Paul Johnson writes in his book Modern Times:
But voting could not equalize black and white incomes. Nor
could the huge and increasing sums of Federal money which John-
son poured into the black ‘problem’. The more progress made, the
more cash available, the more black anger increased. In the 1950s
and early 1960s, Federal power had been used to protect blacks
from white violence. In the course of the series of enforcement
battles staged under Kennedy, the initiative in violence shifted to
the blacks. The turning-point was the night of 10 May 1962, in
Birmingham, Alabama. There was a black riot, with police forced
onto the defensive and white shops demolished: ‘Let the whole
fucking city burn,’ shouted a mob-leader, This’ll show the white
motherfuckers!’ This was a new cry, and a new attitude, in American
race-politics, and it could not be confined to the South.
To Johnson’s consternation, the scale and intensity of black violence, especially in the big cities outside the South, advanced step by step with his vigorous and effective efforts to secure black rights. The first really big and ugly black riots broke out in Harlem and Brooklyn on 18 July 1964, only two weeks after the epoch-making Civil Rights Act was passed. The violence spread to Rochester in New York State, to Jersey City, Patterson and Elizabeth in New Jersey, to Dixmoor in Chicago, and Philadelphia. In August 1965 the Watts riots in Los Angeles lasted six days, involved 15,000 National Guardsmen, killed thirty-four, injured 856 and destroyed $200 million of property. Thereafter, large-scale riots by blacks in the inner cities became a recurrent feature of the Sixties, in sinister counterpoint and sometimes in deliberate harmony with student violence on the campuses. The riots in Detroit on 24-28 July 1967 were among the most serious in American history, killing forty-three people and forcing a distraught President Johnson to move in the 18th Airborne Corps of paratroopers, whose commander said he entered a city ‘saturated with fear’. 130 By 1968, with the Vietnam War moving to its sickly climax, students rioting on over 200 campuses, and blacks putting some of the biggest cities to fire, Johnson seemed a failure. His decision not to seek re-election was an admission of defeat. He was the first major casualty of the Sixties illusions. But not the last. America’s troubles were only beginning.
Nor was Johnson a victim of lost illusions alone. He was also, in a real sense, a victim of the media, and especially of the East Coast liberals who controlled the most influential newspapers and the big three TV networks. The two points were connected, for one of the deepest illusions of the Sixties was that many forms of traditional authority could be diluted: the authority of America in the world, and of the president within America, Lyndon Johnson, as a powerful and in many ways effective president, stood for the authority principle. That was, for many, a sufficient reason for emasculating him. Another was that he did not share East Coast liberal assumptions, in the way that Roosevelt and Kennedy had done. He had been doubtful about running for president even in 1964 for this reason: ‘I did not believe. . .that the nation would unite definitely behind any Southerner. One reason . . . was that the Metropolitan press would never permit it.’ 131 The prediction proved accurate, though its fulfilment was delayed. By August 1967, the Washington Correspondent of the St Louis Post-Dispatch, James Deakin, reported, ‘the relationship between the President and the Washington press corps has settled into a pattern of chronic disbelief’. 132 Media misrepresentation of the Tet Offensive was immediately responsible for Johnson’s departure. But more fundamental still was its habitual presentation of any decisive and forceful act by the White House as in some inescapable sense malevolent.
