The 1960s were one of the most turbulent
decades in American history. The US fought an
unwinnable war in Vietnam thousands of miles
from home with young men in a largely con-
scripted army. Protests against war increased as
ultimately more than half a million men were sent
to Indo-China and as the brutality of the fighting
became clear to Americans at home. It was,
furthermore, a decade of unprecedented black
protest and of an unusually violent backlash
against political leaders, black and white. Three
assassinations were especially shocking: of Presi-
dent Kennedy in 1963, of his brother, and presi-
dential contender, Robert in 1968 and, shortly
before, of Martin Luther King, the leading non-
violent voice in the civil rights movement. The
murders of the two Kennedy brothers were shown
on television, reaching into practically every
American home. Was the US still governable?
In Dallas on 22 November 1963 a tragedy
unfolded before the nation’s eyes. The smiling
president, his radiant wife beside him, was riding
in a slow motorcade, waving to the crowds. When
his car reached a point opposite a dreary office
building, the Texas School Book Depository,
shots rang out from an upstairs window. The
president fell backwards; a bullet had passed
through his head and throat.
Lee Harvey Oswald, an unbalanced 24-year-
old ex-marine attracted to communist causes and
to the defence of Cuba, recently returned from
the Soviet Union and with a Russian-born wife,had assassinated President Kennedy. The right in
America accused the communists of an assassina-
tion plot; others from the left claimed that irrec-
oncilable conservatives had plotted the murder of
a popular and liberal president. There appeared to
be awkward facts that did not sit with the con-
clusion that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone.
In a bizarre scene, captured by the television
cameras a few days later, Oswald was in turn slain
by a nightclub owner before he could give evi-
dence at his trial. Violence was again seen to be
a strong undercurrent in American society. The
vice-president, Lyndon Johnson, who had been
completely overshadowed by Kennedy, now
stood in the limelight. Unelected to the office, he
would have to see out the remaining fourteen
months of the presidency.
Lyndon Johnson was the eldest son of a small
farmer married to the daughter of a prosperous
lawyer. He had climbed the political ladder the
hard way, with much careful calculation, entering
Washington politics in 1937 as a congressman who
fervently admired Roosevelt. By the time he came
to serve in the Senate, eventually becoming Senate
Majority Leader in 1955, he had become much
more conservative, reflecting the majority of his
Texan electorate. His skill in managing the Senate,
applying his persuasive powers to individual sena-
tors in what became known as the Johnson
Treatment, earned him a reputation for effective-
ness among Washington insiders. Johnson might
have echoed the words of Robert Louis Stevenson(^1) Chapter 53
THE LIMITS OF POWER
THE US DURING THE 1960s