8 Crisis Wicked people bring a like quality to their positions of honor, and stain them with their infection. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy The legacy of John Fitzgerald Kennedy has been the subject of massive scholarship and disagreement, but in this chapter I want to draw attention to three principal parts of it that played central, and interconnected, roles in the American loss of moral capital: one was the symbolic legacy of continuity and connection with the martyred president; the second was the legacy of the assassination itself and the general suspicion it aroused; and the third was the political legacy of reform at home combined with anti-communist action abroad, most crucially in Vietnam. The symbolic legacy One aspect of the symbolic legacy was the astonishingly enduring hope for a rebirth of that shining moment of Camelot in the person of another Kennedy, a hope that, though dwindling, was not wholly extinguished until the death of JFK Jr. in a plane crash in 1999. (It was a hope that showed once again the potential transmissibility of certain forms of moral capital to bona Wde inheritors.) But the symbolic legacy also aVected Kennedy’s successors and their views of the possible role and purposes of the presidency itself. Assassination had inevitably enlarged Kennedy’s heroic status to semi-mythical proportions, and in its dramatic aftermath his immediate successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, felt it expedient to bolster and legitimize his authority by emphasizing continuity with the Kennedy administration (though his own relationship with Kennedy had been abysmal). He not only adopted and extended its social and foreign policies and the conXicts inherent within them, but retained key Kennedy advisers like McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara with ultimately disastrous consequences. 1 Nixon, in his turn, was obsessed … See Moya Ann Ball, ‘‘The Phantom in the Oval OYce: The John F. Kennedy Assassin- ation’s Symbolic Impact on Lyndon B. Johnson, His Key Advisers, and the Vietnam 200 with the image of presidential leadership that his old rival for the presi- dency had bequeathed, craving the adulation given to Kennedy and desperate to be seen as at least the equal of Kennedy in terms of heroic leadership. 2 Virtually every president (or presidential aspirant) thereafter felt constrained to respond in some fashion to the dominating image of Kennedy. Democrats in particular sought to rekindle the presidential Wre that Kennedy had lit, or at least to associate themselves with his myth through their speeches, appearance or programs. 3 The assassination legacy The irony of the symbolic legacy was that it was itself deeply implicated in the progressive disheartening of America. An important element in this was the legacy of the political assassination itself which set an un- happy modern precedent for other attempts, successful in the cases of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, unsuccessful in the case of Ronald Reagan. It produced a climate where democratic leaders needed a virtual praetorian guard to ensure security and where a Colin Powell, who could well have been the nation’s Wrst black president, was reported- ly dissuaded from running because of his family’s fear for his life. Worse, it contributed to a general sense that something was deeply wrong with America. (‘‘I used to love my country,’’ a young Divinity student said to me after the death of Bobby Kennedy, ‘‘but now I hate it. We kill all our best people.’’) It was a feeling heightened by the miasma of suspicion that eventually arose around the Kennedy killing and also that of King. There is no need to rehearse the endless speculations, theories and ‘‘proofs’’ adduced in articles, books and movies that began to Xow after 1967, 4 nor to consider their credibility or lack of it. The point is that the dissatisfaction with the single-assassin account became, in both cases, Decision-Making Process,’’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 24(1)(1994), pp. 105–119; also Ball, Vietnam-on-the-Potomac (New York, Praeger, 1992).   For an account of the relationship between Nixon and Kennedy see Christopher Mat- thews, Nixon and Kennedy: The Rivalry that Shaped Cold War America (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1996). See also Jon Roper, ‘‘Richard Nixon’s Political Hinterland: The Shadows of JFK and Charles de Gaulle,’’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 28(2) (Spring 1998), pp. 422–435. À See Paul R. Henggeler, The Kennedy Persuasion: American Presidential Politics Since JFK (Chicago, I. R. Dee, 1995) (expanded version of his 1991 book, In His Steps: Lyndon Johnson and the Kennedy Mystique). à The Xood was started with the controversy surrounding William Manchester’s Death of a President (Harper & Row, 1967). Jim Garrison’s On the Trail of the Assassins: My Investiga- tion and Prosecution of the Murder of President Kennedy (New York, Sheridan Square Press, 1988), turned by Oliver Stone into the movie JFK in 1991, was the most commercially successful of the assassination plot books, but there are more than 300 others listed by the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. 201Crisis widespread and enduring, and that people became increasingly willing to entertain the thought that dark and complex forces might be at work within their government. 5 Improbable (but conceivable) alliances of Cuban exiles, communist agents, the MaWa, the CIA and even Vice- President Johnson were alleged to have generated devilish plots and murders. The long-range psychological eVect of the conspiracy theories was to create the fear that a terrible gulf existed between the external actions of American politics – the schoolbook accounts of how demo- cratic government worked – and the way it really operated. Beneath the surface there appeared to be a play of secret and sinister forces beyond the power of the democracy to control. Congressional investigations would reveal in 1975–76 that US intelligence agencies were indeed guilty of many abuses at home and abroad, thus lending credence to this fear. It would soon become a cliche´ of Wctional thrillers and movies that the bad guys would turn out in the end to be a rogue agency of the government itself. In such an atmosphere, the traditional repositories of public trust became increasingly suspect. These developments played a part in undermining the symbolic legacy of Kennedy, for the revelations of a gap between public image and internal reality went right to the top. The literature on the president himself up until 1970 had been mostly commemorative and laudatory, dominated by keepers of the Xame like Schlesinger and Theodore Soren- sen (the latter was Kennedy’s speech-writer, who said of the Kennedy legacy that it could be no more summed up in a book ‘‘than a Mozart concerto can be summed up by . . . black notes on white score paper’’). 6 The release of the Wrst Kennedy papers in 1969 in the midst of the Vietnam maelstrom inaugurated a substantial revisionist historiography. AdiVerent and disillusioning picture of the hero began to emerge. He was: a virtual invalid kept going by injections of corticosteroids and amphetamines; an obsessive womanizer incapable of emotional connec- tion with women; a man with MaWa connections, whose election in 1960 had been bought with the help of gangsters; a man as fatally seduced by seedy underworld glamor as by the glitter of the Hollywood stars he befriended and bedded; a man who condoned and perhaps ordered assassination attempts of leaders in Cuba, South Vietnam, the Congo and the Dominican Republic; a man who had put the world at hazard by himself bringing on the Cuban missile crisis through his obsession with overthrowing Castro; and a man who, far from pushing civil rights, had incurred the permanent contempt of Martin Luther King for his dilatori- Õ An exception was Gerald Posner’s Case Closed (New York, Random House, 1993), the only book to argue that Oswald was the lone assassin. Œ Theodore C. Sorensen, The Kennedy Legacy (New York, Macmillan, 1969), p. 18. 202 Moral capital and the American presidency ness and cowardice in confronting the Dixiecrats. 7 Part of Nixon’s fasci- nation with Kennedy, it turns out, lay in the latter’s ability to get away with dirty tricks while maintaining a pristine image, and much of Nixon’s bitterness was the diVerential treatment he felt he received for his own similar, and perhaps lesser, crimes. 8 The sullying of the Kennedy myth was general. Robert was implicated with his brother in most of the above allegations, but the entire Kennedy clan was variously impugned. The patriarchal father, Joseph, was an ex-Nazi sympathizer, political briber and all-round bastard who, among other things, goaded his sons to compete in sexual conquests. Edward, next-in-line for the succession after Bobby, was undone by the womaniz- ing learnt at his father’s knee when an accident connected with a sexual liaison at Chappaquiddick eVectively ruined his chance ever to be presi- dent. America’s love aVair with widow-heroine Jackie ended abruptly when she married Greek billionaire Aristotle Onassis, and disenchant- ment was deepened by stories of compulsive spending that strained even that plutocrat’s pocket and patience. Seldom has the disparity between beautiful facade and sordid interior been so dramatically exposed as in the case of the Kennedys. Given the attendant disillusionment, it was per- haps not to be expected that faith in the nation’s ‘‘best and brightest’’ would ever again be so readily and innocently invested. But there were larger forces involved in this disillusionment that multiplied the eVect. The legacy of reform at home: anti-communism abroad The obsessive chipping at the Kennedy shrine began in, and was signiW- cantly stimulated by, a national atmosphere radically diVerent from that which Kennedy himself had inhaled. It was the era of Johnson, Nixon and the trauma of Vietnam, of the clash of a ‘‘counter-culture’’ with the shocked, confused, resistant core of conservative America. And this era too was part of the Kennedy legacy, or more accurately of that Cold War œ Just a few of the books making such allegations/revelations are: Thomas Reeves, A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy (London, Bloomsbury, 1991); Richard Reeves, President Kennedy (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1993); Seymour Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot (New York, HarperCollins, 1998); Thomas G. Paterson (ed.), Kennedy’s Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961–1963 (New York, Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1989); Aleksand Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, ‘‘One Hell of a Gamble’’: Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy (New York, Murray, 1997); Ernest May and Philip Zelikow (eds.), The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (Harvard University Press, 1997); Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1998). – According to Henry Kissinger, Nixon spent hours every week ruminating on the ruthless tactics and gimmicks he believed had made the Kennedys so formidable; The Years of Upheaval (Boston, Little, Brown, 1982), p. 1182. 203Crisis legacy transmitted through and symbolically embodied in Kennedy. Dur- ing Johnson’s term the threat from the Soviets appeared to be receding and the Chinese–Soviet split made the enemy seem less monolithic. But old patterns of thought persisted, and Washington remained deeply concerned about communist China and its support for revolutionary movements worldwide. A new containment policy now settled on China and its clients in South-East Asia. America had maintained a low-level involvement in South-East Asia since 1950, but JFK had increased American military support (in the shape of some 16,000 ‘‘advisers’’)to Laos and South Vietnam to prop up regimes under threat from national- ist insurgents backed by China. Kennedy-philes would later argue that their hero would never have committed America to a major war in Vietnam, and it was true that he was unhappy about involvement there. Nevertheless, Lyndon Johnson, responding to the ongoing weakness and failure of South Vietnamese regimes, was continuing and furthering a process already begun by Kennedy. Johnson, the big Texan, was at least as macho a Cold Warrior as his predecessor and much more determined to get his ‘‘fellas’’ out into the jungles of Vietnam to ‘‘whip hell out of some communists.’’ He wanted to prevent the Chinese and ‘‘the fellas in the Kremlin’’ from thinking Americans were ‘‘yellow and don’t mean what we say.’’ 9 But Johnson merely wanted to win the war as rapidly and decisively as possible so he could concentrate on his domestic program. He was in truth no happier than Kennedy about the Vietnamese entanglement, and was presciently warned in 1964 of the likely consequences of escalation by his own Under-Secretary of State, George Ball. The White House tapes revealed, many years later, that even as he drove relentlessly on with the military build-up in Vietnam, Johnson thought that country ‘‘the biggest damn mess’’ he ever saw and not worth Wghting for. 10 However, he had sur- rounded himself with Kennedy men resolutely committed to their mas- ter’s course, and there was always Robert Kennedy, the man LBJ feared most, waiting in the Democratic wings should Johnson stumble. Most important, though, was the memory of Truman, China and McCarthy- ism, which haunted Johnson as it had haunted Kennedy. What would Congress and the country do to a president who showed himself ‘‘soft on communism’’? Johnson could not aVord to ‘‘lose’’ Vietnam to the mortal enemy as Truman had ‘‘lost’’ China. The rigidiWed American virtue identiWed with anti-communism thus led the nation into a decade of — CitedinMichaelH.Hunt,Lyndon Johnson’s War: America’s Cold War Crusade in Vietnam, 1945–1968 (New York, Hill and Wang, 1996), p. 79. …» Michael Beschloss (ed.), Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1997). Reported in New York Times, 18 March 1997,p.12. 204 Moral capital and the American presidency destructive and futile warfare that would induce a loss of faith in Ameri- can virtue and provoke something like a revolution at home. Johnson failed to take his courage in his hands and withdraw because he dreamed of domestic glory through the expansion of Kennedy’s re- form program. Johnson’s Great Society project was made feasible by his landslide victory in the 1964 elections which had also greatly strengthened the liberal Democratic contingent in the House of Repre- sentatives, but he knew it would be destroyed in the political furore that Republicans would foment if he abandoned Vietnam. The terrible irony for Johnson was that the necessary price of his domestic program was commitment in Vietnam, while the escalating cost and distraction of the war inevitably crippled that program which Wzzled after the Wrst astonish- ing burst of achievement in 1964–65. He might have solved the problem by doing as the Pentagon urged and asking Congress for a tax increase in 1966, thus covering the costs of both war and reform, but here the inherent weakness of the presidency came into play. Johnson had spent a large part of the previous year and a vast amount of political capital persuading Congress to grant a tax cut, and he had not the heart to recommence the enervating process of seeking a reversal – and probably could not have got the votes if he had. 11 Unable to relinquish either his Great Society or the war, he pursued inXationary spending that would have dire economic consequences in the 1970s, while feeling compelled to hide the full truth of the situation from the public and from Congress. It was also lack of presidential power – the power to declare war without Congressional approval – that led Johnson to use deception to achieve escalation of American military commitment in Vietnam. The device he employed (used only moderately by previous presidents) involved seeking a ‘‘blank check’’ from Congress for the contingent use of force in an area where American interests had been threatened by a local disturbance. In 1964,an‘‘incident’’ of North Vietnamese aggression in the Tonkin Gulf provided the pretext, and on the strength of it Johnson gained nearly unanimous Congressional approval for whatever action he deemed necessary. He used the Tonkin Gulf resolution to pursue, not the limited action Congress had envisaged, but what was in eVect an undeclared war. Resentment at this trickery when it was Wnally revealed fed into growing antiwar sentiment, stimulating moves by Congress to assert some of the constitutional prerogatives in foreign policy it had hitherto largely ceded to the executive. Thus the actions of the so-called Imperial Presidency …… GeoVrey Hodgson, All Things to All Men: The False Promise of the Modern American Presidency (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), p. 48. See also Richard E. Neus- tadt, Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan (New York, Free Press, 1990), pp. 210–211. 205Crisis provoked a Congressional reaction aimed at curtailing presidential powers in the only arena that imperial powers could be displayed, foreign aVairs. Johnson’s deceptions did not cease with this initial piece of trickery. In an eVort to protect his domestic objectives, he went on for as long as he could concealing from both the legislature and the public the real extent and cost of America’s deepening military involvement during 1964–65. Likewise, he systematically obscured the infuriating failure of South Vietnamese governments, enmeshed in their own internecine conXicts, to establish a viable nation capable of standing on its own feet and Wghting its own Wghts. Secrecy no doubt came naturally to LBJ, but concealment and deception were also an integral part of Cold War mentality and its obsession with espionage. Former presidents, not least Kennedy, had been just as cavalier as Johnson about deceiving Congress when it suited them, and he, as former Democratic Senate majority leader, knew better than most the capacity of Congress to frustrate presidential action. But in the bitter atmosphere created by Vietnam, deceptive executive conduct created strong congressional antipathy and suspicion that would lead, in Nixon’s time, to attempts to monitor more closely the secret activities of the executive and its intelligence agencies. Johnson’s strategy of deception bought him short-term political ma- neuverability at the price of long-term erosion of public and Congres- sional conWdence. Not all his considerable cunning, blustering and bullying could in the end conceal the fact that America was hopelessly stuck in the quicksands of Vietnam. In the end his presidency would sink in the quagmire, but the cost was not only Johnson’s. According to Brian VanDeMark, Johnson’s strategy of concealment: tarnished the presidency and damaged popular faith in American government for more than a decade . . . LBJ’s decision, however human, tragically undermined the reciprocal faith between President and public indispensable to eVective gov- ernance in a democracy. Just as tragically, it fostered a pattern of presidential behavior which led his successor, Richard Nixon, to eventual ruin amid even greater popular alienation. 12 To this I would enter the caveats that Nixon’s model was Kennedy as much as Johnson, and that the American loss of faith cannot be explained simply by reference to Johnson’s and Nixon’s concealments and crimes, causally important though these were. The dereliction of a successive pair of delinquent incumbents should not, I have argued, necessarily seriously …  Brian VanDeMark, Into the Quagmire: Lyndon Johnson and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (New York, Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 217. See also Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1976); and Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson (2 vols., New York, Knopf, 1982–84). 206 Moral capital and the American presidency aVect the moral capital of the oYce itself unless larger forces are at work, as indeed they were here. The sullying of the Kennedy myth and the general suspicion raised about government and its agencies were an important part of the larger disillusioning process, and so was, connected- ly but distinctly, the profound impact of the war itself on the American conscience. Vietnam In February 2000, William Cohen became the Wrst US defense secretary to visit Vietnam since the Nixon era. A month later, on the twenty-Wfth anniversary of the war’s end, television channels, magazines and news- papers all over America ran reXective pieces of a generally reconciliatory tone. According to teachers, the war had become forgotten history for most students, while Richard Haas of the Brookings Institution noted that there were few attempts now to understand the lessons of Vietnam. 13 It seemed that the American people had Wnally laid to rest the ghosts of the most divisive and traumatizing conXict that America had suVered since the Civil War. Indeed the moral eVects of Vietnam were arguably much deeper and more scarring than those of the nineteenth-century conXict which, for all its tragedy and suVering, was at least ennobled by the sacred causes of Union and liberty. The Civil War could in good faith be commemorated in triumph as well as sorrow (if we exclude the feelings of an embittered and defeated South). The Vietnam memorial wall in Washington, visited by tens of thousands of people each year, was by way of contrast a site of grief, painful regret and still-lingering confusion and anger. Part of the lasting injury was, understandably, to American pride. George Ball had warned LBJ in July 1965 that a long protracted war would expose US weakness, but Johnson had worried about the loss of national credibility if he failed to honor commitments to South Vietnam. Ball had responded: ‘‘The worse blow would be that the mightiest power in the world is unable to defeat guerillas.’’ 14 And so it happened: the richest, most powerful nation the world has ever seen was humbled in Vietnam by a backward but tenacious peasant people, the North Viet- namese, and their southern guerilla allies, the Viet Cong. Vietnam revealed how far American pride had turned into outright arrogance on the part of both military and political elites. For too long these elites persisted in the optimistic belief that American power must …À Martin Kettle, ‘‘25 Years On, the US Lays Vietnam War to Rest,’’ The Age (reprinted from Guardian), 28 April 2000,p.12. …à Box 1, Meeting Notes File, Johnson Papers, cited in Hunt, Lyndon Johnson’s War,p.103. 207Crisis necessarily prevail in the end. As the war continued, dispatches from the front and from policy-makers in Washington declared repeatedly that the corner had at last been turned, the end was in sight. Victory was forever at hand and forever postponed, but the tone of optimism remained; ‘‘paci- Wed’’ villages and regions were exhibited and the infamous body count adduced to demonstrate the enemy’s superior and unsustainable losses and hence its ultimate, inevitable defeat. This continual prevarication eventually engendered mistrust at home as the returning body bags mounted. Defenders of the war (most notably Commanding General Westmoreland) liked to say after the event that Vietnam, the Wrst televi- sion war, was lost by media which portrayed even American–South Vietnamese victories (for instance, the 1968 Tet oVensive) as defeats. In fact the bulk of the media dutifully purveyed the oYcial line on the conXict for several years, adopting a more critical tone only after public sentiment at home began to turn signiWcantly against the war in 1967. Americans eventually became divided on the war, sometimes within themselves. (Bob Hope could get a massive, ironic cheer from troops in Vietnam with the line: ‘‘I’ve come over here to assure you guys that the country is 50 percent behind you.’’) Whether or not one thought United States involvement wise or necessary, the fact that it was involved meant national pride was irrevocably at stake. Many argued, therefore, that superior Wrepower should be backed with the necessary will and conW- dence to Wnish the job. But conWdence was severely dented in Vietnam, and the inability to attain a victory meant inevitable injury to the national pride. Humiliation is hard to bear even when it is salutary, as McNamara would later claim it was in Vietnam. The damage done to US pride would have long-range eVects that were inextricably bound up with long-term moral eVects of the conXict. Such moral eVects went well beyond regret for the sin of overweening arrogance. Being bloodied and frustrated by a pygmy nation was an oVense to pride, but why was the giant pounding at the pygmy in the Wrst place? Because the pygmy was not really a pygmy but just one extended tentacle of a vast and monstrous foe licking malignantly at a small, independent and relatively weak nation that the leader of the Free World was obliged to defend. American virtue (as transWgured in rigid anti-communism) was engaged here as much as American pride and power. Except that South Vietnam with its corrupt, feuding, incompetent leaders was a poor excuse for an innocent victim, and the indigenous struggle was as much a national one with local historical roots as an instance of creeping global communist menace. Had South Vietnam been capable of establishing itself as a genuine and viable State with widespread popular support it might all have been diVerent, but it was not. The result was that American 208 Moral capital and the American presidency pride and American virtue were not only independently injured in Viet- nam, but severed from one another with damaging results. The political failure of successive South Vietnamese regimes meant that loyalty was always uncertain at best among the local population. It became famously diYcult for American troops and their allies to distin- guish innocent friend from deadly foe, to tell Charlie from a peasant girl in black pyjamas who might, after all, be the same person. The trouble with communists was that they did not necessarily sport badges or share a particular skin color. The safest bet for frightened soldiers in a dangerous situation where everyone looked much the same seemed to be a general presumption of enmity. Where discrimination between friend and enemy was so diYcult, violence itself tended to become indiscriminate. Though there was much talk of winning hearts and minds in South Vietnam, coercion often seemed the surer route. The remark of one senior Ameri- can commander engaged in ‘‘resettling’’ peasants to deny the sanctuary of their villages to the Viet Cong –‘‘Grab ’em by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow’’ – was perhaps less the expression of a callously cynical military mind than a reXection of the general frustration and moral confusion that reigned on the ground. In Vietnam, American anti-communism shaded into American racism: a slope was a slope and a gook was a gook. Friend or enemy, they were all the responsible for American boys dying miserable deaths in paddies, villages and jungles thousands of miles from home. It was an atmosphere in which massacres like that at My Lai – merely the most publicized of American atrocities – were almost bound to happen. (SigniWcantly, when cameraman Ronald Haeberle, present at the massacre, showed his harrowing photographs to civic organizations in Cleveland, people refused to believe it. ‘‘They said Americans wouldn’t do this,’’ he noted.) 15 War, we may safely assume, is always brutalizing, obscene and liable to atrocities, redeemed, if at all, only by necessity and a cause believed to be worth killing and dying for. But as more and more troops and materiel were committed to Vietnam, apparently to little eVect, the necessity and high moral purpose of the war were increasingly questioned and doubted. The words of a popular song –‘‘One, two, three/What are we Wghting for?’’ – summed up the gathering mood. As the conviction grew among many that the war was wrong, American carpet bombing, napalming, straWng and the incidents of all the ‘‘dirty little war stories’’ 16 that …Õ Cited in Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disil- lusioning of a Generation (New York, Basic Books, 1995), p. 219. Note that Engelhardt’s central theme in this book parallels my own, though he pursues the disillusioning process through an examination of the mythology of what he calls the ‘‘American war story,’’ largely using an analysis of cultural materials like books, Wlms and television shows. …Œ The phrase is Michael Herr’s from Dispatches (London, Picador, 1978). 209Crisis [...]...210 Moral capital and the American presidency circulated back home began to appear radically unredeemed and unredeemable And in this lay the real moral shock and the long-term moral eVect of Vietnam for America Americans, as well as being on the winning side, were supposed by deWnition to be on the right side They were the good guys – tough, of course, but good This was the disillusionment... of faith and conWdence that was played out in American life during this period, but the crisis involved much more than just a loss of the moral capital of the presidency or of individual presidents At stake was the moral capital of the nation itself insofar as this informed the nation’s sense of its own rightness and founded its morale Nixon’s sins and his fall were not the prime causes of the loss... to Americans, increasing their distrust of the presidency The Xaws in Nixon’s character undoubtedly played a crucial role, but the larger context in which those Xaws were fatally revealed was America’s ideological response to the Cold War and the actions of previous presidents in the light of it The pivotal moral, political and symbolical role of the presidency made it the natural focus of the crisis. .. severing of pride and virtue and the problem of how to put them back together again 212 Moral capital and the American presidency The Nixon–Kissinger ‘‘solution’’ This was Richard Nixon’s central problem when he won election in 1968 promising to end the war and restore ‘‘unity.’’ He did not believe the war could be won, but nor did he believe that it was politically possible to tell the American people... communism Yet the war went on, and it went on too long The problem with Nixon’s construction of a plausible scenario for honorable withdrawal was that the weakness of the Saigon regime and the tenacity of the one in Hanoi made 214 Moral capital and the American presidency it a very extended process, leaving ample space for continuing opposition by the press, congressmen, college students and black and white... leaving the task of defense to the only person that could speak politically for all the American people – the real American people of the conservative heartland The Republic that Nixon represented in his person was in danger, and only he could reliably defend it against its enemies in the colleges and the streets (where they shouted at him), in the Congress (where they obstructed him), in the permanent... citizens taking to the streets in protest The virulence and anger of the antiwar protests revealed the depth of betrayal and disappointment felt by youth reared on the American myth, who had imbibed the rhetoric and believed the promise of the Kennedy years Symbolic burnings of Xags and draft-cards, and visits to Hanoi by dissenting celebrities, seemed to declare that a noisy segment of the American population... to require They broke with government and national institutions, particularly the presidency, because they believed them to be forces of violence and oppression, thus antithetical to virtue There was, of course, a generational issue here that went well beyond the moral crisis of Vietnam, for the sixties divided the generations – parents and children, old and young – on more value issues and at more... Schlesinger’s words, the imperial presidency abroad into the revolutionary presidency at home by asserting an expanded presidential prerogative against Congress.21 In other words, he  » Schlesinger, The Imperial Presidency, pp 380–338, conveys the surreal White House atmosphere  … Congress resented many other things, not least Nixon’s frequent assertion of ‘‘executive 216 Moral capital and the American presidency. .. positively anti -American Yet it was surely no accident that the love -and- peaceniks with their fantasy of an innocent, anti-materialist, apolitical Eden, realizable if we all tuned in …œ Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1976) Crisis 211 and dropped out, were indulging a diVerent but no less naive version of the American myth They discarded patriotism because that is what the preservation . Moral capital and the American presidency aVect the moral capital of the oYce itself unless larger forces are at work, as indeed they were here. The sullying. unredeemed and un- redeemable. And in this lay the real moral shock and the long-term moral eVect of Vietnam for America. Americans, as well as being on the winning