The politics of the Vietnam War in 1967

Vice President Hubert Humphrey with President Lyndon Johnson

I'm always leery of historical analogies applied to present policies. That doesn't mean they're all bad. Just that most of them are.

Analogy or not, people inevitably are comparing the Iraq War to the Vietnam War. This is complicated by the fact that our Republican "culture warriors" have an image of their domestic political Enemy (the liberals, the dirty hippies, scary black people, etc.) that derives heavily from rightwing mythology about the 1960s, including about the antiwar movement and the Vietnam War itself.

The print edition of the New York Review of Books for 10/11/07 has some excerpts from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s, diaries for the year 1967 under the title "The Turning Point", focusing on the Vietnam War. During that period, the military brass were sure of "victory" in Vietnam. The antiwar movement in 1967 was growing among the public and Senators like William Fulbright, Robert Kennedy and George McGovern were expressing their skepticism about Lyndon Johnson policy in the war. The practice at that time, to summarize very briefly, was to escalate the number of troops and call periodic bombing pauses to make a show of "peaceful intentions" but actually not believing any serious willingness to negotiate with the enemy was necessary.

Despite the later public impression that no one knew what we were fighting for in Vietnam - an understandable notion in light of the changing official justifications for the war - there was a defined goal in the war: to preserve an independent, non-Communist South Vietnam. As Schlesinger put it in a diary entry of March 11, the generals at that time were persuaded that they could "force a retreat of the regular Hanoi forces back over the 17th parallel and a dissolution of the Viet Cong". (In historical writing now, the Vietcong is often referred to by its official name, the National Liberation Front [NLF], though Vietcong is also still used because that was the term so commonly used by Americans during the war.)

In light of recent Congressional concern over the blaspheming of the divine presence of our Saviour-General David Petraeus, that diary entry is worth quoting at greater length:

The effect of [Bobby Kennedy's] intervention [by publicly encouraging meaningful peace talks], I think, was to make the administration think concretely about the meaning of negotiation - and, having thought about it, they did not like it. Or, to put it more exactly, having thought about it in the context of the military optimism now sweeping Washington, they feel it would be a great mistake. One has the impression that very little would embarrass the administration now more than a peace overture from Hanoi. The military have the bit between their teeth and are confident that they can "win" the war - i.e., that they can force a retreat of the regular Hanoi forces back over the 17th parallel and a dissolution of the Viet Cong. If they are right, LBJ may still pull himself out of this. But if they are wrong - and the Joint Chiefs of Staff are almost always wrong in their military predictions - then we are committed to a steady enlargement of the war; for, if one thing does not break the resistance, the pressure will increase to do something more - to bomb large population centers, harbors, the industrial complex, to strike along the Chinese border, until we force China into the war. (my emphasis)

Shocking, shocking that a supposedly responsible American and leading historian would suggest even in private that our glorious military leaders might be "wrong" about "their military predictions", and this in a time of war!

Of course, they were wrong about their optimistic predictions on the Vietnam War. And some of the generals finding themselves in that position found it convenient to hide behind conservative idolatry of the military and a dishonest stab-in-the-back theory about the war's outcome.

Sadly, the idea of attacking critics of the war generally as unpatriotic hasn't entirely a Republican habit, as Schlesinger observed in his entry for April 27:

We are reaching some sort of crisis on Vietnam. LBJ has evidently decided on a quick and brutal escalation of the war. It was clear in February that he did not wish negotiation until the existing military balance could be turned considerably in our favor; and his clear intention now is to bomb North Vietnam until Hanoi is prepared to sue for peace on terms which will meet Rusk's idea of a satisfactory settlement. More than that, the administration is apparently determined to advance the proposition that dissent is unpatriotic, and has brought General Westmoreland back for this purpose.

He continued in that same entry with an observation about the practical power the American President has to continue a war, even in the face of major Congressional opposition:

The irony is that all of us for years have been defending the presidential prerogative and regarding the Congress as a drag on policy. It is evident now that this delight in a strong presidency was based on the fact that, up to now, all strong presidents in American history have pursued policies of which one has approved. We are now confronted by the anomaly of a strong president using these arguments to pursue a course which, so far as I can see, can lead only to disaster. It is not hard to assert a congressional role; but, given the structure of the American system, it is very hard to see how the Congress can restrain the presidential drive toward the enlargement of the war. Voting against military appropriations is both humanly and politically self-defeating. The only hope is to organize a broad political movement; and even this cannot take effect until, at the very earliest, the 1968 primaries, which may be too late.

I don't read this as a statement of hopelessness on his part. He was just saying that bringing Congress to the point of forcing a change in Vietnam War policy onto the President would require very significant public political pressure.

Here is one case in which I think we need to be careful not to assume a parallel between then and now. The Vietnam War was intensely unpopular among a significant minority in 1967, but it would still be years before that became a distinct majority sentiment. A majority of the public have been opposed to the Iraq War for quite some time now. The fact that the much-publicized appearance of our Saviour-General Petraeus in Washington, blessing us with his personal divine presence, caused hardly a ripple in public opinion on the war is a sign of the level of opposition to this current war. The situation Schlesinger describes in 1967 is not a parallel in that regard.

His observation about the fact that Congress can only be moved to do their job in restraining a President on a destructive course in the war by continued strong public pressure is, unfortunately, all too relevant today.

The numbing effects of war on people's thinking comes out in his April 18 entry describing a meeting of the previous day with Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey later came to be regarded as what was then called a "Cold War liberal" (at least by critics who wanted to move beyond the Cold War). But up until 1967 or so, Humphrey had been regarded as more of an aggressive, activist liberal, particularly on the civil rights issue. In that entry, Schlesinger writes:

I think I was depressed most of all by the lack of the sense of the concrete human dimension of problems which characterized the old Hubert. Not once in his long discourse on Vietnam did he express any dismay over the human wreckage wrought by the American policy.... This trailing off of humanity is accompanied by an obvious delight in hobnobbing with statesmen - many mentions of the Pope, de Gaulle, [Sarvepalli] Radhakrishnan, etc., etc., etc. (my emphasis)

The courtier is an ever-present feature around the seats of power. Walt Rostow was one of the key advisers on the Vietnam War during the Kennedy and Johnson administration and is widely regarded as a hack. In his diary entry of July 28, he described Rostow's then-resurgent influence on LBJ:

Walt Rostow has suddenly emerged from a long eclipse and is now established as the Pangloss of the White House, telling the President with great authoritativeness all the things the President wants to hear. Everything, according to Walt, is getting better and better; and I can see him when the bombs begin to fall on Washington, assuring LBJ that the deep-running historic tendencies are on our side, that we are turning the corner in Zambia and Tasmania, and that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. I last saw him at dinner at Jane McBaine's in Washington on June 14. He exuded self-satisfaction with his resurrection and set forth a tedious and misconceived analogy between LBJ and Lincoln, casting the opposition to the war in the role of the Copperheads [pro-Southern Northern Democrats] and saying that, if LBJ only kept up the military momentum, he would be in the clear in another few months. (my emphasis)

As tempting as it is to see this as a parallel to the neocons and their "cakewalk" fantasies, the similarities probably have more to do with the persistence of hackery and flattering the king than anything else.

But also in light of the present-day polemics over the war-loving Trotskyist neoconservatives and "chickenhawks", these two passages from that same diary entry are striking:

The big issue, of course, has been Vietnam. I would say that this period has marked, if not a change in Lyndon Johnson, at least a change in my own perception of him. I had thought until rather recently that the tendency toward a widening of the war represented a triumph of his advisers over his instincts - that the last thing he wanted was American involvement in a ground war in Asia, or, even less, a war with China, and that his dearest hope was a negotiated solution making possible American withdrawal. If this was once his mood, I fear it is so no longer. He would seem to have turned a corner toward the systematic enlargement of the war. Why? I cannot resist the feeling that domestic politics - his precipitous decline in the public opinion polls - constitute a major factor. He once told Dick Goodwin that there was far more chauvinism in the United States than easterners understood, and it now looks as if a course of playing the war to the hilt has recommended itself to him as the best way of reversing the polls and bringing about Democratic gains in November. There may be other, deeper pressures working on him. Dick has hinted that he may have a streak of personal cowardice (as demonstrated in his panic after the murder in Dallas), which may force him into public virility in order to prove something about himself (in the sense that a war hero, like JFK, felt no need to prove himself by invading Cuba after the Bay of Pigs or the missile crisis). ...

The conversation was resumed over the weekend of July 24, which I spent at Ken Galbraith's in Newfane, Vermont, with George McGovern and Seymour Harris. But now I had begun to think for the first time of the possibility of RFK's going for the nomination in 1968. Of course, this is a long time away - and two years would give LBJ plenty of opportunity for all the escalation he seeks and needs. But, assuming he follows the present course without getting into a nuclear war with China, there might be just the possibility of reversing all historical precedent and rejecting the nomination of an incumbent president.

George said that he would be all for it; adding that he thought that LBJ had a "great yellow streak" and might conceivably be bluffed out of trying for renomination, citing his health and the 22nd Amendment as reasons for not running again. This is all remote and unlikely, but a month ago none of us would have thought it worth a moment's consideration. (my emphasis)

Aside from the psychological speculations, it could certainly be argued that Johnson's withdrawal from the 1968 Presidential race is at least partly a confirmation of McGovern's thought that Johnson could be "bluffed" out of the race. Because at the time of his withdrawal, it was by no means a done deal that Gene McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy could have captured the nomination.

In fairness to Johnson, I would also say that he had a genuine concern for the well-being of the country and a real feeling of responsibility about the Vietnam War (however misguided or reprehensible his policies were) that is difficult to even imagine in men like Dick Cheney, George Bush or Rummy.

On biographical matters, I also found this to be a valuable observation about Hubert Humphrey from a March 11 entry:

... Hubert [Humphrey] went on the air on Issues and Answers. We all watched it before lunch at Hickory Hill (except Bobby [Kennedy], who was so irritated and upset by Hubert's performance that, after a few minutes, he went silently away). It was a new and different Hubert - hard-faced, except for some unctuous smiles, and uncharacteristically coarse in his language. His trouble, I fear, is that he cannot say something publicly without deeply believing it privately; and when, as now, he has no choice in his public utterances, he whips up a fervency of private belief. I fear also that Max Kampelman or someone has persuaded him that this is the issue on which he can knock out RFK. His sense of splitting with the liberal community, a probable feeling of guilt over the positions he is taking - all this has made him self-righteous and irascible. (my emphasis)

The trait of being unable to "say something publicly without deeply believing it privately" would be quite a handicap for most politicians!

Tags: arthur schlesinger, george mcgovern, lyndon johnson, robert kennedy, vietnam war

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 25: What have all the "moderates" gone, long time passing?

African-American civilians and Federal troops occupying Jefferson Davis' plantation near Natchez; the banner says, "The House Jeff Built"

I recently read for the first time Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s, 1949 essay, "The Causes of the Civil War", which is included in The Politcs of Hope (1963). At that time, he was dealing with a trend in professional historical writing that was known as "revisionist", although it reflected aspects of the Lost Cause dogma that conservative white Southerners had been promoting practically since the end of the Civil War.

His essay focuses mainly on two advocates of this "revisionism", James Randall and Avery Craven. They "denied the traditional assumption of the inevitability of the war and boldly advanced the thesis that a 'blundering generation' had transformed a 'repressible conflict' into a 'needless war'."

Schlesinger also found Alan Nevins indulging in "a measured but entire acceptance of revisionism" in his 1947 Ordeal of the Union, where he wrote:

The primary task of statesmanship in this era was to furnish a workable adjustment between the two sections [North and South, or, more accurately, slave states and free states], while offering strong inducements to the southern people to regard their labor system not as static but evolutionary, and equal persuasions to the northern people to assume a helpful rather than scolding attitude.

The claim that "northern people" assumed a "scolding attitude" reflects the antebellum whining and blustering of the slaveowners and the publicists who huffed and puffed in defense of the slave system. A "scolding attitude"? We're talking about human slavery, people! If a scolding attitude was all that people could muster against slavery, that would mean they were disgraceful collaborators with slavery.

And, in fact, that was one of the driving forces behind free-state efforts to restrict slavery. Very few whites besides John Brown and his white supporters were ready to wage some war of liberation to free the slaves in the South. But people in free states did feel that they were increasingly made to collaborate against their wills and their consciences with the Slave Power. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 made that coerced collaboration explicit by requiring free state citizens to join federal posses to recapture human property that had escaped from the lords of the lash.

Schlesinger's essay uses more judicious language than I do, being a part of the mean and nasty blogger world and all. But he rips the "revisionist" version of the Lost Cause ideology apart. He summarizes the Randall-Craven type of revisionism as including three primary premises:

First: that the Civil War was caused by the irresponsible emotionalization of politics far out of proportion to the real problems involved.

Hell, it was just human being held in slavery and being used as breeding stock to produce additional human property to be sold to other slavemongers. Plus, the freedoms of free white citizens were becoming more and more constricted by the demands of the slaveowners and their incresingly paranoid fears. Other than basic human rights and the essential freedoms of all Americans, there weren't such "real problems" that people had to get all worked up about it and stuff.

How did serious historians ever persuade themselves to write this nonsense? It boggles the mind.

Also, as part of this first plank of the "revisionist" Lost Cause approach, its advocates embraced the notion that slavery didn't have anything to do with causing the war. It was "fanaticism", lack of moderation, you know. The fact that all this ungentlemanly immoderation revolved around slavery was, what, a random coincidence?

Thus the second revisionist thesis: that sectional friction was permittd to developinto needless war by the inexcusable failure of political leadership in the '50s.

Schlesinger notes drily, "It is hard to tell which was under attack here - the performance of a particular generation or democratic politics in general."

The reality was that democratic politics and slavery were fundamentally incompatible. Democracy or the slave system had to win out.

Hence the third revisionist thesis: that the slavery problem could have been solved without war.

Assuming as I do that these really were serious historians, I just have to wonder, were they completely unaware of the existence of black people? I mean, really. The real lives of black people seemed to be an exotic abstraction for people who could come up with this kind of stuff.

As Schlesinger points out, this only makes any sense if there was a realistic possibility that slavery could have been abolished nonviolently. But those high-minded desires for peaceful abolition that the "revisionists" implicitly assume were there in the South somehow managed to stay well hidden. Probably because in large parts of the South, open discussion of abolition sentiments was just flat-out repressed. It also assumes that non-Southerners could have remained as completely indifferent to slavery and its poisonous effects on the whole Republic as the lords of the lash were to the humanity of their slave property.

Schlesinger also reminds us that there was no shortage of compensated emancipation schemes, under which capital in the form of cash would be given to the slave owners to replace their capital in the form of human flesh. The idea went about as far as an humanitarian thought would get if it entered the mind of Dick Cheney - nowhere, in other words.

While there are certainly a wide variety of issues generated by slavery, not least of which were class-based effects of slavery, primary among them the threat of slavery to free labor, Schlesinger in this essay focuses on a moral issue, which was certainly how it was widely perceived in both slave and free states:

The revisionists first glided over the implications of the fact
that the slavery system was producing a closed society in the South. Yet that society increasingly had justified itself by a political and philosophical repudiation of free society; southern thinkers swiftly developed the anti-libertarian potentialities in a social system whose cornerstone, in Alexander H. Stephens' proud phrase, was human bondage. In theory and in practice, the South organized itself with mounting rigor against ideas of human dignity and freedom, because such ideas inevitably threatened the basis of their own system. Professor Frank L. Owsley, the southern agrarian, has described inadvertently but accurately the direction in which the slave South was moving. "The abolitionists and their political allies were threatening the existence of the South as seriously as the Nazis threaten the existence of England," wrote Owsley in 1940; "... Under such circumstances the surprising thing is that so little was done by the South to defend its existence."

There can be no question that many southerners in the '50's had similar sentiments; that they regarded their system of control as ridiculously inadequate; and that, with the book-burning, the censorship of the mails, the gradual illegalization of dissent, the South was in process of creating a real machinery of repression in order more effectively "to defend its existence." No society, I suppose, encourages criticism of its basic institutions. Yet, when a democratic society acts in self-defense, it does so at least in the name of human dignity and freedom. When a society based on bond slavery acts to eliminate criticism of its peculiar institution, it outlaws what a believer in democracy can only regard as the abiding values of man. When the basic institutions are evil, in other words, the effect of attempts to defend their existence can only be the moral and intellectual stultification of the society.

A society closed in the defense of evil institutions thus creates moral differences far too profound to be solved by compromise. Such a society forces upon everyone, both those living at the time and those writing about it later, the necessity for a moral judgment; and the moral judgment in such cases becomes an indispensable factor in the historical understanding. (my emphasis)

Schlesinger was suggesting that, in reference to the approach of Randall and Craven, that this neglect of ths historical fact that strong emotions were generated on both sides may have been the main cause of their particular route to embracing a Lost Cause tall tale on the origins of the war. The "fanaticism" that they tried to blame for causing an avoidable war, in other words, was really only one of the manifestations of the social conflict caused by two incompatable systems, slavery and democracy, coexisting in one country under one government. Resolving that contradiction required strong feelings and much more besides.

Tags: arthur schlesinger, avery craven, civil war, james randall, slavery, us civil war

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 22: The Mississippi Plan

Adelbert Ames: a genuine hero of American democracy - his lost cause was real, and worth fighting for

In yesterday's post, I referred to the overthrow if the democractically elected Reconstruction governments in the postwar South through force, violence, threats and fraud. This unfortunately successful overthrow was known as the "Mississippi Plan", because that's where it achieved its first clear-cut victory.

Sad to say, the white peoples' narrative of national reconciliation, based to a large extent of the Lost Cause mythology, affected the consciousness of people who really should have known better. John Kennedy in Profiles in Courage (1956) is an unfortunate example of that. One of his profiles was on the rotten white supremacist Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar (L.Q.C. Lamar for short) who as Mississippi Senator was a key figure in promoting reconciliation between the whites of North and South and the expense of democracy and basic civil rights for African-American citizens.

Lamar's most famous moment in establishing his "moderate" image in the North was his generous eulogy for the Massachusetts Radical Republican Senator Charles Sumner in 1872. The old scamster held forth with stuff like this:

Shall we not, over the honored remains of... this earnest pleader for the exercise of human tenderness and charity, lay aside the concealments which serve only to perpetuate misunderstandings and distrust, and frankly confess that on both sides we most earnestly desire to be one... in feeling and in heart?... Would that the spirit of the illustrious dead whom we lament today could speak from the grave to both parties to this deplorable discord in tones which should reach each and every heart throughout this broad territory: "My countrymen! know one another, and you will love one another!"

Pretty words. But he presented a very different face to the white folks back home. Richard Nelson Current in Those Terrible Carpetbaggers (1988) recounts the following about Ames' testimony to the Senate after he was impeached and removed from office by the Mississippi legislature in 1875, then in the grips of the so-called Redeemers:

His testimony before the Senate committee was secret for the time being, but he got immediate publicity for his opinions when a New York Times correspondent intervewed him in Washington. He told the Times man that the Mississippi Democrats would try to get rid of anyone. Northerner or Southerner, who stood by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. They were determined, he said, to control or neutralize the blacks in politics.

Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar: a genuine villain who conned gullible Yankees with his "moderate" talk while fighting for white supremacy and against democracy

"Does not Lamar oppose this policy?" the reporter asked incredulously. Lamar, now [former Mississippi Senator] Alcorn's successor in the Senate, enjoyed throughout the North a reputation as the foremost Southern advocate of reconciliation between the sections and between the races. He was remembered for the eloquence of his eulogy of Charles Sumner after Sumner's death. "No; Lamar makes very different speeches in Mississippi from those he delivers for the Northern market," Ames replied to the newsman's query. "He made the most vituperative speeches during the last campaign, and he owes his election as United States Senator to that fact. He explained away his eulogy to Sumner as being a political necessity — to give the South a hearing in the North." (my emphasis)

I wouldn't want to leave the impression at all that a peaceful impeachment proceeding was all that was involved. Here is Kenneth Stammp's summary from The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (1965):

But the [official] end of the [Ku Klux] Klan [around 1872] was not the end of organized violence, for violence was a basic part of the crusade against the radicals [i.e., defenders of democracy, Radical Republicans] in every southern state. The Klan had done this rugged work in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia, where the conservatives had regained control between 1869 and 1871; but similar groups arose in the seven remaining southern states. The pattern of violence that conservatives developed in Mississippi, generally known as the Mississippi Plan, sometimes as the "shotgun policy," was typical. In the state election of 1875, Mississippi Democrats simply resolved to use as much force as was necessary in order to win. During the campaign a local newspaper announced this purpose with complete candor: "All other means having been exhausted to abate the horrible condition of things, the thieves and robbers, and scoundrels, white and black, deserve death and ought to be killed. ... [They] ought to be compelled to leave the state or abide the consequences. ... Carry the election peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must." According to another editor: "The present contest is rather a revolution than a political campaign - it is the rebellion, if you see fit to apply that term, of a down-trodden people [i.e., whites] against an absolutism imposed by their own hirelings ..."

To implement the Mississippi Plan local Democratic clubs organized themselves into irregular militia companies and armed themselves with rifles. They drilled and paraded through the areas of heavy Negro population; they enrolled Negro leaders in so-called "dead-books"; they dispersed Republican meetings; they forced Negroes at rifle point to listen to Democratic speakers; they deliberately provoked riots in which hundreds of Negroes were killed; and they posted armed pickets at registration places to prevent Negroes from registering. Before long, in many Mississippi counties, the Republicans simply abandoned any attempt to hold political meetings.

Ames tried to raise a biracial militia to defend the elected government against the Redeemers. But without adequate military assistance from the federal government, which was not forthcoming, he was unsucessful indoing so. After the Redeemers violent tactics had clearly prevailed, Ames resigned the governorship and left the state. The state legislature had made a deal with him to drop the phony impeachment action if he resigned, but with the Redeemers brand of "Southern honor" they went ahead with the impeachment action even after he resigned.

And what was the "moderate" L.Q.C. Lamar doing for democracy during this critical time? Current writes:

L.Q.C. Lamar, the Democratic Mississippi congressman, and John B. Gordon, former head of the Georgia Ku Klux Klan, were visiting the state and making what seemed to Ames "most incendiary" speeches. "The language they use is not of itself violent, but the conclusions they reach are that this election must be carried, even if violence be resorted to."

Ames beautiful and politically savvy wife Blanche saw what Lamar really was. Current quotes her:

The warmest friends of Lamar here [in Mississippi] are the most violent for impeachment - and Mr. Lamar is a double dealer on whom no dependence can be placed, as it is well known that in all matter political he does not hesitate to be false. ... If he really wishes to be of service, let him call off the dogs - which he can easily do, as they are trained to hound or retreat at the word of command.

Ames characterized the Redeemer takeover accurately at the time:

Yes, a revolution has taken place - by force of arms - and a race are disfranchised - they are to be returned to a condition of serfdom - an era of second slavery.

Here was John Kennedy's description of the transition from the democratic Reconstruction government headed by Governor Adelbert Ames (pronounced a-DEL-bert) to the undemocratic and thoroughly corrupt "Redemption" government:

No state suffered more from carpetbag rule than Mississippi. Adelbert Ames, first Senator and then Governor, was a native of Maine, a son-in-law of the notorious "butcher of New Orleans," Ben Butler. He admitted before a Congressional committee that only his election to the Senate prompted him to take up his residence in Mississippi. He was chosen Governor by a majority composed of freed slaves [Mississippi had been majority black at the time of secession in 1861] and Radical Republicans, sustained and nourished by Federal bayonets. ... Vast areas of northern Mississippi lay in ruins. Taxes increased to a level fourteen times as high as normal in order to support the extravagances of the reconstruction government and heavy state and national war debts.

Those "extravagances" included things like "Freedman's Schools" to teach African-American citizens to read and write; it had been strictly prohibited to teach slaves to read and write. As this picture shows, women and children were also included in the instruction. The white teacher depicted here was one of many Northern teachers who volunteered to go South to teach.

Ben Butler, by the way, was mainly known as the "butcher of New Orleans" because the fine white ladies were known to dump the contents of their chamberpots out the windown onto Federal soldiers after the city was taken. This being the brave and honorable way that white men in New Orleans chose to express their opposition. Butler eventually decreed that any woman caught doing this again would be arrested for prostitution. They stopped.

Kennedy wrote further:

Mississippians, on the whole, came either to understand and admire the sentiments of the Sumner eulogy, to respect Lamar's sincerity if they did not admire it, or to forgive him for what they considered to be one serious error of jedgment if they were strongly opposed to it. Riding a wave of popularity and the 1876 return to Democratic rule in Mississippi, Lamar was elected by the Legislature to the United States Senate.

The Profiles in Courage picture of "Redemption" had no room to discuss the Mississippi Plan and the violent details of the "return to Democratic [Party] rule in Mississippi" - though democratic rule had been ended, to be replaced by a truncated democracy for whites.

Current also reported:

But truth did not prevail. When the prize-winning book Profiles in Courage (1956) came to their attention, Ames's daughters were understandably upset. This book, bearing on the title page the name of John F. Kennedy, then a United States senator from Massachusetts, lauded the Mississippi white-supremacist L.Q.C. Lamar as one of its exemplars of statesmanly courage. In doing so, it slurred Adelbert Ames. "No state suffered more from carpetbag rule than Mississippi," the book asserted, and it exhumed the stale canard about "the extravagances of the reconstruction government" with its "heavy" state debt. By implication, Governor Ames was to blame. Ames's daughters protested repeatedly to Senator (and later President) Kennedy and to his special counsel, Theodore C. Sorensen. They got only evasive replies. No correction was ever made in any of the successive reissues of the Sorensen-Kennedy book. (my emphasis)

Now, to be clear, John Kennedy as President from 1961-63 did more than any other President except for Lyndon Johnson to restore the democracy in the South that Lamar and his white-supremacist cronies had destroyed. That was the main reason Kennedy was so bitterly hated by so many white Southerners.

And Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in Robert Kennedy and His Times (1978) quotes John Kennedy from Schlesinger's own contemporary diary entry of 06/20/1963. Kennedy was commenting specifically on the murder of Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers:

I don't understand the South. I'm coming to believe that [Radical Republican Reconstruction-era Congressman] Thaddeus Stevens was right. I had always been taught to regard him as a man of vicious bias. But when I see this sort of thing, I begin to wonder how else you can treat them.

Schlesinger, who had been a Harvard professor, notes, "Alas, he had been thus taught by the Harvard history department."

Schlesinger also quotes Robert Kennedy, again in response to a Mississippi incident, the white mob riot at the University of Mississippi in 1962, saying that Jack Kennedy had told him that his experiences as President with the Southern resistance to racial integration had made him change his view of Reconstruction.

So I'm willing to be generous and think that if Kennedy had not been assassinated, that he might eventually have rewritten his chapter on L.Q.C. Lamar and Adelbert Ames.

Adelbert Ames' story had a happier ending than Kennedy's. Ames returned North and became a millionaire in the textile business. He had a big family and lived until the age of 97. He died the month after Franklin Roosevelt was inagurated as President in 1933. He always defended his fight for democracy in Mississippi.

Tags: adelbert ames, arthur schlesinger, kenneth stammp, l.q.c. lamar, reconstruction, redeemers, redemption, richard nelson current