20 Years Ago 9: Dominoes

I recently heard, for the umpteenth time, someone from academia smugly denying the validity of the domino theory. That was the argument made during the 1960s by proponents of American military involvement in Vietnam, that, if we allowed a Communist takeover of South Vietnam, other non-Communist governments in Asia would proceed to fall like a line of dominoes.

When we allowed just that, in 1975, much of Asia was spared. But anyone completely dismissing the domino theory has a couple million Cambodian souls to answer to.

Whatever one thinks about that argument, it's clear that, in 1989, the domino theory worked in reverse.

Once the Marxist-Leninist regimes of Poland, Hungary and East Germany fell, what little legitimacy the other such governments had, completely disappeared. Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia fell in line, shortly after the opening of the Berlin Wall.

As of November of 1989, the end of European Communism had come about with remarkably little violence. In fact, the process in Czechoslovakia was so peaceful, it was called the "Velvet Revolution".

Romania was a tougher situation. Nicolae Ceausescu had been one of the most corrupt and hard-line of the dictators. He held out longer than his counterparts in the other Soviet satellite countries. By December of 1989, the situation had grown violent, as Ceausescu tried to use his security apparatus to maintain his power, in the face of a growing popular revolt. His effort ended on Christmas Day, when he and his wife Elena were executed.

Man on the Moon!

It's an interesting coincidence that Walter Cronkite died during the 4oth anniversary of the flight of Apollo 11.

I'm old enough to remember his reporting of Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, Watergate, etc., but his coverage of the space program is what I most remember.

With retired astronaut Wally Schirra at his side, Cronkite described, forty years ago today, the moon landing and the moon walk (when that was done by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, and not by the late Michael Jackson). At our house, there was no question but that Walter would be the one to bring us that news.

This past weekend, many have quoted Lyndon Johnson's supposed response to Cronkite's statement, in a documentary about the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam, that the war was unwinnable. Johnson is said to have lamented that, if he had lost Cronkite, he had lost Middle America.

I wonder if the opposite effect was at work in relation to the space program. Did Cronkite's enthusiasm for space travel bolster political support for projects such as the Apollo 11 moon flight?

As Tom Wolfe described in his book The Right Stuff, America's space program was heavily tied into our Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union. The USSR's launch of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, in 1957, was a catalyst for an acceleration of the U.S.'s nascent rocket efforts. Wolfe compared the manned flights that began in the early '60s to the ancient tradition of single combat, whereby two warring sides would each send one warrior to fight a one-one-one battle to decide the issue, rather than engaging in all-out war between full armies.

After the 1960 election, in which John Kennedy and Richard Nixon were each out to prove that they were more hardline that the other in the Cold War, it was relatively easy to get Congress to appropriate funds for a program such as Apollo, which would demonstrate the ultimate superiority in rocketry, which was becoming so important to modern warfare.

As the '60s were ending, the Vietnam War had weakened support among the American people, for a hawkish approach to the Cold War. NASA had to fight harder and harder against other priorities, in order to maintain its budget for manned flights.

Then, once the U.S. had achieved the man-on-the-moon goal, support waned further. I was totally caught up in the space program, and would have been happy if moon landings had gone on forever, perhaps followed up by a Mars trip. It was hard for this space-obsessed 12-year-old to imagine that people would take a been-there-done-that attitude about moon landings, even before the Apollo 11 astronauts returned to Earth.

There were six more attempts at lunar landings, of which five were successful. Some planned additional flights were cancelled. And, of course, human beings have not gone beyond Earth orbit since 1972.

NASA always understood the need for a strong public relations effort. And television journalists such as Cronkite saw the potential for spectacular TV images from the manned flights. Without that PR effort, it's possible that support for the program would have eroded even earlier.

Image: NASA

Novice Running Mates

Robert McNamara was a significant figure in America's 20th-century history. He was perhaps the only person to hold what is still the relatively young title of secretary of defense, who was more controversial than Donald Rumsfeld.

So leave it to me to ignore all that, and zero in on a quotation in McNamara's New York Times obituary that can serve as a springboard for a point of political trivia.

McNamara is quoted as saying that he turned down an offer to be Lyndon Johnson's running mate in 1964 by telling the president “You shouldn’t start your elective career running for the vice presidency.” That sparked a series of questions in my mind.

Who was the most recent vice president who had not previously run for elective office? Henry Wallace. Franklin Roosevelt appointed Wallace secretary of agriculture in 1933. But, when Roosevelt made Wallace his vice-presidential nominee for his unprecedented run for a third term in 1940, that was Wallace's first time running for office (he and Roosevelt won). Wallace later ran for president on a third-party ticket, as I described here.

Who was the most recent person to lose the vice presidency in his first run for elective office? Sargent Shriver. George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, was seeing his already long-shot candidacy fall further down hill, when his first choice as running mate, Thomas Eagleton, withdrew from the race after disclosing that he had been treated for depression. Several big names were reluctant to take Eagleton's place. Finally, Shriver agreed to run with McGovern. They lost to Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew in a massive landslide. As was the case with Wallace, Shriver later sought the presidency; he failed to win the Democratic nomination in 1976.

Who was the most recent Republican running mate in this category? Frank Knox. He was another landslide loser. Knox was running mate to Alfred Landon, the Republican presidential nominee in 1936, when Franklin Roosevelt won his second term, with the largest margin of victory of any of his four wins. There's a connection with McNamara. Knox went on to serve as secretary of the navy under Roosevelt. That position was later combined with that of secretary of war, to form the office of secretary of defense.

Building a Platform

Here's a story about impending platform debates leading up to the Republican National Convention in September.

Party platforms are curious things. They are often dismissed as meaningless pieces of writing, that give very little guidance as to the actions that a new or re-elected president will take upon winning the election. But a lot of people seem to take them seriously, while they're being written.

Each party appoints a platform committee to meet shortly before their national convention, and draw up a document listing their party's positions on the issues of the day. The convention then approves the platform, perhaps after amending it.

Convention debate on amendments to the platform can be troublesome. One of the most (in)famous was at the Democratic convention in 1968. The candidate who went into the convention with the nomination locked up was Vice President Hubert Humphrey. He had staked out a moderate position on the Vietnam War. The party's antiwar faction proposed a strong antiwar amendment to the platform. The amendment was defeated, but the extended debate over it, on national TV, contributed to the general impression of chaos at that convention, and to Humphrey's defeat in the general election.

I see a parallel of sorts between that 1968 experience and what McCain is facing this year. In each case, a candidate whose background largely aligned him with his party's dominant ideological faction, came into the election year needing to prove himself to ideologues in his party.

Humphrey was considered the liberal's liberal during his first tour of duty in the Senate, from 1949 to 1964. However, after a term as Lyndon Johnson's VP, he was identified with the pro-war position on Vietnam, which by that time was anathema to many liberals.

McCain has built a Senate record that is considered to be conservative on many issues. However, he clashes with many conservatives on the issues mentioned in the MSNBC piece to which I've linked, above.

As I'll write more about later, the parties don't like to have their convention TV shows marred by intra-party clashes anymore. So it will be interesting to see whether any disagreements hit the floor at the Republican convention this year.

A Turbulent Year

There will forever be disagreements about the meaning of various events in 1968. But I think all will agree on one thing: it was a turbulent political year such as has seldom been seen in America (not that the turbulence was limited to America).

Four years earlier, Lyndon Johnson had won a full term as president in a huge landslide, almost a year after he had become president when John Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. After the 1964 election, the widespread expectation was that Johnson would run for a second full term in 1968, and at that time he seemed invincible. Johnson would have been constitutionally eligible to run for two full terms, because he had served less than half of the term to which Kennedy had been elected in 1960. However, no president who had succeeded to the presidency upon the death or resignation of a president has won a second full term.

What ensued? To quote Harold Macmillan, who was British prime minster from 1957 to 1963, "events, dear boy, events". The 1965-1969 presidential term was certainly eventful. Johnson's domestic policies, including federal funding of elementary and secondary education, federal health insurance for senior citizens, and other expansions of the federal reach, disillusioned some voters. But the biggest "event" was the escalation of American military involvement in Vietnam, which began in earnest in 1965.

By 1968, Johnson had lost much of his support. On March 31 of that year, he announced he would not run for president in 1968. In that same speech, he announced the beginnings of the U.S.'s standing down from its military commitment to South Vietnam.

Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey, won the Democratic nomination, after a contentious campaign that saw, among other things, the assassination of one of Humphrey's rivals, Sen. Robert Kennedy of New York.

The Republican nominee was Richard Nixon. After losing the 1960 presidential election to John Kennedy, and the 1962 California gubernatorial election to Pat Brown, Nixon moved to New York, joined a law firm there, and patiently planned his comeback. He was talked about as a contender for the 1964 Republican nomination but, in what certainly seems in retrospect a wise move, he bided his time. He rather easily won the 1968 Republican nomination; his main opponent was Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York.

The third-party candidate was George Wallace, then the former and future governor of Alabama. At his first gubernatorial inauguration in 1963, he said: "I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." Between that inauguration and his 1968 presidential candidacy, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had been enacted. For the first time, the federal government possessed the tools to enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments, which were ratified in the wake of the Civil War, and were intended, respectively, to give freed African American slaves equal protection of the laws, and voting rights.

I did not find in Wallace's 1968 platform an explicit pledge to repeal those acts, but that is at least strongly implied by such planks as:

Reestablishment of the authority and responsibility of local government by
returning to the states, counties and cities those matters properly falling
within their jurisdiction and responsibility.

the Federal Government has adopted so-called "Civil Rights Acts,"
particularly the one adopted in 1964, which have set race against race and class
against class, all of which we condemn.

One can speculate about what combination of ambition and conviction brought Wallace to his decision to launch a third-party candidacy. But it is clear that he was setting out a policy position separate from those of the major-party candidates.

Humphrey was a consistent supporter of the type of federal actions that Wallace condemned. I wrote about Humphrey's 1948 convention speech here. In 1964, Humphrey was Senate floor manager for proponents of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Nixon had been seen as a moderate on racial issues. During his presidency, when the issues shifted from elimination of Jim Crow laws, and impediments to African American voting, to such issues as affirmative action, and the so-called "busing" issue (sending children to public schools outside their neighborhood, in order to achieve racial balance), Nixon to a large degree sided with southern conservatives. But that's different from advocating rollback of the 1964-5 civil rights legislation.

Nixon won the general election with 301 electoral votes, to 191 for Humphrey and 46 for Wallace. The popular vote was very close, with 43.42% for Nixon to 42.72% for Humphrey. Wallace received 13.53% of the vote, a much higher proportion than Strom Thurmond had garnered in his similar third-party run in 1948. Wallace won a fair number of votes outside the south, although all of his electoral votes were southern.

Never again was there to be a major segregationist third-party run. Wallace ran for president as a Democrat in 1972 and 1976, failing to win his party's nomination in both of those years. Wallace, as was generally the case with major white southern politicians who retained significant support in the 1970s and onward, moderated his position on racial issues. He won further gubernatorial elections in Alabama in 1970, 1974 and 1982, despite being paralyzed after an assassination attempt in 1972.

Nixon won the electoral votes of Florida, Virginia, both Carolinas, and Tennessee in 1968. He then swept every southern state in his 1972 landslide victory over George McGovern. With the exception of 1976, when Georgian Jimmy Carter won a huge majority of southern electoral votes, Republicans have dominated the south ever since. Even in 2000, when Al Gore of Tennessee was the Democratic presidential nominee, his Republican opponent George W. Bush made a sweep of the south, including Gore's home state. Gore won a plurality of the popular vote, but the bulk of his support was outside his home region.