2/64 The Month that Launched the Sixties

2/64

The Month That Launched the Sixties

by Thomas P. Del Signore

Published by Thomas P. Del Signore at Smashwords

Table of contents

Chapter 1 The New, Old Guy: LBJ Takes Over

Chapter 2 A Change Gonna Come

Chapter 3 An Invasion of Beatles

Chapter 4 A Colorful Heavyweight

Chapter 5 Sixties-Style Scandals

Chapter 6 Radical Lifestyle Changes

Chapter 7 The Culture Is A-Changing

Chapter 8 Reds and Rebels on the Loose

Chapter 9 The Eager Opposition

Chapter 10 Moon Rangers

Chapter 11 And Now...The Sixties-style

Chapter 12 Lesser Lights from a Frantic February

Chapter 13 Final Voices

Chapter 14 2/64 to Infinity

The winter of 1964 looked like it was going to be particularly gloomy.

The decade that looked so promising when the youngest elected President, John F. Kennedy, defeated the Vice President of the previous eight years under grandfatherly President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, fell into a national pall when an assassin's bullet cut down the 46-year, vibrant chief executive, bringing the era of Camelot to an end on November 22, 1963.

Now in charge of the country was another older generation leader, Lyndon Johnson, the lumbering Texan who was a master of Congress as Senate leader but was relegated to nearly invisible status in a White House commandeered by the Kennedy boys – Jack and Bobby – and the best and brightest brought to Washington from the ivy halls of New England colleges to lead America into a New Frontier.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. seemed poised to finally bring civil rights to all Americans with his awe-inspiring speech highlighting the March on Washington at the end of the previous summer. But the civil rights battle under the three years Kennedy was in charge suffered various fits and starts, and the year 1963 was known not only for King's speech but for the beating of peaceful marchers in Alabama, the express defiance of any whiff of integration by the state's governor, George Wallace, the bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four little girls, and the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Mississippi.

Boxing was still the dominant sport in the 1960s, but the polite, fresh-faced heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson, who became the first to win back the title after felling Sweden's Ingemar Johnasson in the rubber match of their three-bout series, had been knocked flat in the first round not once but twice, in 1962 and again in 1963, by the dangerous, sullen Sonny Liston, who learned to box while doing time in prison in the 1950's.

The only challenger boxing could get to take on Liston in the winter of 1964 was the 1960 U.S. light heavyweight Olympic gold medalist Cassius Clay, who was called the Louisville Lip by the press for his brash, flamboyant style, which didn't win him many fans and who many thought might be killed in the ring by the dark ex-con, who was favored by most fight fans over the loudmouth kid despite his sordid past.

Popular music had often reflected the mood and direction of the country in the past. In the Roaring Twenties, jazz spoke to the wild, unbound era with improvisational and up-tempo riffs while the Fifties were hopped up on the new music called rock 'n' roll, marking the steady assimilation of sensual black rhythms into the pelvises and feet of white teenagers to the chagrin of their parents.

But by the Sixties, Elvis had gone into the Army, Little Richard had become a preacher, Buddy Holly died in a plane crash, and Chuck Berry was facing morals charges, leaving America with more safe alternatives, like the tuxedoed Jersey Boys called the Four Seasons, who had their third No. 1 hit in 1963. Some black artists were still making it on the Billboard charts heading into 1964, including a blind boy called Little Stevie Wonder. But early in the year, it became evidence that A Change Gonna Come, albeit in the form of four English boys playing rhythms influenced by Motown as well as American country and western.

Cuba and the so-called threat of communism reared its ugly head twice during the first term of President Kennedy, what with the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis that scared everyone in the fall of 1962. The Kennedy administration was less focused on Indochina, specifically in the far-off places called North and South Vietnam. In a stumbling attempt to prevent communist incursion by the North into the South, Kennedy engineered a coup that took out the leader they thought they wanted to lead South Vietnam at the beginning of the administration's first term, Ngo Diem, and replaced him with a president who would listen more closely to the American military leaders that were become increasingly engaged in southeast Asia.

The new President Johnson vowed to address the Vietnamese situation more seriously, making his strong feelings about the importance of Indochina to America early in 1964.

For these reasons, and many more that will be laid out in this book, the case can be made that the Sixties really didn't get off the ground for four years. Specifically, the month of February 1964 was the launching pad for the 1960s as they would be remembered by future generations. From President Johnson throwing down the gauntlet on Vietnam in his first news conference on February 2, to the country's first meaningful civil rights bill passing the House of Representatives on February 8, to Cassius Clay's stunning upset of Sonny Liston on February 25, to the Beatles hitting No. 1 with I Want to Hold Your Hand on February 1, followed by the emergence of Beatlemania surfacing on American shores on February 8, the Sixties truly began this month and would lead the United States into a daring new era.

There was a summit meeting of sorts in February 1964 that would mark the era called the Sixties. It was a publicity stunt that would would take place in a sweaty gym in Miami on February 18 that would feature those four musical icons that would dominate the decade musically and culturally, and the boxer who would become the model for the dauntless male athlete and a target for both scorn and admiration during the Sixties and beyond.

The frippery between the Beatles and Cassius Clay in the boxer's training camp brought together two of the icons of sports, music, culture and youthful exposition that would define the Sixties.

And it happened in February 1964.

Chapter 1 The New, Old Guy: LBJ Takes Over

The country had been robbed of its vitality on November 22, 1963. When an assassin's bullet exploded the back of the head of the handsome, vibrant, middle-aged President John F. Kennedy, the country sank into, at least, a winter of malaise and depression as the era of Camelot came to a violent end and the rule of the dour, bald Texan, Lyndon Baines Johnson, came to pass.

From the time LBJ took the oath of office aboard Air Force One, a comatose former First Lady Jackie standing by his side with her husband's brains still dotting her smart, pink suit, the youth of America hung their heads. The so-called baby boomers, who were just reaching their late teens after the surge of births that began in 1946 after World War II was ended, finally had someone who represented their youthful hope and exuberance with JFK after eight years with grandfatherly Dwight D. Eisenhower as President and the sinister-looking Richard Nixon as Vice President. Even though Nixon was about the same age as Kennedy when they ran against each other in 1960, the Dracula-esque appearance of the former California congressman who engineered the abominable House Un-American Committee during the McCarthy Era in the 1950's couldn't attract the wispy, dashing, cocksure manner of jaunty Jack Kennedy.

Though the youthful President had only a fraction of the skills on Capitol Hill that his running mate had, Kennedy still gave the appearance that the Sixties was going to a decade for the youth of America. When JFK implored indifferent young people to national service [Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country], they snapped to attention and offered their young energy to serve not only citizens of this country but of the world. Kennedy obliged them by setting up the Peace Corps, if military service was not a youngster's idea of serving his country.

Kennedy challenged the country and awakened the great minds of the nation to dedicate itself to go to the moon by the end of the decade. It was a lively challenge for the Sixties that would send the great minds of America on a vigorous pursuit of a scientific goal that, with JFK advocating it, seemed very possible.

But as America inched toward a winter that would prove to be quite harsh in late November 1963, that exuberance had been replaced in the national psyche by the presence of a dreary, gangly new President with a deep Southern drawl.

By virtue of simple mathematics, President Johnson would complete his first 100 days in office at the very end of February 1964, which had 29 days because of the Leap Year. Americans typically used every President's first 100 days in office as a measuring stick for the rest of his administration. By the time those first 100 days were up, the country could usually tell what direction a new President was going to take them. That made the month of February 1964 particularly relevant for LBJ, since his first 100 days would end by March 1.

When President Johnson had his first full-fledged news conference on February 2, he was ready to display his image as commander-in-chief rather than consoler-in-chief. And one of the first orders of business Johnson was to address in this first back and forth with the nation's press was a new idea put forth by one of America's greatest frenemies (sometimes friend, sometime enemy) over the last 30 years – French President Charles de Gaulle.

Like most of the World War II generation, whether they were men in position of power or served in the war, there had been something of a love-hate relationship with de Gaulle and France. During the war, de Gaulle was an important figure in the French underground that worked from the shadows after Nazi Germany overran the country in 1940. France was a key ally in the European theater, and Normandy beach was the site where the United States finally broke through the German lines on D-Day, June 6, 1944, that eventually led to the liberalization of the country and began the march to Berlin that would end the war.

But after the war, de Gaulle was the national hero in the rescue of their beloved country, and the contributions of the Americans were downplayed with the willing consent of the général.

With the country now secure, and Nazi Germany defeated, France continued to flex its own expansionist muscle elsewhere in the world, particularly in a part of southeast Asia known as French Indochina. France tried to bring the countries of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam under its wing, but particularly in Vietnam, the Communist faction in the north, aided by Red China and led by influential rebel leader Ho Chi Minh, wanted the imperial powers out of their country and desired a now-divided North and South Vietnam to become one again under the direction of Ho and the ChiComms.

What resulted was a nearly decade-long, military confrontation between French forces sent there to support the South Vietnamese government and the Viet Cong from the north until France decided in 1954 at the climactic battle at Dien Bien Phu between the VC and French Expeditionary Forces that the battle for Indochina was a zero sum game, at least for France.

The western powers, especially the United States, which sent advisers to South Vietnam under the orders of President Dwight Eisenhower, kept a wary eye on the military support of South Vietnam by France, and after the decisive battle at Dien Bien Phu became increasingly concerned that the whole of Southeast Asia might now fall into Communist hands like a string of dominoes. According to the common anti-Communist belief by the United States and the West, the domino theory proclaimed that if South Vietnam fell to the Chinese Communists, the rest of Southeast Asia – Laos, Cambodia, probably even Thailand and Singapore – would fall like dominoes to the expansionist Communists of Chinese leader Mao Tse Tung.

This theory carried on into the presidency of President Kennedy, who wound up boosting American advisers and military personnel in South Vietnam to 15,000 by the time he was assassinated. The litmus test for any American politician, Democrat or Republican, was the stopping of the spread of Communism at every turn. Kennedy certainly burnished his credentials when he stood up to the Russian/Cuban brand of Communism during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, despite a rout at the Bay of Pigs in an ill-fated attempt to oust new Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

While in Congress and as Kennedy's Vice President, Lyndon Johnson was equally anti-Communist, if not more so. As Vice President, he could only watch Kennedy try and deal with serious leadership questions in South Vietnam. Johnson was a virtual bystander as the Kennedy administration first propped up Ngo Dinh Diem as president of South Vietnam only to watch him fall out of favor in 1963 and be murdered in a coup d'etat, allegedly with the encouragement of American intelligence.

At the time of the Kennedy assassination, there were murmurs at the highest levels of government that Kennedy was becoming increasingly convinced that there no was no stable horse for the U.S. to back in South Vietnam and that it may be time to pull out of the civil war that was brewing with each and every passing month.

But Johnson, now commander-in-chief, didn't hold the same view, and in fact firmly held to the domino theory despite what France did in January 1964. That is when de Gaulle convinced France to become one of the first Western nations to recognize Red China. At the same time, de Gaulle offered the opinion that other allied countries, including the United States, ought to consider neutralization in Vietnam, drawing upon France's disastrous efforts in Indochina to force Western-style democracy upon a country that didn't seem to care much about who their leaders were.

De Gaulle's normalization of relations with Communist China were bad enough, in the eyes of numerous diplomats and newspapers columnists in the U.S., but his lobbying of neutralizing Vietnam was met with even more stern opposition from most of those same American commentators and was the lead statement in President Johnson's first press conference on February 1.

Far from the engaging, congenial White House press conferences usually conducted by Kennedy, Johnson was brusque and blunt in his first meeting with reporters, leading off with abject disagreement with de Gaulle's proposed Southeast Asia policy, saying it was not in the interests of freedom. Johnson not only rejected the policy of neutralization, he said the U.S. would continue to support South Vietnam's anti-guerrilla campaign and would like to see America's war effort stepped up.

Numerous newspaper columnists and commentators were not so kind to the French president's proposal, claiming that de Gaulle's recognition of Red China and his desire to proceed to a neutralization policy in Southeast Asia was some sort of payback to the United States for their indifference to France's losing battle against Communist guerrillas after World War II that turned a region that once was called French Indochina into the Communist-controlled countries of Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam. To these foreign policy experts, South Vietnam was the next domino to fall, and they were supporting Johnson's call to step up the undeclared war effort. Prove to the Viet Cong that American military technology and might be brought to bear like it was in World War II to defeat Germany and Japan. This was not the time to talk neutralization and, as one editorial writer put it, allow the Commuinst enemy or foolish, short-sighted, spiteful allies to deter it from developing the tools of total victory over Communist revolutionary warfare.

The apparent petulance of the French president and the stiff putdown by President Johnson of de Gaulle's neutralization plan that would have pulled U.S. off to the access road on the path to increased engagement opened the lid to a record of American snubs by le générale since he became president in 1958. Newspaper editorial writers and analysts dragged out the negative record of de Gaulle the past few years that didn't endear him to the power brokers in Washington. In January 1963, after President Kennedy had addressed Congress about becoming a partner with Europe in what he envisioned as a European Common Market, de Gaulle pronounced immediately that he didn't consider Britain a European nation. That was considered nationalism at its purest because any European Common Market without Britain would be economically dominated by France. On July 25, 1963, Kennedy's proud to have accomplished with Britain and the Soviet Union a nuclear test ban treaty. But the next day, de Gaulle said France would not sign the agreement because they wanted to develop their own nuclear weapons, indicating a couple of months before that he had his doubts that the United States would come to his country's defense in the event of a Soviet attack.

Now with his neutralization idea, which would serve to neutralize the billions in aid the U.S. had already pumped into South Vietnam to fight the Viet Cong, de Gaulle continued the snit he had been revealed the past two years with just about every foreign policy move the Americans made.

There is immaturity in his obsessive nationalism which would have been more fitting in the 18th century when Napoleon was emerging and French horizons seemed unlimited, Associated Press news analyst James Marlow wrote. His personal immaturity is in his need for grandeur and the trappings of grandeur, in himself and France. He resents what he considers affronts and to maintain his ego retaliates with obstruction, like a child tearing toys.

The notable contrarian view to de Gaulle's neutralization idea, at least in the press, came from veteran journalist and author Walter Lippman. Now in his 70's, Lippmann was the founder of The New Republic commentary magazine, and for 50 years was an editorial writer for the New York Herald-Tribune and Washington Post. He was critical of America's rush to war as far back as World War I, writing his first of three books in 1920 about the wars that had been engineered by government propaganda and the jingoistic press that fed the public lies, distortions and stereotypes in the run-up to conflicts around the world.

Lippmann virtually coined the term The Cold War in his book of the same name, which fastidiously defined the early struggle between the United States and Soviet Union right after World War II. Lippmann was openly critical of American policy toward fighting Communism around the world, presciently describing U.S. involvement in Korea and, now, Vietnam. He thought U.S. policy could lead to recruiting, subsidizing and supporting a heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents and puppets that would lead, in the future, to disown our puppets, which would be tantamount to appeasement and defeat and the loss of face, or force the U.S. to back them at an incalculable cost on an unintended, unforeseen and perhaps undesirable issue.

Lippmann saw the same thing happening in Vietnam, now encouraged by President Johnson, first, with his dismissal of de Gaulle's neutralization proposal and the overwhelming fire bell of criticism by most of the nation's press for standing down, as advocated by the French leader.

The official American view is to say unreservedly that the war will be won and refuse to think about what we shall do if it cannot be won, Lippmann wrote in a February 2 editorial. "This is the critical weakness of our policy in Southeast Asia. If it is not a winning policy, then all is lost. We have staked everything on one card.

This is where General de Gaulle is in fact rendering us a signal service. He is opening the door to the possibility that Southeast Asia can be saved from Chinese conquest by political developments which can be simulated and by diplomatic bargaining, which can be undertaken.

With the proud Texan now in command and a cabinet of hawks led by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, it is unlikely they were going to be convinced to change course by a progressive scribe like Lippmann, no matter how historically right he had been.

For those who thought the U.S. ought to consider reaching out to the Viet Cong and their Chinese enablers, not necessarily with an olive branch but with a neutralization proposal as de Gaulle had put forth, almost lost their argument the day after President Johnson declared the French president's idea a blow for freedom in Southeast Asia.

The very next day, a group of Viet Cong guerrillas staged their first attack on an American military compound in the village of Kontum, about 260 miles northeast of Saigon. As reported by the Associated Press, guerrillas launched a grenade attack on the eight-building post, which housed 130 officers and American soldiers. The South Vietnamese were supposed to provide security for the outpost but wisely, the U.S. put what could be considered a small group of night watchmen on the roofs and around the perimeter of the compound.

The AP described breathlessly the heroics of 24-year old Specialist Dale Flinn of Fowler, Kansas, who happened to be on the roof of one of the buildings in the wee hours of the night the attack occurred. Nine South Vietnamese security guards, who were supposed to be on duty that night, were suspiciously away without leave, raising concerns that they were in collusion with the Viet Cong attackers.

According to wire reports, Flinn noticed four guerrillas cutting their way through a barbed wire fence and making their way very quickly to one of the buildings that housed U.S. officers bearing ranks from major to colonel. Three of the guerrillas made it inside the building and exploded a grenade inside, causing one injury to an officer and setting the building on fire. Flinn could not get to the attackers on the way in but exchanged rifle fire with the three guerrillas as they headed back toward the opening in the fence. The American soldier killed two of the guerrillas and avoided getting hit himself as the other two guerrillas scurried away into the darkness.

Only one officer was hurt, getting treatment at a nearby hospital for cuts and scrapes, and Flinn was praised for his alert reaction to the terrorist attack that could have been disastrous but represented the first official Viet Cong assault on Americans currently present in Vietnam.

Although this one incident by a small band of renegades did not set off alarms back on the homefront, it did help bolster Johnson's argument that de Gaulle's reachout to North Vietnam regarding neutralization might not be the way to go and it raised nagging questions about South Vietnam's ability to defend itself and its American advisers against an increasingly aggressive North Vietnam.

But de Gaulle's neutralization plan still would not be dismissed out of hand when influential Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana, with whom Johnson worked closely in the majority when he was Senate leader in the 1950's, advocated it publicly a couple of weeks after the president's Feb. 1 news conference.

Notable foreign policy journalists, while not ready to engage North Vietnam or China as de Gaulle had or wanted to, offered Johnson other options besides full-fledged military involvement, which seemed to be where the new president was headed.

C.L. Sulzberger, nephew of Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times until he turned over the newspaper to his son and C.L.'s first cousin, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, was author of the thrice-weekly Foreign Affairs column in the Times and from his base in Paris had virtually unlimited access to world leaders ranging from Josef Stalin and Nikita Khruschev to Winston Churchill and de Gaulle. His columns and editorials were so incisive and widely-read reporting was so influential that he was given a special Pulitzer Prize in 1951 for providing the best foreign reporting in America at a time when the Cold War was red hot.

Sulzberger's Feb. 26 editorial zeroed in directly on the burning questions confronting Johnson in Vietnam as he finished his first 100 days in office. He baldly pointed out the rapidly deteriorating state of affairs in Southeast Asia.

The situation in the land now rots at an accelerating pace. A year ago, fewer than 300 Viet Cong incidents were reported. The present monthly is 3,500. Despite experiments with new tactics and weapons, we haven't learned how to defeat guerrillas under their own fighting rules. And the moonstruck way we handle propaganda makes things worse.

Sulzberger had harsh words for muddled message the Johnson administration was sending South Vietnam, pointing out that Defense Secretary McNamara seemed to waffle between tough talk of increased military training and mentioning that the U.S. would be pulling out of South Vietnam in a year.

The Times writer agreed with Johnson that de Gaulle's neutralization plan was tantamount to losing South Vietnam to the Communists, but he stopped short of advocating an attack of North Vietnam. Sulzberger said that to stop the terrorist attacks by the Viet Cong, the U.S. should advance surgical strikes against terrorist bases in North Vietnam and Laos, then launch a massive diplomatic and propaganda campaign that would make it clear that the U.S. didn't want to make North Vietnam go democratic, he just wanted them to leave South Vietnam alone.

Another newspaper correspondent who pitched a third option that included both elements of de Gaulle's neutralization approach and the build-up of military in Southeast Asia was special United Nations reporter William R. Frye.

In 1957, Frye had authored a paper for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace entitled A United Nations Peace Force. By 1964, Washington had about as much confidence in the U.N. as they did in the French, even after watching U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Adlai Stevenson challenge the Soviet Union in his famous hell freezes over speech during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. But sensing that Americans were not eager to ready to plunge headlong into another Asian war barely 10 years after the end of the Korean conflict, Frye put the cards on the table in a special report on Feb. 16 for his newspaper The Miami News.

"Each week it is becoming more and more apparent that the United States is caught in a dead end street in Vietnam. The war is not being won. On the contrary, it is drifting from bad to worse. Some officials are beginning to doubt that it can ever be won, short of a far greater degree