Quote of the Day (J. William Fulbright, on ‘The Arrogance of Power’)

“The ‘arrogance of power’…[is] a psychological need that nations seem to have to prove that they are bigger, better or stronger than other nations. Implicit in this drive is the assumption that the proof of superiority is force—that when a nation shows that it has the stronger army, it is also proving that it has better people, better institutions, better principles—and, in general, a better civilization.”—J. William Fulbright (1905-1995), U.S. Senator from Arkansas and chair, US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, “Address Delivered at Johns Hopkins University,” May 5, 1966

In 1966, unable to receive straight answers from the Johnson Administration about the course of the Vietnam War, J. William Fulbright helped give wide public currency to a phrase that had been gaining traction among Washington observers: a “credibility gap” covering the distance between what officials said and the reality on the ground.

In the decades since then, presidents and their advisers have certainly trimmed the truth. But aside, perhaps, from the Watergate era, I’m not sure that “credibility gap” has been used much. It is certainly time to bring that phrase back, as well as another one that Senator Fulbright popularized: “the arrogance of power.”

In Lyndon Johnson’s college days, biographer Robert Caro revealed, the future President’s friends nicknamed him “Bull Johnson” because, as one classmate said, he “just could not tell the truth.” But LBJ’s mendacity has been exceeded thoroughly by Donald Trump, who can barely move his lips without uttering an untruth.

Trump’s secret sauce as a liar? Lie so fast, so often, so much, without fear that one day’s statement might contradict an earlier one, that it will be impossible to keep up and eventually inure the public to what he says.

Trump voters could console themselves, based on the lack of new military commitments abroad in his first term, that his deceptions were at least not putting service personnel at risk. That assurance is now gone.

Trump’s credibility gap is a necessary precondition for aggrandizing not just America’s power but his personal sway. He couldn’t get the correct synonym for the invasion of Iraq (it’s “incursion”), but for him it might as well be an “excursion,” a holiday from history and truth.

Throughout these first few weeks of the war, it’s been bad enough that he hasn’t been able to offer a consistent rationale for the invasion, but he simply lied about the nature of the threat posed by Iraq. While it was true that Iraq’s stockpile of weaponry posed a threat to Israel, it in no way endangered the United States.

The “arrogance of power” and “the credibility gap” have particular consequences in matters of war and peace, not only because of lives endangered but also because of violations of international law that endanger order between and even within nations through shredding human rights. 

(See, for instance, Marc Weller’s mid-January analysis for the London-based think tank Chatham House, which explains why, despite Trump’s second-term disregard for the concept, without international law, “The aim of predictable and stable relations, and clear pathways for international transactions, would be destroyed.”)

In his book The Arrogance of Power, Fulbright offered a defense of international law that has, sadly, been forgotten over the past decade:

Law is the essential foundation of stability and order both within societies and in international relations. As a conservative power, the United States has a vital interest in upholding and expanding the reign of law in international relations. Insofar as international law is observed, it provides us with stability and order and with a means of predicting the behavior of those with whom we have reciprocal legal obligations. When we violate the law ourselves, whatever short-term advantage may be gained, we are obviously encouraging others to violate the law; we thus encourage disorder and instability and thereby do incalculable damage to our own long-term interests.

Quote of the Day (Tim O’Brien, on the Vietnam War and Remembrance)

“[T]he [Vietnam] war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”— American novelist Tim O’Brien, “Spin,” in The Things They Carried (1990)

Fifty years ago today, within 24 hours of a massive airlift operation evacuating 6,500 people, including nearly 900 Americans, Saigon fell to the Communist forces that had already overtaken the rest of Vietnam. The governmental seizure concluded a conflict that had preoccupied the United States, the USSR, and Red China for more than a generation in the Cold War.

Estimates of the number of Vietnamese who died in the war vary widely, with one official 1995 count putting the total as high as 3 million. Unfortunately, their stories are largely unknown half a world way here in the United States.

Naturally, the focus in our country has been on the more than 58,000 Americans who perished in Vietnam—names now inscribed on the wall in the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington. But these are only part of the casualty rate of the conflict. They don’t reflect the wounded—physically or, in the case of Tim O’Brien, psychologically.

The Things They Carried was published 35 years ago this spring, a full generation after O’Brien’s service in Southeast Asia, and I was lucky enough to hear him read from and discuss the book in an appearance at Fairleigh Dickinson University at the time. But he needed to come to terms with his memories repeatedly through the act of storytelling: not just in this acclaimed group of interconnected semi-autobiographical short stories but also in a memoir (If I Die in a Combat Zone) and a novel (Going After Cacciato).

Even from reading The Things They Carried and hearing him speaking, I had no idea of the intensity of his memories—so painful that they required extensive and expensive use of the anti-anxiety prescription medication Oxazepam, I discovered in a 1994 essay he wrote for The New York Times about a return visit to Vietnam.

But O’Brien has survived to tell about the hell that he and his brothers in arms endured, their grief over fallen comrades, and the postwar adjustment in a nation with civilians who could never begin to understand what they had gone through.

Or, as O’Brien wrote in another short story in The Things They Carried, “How to Tell a True War Story”:

“In the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.”

This Day in Vietnam War History (Congress Approves Tonkin Gulf Resolution, a ‘Historic Mistake’)

Aug. 7, 1964—When the U.S. Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution with shamefully minimal debate, it did more than just abrogate its constitutional authority to declare war.

It also furnished Lyndon Johnson with carte blanche to widen American participation in the Vietnam War from a limited advisory capacity to a massive ground-troop commitment—eventually resulting in 58,000 lives lost, along with hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians.

The incident that gave LBJ the congressional authorization he jokingly termed “Grandma’s nightshirt” (i.e., “it covers everything”) foreshadowed a pattern that continued through the war of military intelligence twisted to fit preconceived policy or strategic objectives. Like the war itself, the American intelligence operation was conceived in error and carried to term through deception.

The resolution came following a week of heightened tensions and misinterpreted actions by the Communist government in North Vietnam and the U.S. In late July, in assisting the South Vietnamese in warding off North Vietnamese attacks and Vietcong subversions, the U.S. Maddox (pictured) started a reconnaissance patrol off the coast of North Vietnam.

The destroyer was not far from the island of Hon Me on August 2 when torpedo boats advanced towards it. The boats ignored warning shots from the Maddox and continued. Shots were exchanged, with the North Vietnamese vessels withdrawing after sustaining damage.

Two days later, U.S. radio operators misinterpreted a message, concluding that a North Vietnamese military operation was imminent. Actually, Hanoi had warned torpedo boat commanders to be ready for a new raid by South Vietnam.

Later on the 4^th, as the Maddox and a second destroyer, the Turner Joy, found themselves amid thunderstorms and rain squalls. With radar malfunctioning, they fired into the night at what appeared to be oncoming ships.

LBJ, when told a second North Vietnamese attack was probable but not certain, went ahead on the assumption that it had occurred. He even scoffed a few days later about the accuracy of the initial reports: “Hell, those dumb stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish.”

The deception didn’t end there:

*While claiming that the destroyers were within “international waters” when fired upon, the administration didn’t mention that its recognized three-mile limit was far less than North Vietnam’s 12-mile restriction.

* U.S.-backed South Vietnamese commando attacks and intelligence-gathering missions along the North Vietnamese coast, codenamed Operations Plan (OPLAN) 34A, had probably provoked the August 2 attacks on the Maddox.

*The administration engaged in a rush to judgment about the confusing stream of intelligence reports that initially arrived, with some intelligence about the August 2 attack being included in reports about August 4—thereby mistakenly confirming North Vietnam had initiated hostilities on the latter date.

The incident served as a convenient pretext for ordering retaliatory air strikes and for sending to Capitol Hill a resolution—drafted two months earlier by Presidential aide William Bundy—providing the White House with freedom of action in Vietnam.

Polls showed a gain of more than 30% in public support for Johnson’s response—which was seen as firm but calibrated, in contrast to GOP Presidential nominee Barry Goldwater’s charge that the President’s irresolution in the face of Communism had invited the attack.

Both houses of Congress quickly got in line behind the President. The House of Representatives took only 40 minutes before passing the resolution 416-0. The Senate took longer—nine hours—before giving way, too, with its two dissenters easy to overcome and even ignore.

Even aside from his migrating party affiliations (first Republican, then independent, then a Democrat), the first dissenter, Wayne Morse of Oregon, had earned a reputation as a maverick and gadfly, even a crank and obstructionist. Eleven years before, he had conducted what was at the time the longest one-person filibuster in Senate history, and later in the 1950s he had publicly feuded with a Senate colleague from his own state and party. Moreover, his disdain for alcohol and levity alike left him isolated in a chamber that operated like a club.

Nevertheless, Morse already sensed something was amiss with this incident. As noted by Randall Bennett Woods’ biography of Senate foreign policy grandee J. William Fulbright, a Pentagon contact urged Morse to request the logbooks for the Maddox and Turner Joy from Robert McNamara. (The Defense Secretary claimed they were still aboard ship when, in fact, they had already arrived in Washington.)

Morse chose not to make this an issue when he rose to speak. Instead, he denounced the resolution for being unconstitutional:

“I believe that history will record that we have made a great mistake in subverting and circumventing the Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 8 [which gives Congress the power to declare war] thereof by means of this resolution. . . I believe [this resolution] to be a historic mistake. I believe that within the next century, future generations will look with dismay and great disappointment upon a Congress which is now about to make such a historic mistake. Our constitutional rights are no better than the preservation of our procedural guarantees under the Constitution.”

As for 77-year-old Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska, his arguments against the resolution, if they were mentioned at all in the news coverage, were dismissed as unrealistic and not to be taken seriously. His prediction proved as eerily prophetic as Morse’s, however:

“We now are about to authorize the President if he sees fit to move our Armed Forces…not only into South Vietnam, but also into North Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and of course the authorization includes all the rest of the SEATO [Southeast Asia Treaty Organization] nations. That means sending our American boys into combat in a war in which we have no business, which is not our war, into which we have been misguidedly drawn, which is steadily being escalated. This resolution is a further authorization for escalation unlimited. I am opposed to sacrificing a single American boy in this venture. We have lost far too many already.”

Administration and Pentagon assurances to the contrary, U.S. plans for a rapid victory were about to sink into the jungles of Vietnam.

The same pattern of U.S. military authorization framing intelligence in a misleading manner recurred in the run-up to the Iraq War. Although that conflict did not lead to as many American casualties as the Vietnam War, the damage to the Iraqi population—and, ultimately, to US credibility in the region—was worse.

When will U.S. policymakers learn to make sure they are right before the shooting starts? 

Flashback, December 1971: Lennon’s Yule Classic, ‘Happy Xmas,’ Released

Released 50 years ago this week, while American soldiers were still dying in Vietnam, “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” did not enjoy the kind of immediate success that John Lennon was used to. But the single from the ex-Beatle and wife Yoko Ono has since become a staple of the holidays.

The single was so melodic that some have decried it for sappiness. (Producer Phil Spector noted its resemblance to The Paris Sisters’ 1961 hit “I Love How You Love Me.”)

But Lennon wanted to leave listeners with more than the cheerful ditties that he, Paul, George and Ringo used to send each Christmas to members of members of their fan club.

As a religious skeptic who had caused a firestorm of controversy by claiming that the Beatles were “bigger than Jesus,” he would not write a hymn to Christ the Redeemer. Likewise, he was uninterested in evoking the sleigh rides or winter landscapes that had increasingly filled the pop airwaves in the last few decades.

What he aimed for was, in part, a challenge—another attempt, like “Give Peace a Chance,” to attempt to rally sentiment against the Vietnam War through the power of music. His song’s refrain, “War is over (if you want it),” put to musical use a slogan of his “Bed in for Peace” protest with Yoko in late spring 1969.

The tune, recorded in late October 1971, came too late in the year for it to be promoted adequately in time for the Christmas season. (One singular exception: Lennon’s performance on the song in a December 16 appearance on The David Frost Show.)

From the last days of the Beatles through most of his decade as a solo artist, Lennon was engaged in a competition with Paul McCartney. One manifestation of that rivalry can be seen in their respective biggest Christmas hits as solo artists. Before he was murdered in 1980, it would not have been out of character for Lennon to compare his major solo Christmas song with McCartney’s, “Wonderful Christmastime.”

In the U.S., “Happy Xmas” peaked at number 36 on the Cash Box Top 100 Singles and number 28 on the Record World Singles Chart. Over in the U.K., matters were even worse, as a publishing-rights dispute between Lennon and music publisher Northern Songs led the song to be delayed for a year. “Wonderful Christmastime” didn’t do particularly well, either, in the U.S., reaching only number 83 on the Cash Box Top 100 Singles chart.

But in terms of how other artists how viewed the tunes, matters have shifted more decidedly Lennon’s way. The Website Second Hand Songs, which tracks song covers, lists approximately 100 interpretations of “Wonderful Christmastime” by other artists, versus more than 2 ½ times that amount for “Happy Christmas.”

The question of other artists’ interpretation of the song came to the forefront for me over 30 years after its release, when Sheryl Crow sang it live as part of the televised Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting in 2002. One year after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, with an attack on Iraq being prepared for the following year, Lennon’s call for collective responsibility (“Another year over/And what have we done?”) retained its melancholy undertone.

Nearly 30 years later, it still does, along with its appeal to universal brotherhood and the instinct for peace that crosses so many spiritual traditions.

Quote of the Day (Tim O’Brien, on a Searing Vietnam War Experience)

“The field was boiling. The shells made deep slushy craters, opening up all those years of waste, centuries worth, and the smell came bubbling out of the earth. Two rounds hit close by. Then a third, even closer, and immediately, off to his left, he heard somebody screaming.”—American novelist Tim O’Brien, “Speaking of Courage,” in The Things They Carried (1990)

The interconnected stories in the acclaimed The Things They Carried are harrowing, sometimes difficult to read, as seen by the angry responses they continue to evoke from some readers on Amazon. In this, they resemble nothing so much as the visceral reactions that America’s major conflicts since the end of World War II have sometimes inspired.

For the soldiers in Alpha Company, “the things they carried” represent not just the physical material they lug around Vietnam, but also the psychological burden hauled by the survivors of that conflict, a weight not understood by civilians. 

One of these occurred in the scene begun above, when Norman Bowker witnessed his comrade Kiowa slide to his death amid all that "waste" (an unforgettable symbol for what the war meant for so many).

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln urged his countrymen to help with the essential post-Civil War duties “to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan.” More than a century and a half after he uttered those words, those tasks remain just as essential this Veterans Day.

This Day in Media History (Marguerite Higgins, First Woman to Win Pulitzer for International Reporting, Born)

Sept. 3, 1920—Marguerite Higgins, who overcame the rampant sexism of her time and profession to become the first female winner of the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting, was born in Hong Kong, in the Asia-Pacific Rim where she would establish much of her reputation.

In the Library of America anthology Reporting World War II, Higgins was the last by birth among the approximately 80 writers represented. A day shy of 25 when Japan formally surrendered, she reported on some of the major stories coming out of the latest six months of the European conflict: the refugee crisis and the liberation of the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps.

These would have been great scoops for any reporter. They were extraordinary for a recent graduate of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and a woman in an unrelieved, unapologetic masculine environment.

But it was in Asia—specifically, in Korea and Vietnam—where Higgins advanced closer to achieving her stated post-collegiate goal of becoming more famous than Dorothy Thompson, perhaps the most influential female journalist of the day. How she moved towards her goal has made her the subject of speculation and even controversy ever since.

Stationed in Tokyo as the New York Herald Tribune’s Bureau Chief, Higgins was ideally situated to cover the outbreak of hostilities in Korea in 1950. Despite her credentials as a war correspondent in WWII, she was initially ordered out of the country by Gen. Walton Walker.

Only a direct appeal to Douglas MacArthur, who had become Commander in Chief of the United Nations Command in Korea, enabled her to report on the conflict. She joined MacArthur's troops on the daring invasion at Inchon that, for a time, changed the direction of the war. In fact, she was the only female reporter to land on Red Beach (“a rough, vertical pile of stones”) with the men.

The Pulitzer Prize committee cited Higgins’ "enterprise and courage" in her coverage of the campaign, noting that she deserved "special consideration by reason of being a woman." But even as she was winning a new level of renown, she was stirring animosity among the largely male cadre of war correspondents that would dog her even beyond her early death.

Thousands of readers were amazed at how Higgins smashed through conventions that restricted women’s chances for achievement; a smaller cadre of colleagues were disgruntled at how they believed she ignored traditional ethical codes in pursuit of her laurels. It is still not easy sorting through these issues more than a half-century after her death.

While displaying outward bravado, Higgins was inwardly driven by an insecurity so unrelenting that it manifested itself as bravery so extreme that some males believe it shaded into foolhardiness. (Among them was Herald Tribune colleague Homer Bigart, who, like Gen. Walker, wanted her out of the country--leading not just to heightened competition between the two journalists but also to a closely watched feud between the two.) 

Such aggressiveness might be taken for granted among male reporters but were eyed critically when exhibited by females—and led to speculation that Higgins was not above stealing colleagues’ scoops.

Another serious charge against her arose from her good looks. Anyone glimpsing the stunning blonde in the attached photo might be forgiven for thinking that Betty Grable or even Marilyn Monroe had suddenly morphed into a top-flight journalist.

Those same people were often convinced that someone that glamorous could not have succeeded through her own efforts, but by sleeping with important men to further her career. 

In the process, these critics ignored factors that facilitated her work—knowledge of French and Chinese; extraordinary sympathy and compassion for young soldiers that sealed their bond with her; and willingness to endure extreme discomfort and danger.

(Ironically, when particularly obsessed with a story, Higgins was so oblivious to how she looked that she neglected to clean her face.)

Opinion remains divided to what extent those charges were true. But, if ruthlessness in pursuing scoops and straying outside traditional sexual norms are to be assessed, many if not most of Higgins’ male rivals would be as guilty as she.

A third charge against Higgins is more troubling: that, through personal associations and ideological preconceptions, she abandoned objectivity in her reporting on the early days of the Vietnam War. 

In 1963, younger reporters such as David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan were making plain in their dispatches that South Vietnamese forces were collapsing in the Mekong Delta. Based on her high-ranking military sources, Higgins disagreed strongly, airing their view that the Viet Cong were being progressively crushed. Any problem in Southeast Asia had resulted from journalists accepting at face value the notion that Buddhists in Vietnam were being oppressed by President Ngo Dinh Diem's "Catholic-dominated government":

"In the fall of 1963 Washington went into the business of hiring and firing governments,” Higgins charged in Our Vietnam Nightmare. “We not only forgot the one overriding priority, the war effort, but also, for the first time in history, conspired in the ouster of an ally in the middle of a common war against the Communist enemy, thus plunging the country and the war effort into a steep spiral of decline."

Higgins was ill-prepared to examine the reality of Vietnam dispassionately. In 1947, she had witnessed how Communists employed deception in taking over Poland. Friendly with both Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, she had adopted their view of the need to counter Soviet aggression. And, in 1952, she had married William Evens Hall, an Air Force Lt. General.

Vietnam undermined the credibility of a fellow journalist who accepted the government line, columnist Joe Alsop. Long before that happened, a tropical disease contracted in that country led to Higgins’ death in 1966 at age 45. She is one of a handful of war correspondents buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

During her lifetime, Americans became very familiar with the sight of Higgins—in well-attended lectures, her book covers (War in Korea: The Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent and News is a Singular Thing), and TV appearances (in 1956, the quiz show What’s My Line?). 

Though her celebrity has faded, her face and story have still attracted enough posthumous attention to land her on a postage stamp (in 2002) and have made her the best-known character in a little-noticed film about the early days of the Korean War last year, The Battle of Jangsari.

I have not yet seen that movie, but in a sense its most famous cast member, Megan Fox, should be able to identify intensely with Higgins. In both women’s cases, men were so besotted by their looks that they sometimes had a difficult time taking their drive and work seriously. Time will tell how well Fox counteracts that perception.

Flashback, April 1967: King Breaks With LBJ in Fiery Anti-War Speech

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (seen here, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964) spoke out more directly and passionately against the Vietnam War than he ever had before 50 years ago this week, in a controversial address, “Beyond Vietnam,” at New York’s Riverside Church. The Nobel laureate’s break with Lyndon B. Johnson, who had helped pass civil-rights legislation King had long advocated but who was now pursuing a conflict that the minister regarded as “madness,” came amid a year of personal anguish and reduced effectiveness in leading his movement.

As King looked out on April 4, 1967, at the Morningside Heights congregation, hosted by the antiwar group Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam, he was aware that opponents had been questioning his direction over the past year. His 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., followed by passage of the Voting Rights Act a few months later, was his last significant victory. Since then, he had endured:

*a failed “Chicago Campaign” that failed to alter either de facto discrimination in the city’s housing or the broader plight of its African-American population;

*criticism from “Black Power” activists that his continued belief in nonviolent protest was too accommodating to white power structures; and 

*gnawing self-doubt about his purpose as a leader. Once, he burst out at a meeting with associates that he wished he could simply be the pastor of a small church again. Instead, he had decided, while on a vacation that winter to finish his latest book, to embrace a broader role implied by his Nobel Prize: an advocate for wider social justice.

Above all, he was growing uneasy over American involvement in the Vietnam War and the collateral damage to African-Americans, the nation’s poor and world peace. At last, he told the full house at Riverside, he felt compelled to ‘‘break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart.’’

At this point widespread public recognition that the American involvement in the conflict was a failure had not yet crystallized. (In fact, it hadn’t even coalesced among African-Americans. Even after King’s address, only a quarter of blacks backed his stance on the war, according to one opinion poll.) That meant he was already veering far out on a limb, particularly for a white population (already annoyed, even suspicious, about his protests) who thought he was getting even further from his core role than he should.

King’s constant traveling as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference left him little time to write a speech with such momentous implications for his cause. His associate Andrew Young helped stitch the address together with significant input from attorney Clarence Jones and King’s close friend Vincent Harding. “He knew that I would not be putting words into his mouth. I would simply be speaking as my friend would want to speak, and that was the way that I went about the task that he asked me to do,” Harding recalled in a 2008 interview with Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman included on the Website Democracy Now.

In his address, King reviewed the course of the war and offered reasons why he had come to oppose it--notably, diverted government resources and energy from the Great Society legislation proposed by LBJ only two years before, and the disproportionate impact of the conflict on the poor, who were forced to send “their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population.”

With time, King’s general rationale was repeatedly confirmed (e.g., “we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support.”) But two examples of rhetorical overkill undercut the speech’s effectiveness: 1) What did Vietnamese peasants think of America, he asked, “as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe?” 2) In bombing defenseless villages, King claimed, the U.S. government had become “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” 

It was predictable that conservatives would fire back after the speech, taking their cue from William F. Buckley Jr., who termed it “one of the greatest acts of intellectual confusion in recent history.” The godfather of modern conservatism continued: “Dr. King gave a speech which could have been written in, indeed it was for all intents and purposes written in, Hanoi.”

More problematic for the future direction of liberalism in the U.S. was that King’s speech was condemned by such mainstream progressive media as The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as such prominent African-American leaders as Urban League head Whitney Young and the player who broke baseball’s color line, Jackie Robinson. The board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People even voted unanimously in favor of a resolution assailing his speech as a “serious tactical mistake.”

Most ominously for King’s future well-being, President Johnson was dangerously angered by King’s turn against him. He didn’t stop at merely referring to King in private as "that godd---ed n---er preacher." Instead, he stopped ignoring J. Edgar Hoover’s constant drumbeat of criticisms of the civil-rights leader and even asked his press secretary to distribute the FBI’s information about King’s ties with alleged Communist Stanley Levison to favorite reporters. 

The animus caused by his Riverside speech may have helped fulfill King’s sense of his prophetic mission, but it came at the price of making him feel increasingly like a target, according to Stanford University historian Clayborne Carson, who in January told USA Today: “There were a lot people who preferred that (King) be dead. If they wouldn’t bring it about, they certainly weren’t disturbed by it. My feeling is that King would not have survived the ‘60s in any case.”

On April 4, 1968, less than a week after Lyndon Johnson announced he would not be seeking re-election—and exactly one year since King had denounced the President’s Vietnam policy so dramatically—the civil-rights leader was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn.

This Day in Senate History (Birth of Eugene McCarthy, Democratic Primary Insurgent)

Mar. 29, 1916— Eugene McCarthy, a cool intellectual who, to nearly everyone’s surprise—including his own—ignited voter passion in one of the most turbulent years in American political history, was born in Watkins, Minn.

The recipient of the most rigorous education, McCarthy earned his undergraduate degree at St. John’s University, then was briefly a novice in the Benedictine Abbey His friend Senator Philip Hart of Michigan called him "a man out of his proper time, a man meant for the Age of Faith... when men like Thomas More could make their last defense, beyond the civil law, in religious belief." He was the only politician I can think of who could have argued with James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and James Wilson at the Constitutional Convention about Thucydides, Aristotle, Locke and Montesquieu, then run rings around them when the conversation turned to Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.

The friend of poets such as Robert Lowell, someone who could rattle off with little prompting hundreds of lines from William Butler Yeats, McCarthy also wrote verses that constitute some of the most intriguing of the 16 books he published in his lifetime. They fully vent his contrarian spirit, including these lines from the campaign that earned him a place in American political annals:

I am alone

in the land of the aardvarks.

I am walking west

all the aardvarks are going east.

Opposition to the Vietnam War was a cause he came late to, as he voted for the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution that gave Lyndon Johnson virtually a blank check to escalate the conflict. But once he turned against the war, in 1966, he was all in, in a way that nobody else contemplated being. At a time when no other Democratic politician could be persuaded to test the President and his military policy at the polls, McCarthy took on an incumbent whose power derived in no small measure from vindictiveness against anyone who thwarted his will.

McCarthy did not win the 1968 Democratic primary in New Hampshire. But his 42% of the vote dismayed LBJ so much that the President announced he would not seek another term. The title of McCarthy's memoir of the Presidential campaign, The Year of the People, expressed his conviction that the feelings of the electorate, as reflected in the primaries, needed to be respected at the party’s convention. They weren’t—Hubert Humphrey ended up as the Democratic nominee, despite being too late to enter any primaries—but the need to contain the divisions exposed in these contests and at the convention led to major rule changes in both parties. (Eight years later, Ronald Reagan took his own challenge to a sitting President of his own party, Gerald Ford, all the way to the convention.)

The Minnesota Senator, then, posed the most consequential challenge to a sitting President and party bosses since ex-President Theodore Roosevelt ran against hand-picked successor William Howard Taft in the 1912 GOP primaries. Now, we have been living in a landscape transformed in his wake: instead of the steeplechase primary season of his “year of the people,” a seemingly permanent campaign.

This year, we have been witnessing another stormy, likely transformative primary season. But exactly which candidate fills McCarthy’s role, and how, is a matter of some dispute.

For instance, when I typed “Eugene McCarthy” AND Trump into Google, I came up with more hits on McCarthy and …Bernie Sanders. The high-toned style of Sanders does have more personality traits in common with McCarthy, another Senator critical of his party’s incumbent President, than the boorish Donald Trump does. But there, the similarities end.

When all is said and done, in the likelihood that Hillary Clinton beats Sanders, she will probably gain the support, however reluctantly granted, of his base. The same cannot be said of Trumpeters, however, who, if they walk out on the GOP convention in Cleveland, will sit out the general election, as many McCarthy supporters did in 1968.

At another level, there are some intriguing parallels between the McCarthy and Trump campaigns:

*Each candidate did not realistically expect to win their party’s nomination. Stephanie Cegielski, a strategist for the Make America Great Again super PAC, has claimed that Trump did not originally think he would win, but would have simply been satisfied to place second in the delegate count, virtually guaranteeing what he wasn’t granted at the 2012 GOP convention: a prominent speaking role. Similarly, McCarthy had unsuccessfully urged Bobby Kennedy to yield to the entreaties of the “Dump Johnson” movement by running, and even as he announced his candidacy he expressed the hope that RFK would eventually enter the race.

*Each man emerged as a protest candidate. While McCarthy’s insurgency was fueled by anger over Vietnam, Trump’s has occurred with a GOP electorate that has largely upended conservative orthodoxy on free trade, entitlements and immigration.

*Each was transformed by encounters with rivals, becoming far more bitter than expected. The current nastiness between Trump and Ted Cruz is all the more striking considering their bromance in the early season of the primaries. And once Kennedy did jump into the race after New Hampshire, now knowing he could not be accused of splitting the party, McCarthy regarded the move as an act of opportunism that would only divide the anti-war vote.To the end of his days, he spoke more bitterly about his assassinated rival for the antiwar vote than about the President the two were trying to replace, according to a retrospective by NPR's Ken Rudin after McCarthy's death in 2005 . (See my account of their final, fierce faceoff in the winner-take-all California primary.)

*Each rewrote the rules of campaigning by introducing new players into their party’s coalition. Ominously for Hillary Clinton, Trump has done well in crossover primaries that allow Democrats to vote Republican, especially with angry white males. These might be termed “Falling Down” ex-Democrats, after the Michael Douglas movie of that name. In 1968, thousands of young people went “clear for Gene”—trimming their long hair and appearing presenting—in stumping door to door for the candidate.

*The tensions of the campaigns found explosive release in violence. Although neither McCarthy nor Kennedy encouraged this, it seemed a constant specter hanging over the campaigns. We are already seeing something of a repetition of that today. Fights have been breaking out at Trump appearances, with his own campaign manager arrested for interfering with a female reporter. Trump has warned darkly of “riots” if he is denied the Republican nomination, and his expressed willingness to allow delegates to carry weapons at the convention not only creates a security nightmare, but also a threat to democratic procedures.

*In both campaigns, candidates’ wives were collateral damage from the combustible energies unleashed by the campaigns. The current fracas involving Heidi Cruz and Melania Trump might be more public, but McCarthy’s family suffered as well. Abigail McCarthy—every bit as intellectually formidable as her husband, and an ardent backer of what appeared initially to be a quixotic campaign—ended up being hospitalized three times while her husband was on the hustings—and, within a year of the campaign’s end, the two had separated as a result of Eugene’s affair with a journalist.

Stylistically, of course, McCarthy can be considered the antithesis of Trump: far more intellectual, less willing to pander shamelessly.

And, although it’s been said that Trump has hurled “insults” at opponents, he is really only peddling puny epithets that any eight-year-old can toss in a schoolyard. For a real insult, one that could have come from the 19^th-century golden age of American political invective, consider McCarthy's elegant jibe at George Romney, a prospective GOP world-beater forced from the race because of his gaffe that he had been “brainwashed" by the military on a trip to Vietnam. In the case of Romney, widely regarded as an intellectual lightweight, McCarthy observed that “a light rinse would have been sufficient." Similar remarks to Capitol Hill colleagues over the years led them to nickname him "The Needler."

At best unconventional, at worst merely quirky, McCarthy could exasperate observers by his unexpected advances into and retreats from the American political thickets. (Garry Wills: “Eugene McCarthy spent a good deal of his time trying to prove that he was too good for politics. What use was that? Most of us are too good for politics; but we do not make a career of demonstrating it.”) Nowadays, though, most people would die to be represented by someone who doesn’t stick slavishly to an ideology or party line but is interested in something more than politics.