issue as the disbanded, disillusioned brigade toured the United States under Republican auspices, revealing how Kennedy had betrayed them and the cause of anti-Communism. Dulles asked the President whether he was ready to tell this "group of fine young men" who asked "nothing other than the opportunity to try to restore a free government in their country" that they would "get no sympathy, no support, no aid from the United States?"

Kennedy asked what the chances of success were. Dulles reminded him that in June 1954 the CIA had overthrown Guatemala's Marxist government. He said, "I stood right here at Ike's desk, and I told him I was certain our Guatemalan operation would succeed, and, Mr. President, the prospects for this plan are even better than they were for that one." The Joint Chiefs unanimously endorsed it. Late in February Kennedy asked for a second opinion from the Chiefs. They sent an inspection team to the Guatemalan base. After reading the report and studying La Brigada's tactical plan, General Lemnitzer again predicted that it would succeed, and Admiral Arleigh Burke, chief of naval operations, seconded him.

Again considering my current vantage point, it always interested me how in the supposedly liberal late 60s we got Nixon as a president. Campus-based and youth rebellious behavior boosts conservative candidates:

The fall elections of 1966 marked a political turning point. Resentment against ghetto riots and civil rights demonstrations had finally coalesced, making white backlash a potent political force for the first time. Combined with inflation, high interest rates, a scarcity of mortgage money, and the rising cost of living, backlash provided Republican candidates with a powerful springboard. George Romney and Nelson Rockefeller were re-elected with huge majorities. Among the new Republican faces in the Senate were Howard Baker Jr. of Tennessee, Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts, Mark Hatfield of Oregon, and Charles H. Percy of Illinois; new Republican governors included Ronald Reagan of California and Spiro T. Agnew of Maryland. Altogether the Republicans picked up three seats in the Senate, eight new governors, and 47 seats in the House of Representatives, more than they had lost in 1964..

The campuses of venerable institutions of learning had often become disagreeable and even dangerous places. The one at Wesleyan, little ivy a college in Connecticut, had to be floodlit at night; crossing it was unsafe; there had been an epidemic of muggings there. Universities were con- fronted with a new disciplinary problem: how to cope with the under- graduate who was putting himself through college by peddling dope to fellow students who had become drug addicts. Crime became common- place in peculiar places. One respected physician in New England entertained dinner party guests by telling how he and his wife had started shoplifting as children, still did it, and in fact had stolen the centerpiece on the table only three days ago. An assistant dean explained in great detail the information he had given, to a recent undergraduate drafted into the tank corps, on the best way to sabotage a tank. And a July 1967 issue of the New York Review of Books carried on its front page a large drawing showing how to make a Molotov cocktail, with a rag soaked in gasoline as the stopper, a fuse of clothesline rope, and instructions to use as fuel a mixture two-thirds gas and one-third soap powder and dirt.

The election of Richard Nixon to the Presidency was a reaction against all this, and a healthy one. The nation wanted no more visionaries for the present. What was needed was a genuine conservative administration, another Eisenhower era.

 ...

The campus disorders which greeted Nixon's announcement of the Cambodian adventure formed a key link in the chain of events which led, ultimately, to the burglarizing of the Democratic National Committee's offices in the Watergate complex in Washington two years later. The first link had been a story in the New York Times of May 19, 1969, under the byline of William Beecher, who covered the Defense Department for the paper. It began: "American B-52 bombers in recent weeks have raided several Vietcong and North Vietnamese supply dumps in Cambodia for the first time, according to Nixon administration sources, but Cambodia has not made any protest."

Nixon was dismayed. He felt that his worst fears about the irresponsibility of the eastern establishment press had been confirmed, and believed them reconfirmed when the Times published technical details of American preparation for the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) talks with Russia. Under the Constitution there was little he could do about Beecher and his paper, but he could at least hunt the unknown informants in his administration who were leaking classified information to newspapermen. He consulted Henry Kissinger, who drew up a list of thirteen officials, including five of his own National Security Council aides, who knew about the secret Cambodian bombing. On orders from the President, their tele- phones were tapped by the FBI; so were the phones of four journalists who had published leaked material: Beecher; Hedrick Smith, the Times man at the State Department; Marvin Kalb of CBS; and Henry Brandon of the London Sunday Times. It was the White House's first incursion into the twilight zone of questionable activity, and it was fruitless; Beecher's source was never found.

The President began to entertain misgivings about the efficiency of both Hoover's FBI and Richard Helms's CIA. His doubts deepened after the events of May 1970. Nixon was convinced that the campus outbreaks were the work of foreign instigators, probably Cubans, Egyptians, and eastern Europeans. He asked the CIA to identify them.

Still Nixon apparently did some effective leadership, like leading the nation out of an economic downturn through a final end to a gold standard.

...the day after Nixon's announcement of the freeze - or Phase One, as it was already being called - the Dow Jones industrial average jumped 32.93 to 888.95 on what was then the busiest day in its history; 31,720,000 shares were traded. In September, the first full month of Phase One, the nation's rise in living costs was held to 2.4 percent and the wholesale price index posted its biggest decline in five years. A few holes were poked in the wage and price ceilings, and inevitably there was a great deal of confusion in some industries, but for the most part the thing worked. Unfortunately it was, by definition, only the first step. On November 13 it would expire. Before then the administration had to find guide- lines which provided hope of preserving relative stability while rectifying the injustices which had been frozen into the system.

On October 8 Nixon spoke to the nation again, this time setting up the machinery for Phase Two. The challenge was greater now. Economist Herbert Stein, the chief planner of the new stage, had anticipated the difficulties at the time of the first message. He said, “I knew immediately the problem would not be the freeze, but the unfreeze, the thaw." The goal of this second program was to hold inflation to between 2 and 3 percent a year. Controls would be administered by a seven-man Price Commission and a fifteen-member pay board. There would be no ceiling on profits, the President said, and the success or failure of the plan would depend upon "the voluntary cooperation of the American people."

But, as great as that was, I can't think of Nixon without asking "Why Watergate?" This is the clearest, most compact explanation of the ITT angle I recall:

Bargaining between the administration and the conglomerate was apparently concluded at a lunch given by the governor of Kentucky at the Kentucky Derby the month after Kleindienst and McLaren thought they had committed the government to a Supreme Court trial. The mediators were Mitchell and Dita Beard, ITT's salty Washington lobbyist. ITT agreed to pay $400,000 and the administration agreed to forget about the antitrust action. In a highly incriminating memorandum dated June 25, 1971, Mrs. Beard told her immediate superior that the only Republicans to know "from whom the 400 thousand commitment had come" were Nixon, Mitchell, Haldeman, and the lieutenant governor of California. She said: "I am convinced that our noble commitment has gone a long way toward our negotiations on the mergers eventually coming out as Hal [Geneen] wants them. Certainly the President has told Mitchell to see that things are worked out fairly. It is still only McLaren's mickeymouse we are suffering. is definitely helping us, but it cannot be known." ... 

She ended the memo, "Please destroy this, huh?" It wasn't destroyed, and when it surfaced in a Jack Anderson column the following February 29, ITT's response was to shred all other documents relating to the case and claim that this one had been a forgery.

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