10 years that changed everything

The Daily Inter Lake

I'm sure I'm not the only person in America who has grown increasingly pessimistic watching history unfold in the last half century, but I thought it might be instructive to look at how my own political thinking - and perhaps our nation's destiny - was shaped by three crucial presidencies in the mid-20th century.

I am confident that the decade between 1963 and 1972 will turn out to be the most significant pivot point in American history other than the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln declared that the United States of America was not just a civil union but a holy matrimony that no man should put asunder.

In a sense, the years between Kennedy's assassination and Nixon's resignation were themselves something like a civil war, although one with few shots fired. But whereas the first civil war strengthened our nation, and taught us to remember our unity, the second civil war weakened us and left us uncertain of our loyalties. Moreover, the succession of presidencies from Kennedy to Johnson to Nixon left us increasingly cynical and sowed the seeds of a political disunity that perhaps even Lincoln could not have overcome.

I have no particular recollection of the election of 1960. I was just 5 years old then, but suffice it to say that John F. Kennedy was elected president, and I went about life in kindergarten with the same exuberant confidence I would have felt if Richard Nixon were president.

Soon thereafter, however, I began my political education in earnest. Unlike this contemporary era - in which our children are insulated from the real world by Cartoon Network, iPods and Play Stations 1 through 3 - children and their parents in those days shared the same cultural milieu and there was a much greater continuity of thought between the older and younger generations.

Thus, while I was playing with Erector Set robots and rocket ships on the living room floor, I was absorbing the same TV and radio reports that my parents heard. The Bay of Pigs incident probably did not make much of an impact on me, but the Berlin Wall crisis did, and like every other child of the era I very well remember practicing how to "duck and cover" to avoid the impact of a thermonuclear blast. When the Cuban Missile Crisis played out in October of 1962, I started to develop a real awareness of the presidency, and in particular of this president - the one with the funny accent and the perfect hair.

It became clear to me that my future was in President Kennedy's hands, and with or without my mother crying about the likelihood that we were going to be blown up, I had probably begun my inevitable conversion to dread realism. Then, one year later, something happened which changed my life and this country forever.

I was 8 years old when President Kennedy was assassinated. To sum up the impact of that event is impossible. Lack of certainty about what happened on Nov. 22, 1963 - or why - clearly set the nation on a path of self-doubt and puzzlement from which it has never wholly recovered. Every attempt to find a simple explanation for the death of the president seemed to lead to additional questions and additional doubts about the veracity of our government.

Meanwhile, despite the trauma of the assassination, politics continued as usual. In 1964, Kennedy's vice president, Lyndon Johnson, was re-elected president in a landslide. Although I was just 9 years old, I remember feeling comfortable with the idea that Kennedy's Democratic legacy would live on. Little did I or anyone else know then that there was a dark side to that legacy, but part of that dark legacy would surface soon in the form of the Vietnam War.

Perhaps Kennedy would have handled Vietnam differently; perhaps not. Questions like those can never be answered, but it is clear that Lyndon Johnson did not know how to handle it and squandered much of the good will that Kennedy had left behind. Despite overseeing implementation of much-needed civil rights reforms and trying to address issues of poverty, health care and education as he sought to use presidential power to shape a "Great Society," Johnson lost his way in Southeast Asia. By 1968, all that most people could see was the increasing quagmire of Vietnam, and the body bags returning home with our boys inside.

We were a different country then, still an optimistic country because of our successes in both war and peace, and the prospect of losing a war was just unfathomable. But Johnson did not seem to know what to do. He looked tired, overwhelmed - as he told us in an address to the nation, he had a "heavy heart." Eventually, with the humiliating campaign challenge of Sen. Eugene McCarthy developing steam, Johnson dropped out of the presidential race.

I had learned a valuable lesson. Just being a Democrat did not mean you had all the answers. And yet there was no reasonable Republican alternative to the Johnson policy either. By the time of the election in 1968, it seemed as though the Republicans were even more set on what was apparently a disastrous war policy than the Democrats.

Thus in 1968, I and many other Americans supported Bobby Kennedy for president. He seemed like a genuinely caring and compassionate man, more bookish and pensive than his brother John, with a greater sense of irony perhaps, but forced to action by his conscience. When he spoke after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., he soothed an entire nation's troubled heart. It appeared to many of us that Bobby was the best hope for restoring a sense of order to a nation that was increasingly divided and chaotic. But Bobby, of course, did not live to see the election he might very well have won. Another assassination, another lost cause.

Ultimately, for many of us, the election of 1968 was an irrelevant afterthought - the age of Camelot had ended, and whatever came next had to be a disappointment. I supported Vice President Hubert Humphrey somewhat half-heartedly as he campaigned against Richard Nixon, but instead Nixon won and the nation would have a chance to see what a Republican presidency could bring.

It reminds me of the excitement Democrats feel today about regaining control of Congress, and their anticipation of winning the White House in 2008. No doubt Nixon thought he would change this country for the better, and that he would wield power wisely. But sometimes power wields the man, not the other way around. And despite his agenda for doing good, Nixon wound up creating a legacy of distrust and disdain for government that has tainted everything which has happened since then. His example should be studied attentively by anyone who expects to change things for the better, including Nancy Pelosi.

The problem of course is that new leaders don't get to begin their leadership with a clean slate. Everything that has come before them must be factored into the equation. Pelosi and company cannot just posture about the war in Iraq any longer; they must develop a policy that will get us out of Iraq without leaving behind a powderkeg and a book of matches. Nixon likewise, who said he had a secret plan for getting us out of Vietnam, learned that reality cannot be fashioned to fit a political slogan.

Nixon had to deal with the Vietnam War for the next four years as president. And despite his complaints about Johnson's policies, he could do no better, so everything else Nixon did is seen today through the blood-red prism of the war. Many young people, myself included, were eager to get Nixon out of office, partly because we were terrified of being sent to Vietnam when we graduated from high school and partly just because we did not trust him.

That meant I took an active interest in the campaign to find a Democratic candidate who could unseat Nixon. At first I was for Sen. Edmund Muskie, but in one of the earliest instances of Big Media destroying a political career, Muskie was filmed crying (or appearing so) while defending his wife from an editorial that said she liked to drink and tell dirty jokes. I never understood why defending your wife was a bad thing, so I stuck by Muskie, but the rest of the nation didn't, so we were left with George McGovern, a South Dakota senator who had made his political reputation by opposing the war and by - well, um - by opposing the war. Proving to be a dismal campaigner and a bumbling oaf when it came to policy matters, McGovern went down in flames.

Before we leave the Nixon White House, it is interesting to note that Nixon - though a Republican - was the last great liberal president this country has had. It was Nixon who gave us the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, federal affirmative action, detente with Russia, and a renewed relationship with Communist China. He also started the space shuttle program and ended the gold standard. So even though Nixon is despised by liberals for Watergate and Vietnam, he is also despised by conservatives for his big-government agenda.

Meanwhile, even though I despised Nixon, too, I also had a begrudging admiration for him. He was a self-made man who had used will power and brain power to become the most powerful man in the world, and despite his paranoid tendencies which resulted in Watergate and his ultimate downfall, he did indeed attempt to use his power to make the world a better place.

In a sense, Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon were all modern Shakesperean tragic heroes. Each had the capacity for greatness, each did some good, yet each possessed a flaw that not only brought him down, but also marred his legacy for all time.

Kennedy has attained the martyr's exemption from too close of a look at his flaws, but there is no doubt that his hubris led him to take unnecessary risks both in his personal life and also with the nation's security. Even though we know of these lapses now, we have forgiven Kennedy. It is not so with Nixon and Johnson. Familiarity in those cases has bred contempt.

Yet already by the early 1970s, I was aware that both Nixon and Johnson had been players in a drama that was much larger than themselves. Although they were despised by many of my generation, including by me, I recognized in them a greatness that is little evident in today's leaders. In fact, if anything defines my brand of politics, it is that I recognize the enormous difficulty of successfully taking the helm of state, and have learned to accept that failure should not necessarily earn opprobrium. I also learned from the examples of Johnson and Nixon that failures happen without regard to partisan affiliation, and I learned that the mob will turn on anyone, even its heroes.

So despite the turmoil of the 1960s and '70s, and partly because of it - because I came to recognize the inevitability of failure under certain circumstances - I admire both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Even when Johnson died of a heart attack in 1973, I broke down in tears and sobbingly told my mother that "He tried, Mom. He really tried."

I was sure that if not for Vietnam, Johnson would be remembered as a great president, but instead he had been hobbled and hated. Eighteen months later, when Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace, I cried again, and for the same reason. For all of the complicated flaws of Richard Nixon as a human being, "He tried."

I learned in that decade from the death of President Kennedy to the resignation of President Nixon that power has its limits, that ambition can be thwarted, that success is often tempered, that greatness may mask insincerity, and that a nation must not expect too much from its leaders.

Yet it seems as if these lessons - repeated over and over again in our recent history - have not been absorbed by the body politic. Thus, we have the spectacle of "the loyal opposition" turning into the gang of senatorial thugs who surrounded Caesar and punched daggers into his body 23 times. "We can do better," they shout as they slay him, but of course they cannot.

This has nothing to do with partisan politics. It was just as true when Republicans did everything in their power to destroy the presidency of Bill Clinton, as it is today when President George W. Bush is mocked and belittled for his inability to be perfect. Ultimately, we must decide if we think it is better to destroy our imperfect presidents, or to lift them up in our expectations so that we may inspire them to be better.

I am sure of one thing only - if we continue to destroy our presidents, we will destroy our country as well.