Long Sixties

From 1960 to Barack Obama

Tom Hayden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317256526
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Politics
• Index: History

In this unique and compelling book Tom Hayden argues that Barack Obama would not have been able to mount a successful presidential campaign without the movements of the 1960s. The Long Sixties shows that movements throughout history triumph over Machiavellians, gaining social reforms while leaving both revolutionaries and reactionaries frustrated. Hayden argues that the 1960s left a critical imprint on America, from civil rights laws to the birth of the environmental movement, and forced open the political process to women and people of colour. He urges President Obama to continue this legacy with a popular programme of economic recovery, green jobs and health care reform. The Long Sixties is a carefully researched history which will be of interest to activists, journalists and historians as the fiftieth anniversary of the 1960s begins.

PART I

The First Sixties, 1955–1965

INTRODUCTION

Movements against Machiavellians

What is important is that the action took place, at a time when everyone judged it to be unthinkable. If it took place, it can happen again.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, 1968¹

Employers are going to love this generation…. They are going to be easy to handle. There aren’t going to be any riots.

—Clark Kerr, president, University of California, 1963²

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all.

—Mario Savio, Berkeley Free Speech Movement, December 2, 1964³

I’ve always felt a curious relationship to the sixties.
In a sense, I’m a pure product of that era.

—Barack Obama⁴

THE SIXTIES SHAPED MY CHARACTER PERMANENTLY. It remains a decade that still reverberates in America and around the world. No less an authority than Bill Clinton, a Vietnam draft resister who became president, has written that “if you look back on the sixties and, on balance, you think there was more good than harm, then you’re probably a Democrat. If you think there was more harm than good, you’re probably a Republican.”⁵ Our new president, Barack Obama, writes of himself as a “pure product” of the time, though repeatedly asserting a new agenda of the postsixties generation. The truth, this book will argue, is that Obama was created in a classic sixties rebellious act of interracial love; shaped by black theologians from the sixties like Reverend Jeremiah Wright; benefited from the openings to the mainstream created by the sixties; gave his first speech at a student rally against South African apartheid; and was prepared by the sixties to enter a postsixties elite, thereby becoming the first African American president, the first community organizer president, the first to be elected on an antiwar platform, and the first to cite social movements from the bottom up as a primary force in making America a better place. Of course, he is equally postsixties, his very character embodying the era of globalization. How he finesses the contradictions between movements and Machiavellians—his story encompasses both—will shape his presidency and perceptions of the sixties and beyond.

I chose the title The Long Sixties to recognize the length of this era over our lives. The term “the long sixties” has floated into academic discourse in the past decade, its origins obscure.⁶ The concept is useful in two ways. First, it lengthens the period by locating its proximate origins in the civil rights movement and beat generation of the fifties and its ending with America’s defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal that drove President Richard Nixon from office. And second, the concept recognizes that the sixties are with us still, as demonstrated most recently in the personal narratives of the major 2008 presidential candidates. John McCain was a navy pilot who bombed North Vietnam two dozen times before being shot down and imprisoned in Hanoi. Hillary Clinton was an early feminist who shared the values of the 1962 Port Huron Statement (PHS). Barack Obama, born at the time of the 1963 March on Washington, sought validation from a preacher of black liberation theology and was accused during the campaign of “palling” with a former Weathermen founder, William Ayers. As the fiftieth commemoration of everything that occurred in the sixties will be upon us in 2010, it is appropriate that a historic timeline be published as well, for the use of students, historians, and participants in what I call the coming “battle over memory.”

This book is a reflection on the sixties told through my experiences looking forward as a participant and later looking backward across the decades. And I will argue that events seemingly long behind us can reverberate in the present as a prologue to the future. For example, as I write these lines in 2008, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan contain echoes of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in the sixties. After the first Persian Gulf War, then-president George H. W. Bush exclaimed that America finally had defeated “the Vietnam syndrome.” This was a president comparing antiwar sentiment to a mental health condition, fearing that norms of the sixties—against more Vietnams, against policing the world, against an imperial presidency—would become impediments to future wars unless vanquished by a quick and successful battlefield triumph. Few today, however, look back on the long wars in Iraq and beyond with any triumphalism. Instead, the desert wars remind us of the jungle wars before, with superpower occupation fiercely resisted by nationalism and culture, with Lyndon Johnson’s passing to Richard Nixon a paranoid syndrome of secrecy, plumbers in the White House, conspiracy indictments, and Phoenix programs, those in turn foreshadowing George Bush’s warrantless wiretaps, secret renditions, Guantánamo gulag, and media manipulation by planted military commentators. Including Central America in the toxic mix, we have been suffering from hot wars to secret wars against conspiratorial bogeymen since the ominous showdown between John Kennedy and Fidel Castro at the Bay of Pigs. In coming full circle, we are even reviving the Vietnam era’s discredited “Phoenix” assassination program in the long war that began with Iraq.⁷

“But where are the protesters, hippies, blood-soaked radicals?” many will ask. “Aren’t those shocking sixties radicals long gone, replaced by a sleek geek generation, the ‘microserfs’ of Douglas Coupland’s novels?” Actually, the evolution of the two generations is more consistent than it appears. The participatory sixties broke the institutional doors open with the vote for eighteen-year-olds, the suspension of the military draft, and the far greater inclusion of people of color and women than ever before. The Internet revolution—participatory democracy on an unprecedented scale—subverted from below many control mechanisms. The “indymedia” explosion was a quantum leap beyond the early reach of the Berkeley Barb, the Black Panther newspaper, or the Village Voice. MoveOn.org generated $180 million in contributions for liberal peace candidates in 2003–2004 alone, breaking the special-interest money barriers and amassing a budget greater than those of all the peace groups in the past century combined. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 eclipsed all box office records for documentaries. The old counterculture was merging and surging into the contemporary mainstream. A majority of Americans came to feel that Iraq was a “mistake” more rapidly than had the majority during Vietnam, although American casualties had been twenty times greater in the earlier conflict.

Then came Barack Obama, who famously dismissed the sixties as a tiring replay of “old politics,” as “the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation—a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago.”⁸ He added in 2007 that the culture wars that followed the sixties were “so ’90s.”⁹ He then declared the arrival of a new day. In a literal sense, Obama was right. He was five years old in the middle of the sixties. But when he sought civil rights validity, there he was, arm in arm with the old civil rights leaders on the Selma, Alabama, bridge. He sought to position himself as a new centrist between the old extremes of cold war senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson and the “Tom Hayden Democrats,”¹⁰ but legions of sixties people voted and sent checks because of his 2002 speech against the Iraq War. Obama could not shake off the sixties, and the Republicans would not allow him to, especially when his pastor of twenty years, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, was revealed to be a vintage-sixties black liberation theology proponent.

So how do we make sense of the sixties? Though some argue that no single narrative line is possible, and others see only chaos and the melting down of old ways, the sixties already are remembered as an era with a distinctive heart and ethos, whether revered or hated. What is therefore necessary, I think, is to define and explain an essence that is intuitively felt by many. This can be done on two levels: the macro (or overview) level of the era as a whole and the micro level through concrete case studies of specific movements.

A Model of Social Change

The story of the sixties I propose to tell is within a larger framework of “movements against Machiavellians,” a model I have tried to apply to American history as a whole. In its simplest terms, I can describe the concept in stages. First, a few definitions, beginning with the letter M; thus the M/M model of social change. Though gimmicky, I find the repetitive M approach is grasped most widely and easily among my students. (See Illustrations on pages 263–264)

• Movements are mass gatherings of people outside society’s institutional structures who assemble for the purpose of righting a moral injury that those institutions refuse or fail to address. Examples of such movements include those for civil rights, women’s rights, gay/lesbian rights, the rights of unorganized workers, disabled people, peace movements, and environmental movements. The sixties overall were an expression of the commonalities of all these movements and countercultures. The sixties were a period of more movements than at any time in American history.¹¹ The 2007–2008 campaign for Barack Obama was a social movement in electoral form, a renewal of sixties energies inside a political system and culture broken open under sixties pressures.

• Machiavellians are power technicians, often from corporate legal firms and national security agencies, who represent the institutional hierarchies of business, government, the military, the intelligence agencies, the media, and organized religion.¹² They will differ according to interests, political affiliations, and degrees of enlightenment, but their core objective is to maintain incumbent power by whatever means are available. The Machiavellian code excludes values such as honesty, decency, and democratic accountability where they conflict with the primary ethos of preserving and expanding power. According to archconservative (and passionate opponent of the radical sixties) Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield, Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince is “the first and the best book to argue that politics has and should have its own rules and should not accept rules of any kind or from any source where the object is not to win or prevail over others.”¹³

Read in their entirety, Machiavelli’s works are more complex than the axioms associated with his name. The notion that the means justify the end is explained more fully: If the prince wins battles and improves the reputation of the state, his means will be judged honorable because, “in the action of all men, and especially of princes, where there is no court to appeal to, one looks to the end.”¹⁴ For another example, the belief attributed to Machiavelli that statesmen should avoid truth and charity because neither quality is the way of the world is formulated more subtly: “A prince, and especially a new prince, cannot observe all those things for which men are held good, since he is often under a necessity, to maintain his state…. He needs to have a spirit disposed to change as the winds of fortune and variations of things command him, and as I said above, not depart from good, when possible, but know how to enter into evil, when forced by necessity.”¹⁵ In the hands of Mansfield (or Karl Rove, who passed around copies of The Prince to White House staff), a rather rough and robust set of lessons is drawn: “A new morality consistent with the necessity of conquest must be found” or “The haves of this world cannot quietly inherit what is coming to them; lest they be treated now as they once treated others, they must keep an eye on the have-nots.”¹⁶

• Machiavellian interest groups in the sixties period would be typified in the Johnson and Nixon administrations by the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower had warned about and by the “wise men” who counseled Johnson to disengage from Vietnam. Perhaps the most stunning example of the Machiavellian preoccupation with reputation was contained in an internal Pentagon memo advising that 70 percent of the rationale for Vietnam was “to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat.”¹⁷ Throughout the cold war, the most potent charge in American politics was that a party or candidate “lost” (China, Korea, Vietnam, etc.) and thus weakened the American superpower reputation. Later, the Machiavellians would be represented by the neoconservative faction who largely captured the Bush administration, together with Dick Cheney, and fabricated a pretext for war to a gullible public.

• The overarching and bipartisan consensus on Machiavelli’s relevence is summarized in a 2009 book, Power Rules, by Leslie Gelb, a longtime eminence of the Council on Foreign Relations. The jacket of Gelb’s book reads: “Inspired by Machiavelli’s classic The Prince, Gelb offers illuminating guidelines on how American power actually works and should be wielded in today’s Machiavellian world. Power is still, as in the days of Machiavelli, about pressure and coercion, carrots and sticks…. Reason, values, and understanding are foreplay but not the real thing.” (Leslie Gelb, Power Rules, New York: HarperCollins, 2009, cover notes)

• Movement and Machiavellian conflicts can be both external and internal, may occur in all arenas, and may coalesce around single issues as well as broader campaigns. In the early sixties, for example, the civil rights movement tried to exploit differences between southern (segregationist) power structures and more liberal national elites. The Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover both belonged to the Machiavellian caste, but the differences between them ultimately came close to an internal civil war.¹⁸ Nixon believed that he was brought low by conspiratorial eastern elites; as a consequence of this paranoid thinking, he sent campaign operatives to illegally break into the rival Democratic Party’s 1972 headquarters, an act that set in motion his own impeachment.

The sixties were dominated by an overarching Machiavellian cold war competition between American and Soviet establishments, a conflict that drove power relationships, budget priorities, and resource allocations on both sides. In the view of the American cold warriors, it was necessary to create clandestine spying, covert military operations, and unsavory alliances with virtually any nation-states or leaders who were anticommunist. In the words of the dean of cold war historians, John Lewis Gaddis, “The Cold War transformed American leaders into Machiavellians.”¹⁹ The newly created CIA was tasked with the powers to undertake “propaganda; economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, antisabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation movements, and support of indigenous anticommunist elements in threatened countries of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part I The First Sixties, 1955–1965
• Part II The Second Sixties, 1965–1975
• Part III The Sixties at Fifty
• Part IV The Sixties in the Obama Era
• Part V A Sixties Timeline
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author