Washington Decoded

Indoctrination U

In the guise of education, John Simkin’s website delivers agitprop.

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By Don Bohning

   

    If newspapers write “a first rough draft” of history, as the publisher Philip Graham once put it, then the internet can be said to host a “worst draft” of history. 

    There are tens of thousands of reliable websites about historical topics, of course, and many provide the actual tools (instant access to primary documents) that enable readers to reach their own, independent conclusions. But many other sites are extraordinarily tendentious and shroud their advocacy behind a mask of false scholarship. 

    A case in point is a website, Spartacus Educational, established in 1997 by John Simkin, a British historian.[1] Spartacus is billed on Google as a “British online encyclopedia [that] focuses on historical topics . . . articles are geared toward students.” And the website, according to one description, is “one of the most established and popular history sites on the world wide web.”[2]  In the late 1990s, apparently, Simkin was one of the very first history teachers to recognize the potential of the internet and take advantage of the new digital medium. As for Simkin, he presents himself as a history teacher and prolific author of books about a diverse number of subjects—which he is, although his short books are mostly self-published.[3] 

    An innocent student who stumbles onto Spartacus Educational would probably think the Google description is apt, and be impressed by Simkin’s credentials. It takes a little digging to figure out Simkin is much more interested in indoctrination than education, in keeping with his unreconstructed left-wing views. Simkin exemplifies the kind of militant socialists, once peculiar to the Labour Party, who were all but run out of that party by former Prime Minister Tony Blair.

    I first encountered Spartacus Educational three years ago, when Simkin contacted me after publication of my 2005 book, The Castro Obsession. At first I was impressed with Simkin’s diligence and outreach, and the portion of his website dedicated to US history, particularly intelligence history during the cold war. But it did not take long to learn that more often than not, the articles he featured were at variance with well-documented facts, including information I had gained directly from interviews and thousands of official documents declassified in recent years. Worse still, Simkin proved impervious to the idea that falsehoods should be corrected rather than perpetuated.

Operation 40

    One of  the most egregious misrepresentations on the Spartacus site involves  “Operation 40.” The website describes it as a Central Intelligence Agency unit that was organized in the early 1960s to engage in sabotage operations against Cuba. Operation 40 then supposedly “evolved into a team of assassins.”[4]  No credible documentation is supplied to support either the sabotage or assassination claims, and for good reason: none exists.

    To be sure, there was a CIA-organized group called Operation 40 involved in anti-Castro activities. And though it bears scant resemblance to the Simkin’s fictionalized version, the unit’s interesting history needs to be recounted before one can appreciate how much Simkin bends and distorts it.

    As described by some of its members, as well as in official documents, Operation 40 was the name given to a special unit created to play a supporting role in the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961. The unit’s assigned but never-realized task was to follow on the heels of the Cuban-exile invasion force, purge pro-Castro officials, seize documents, and take over administration of “liberated” towns and villages. Scheduled to depart Nicaragua two days after the invasion force, Operation 40 never did land.

    When the invasion failed miserably, the unit returned to Miami and morphed into a Cuban intelligence organization-in-exile, aka the Cuban CIA, or more commonly, Operation 40. Its CIA codename was AMOT, and for the next 13 years it operated under, but quasi-independently and at a separate location from, JMWAVE, codename for the large CIA station in Miami that waged the secret war against Castro. For many years, AMOT was headed by Joaquín Sanjenís, an official in the pre-Castro Cuban government of Carlos Prío. AMOT was disbanded in 1974 as JMWAVE operations were phased out.[5]

    That’s AMOT/Operation 40 in a nutshell, though like everything else in Cuban exile politics, there was more than a little controversy attached to this unit. Exile politics were extremely contentious and faction-ridden from the outset, and the innuendo about this unit fit that mold. 

    A telling glimpse can be found in a memorandum the late Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., an advisor to President Kennedy, wrote to White House aide Richard Goodwin on June 9, 1961, some eight weeks after the Bay of Pigs debacle. Schlesinger wrote, in part:

Sam Halper, who has been the Times [sic] correspondent in Habana and more recently in Miami, came to see me last week . . . . I have been meaning to pass on the following story as told me by Halper. Halper says that CIA set up something called Operation 40 under the direction of a man named . . . Captain Luis Sanjenis [sic], who was also chief of intelligence. It was called Operation 40 because originally only 40 men were involved; later the group was enlarged to 70. The ostensible purpose of Operation 40 was to administer liberated territories in Cuba. But the CIA agent in charge, a man known as Felix, trained the members of the group in methods of third degree interrogation, torture and general terrorism. The liberal Cuban exiles believe that the real purpose of Operation 40 was to “kill Communists” and, after eliminating hard-core Fidelistas, to go on to eliminate first the followers of [Manuel] Ray, then the followers of [Tony] Varona and finally to set up a right-wing dictatorship, presumably under [Manuel] Artime.[6]

   These kinds of suspicions and allegations were typical within the fractious exile community, as its leaders jockeyed constantly for position and fought to be anointed by their patrons to the north. Thus, as a reflection of the exile community’s back-biting the memo was accurate; as a reflection of Operation 40’s true nature, it cannot be taken at face value.

    In evaluating this document, moreover, the reputation of Sam Halper also has to be kept in mind. Halper, who died in 1989, worked for Time magazine, but was not highly regarded by his colleagues, among them Bernard Diederich and Jay Mallin. Both were Time correspondents covering Cuba and the Caribbean during the same period as Halper. Diederich was based in Haiti and Mallin in Havana, and both are still alive. When I asked Mallin about Halper, he wrote an email that said, “just mentioning his name gives me a nightmare.”[7]   Diederich spoke in a similar disparaging way about Halper’s journalistic skills. “He was no reporter,” Diederich recalled, “although he liked to ‘big foot’ [intrude on] big stories.”[8]

    A more realistic and first-hand appraisal of Operation 40’s role in 1961 was provided by Néstor Carbonell in his 1989 book, And the Russians Stayed. Carbonell had just finished his work for the CIA-created, five-member exile junta that was supposed to become Cuba’s provisional government after Castro’s ouster when some of his colleagues persuaded him to join the special unit. Operation 40, Carbonell wrote,

was to be integrated into the brigade and charged with occupation and temporary administration of liberated territories. (I later heard bizarre stories, echoed by noted reporters and historians, about the purported sinister task of this unit: that [it included] eliminating “leftist” leaders, including [José] Miró, who might stand in the way of “reactionary” plans!)  This unit was composed of about eighty men, most of them young professionals known to me, and was headed by an amiable former colonel of the Cuban army, Vicente Leon, who had honored his uniform throughout his career.[9]

    The controversy that swirled around Operation 40 did not abate much after 1961. As with any intelligence organization, especially one that functioned as a CIA with some J. Edgar Hoover-style functions added on for good measure, Operation 40 generated rumors and suspicion merely by existing. After the abortive invasion effort, when it operated as an intelligence-gathering unit under Joaquín Sanjenís in Miami, Operation 40 collected information not only on arriving Cubans and regime officials still in Cuba, but also closely monitored Cuban organizations throughout South Florida. The unit even produced occasional studies on the Cuban economy, especially the sugar industry.[10]

    More than three decades after its demise, in fact, Operation 40 remains a controversial topic within the South Florida Cuban exile community, many of whom it spied upon. As the late Rafael Quintero, a widely respected exile leader, told me during an April 2003 interview,

When the Bay of Pigs went kaput, they stayed [together] as a group and Sanjenís became a very, very dangerous and powerful guy in Miami because he had a file on everybody . . . whose wife was whose lover, how much money, etc. . . . Some people tried to use that for blackmail. Actually, nobody knows where those files are [to this day]. It’s a big question mark.[11]

According to Simkin

    This capsule history of an admittedly controversial organization bears scant resemblance to the version presented on John Simkin’s popular website.

    According to Simkin’s version of history, Operation 40 does not have its roots in the Bay of Pigs invasion, but goes all the way back to December 11, 1959, when J.C. King, then chief of CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division, sent a confidential memo to Allen W. Dulles, the CIA director. King’s memo argued that Cuba had a “far left” dictatorship which, if permitted to stand, would encourage similar actions against US holdings in other Latin American countries.[12]  Such a memo was written by King, but it is not true that “as a result . . . Dulles established Operation 40,” which is what Simkin goes on to claim.[13]

    Operation 40’s first successful action, according to Simkin, supposedly occurred on March 4, 1960, “when La Coubre, a ship flying a Belgian flag, exploded in Havana Bay.” No evidence has ever been presented to prove that explosion of the La Coubre—a French vessel laden with Belgian arms and ammunition for Castro—was anything but an accident. It should be noted, too, that the incident Simkin attributes to Operation 40 happened two weeks before President Eisenhower approved, on March 17, 1960, the CIA’s first covert plan to rid Cuba of Castro.

    At this point in Simkin’s fictitious history, if not earlier, it becomes apparent where he prefers to get his history from. Not surprisingly perhaps, it turns out that Simkin’s sole source for linking Operation 40 to the La Coubre explosion is Fabián Escalante, a former head of the Cuban state security apparatus (G-2), charged with carrying out counterintelligence operations.[14] There is no doubt, of course, that the secret war as seen from Havana will look different from the Washington-centric view that currently predominates. However, until and unless Havana’s archives—including the records of the Cuban state security apparatus—are thrown open to an extent comparable to what Washington has done with CIA, State Department, and Pentagon records, Simkin’s reliance on Escalante is, at best, very naïve. Escalante is a purveyor of mis- and disinformation.

    Without specifying a point in time, Simkin goes on to claim that Operation 40 was not only involved in sabotage, but “evolved into a team of assassins.” It is true, of course, that the CIA sanctioned plots to kill Fidel Castro and also initiated assassination plots. But did Operation 40 have anything to do with those efforts?

    The 1975 Senate investigation headed by Frank Church (D-Idaho) published a report devoted entirely to the subject of Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, the bulk of which concerned Castro.[15] The report made no mention of Operation 40. Nor did a 1967 internal report by the CIA’s inspector general, prepared at the direct order of then-President Lyndon B. Johnson, and declassified in 1993.[16] If Operation 40 had been a CIA-sanctioned assassination unit, as Simkin claims, it is inconceivable that it would have escaped the attention of both the Church Committee and the CIA’s inspector general.[17]

Sturgis, Hemmings, and Goss?

    Simkin’s predisposition to take as gospel information from the most dubious sources is never more evident than when he relies on the late Frank Sturgis to describe Operation 40’s evolution into a “team of assassins.” Simkin quotes Sturgis as saying,

this assassination group [Operation 40], would, upon orders, naturally, assassinate either members of the military of the political parties of the foreign country that you were going to infiltrate, and if necessary some of our own members who were suspected of being foreign agents . . . [though] we were concentrating strictly on Cuba at that particular time.[18]

    There are two problems here. As a reporter for The Miami Herald during that period, I knew Sturgis–or Frank Fiorini, the name he then went by—quite well. He was one of many “soldiers of fortune” floating around Miami in the 1960s. Like other journalists, I would listen to his stories but I rarely, if ever, found him credible. The other, more significant problem is that while Sturgis invariably tried to create the impression that he worked for the CIA, in fact, he never did in any capacity. As the 1975 Rockefeller Commission report stated, “Frank Sturgis was not an employee or agent of the CIA either in 1963 or at any other time. He so testified under oath and a search of CIA records failed to discover any evidence that he had ever been employed by the CIA or had ever served it as an agent, informant or other operative.[19]”

    This finding means that even if one were to accept, for the sake of argument, that there was such a thing as Simkin’s version of Operation 40, then Sturgis was certainly not a part of it.

    In addition to Sturgis, the Spartacus website provides a list of “CIA officials and freelance agents” who allegedly belonged to Operation 40. Among the other Americans listed is the late Gerry Hemming, another “soldier of fortune” type who was even less believable than Sturgis—that is, if it’s possible to have less-than-zero credibility.[20] 

    But not all the alleged members are as obviously phony as Sturgis and Hemming are. Simkin also fingers, without providing any documentation, Porter J. Goss as a member of Operation 40. The Spartacus website even features a photograph, which it claims was “taken in a nightclub in Mexico City on 22 January 1963. It is believed that the men in the photograph are all members of Operation 40.”[21] Among them, allegedly, is Goss (with glasses, at the bottom left-hand corner).

    Goss, of course, actually was a CIA officer from 1962 to 1972, and worked for a 2-3 months in the Miami station during the Cuban missile crisis, primarily as a photo-interpreter. Several years after he left the agency he became a Republican congressman from Florida. He served eight terms before resigning from Congress, and his chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee, to serve as CIA director from 2004 to 2006.

    Goss was provided with a copy of the photograph featured on Simkin’s website. In a telephone interview, Goss not only said that he had “never heard of Operation 40,” but declared, with some vehemence, that the “Goss” identified in the photo is “categorically, decisively, and completely . . . not me.”[22] Simkin’s website biography of Goss contains other errors, but to point them out would belabor the obvious.

    Spartacus Educational is not dedicated to spreading accurate historical knowledge, but diffusing John Simkin’s tired ideology.

Don Bohning, a former Latin America editor at The Miami Herald, is author of The Castro Obsession, Potomac Books, 2005.

      

[1] Simkin is also a leading member of The Education Forum, a woefully misnamed website, which purports to be a “forum for teachers and educators.”

[2] History Nexus, “Spartacus International.”

[3] The vast majority of Simkin’s books are published either by Tressell Publications, which he helped found in 1980, or Spartacus Educational Publishing, which he established in 1984. What Simkin calls a “book” is also open to interpretation, as most of his works appear to be extended essays or long pamphlets (e.g., his Spartacus-published books on the Vietnam war, US race relations, and the Cuban missile crisis are, respectively, 64 pages, 90 pages, and 32 pages long).

[4] Spartacus Educational, “Operation 40,” accessed 11 June 2008.

[5] AMOT’s CIA case officer for at least two years, beginning in 1970, was the late Frank Belsito, who published an account of his years managing the unit before his death in 2006. Frank J. Belsito, CIA: Cuba and the Caribbean, CIA Officer’s Memoir (Kearney, NE: Morris Publishing, 2002).

[6] Cuban Information Archives, Document 0355.

[7] Email to author from Jay Mallin, 17 April 2007.

[8] Email to author from Bernard Diederich, 17 May 2007.

[9] Néstor T. Carbonell, And the Russians Stayed: The Sovietization of Cuba, a Personal Portrait (New York: William Morrow, 1989), 141-143.

[10] Don Bohning, The Castro Obsession: US Covert Operations Against Cuba, 1959-1965 (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005), 144-145.

[11] Ibid., 145. This same quote appears in my book, but at that time Quintero asked not to be identified. 

[12] US Senate, Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders: An Interim Report (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, November 1975), 92.

[13] Spartacus Educational, “Operation 40,” accessed 11 June 2008.

[14] In his retirement, Escalante has devoted himself to writing a number of what must be considered “authorized” books about Castro’s resistance to North American aggression. It should be noted that while Escalante, in his written work, claimed that the La Coubre explosion was a “CIA operation,” not even he was so sloppy as to attribute the blast to a plan/organization (Operation 40) that did not yet exist. See Fabián Escalante, The Secret War: CIA Covert Operations Against Cuba, 1959-62 (Melbourne, Australia: Ocean Press, 1995), 44-45.

[15] US Senate, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, 71-180.

[16] J.S. Earman, (CIA) Inspector General, “Reports on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro,” May 23, 1967.

[17] The only systematic CIA assassination program that is documented in US government records was code-named ZRRIFLE. It was created in 1960 by Richard Bissell, then the CIA’s director of plans, as the Eisenhower administration contemplated the elimination of such troublesome Third World leaders as Patrice Lumumba and Fidel Castro. Following Bissell’s resignation after the Bay of Pigs debacle, Bill Harvey took over the program in 1961 and directed it through the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, until Harvey, too, was demoted. ZRRIFLE never actually resulted in an assassination. For an excellent account of the program, see Bayard Stockton, Flawed Patriot: The Rise and Fall of CIA Legend Bill Harvey (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2006).

[18] Spartacus Educational, “Operation 40,” accessed 11 June 2008.

[19] Commission on CIA Activities within the United States, Report to the President (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), 252.

[20] Hemming, who had a record of three arrests and one conviction for either drug or gun smuggling, died in February 2008 at his home in North Carolina. In an obituary, Robert K. Brown, editor of Soldier of Fortune magazine and Hemming’s friend, described Hemming as a charismatic man, but “it was hard to tell where the fact ended and the fiction started.” In the same article, I was accurately quoted as saying, “I never believed a word he had to say.” John Dorschner, “Adventurer’s Life Offers a Look at a Bygone Miami,” Miami Herald, 6 February 2008.

[21]  Spartacus Educational, “Operation 40,” accessed 11 June 2008.

[22] Telephone interviews with Porter Goss, 29 February and 5 March 2008.

© 2008 by Don Bohning

Tapes: Hearing a Wrong Leaning, er, Meaning

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By Max Holland

    Twenty-five years ago this month, a handful of captured conversations helped to bring down Richard M. Nixon's presidency. Given the demonstrated power of White House tapes to record, and sometimes alter, history, it's striking that it has taken all these years to flesh out a full account of surreptitious recording devices installed at the behest of presidents. The more than 3,500 hours of meetings and conversations tape-recorded during the Nixon presidency merely represent the apogee of a slow trend that began with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940, and greatly accelerated during the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

    These recordings are presidential history with the bark off and will foster and sometimes force novel interpretations of even the most familiar events. Yet, when the source material is so raw--one is trafficking in micro-history--the potential for misunderstanding and misrepresentation is great. Sometimes, a single mis-heard word can make all the difference. Consider, for example, the rendering of a September 18, 1964 conversation in Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964, historian Michael R. Beschloss's initial volume on the Johnson recordings.

The first minutes of this telephone conversation between Johnson and his mentor, Senator Richard B. Russell, concern the latter's participation on the Warren Commission, which was created to investigate the Kennedy assassination. That very day, after 10 arduous months, the panel had put the finishing touches on what would become known as the Warren Report. Johnson asked Russell if the commission's findings were unanimous. Russell replied, according to Beschloss's transcript, “Yes, sir. I tried my best to get in a dissent, but they'd come 'round and trade me out of it by giving me a little old threat.”

    The implication is that the senior senator from Georgia, one of Washington's most powerful men, signed the Warren Report  under duress; that he was in fundamental disagreement with one or more of the commission's key findings, but bowed to an unspecified threat.

    There's something wrong here. A Southern Democrat and staunch opponent of civil rights, Russell detested Chief Justice Earl Warren and the kind of jurisprudence the Warren Supreme Court practiced. In fact, Russell protested long and vigorously when Johnson informed the Georgian, on November 29, 1963, that he had been appointed to serve on the commission. It wasn't because Russell thought the duty unimportant; it was primarily because he didn't want to work with Warren on any matter. But Johnson insisted. “I don't give a damn if you have to serve with a Republican; if you have to serve with a Communist; if you have to serve with a Negro; if you have to serve with a thug,” he stated. So Russell did serve. Still, the notion that a grudging participant like Russell would ever bow to a threat from a panel headed by Warren is astounding.

    Listening to the tape, it becomes clear that Beschloss's transcription is incorrect. What Russell actually said is: “I tried my best to get in a dissent, but they'd come 'round and trade me out of it by giving me a little old thread of it.”

     Suddenly, the conversation makes sense. Russell came to the commission's last meeting on September 18 determined to register his opinion on two pivotal issues: whether a foreign conspiracy existed, and the sequence of the bullets that struck Kennedy and Texas Governor John B. Connally in Dallas's Dealey Plaza. Far from threatening the Georgian, Warren had labored that day to oblige him.

    The chief justice believed it was inordinately important for the commission to deliver a unanimous decision to the American people. If complete agreement proved elusive, Russell, of all the members, could not be the lone dissenter. Russell was to conservative opinion what Warren was to liberal: a standard bearer and powerful influence. So along with the other panel members, Warren kept massaging the final language until it incorporated Russell's views. Finally, the senator could only assent.

    Construing history from presidential recordings is an arduous but hardly thankless task. Yet, it requires being steeped in contemporary minutiae: events of a given day and sometimes a given hour; the nuances of every issue before the president; and the foibles of each individual unwittingly recorded for posterity. It might not even be an exaggeration to say that those who would interpret the recordings need to be as well-versed as these evocative voices were in their day.

    Postscript: Despite an enormous volume of tape recordings waiting to be transcribed and annotated, Beschloss has not released another book of Johnson tapes since his second volume,  Reaching  for Glory, was published in 2001.

       This article first appeared in the Los Angeles Times, 1 August 1999
                                  © 1999 by Max Holland

Jerry Ford Was No Accidental President

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By Max Holland
   

    Conventional wisdom attributes Gerald R. Ford’s presidency solely to the Watergate scandal of the 1970s. Yet it is no less accurate to say that but for the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, it is likely that Ford never would have become president. His  ascent was the culmination of eleven tumultuous years, not two.

    To be sure, in the early 1960s, many Republicans believed the tall, blond, athletic congressman from Grand Rapids, Michigan represented the GOP’s best response to Kennedy’s youthful appeal, the perfect spokesman for a modern, postwar brand of Republicanism. But at  the time, the 50-year-old Ford had only one great ambition in life, and it certainly did not include running for president. All he yearned to accomplish politically was to preside as  speaker over a House of Representatives firmly in Republican control.

     The November 22nd assassination changed all that. Akin to a political earthquake with large, persistent aftershocks, the assassination marked the first in a series of convoluted,  yet interrelated, developments that would ultimately thrust Ford into the Oval Office. The sequence defied imagination in 1963, and remains astounding even in retrospect.

    The first tangible effect of the assassination on Ford’s career was the new president’s  decision to appoint him to the Warren Commission, the presidential panel charged with  investigating the assassination. That single decision lifted Ford from being a parochial  congressman—apart from his constituents, he was largely known only to the small club of reporters who covered Capitol Hill—and introduced him to the country at large as a politician worthy of national responsibilities.

    When I interviewed Ford in 1996, I asked him about President Johnson’s November 29th telephone call. Effectively, LBJ was asking Ford to serve under Chief Justice Earl Warren, whose competence and jurisprudence Ford harshly and regularly attacked on the House floor. Ford’s recollection was that he was unenthusiastic,  and had to be dragooned by Johnson into serving. Unbeknownst to Ford, however, LBJ was secretly taping their phone conversation, and the extant recording proved the opposite. Judging from the alacrity of Ford’s expressed willingness to serve, he immediately recognized that the new president was handing him a great big political plum. He leapt, in  fact, at the opportunity.

     Ford might well have eventually risen in the GOP ranks on his own merits, but service on the Warren Commission—in its day, the equivalent of the 9/11 Commission—indelibly marked him as a leader, someone who “would rise to the consciousness of responsibility,” as Speaker John McCormack (D-Massachusetts) put it when Johnson asked McCormack what he thought about selecting the little-known Michigan congressman to sit on the Warren Commission. After the 1964 election, in which the GOP suffered a landslide defeat, the so-called “Young Turks” in  the House, led by a newly-prominent Jerry Ford, mutinied against the House minority leader, Representative Charles Halleck (R-Indiana). Ford won the vote to replace Halleck.

     By 1966, Johnson rued the day that he had plucked the Grand Rapids congressman out of relative obscurity and  put him on a national stage. LBJ would complain bitterly about Ford’s hard-ball tactics to Senator Everett Dirksen (R-Illinois), Ford’s counterpart in the upper body. The energetic  Ford had proved to be far tougher in the political clinches than Halleck ever was, or some of the other GOP congressmen Johnson contemplated appointing to the Warren Commission.

    Over the next decade, the landscape that Ford expected to contend with for the balance of his political life shifted dramatically, also precipitated in no small part by John F. Kennedy’s absence. By 1966, the Democrats’ New Deal coalition was coming unglued under the  twin pressures of the Vietnam war and civil rights, and although the party’s congressional  majority would largely persist for another 30 years, decay was in the air. The skillful Texan who succeeded Kennedy might have coped successfully with one of these elemental challenges, but not both taken together. Southerners and conservative whites elsewhere began abandoning the party in droves, effectively ending Democrats’ hegemony.

    Of course, it’s absurd to think that John Kennedy would not have faced the same troubling issues that destroyed Lyndon Johnson’s desire to stay in office until 1972. Still, it’s hard to imagine, had JFK served two terms, that things would have worked out exactly the same for the Democrats, which is to say, as badly as they did. Johnson had to make critical decisions about South Vietnam in his first term, whereas Kennedy, facing the end of his tenure, might have cut American losses with the same cold calculation that prompted him to overthrow Ngo Dinh Diem. It’s also unlikely that JFK would have ever have lost the allegiance of the Democratic Party’s intelligentsia, much less have been subjected to its blistering attacks.

     The 1968 Democratic crackup, symbolized by the party’s unprecedented repudiation of Johnson, culminated in the narrow election of Richard Nixon, who had seemingly been consigned to political oblivion following his defeats in 1960 and 1962. But with Democrats hopelessly split over foreign policy, Nixon could reasonably claim that a return to Republican stewardship was needed, and he augured in a nearly unbroken period of GOP control of the Oval Office until the cold war ended.

    Nixon shared some of Johnson’s demons, specifically, paranoia about war protestors and the Kennedy mystique. Yet in his lawlessness Nixon was so brazen that it eventually  threatened his own tenure in office. When he needed to appoint a vice president who might actually succeed him in office, the pool of plausible GOP candidates for a national office was not that large. Former New York governor Nelson Rockefeller was anathema to GOP conservatives, and former Texas governor John Connally (another political phenomena formed by the shots in Dealey Plaza) was unacceptable to the GOP rank-and-file, not to mention a Democratic Congress. The GOP leadership in the Senate, after decades of being in the minority, was relatively old and uninspiring, which left the stolid, vigorous Ford as the only Republican who could plausibly claim to have national standing.

    Rather than label Ford the accidental president, because he was never elected, it might make more sense to place him in the same category as a Harry Truman or Dwight Eisenhower. These were also men who, initially, never yearned for the presidency with every fiber of  their being. Only events, and their performance in positions of responsibility, conspired to put them into the Oval Office.

      This article first appeared on History News Network, 29 December 2006
                                                © 2006 by Max Holland

RFK: The Man Who Really Brought Down LBJ

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By Max Holland   

 

    Nearly all the obituaries for Eugene McCarthy credit the former Minnesota senator with forcing Lyndon Johnson out of the 1968 race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Without taking anything away from McCarthy’s principled run against a sitting president of his own party, this is simplistic history that ignores everything we have since learned about that fateful year.

    To be sure, McCarthy added to Johnson’s sense of beleagurement when the little-known senator made an unexpectedly strong showing in the New Hampshire primary, garnering 42% of the vote. Johnson had talked plenty about quitting months earlier. He was worn and exhausted by the burdens of office, especially the war, and worried about his ability to survive another term. The Tet offensive by communist forces in South Vietnam, while a defeat for Hanoi, was particularly debilitating. It gave lie to Johnson’s claims of steady progress in the war, and was undoubtedly a decisive factor in McCarthy’s unexpectedly strong showing on March 12. Before the offensive, reliable polls indicated that Johnson was going to “annihilate” McCarthy. Johnson did not announce his withdrawal the day after the primary.

    Indeed, political soundings taken soon afterward showed that he could still garner enough delegates to win the nomination, and Johnson was convinced that if nominated he would be reelected, assuming Nixon was his GOP opponent. To some degree, Johnson relished the prospect of running against the liberal intelligentsia in his party, an element he had assiduously courted but one that had never truly accepted him. So what precipitated LBJ’s withdrawal on March 31?

     The only event of significance between McCarthy’s unexpected showing and Johnson leaving the race was Robert F. Kennedy’s entry. RFK announced his candidacy on March 16, after refusing to challenge Johnson earlier because he reportedly feared that it would be perceived as only personal. But after New Hampshire, Kennedy could plausibly claim that the Democratic Party was deeply split over the war, and that he was not the cause.

    Much of the media treated Kennedy’s entrance as proof that Johnson was unlikely to be renominated. But as any hard-boiled, vote-counting politician would have realized on March 16 - and Johnson was among the best - RFK’s entrance enhanced Johnson’s chances. The 1968 process involved a different set of rules for nearly every state, meaning that delegates were largely controlled by elected officeholders and party bosses. And since McCarthy deeply detested Kennedy, and was not about to withdraw or join forces with him, a three-way race meant the antiwar faction of the Democratic Party was irrevocably split between two Catholic, liberal senators. As The New York Times reported on March 24, LBJ seemed likely to get at least 65% of the delegates for the nomination.

  Nonetheless, it was Kennedy’s entrance that was the precipitating factor in Johnson’s withdrawal. Johnson believed, and with good reason, that he had always kept faith with the 1960 political compact he had formed with John Kennedy in Los Angeles, when LBJ stunned most observers by giving up the Senate to run for vice president. In return for subordinating himself to an undistinguished senator who was clearly his political junior, Johnson was given the opportunity to be on a national ticket and thereby transcend the onus of being a southerner, perhaps the last political vestige of the Civil War. If he ran well, LBJ could keep alive his burning desire for the presidency - in 1964, if the JFK-LBJ ticket lost, and in 1968 if Kennedy served two terms.

  Instead, of course, Johnson was abruptly catapulted to the White House in 1963. He was then treated, first by RFK, as a usurper, grabbing at the accoutrements of power, and then later by the country as an unworthy successor, even though Johnson had done far more to advance liberal causes than JFK.

    The flaw in Johnson was that he was not content to lead and be respected. Rather, he demanded almost slavish support and public adoration. Such deep emotion is reserved for very few presidents, and usually, they have to die in office to achieve it. Johnson’s curse was that he inherited the presidency from such a man. And now RFK was repudiating everything Johnson represented or hoped to accomplish. As Johnson told his biographer Doris Kearns after he left the White House: “I felt [in 1968] that I was being chased on all sides by a giant stampede coming at me from all directions. . . . And then the final straw. The thing I feared from the first day of my presidency was actually coming true. Robert Kennedy . . . openly announced his intention to reclaim the throne in the memory of his brother. And the American people, swayed by the magic of the name, were dancing in the streets. The whole situation was unbearable for me.”

    If McCarthy cannot be credited with forcing Johnson from the race, the meaning of his challenge to LBJ is hardly diminished. In fact, it reverberates to this day. It was McCarthy’s candidacy that cracked open the Democrats’ consensus on foreign policy. Nearly four decades later, the party is still struggling with that divide.