Jon Wiener | The Nation

The author may be contacted regarding this piece at JonWiener@hotmail.com.

THE EMPEROR OF OCEAN PARK.

By Stephen L. Carter.
Knopf. 657 pp. $26.95.

MIA: WOMEN FIGHTING STATE TERROR

Jerusalem

We would like to thank Alexander Cockburn for his excellent March 25 "Beat the Devil" column, "The Nightmare in Israel." As activists in Ta'ayush (Arab-Jewish Partnership), we commend his giving voice to the courageous Jewish Israelis who are fighting against Sharon's state terror. However, we were disappointed that Cockburn did not mention any women. Ruchama Marton, for example, as founder and president of Physicians for Human Rights Israel, has been struggling against Israel's occupation and draconian policies in the territories for over a decade. Gila Svirsky is one of the leading activists in the Coalition of Women for a Just Peace; this group has been instrumental in raising public awareness and organizing protests and vigils over the past year and a half. Yehudith Keshet is one of the organizers of Machsom Watch, a group of women who stand witness at the various Israeli checkpoints around the country. These are just three of the many Jewish women who deserve recognition for speaking and acting out against the evil being perpetuated by the Israeli government. And while it is crucial at times like these to heed the voices of all progressive Jewish opposition, it is equally vital to recognize the participation of Palestinian citizens of Israel in the same struggles. Often forgotten in a conflict purportedly between "Arabs" and "Jews," Palestinians in Israel continue to play a foundational role in anti-occupation groups like Ta'ayush, PHR and Bat Shalom. We must insure that women and minorities are not, once again, elided from the historical record.

CATHERINE ROTTENBERG
SHIRA ROBINSON

DENMARK VESEY'S SLAVE REBELLION

Clinton, N.Y.

We encourage readers interested in the debate about black abolitionist Denmark Vesey to turn to the October 2001 and January 2002 William and Mary Quarterly (WMQ) rather than rely on Jon Wiener's misleading and error-ridden recapitulation of it ["Denmark Vesey: A New Verdict," March 11]. Wiener applauds the "stunning piece of historical detective work" by Michael Johnson, who contends that the Vesey plot in Charleston in 1822 was "not a plan by blacks to kill whites but rather a conspiracy by whites to kill blacks." In pinning superlatives on Johnson, however, Wiener neglects to disclose that he and Johnson have been close friends for almost thirty years, dating back at least to the 1970s when both worked together at the University of California, Irvine. With the ethics of historians currently under a great deal of public scrutiny, we find this omission disingenuous at best.

We will have more to say about Johnson's novel interpretation in future publications. We do agree with Wiener that Johnson relies on the manuscript court records, although Wiener errs in implying that scholars writing prior to Johnson neglected to examine those documents. We also agree with Wiener that the coerced testimony of Carolina bondmen in the court records, like virtually all documents pertaining to slavery, should not "be taken at face value." Thus, we do not agree with him (or Johnson) that the manuscript court record "is the only authoritative contemporary source." As with any other surviving document about slave resistance, the court record must be evaluated in the context of other relevant sources. We do not believe that Johnson has adequately responded to our criticism in the WMQ. Indeed, given his energetic investment in denying black agency, we wonder what sort of evidence short of the second coming of Vesey himself with an admission of guilt on his lips would persuade Johnson that at least some of the slaves in Charleston in 1822 were planning to liberate themselves by force.

Johnson responded to his critics by concluding that Vesey and his followers were really the victims of a Machiavellian hoax perpetrated by James Hamilton Jr., the politically ambitious Charleston mayor. For the moment, we will merely say that the principals of 1822, white as well as black, were far more complicated than Johnson, or Wiener, seems to think.

DOUGLAS R. EGERTON, ROBERT L. PAQUETTE

WIENER REPLIES

Irvine, Calif.

Did Denmark Vesey plan what would have been the biggest slave uprising in US history? Or was he framed because of a rivalry between political factions of the slaveholding elite? For decades historians--including myself--have been teaching the former. Now there's important evidence that we may have been wrong. The evidence comes from Michael Johnson. It's true that he was my colleague at UC Irvine until he left for Johns Hopkins eight years ago and that we remain friends. But Southern history is a small field in which people tend to know one another, and I'm friends with those on both sides of this debate. These friendships are less significant for readers than the quality of the evidence about Vesey's trial and execution. Egerton and Paquette promise they'll tell us what they think about that "complicated" issue in "future publications." It's too bad they didn't give us more substance in this one. Meanwhile, Johnson's piece has just been honored by the board of editors of the William and Mary Quarterly, the leading journal of early American history, as its best article of 2001.

JON WIENER

TULSA'S (AND AMERICA'S) SHAME

Tulsa, Okla.

Adrian Brune's insightful and informative article "Tulsa's Shame" [March 18] shines light on a subject once cloaked in a conspiracy of silence. But Tulsa's shame--a horrible act of ethnic cleansing of blacks by the institutions of white power--is not solely Tulsa's or Oklahoma's but America's shame as well. After World War I white mob violence, often tacitly supported by local governments, flared up across the country. Chicago, Omaha and St. Louis were just some of the cities that experienced race riots similar to Tulsa's. The systematic violence and disfranchisement of blacks in Tulsa is not unique to this little oil town on the plains, even though its remoteness from national centers of political and cultural power make it an easy target.

Tulsa may indeed be a conservative town on the buckle of the Bible Belt, but it is the only city, as far as I know, that has been courageous enough to take a good hard look in the mirror in its attempt to seek justice and reconciliation for its almost forgotten victims of racial violence during the pre-civil rights movement era. And it wasn't the legions of cosmopolitan journalists now swooping over the story that broke the silence but the voices of a few brave souls who cared enough about the riot's legacy to keep its history alive.

RUSSELL COBB

Tulsa, Okla.

I am of Native American descent and have lived in Tulsa my whole life, except for a tour in the Navy. The US government took the Oklahoma Territory, gave it away to whoever wanted it and drove Native Americans out of our lands and onto reservations with poor living conditions, then and now. The people who should be upset are the Native Americans, but you don't see Native Americans fighting or complaining that "you took my land." We were here first, but you don't see us wanting a memorial for something that happened long ago. So as far as I am concerned on the race riot, yes, it was a tragedy, the Oklahoma City bombing was a tragedy, September 11 was a tragedy, and I am, with the rest of the country, sorry for those people's losses. Life goes on. Always remember, never forget, but move on.

BRIAN RANDOL

Lexington, Ky.

Adrian Brune mentions that at the end of the Civil War blacks flocked to Oklahoma looking for a state to "call their own." But Tulsa was, as a part of Indian Territory, not a place for either blacks or whites to call their own--unless they were stealing it. Tulsa was part of the Creek Nation, given to the displaced Creeks for "as long as grass grows and water flows." I support reparations for the victims of the Tulsa race riot but find it appalling that there is no recognition that the entire eastern part of the state was created in an orgy of racism unparalleled in the history of our country.

MARGARET VERBLE

Boston

To clarify a statement toward the end of the article that "the Tulsa Metropolitan Ministries has raised about $20,000 toward reparations privately": The Unitarian Universalist Association contributed that $20,000 to the TMM, an interfaith coalition, to initiate a fund for the direct payment of reparations to riot survivors. The UUA has also contributed another $5,000 to help TMM set up antiracism programs.

THE REV. WILLIAM G. SINKFORD

Tulsa, Okla.

As one who has discussed this history with students, colleagues and fellow residents, I know that the riot remains highly controversial. The question is who, if anyone, is going to pay? The city? state? federal government? Tulsa is undergoing significant demographic change with the influx of immigrants from Latin America and Asia. Might it not be more effective to "correct" for past injustices by investing in public services and providing grants to innovative community groups, businesses and individuals to facilitate positive, progressive cultural relations across not just black-white but a number of racial and ethnic lines?

ANDREW WOOD

Bixby, Okla.

The plan backed by many Tulsans, a museum in the old Vernon AME church in Greenwood, and memorial and educational resources funded through the Greenwood Cultural Center, would do more than reparations could ever do. Why feed a few when you can teach a city's population to fish?

KIRK BJORNSGAARD

NEVER DROPPED THE WELFARE BALL

Washington, D.C.

Barbara Ehrenreich and Frances Fox Piven charge that think tanks, including the Economic Policy Institute, failed to look "ahead to the prospect of rising unemployment" in the context of welfare reform ["Who's Utopian Now?" Feb. 4]. That erroneous critique from people we respect and we hoped would be more familiar with our work was disappointing. EPI researchers have published many papers and developed mountains of data on the need to address welfare reform with labor market conditions in mind. We've highlighted the problems of unemployment and underemployment for low-wage workers. We've also shown that falling wages among low-wage workers reflected these problems, which are only worsened by forcing people into the labor market without any corresponding job creation programs.

When welfare reform was first debated, we produced a widely cited report that examined the potential for increased labor supply to outstrip demand and therefore lower wages (by 12 percent!) among low-wage workers. We provided statistics on wages, unemployment and underemployment among workers likely to have left welfare, to illustrate the weaknesses in the job market for former welfare recipients. We published frequent analyses on the labor market experiences of young minority women. We even added staff to try to insure that this work reached a large network of advocates and activists.

To accuse us of not noticing the relationship between the labor market and welfare reform is inaccurate and unfair. We have continued to examine the job prospects of former welfare recipients, even during the boom years. Our current work focuses on how the downturn is affecting former welfare recipients. We haven't once dropped the ball.

HEATHER BOUSHEY
LARRY MISHEL

A historian questions whether he led a slave revolt, but his heroism still stands.

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Thirty-eight years after the bombing of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church, two of the four principals are dead, but the issues are still full of life. Thomas Blanton Jr. is one of two surviving Klan bombers, and after a jury convicted him in early May of murdering the four black girls that Sunday morning, former Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley wrote a blistering Op-Ed for the New York Times accusing the FBI of concealing evidence and aiding the Klan for decades after the event. The FBI's denial made page one the next day: "There's no reason we would have done that," a bureau spokesperson declared. The Times also published a letter from the special agent in charge of the FBI's Birmingham office, calling Baxley's Op-Ed "a disservice to all the agents who tirelessly investigated the 1963 bombing."

Diane McWhorter's Carry Me Home is a history of that bombing, of the FBI "investigation," of the people responsible for it--high and low--and of the civil rights movement in Birmingham. She grew up there--she was 10 years old at the time of the bombing--and later she worried, because her father, who had fallen from an elite family, had spent many evenings attending what her mother called "civil rights meetings." But Diane knew he had Klan literature around. Eventually she realized that her father could have been attending Klan meetings, and might even have been one of the bombers. Many years later she set out to find out the truth about him--and ended up writing this magnificent book.

Although the 16th Street Baptist Church served as a rallying point for demonstrators in the 1963 campaign, it was not a Movement church. McWhorter calls it "the snootiest black congregation in the city," and its founding minister worked with the local industrialists to persuade blacks not to join the union. At services they didn't sing gospel songs but rather "the sedate hymns of white Christianity." And 16th Street Baptist was the only church in the city that charged the Movement for using its facilities.

The bomb was a huge one--perhaps a dozen sticks of dynamite. When the blast was heard across town, Klansman Ross Keith, almost certainly one of the bombers, told a friend, "I guess it's somebody discriminating against them niggers again." The four girls who were killed were in the women's lounge, freshening up for their roles as ushers in the main service. Denise McNair was 11; the three others were 14: Carole Robertson, Addie May Collins and Cynthia Wesley--Wesley was wearing high heels for the first time, "shiny black ones bought the day before."

There is a survivor who was in the women's lounge with the other four: 12-year-old Sarah Collins, sister of Addie May. When they found Sarah in the rubble, her face was spurting blood. She was loaded into an ambulance--a "colored" one. On the way to the hospital she sang "Jesus Loves Me" and occasionally said, "What happened? I can't see." Today she is 50 and still blind in one eye.

Immediately after the four girls were identified, the authorities began "furious background checks on them, the search for some flaw deserving punishment." But their records were clean: None, that is, had participated in the recent civil rights demonstrations. Thus, even the city fathers and the local press had to agree they were "innocent."

The big question was never who the bombers were--they were identified by the FBI and the police almost immediately. The big question, McWhorter shows, is what permitted them to get away with it--"the state's malevolence or the FBI's negligence." Dozens of bombings had been carried out by the Klan in the preceding few years, virtually none of which were prosecuted. The FBI's informant in the local Klan, Gary Thomas Rowe, participated in some of them. McWhorter's index has ninety entries for "bombings," starting in the late 1940s. Most Klan bombings in the fifties targeted upwardly mobile blacks moving into middle-class white neighborhoods.

After the 16th Street church bombing, local authorities kept suggesting that blacks were the bombers. The police took the church custodian in for questioning. The FBI's pursuit of witnesses was unhurried, which gave the Klansmen more time to coordinate alibis. FBI informant Rowe told a Birmingham policeman that the man who put up the money to have the church bombed was Harry Belafonte.

The man convicted just weeks ago, Thomas Blanton Jr., was part of an extremist subgroup of the Klan. Initially he focused his violent hatred on Catholics, like the Klan of the 1920s. He had a neighbor, a widow, who was Catholic; she received regular "anonymous calls" from a voice she recognized as his--she had known him for eighteen years--telling her "Niggers and Catholics have to die." Once he threw red paint on her new white Ford and slashed her tires. Earlier in 1963 Blanton had been talking about organizing a church bombing, but he wanted to bomb a Catholic church, not a Negro one. "His associates pronounced him not intelligent enough to make a bomb but dumb enough to place it."

The other man recently charged with the bombing has been judged mentally incapable of standing trial. But in 1962-63, Bobby Frank Cherry was 32 years old, had "no upper front teeth, a 'Bobby' tattoo on his arm, seven kids, and a wife he beat and cheated on." He had been a police suspect in the 1958 attempted bombing of Birmingham's Temple Beth El, and McWhorter has evidence strongly suggesting that he also participated in bombing churches in January 1962, almost two years before the four girls were killed. If the FBI had investigated him after the 1962 explosions, that might have prevented the 16th Street Baptist Church bombings, but as McWhorter points out, "instead the FBI was investigating Martin Luther King," proposing to, as the bureau put it, "expose, disrupt, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" the leader of the civil rights movement. (In the middle of the Birmingham battle, Bobby Kennedy agreed to let J. Edgar Hoover wiretap King.)

The killing of the four black girls finally spurred the Kennedy Administration to propose, Congress to pass and new President Lyndon Johnson to sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing racial discrimination in public facilities--the first significant civil rights legislation in a century. The bombing followed the biggest and most successful mass civil rights demonstrations in US history--police met the thousands of marchers with fire hoses and dogs. Today the history of the civil rights movement seems like one of steady progress: first the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, which propelled King to national prominence and established nonviolent direct action as the new tactic, supplanting the legal gradualism of the NAACP; then, in 1960-61, the sit-in movement, in which small groups of courageous students across the South took the lead in a direct personal challenge to segregation; then the Freedom Rides, where a few brave people provoked racist violence that compelled the Kennedy Administration to enter the civil rights arena; and finally Birmingham, where mass protests filled the jails and finally won national legislation outlawing segregation in public accommodations.

What's been forgotten is the grim situation that faced King and the Movement at the outset of the Birmingham campaign in 1962. It had been seven long years since the Montgomery bus boycott--seven years with intermittent acts of immense heroism but without concrete victories. The Southern states were defiant, and the Kennedys, as Victor Navasky argued in Kennedy Justice, considered activists like Martin Luther King to be a problem that endangered their real initiatives, like a tax cut and fighting communism. By 1963 King and the Movement desperately needed a nationally significant victory, somewhere.

King himself had not, up to 1963, initiated any civil rights protest himself--starting with Montgomery in 1955, he was brought in as a spokesman after the action had already begun. Birmingham was no different. Here the real hero and moving force was Fred Shuttlesworth, in many ways the opposite of King--a man of the people, not of the elite; a man who courted danger and pushed the envelope, who stayed till the end, unlike King, who was criticized for leaving town early and leaving "a community stranded with false hope and huge legal fees." Much of the story of Birmingham is the story of Shuttlesworth's brilliant strategic initiatives and awesome physical courage--and King's more cautious efforts to negotiate a settlement by enlisting the White House, in exchange for calling off the demonstrations. It was Shuttlesworth who set out to launch mass demonstrations, fill the jails and compel the city leaders to desegregate downtown businesses and public facilities. McWhorter's book also shows just how close the Birmingham campaign came to failure. A month into the campaign, few people had signed up to go to jail--barely 300 in total, even though King himself had gone to jail. "There are more Negroes going to jail for getting drunk," one Movement leader commented.

What turned this around was an idea of James Bevel's--he had been a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leader, who later became field secretary for King's organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. His idea for Birmingham: Fill the jails with children. The adults were full of doubt and fear, but the kids were eager. Hundreds boycotted school on May 2, 1963, instead gathering at the 16th Street Baptist Church, then marching into the streets--more than a thousand of them. The children confronted the cops, singing in high voices "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around" and "Which Side Are You On?" and then were ushered into buses to go to jail. For the first time, King and his lieutenants had achieved Gandhi's goal--fill the jails.

The next day thousands more showed up to march. That was the day of the fire hoses. The city's fire chief initially resisted officials' attempts to enlist the fire department in attacking demonstrators, on the grounds that the national union of firefighters officially opposed using fire equipment to "control" crowds. But when the orders came, they turned on high-pressure hoses powerful enough to knock a big man off his feet, blast the shirts off people's backs and flush individuals down the gutters.

The success of the civil rights movement on the national political landscape required not just heroic action by large numbers of ordinary black people; it also required that the viciousness of the opponents of civil rights be presented vividly and dramatically to ordinary American newspaper readers and TV watchers. In this, the Birmingham movement turned out to be supremely fortunate to have the grotesque Eugene "Bull" Connor as police commissioner. Photos of young demonstrators linking arms and standing up to the high-pressure hoses made page one around the world. Life magazine ran a two-page spread of the most dramatic photo of firemen blasting demonstrators, headlined "They Fight a Fire That Won't Go Out." The photos of police dogs attacking demonstrators had the same effect. The New York Times ran a photo of a dog biting a demonstrator on page one, three columns wide and above the fold, headlined "Dogs and Hoses Repulse Negroes at Birmingham."

Key reporters had already found the civil rights drama a compelling story. In 1960, the New York Times published a blazing Harrison Salisbury story on page one before the Birmingham campaign got going: "Every reasoned approach, every inch of middle ground has been fragmented by the emotional dynamite of racism, reinforced by the whip, the razor, the gun, the bomb, the torch, the club, the knife, the mob, the police and many branches of the state's apparatus." State authorities responded by charging Salisbury with forty-two counts of criminal libel. The Times's response was to order its reporters to stay out of Alabama--not exactly a fighting stance--which meant that other news organizations would henceforth get the story while the Times relied on wire copy for the climactic battles. The Times didn't return until a year later, when Claude Sitton persuaded executives to let him cover the aftermath of the Freedom Rides.

While the Times proved gun-shy on Alabama, CBS-TV didn't; network president Frank Stanton sent reporter Howard K. Smith to Birmingham to make a documentary. (Even though Stanton was not exactly a civil rights advocate; he also "blacked out all Negro speakers at the Democratic and Republican presidential conventions.")Smith's crew set out to interview leading whites; the head of the elite Women's Committee told him on camera that "one of the contributing factors to our creativeness in the South is sort of a joyousness of the Negro." But she was worried because it had been four or five years since she had "heard Negroes just spontaneously break into song." Smith also turned out to be the only national reporter on the scene when the Freedom Riders arrived and were savagely beaten by a white mob while the police stood by.

Who Speaks for Birmingham? aired on CBS in 1961 and featured Smith's account of the mob attack on the Freedom Riders. Network executives complained that the program "presented Birmingham's Negroes in a better light than its whites," but executive producer Fred Friendly fought to keep the whole thing, and in the end gave up only Smith's closing line, a quote from Edmund Burke: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." But when the same Howard K. Smith criticized Kennedy in his regular Sunday radio commentary, asking whether "we really deserve to win the cold war" in view of the racist violence in Birmingham, CBS News suspended him from his job as Washington bureau chief.

The media coverage was crucial, but one of the secrets of the demonstrations was that neither the police nor the media distinguished between marchers and spectators. Only a couple of hundred people joined the early official demonstrations, but a thousand or more turned out to watch and see what happened. The police attacked everybody, and the press reported thousands of demonstrators.

Carry Me Home includes the most detailed account ever of the Birmingham Movement's strategy and tactics, day by day and hour by hour, but what makes it unique is its account of the local opposition to civil rights, and particularly the links between the "Big Mules," who ran Birmingham's industrial economy, and the Klan bombers. The book's most important contribution is its decisive evidence that the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church "was the endgame in the city fathers' long and profitable tradition of maintaining their industrial supremacy through vigilantism."

Birmingham had never been what you would call a happy place--the New South's one center of heavy industry, it was a city where the ruling elite fought working-class militancy with the most blatant racism. Power in Birmingham centered on US Steel, which ran the town along fascist lines--one Communist organizer in the 1930s was sentenced to a shackled road crew for possessing "seditious" literature, which included The Nation magazine. The dirty work of the Big Mules was carried out by the Alabama Klan, which was reorganized in the 1930s as an antiunion shock force.

Charles DeBardeleben headed the Big Mules--he ran the biggest coal company in the state, and his father had pretty much founded Birmingham as a coal and iron center. By the mid-1930s DeBardeleben was also a secret corporate benefactor of the Constitutional Educational League, part of a global network of pro-Nazi propagandists. The league's 1938 banquet featured George Van Horn Moseley, who "advocated sterilizing all Jewish immigrants to the US." McWhorter names the names of the other key Big Mules and shows their connections to the bombers of the 1950s and 1960s.

History also loomed large for the Jewish businessmen who owned the downtown department stores that were the target of the demonstrators' demands for integration and jobs. Birmingham's Jews had been traumatized a generation earlier during the Scottsboro trial, when the nine "Boys" were defended during their rape trial by a Jewish attorney from New York named Samuel Liebowitz. The state's closing statement challenged the jury to "show them that Alabama justice cannot be bought and sold with Jew money from New York." The jury obliged.

That was 1933. Thirty years later, Birmingham's Jews were still feeling defensive. One liked to tell his gentile friends, "It wasn't the Birmingham Jews who killed Jesus. It was the Miami Jews." Now they declared that they were as opposed to "outside agitators" as Bull Connor--indeed, one Birmingham Jewish organization issued a public statement demanding not only that Martin Luther King stay away but that the Anti-Defamation League stay out of Birmingham.

Birmingham is also famous as the place where Martin Luther King composed his best-known written work, "Letter From a Birmingham Jail." It wasn't King's idea. Harvey Shapiro, an editor at The New York Times Magazine, suggested that King write a "letter from prison" for the magazine. The missive that King wrote turned out to be a classic, "the most eloquent treatment of the nexus between law and injustice since Thoreau's essay 'Civil Disobedience.'" But when King submitted his piece, the Times editors rejected it. It wasn't printed for another two months, and then in The Atlantic Monthly.

The Martin Luther King who appears in McWhorter's account is not very heroic. His claim that "unearned suffering is redemptive," made at the March on Washington earlier that year, seemed irresponsible to more and more blacks, ranging from SNCC militants to ordinary Birmingham blacks. In King's first statement after the bombing, he asked, "Who murdered those four girls?" and answered, "The apathy and complacency of many Negroes who will sit down on their stools and do nothing and not engage in creative protest to get rid of this evil." Carole Robertson's mother had not participated in the demonstrations; she was so outraged at King blaming her for her daughter's murder that she refused to join the three other families in a mass funeral for the girls.

At the other end of the spectrum in black Birmingham were the men who saw the events as providing "a chance to kill us a cracker." The Movement's insistence that marchers take a pledge of nonviolence was based on leaders' knowledge of the deep rage that black men in particular bore for whites. "At mass meetings, King began passing around a box for people to deposit razors, knives, ice picks, and pistols, and salted his inspirational calls to dignity with reminders that being black did not in itself constitute a virtue." People needed courage and hope before they could take the pledge of nonviolence.

McWhorter's panoramic cast includes blacks on the wrong side of the Movement. "Rat Killer" ran the 17th Street Shine Parlor, a popular after-hours spot where visiting stars like Jackie Wilson, Sam Cooke and the Temptations hung out, and where Movement preachers got their shoes shined. But Rat Killer was "Bull Connor's right-hand man" in the black community--he traded information for informal permission to sell bootleg liquor and do some pimping.

McWhorter weaves her personal story throughout the book, and these sections provide uniquely rich and revealing evidence of the blindness of middle-class whites in this era. The book opens at Birmingham's elite white country club on a Sunday, when McWhorter was having brunch as usual with her family. It turns out to have been the morning the church was bombed. McWhorter was a year younger than the youngest of the four girls killed. Although the bombing marked a turning point in the nation's history, her family took little note of it. She doesn't remember it at all, and her mother's diary entry for that day says only that Diane's rehearsal for the community theater production of The Music Man was canceled--not in mourning over the deaths but because whites feared that black people would riot.

The police dogs that horrified the world were well-known to McWhorter. Before the historic day they attacked the demonstrators, the police brought one of the dogs to an assembly at her school to demonstrate its crime-fighting abilities. McWhorter was so excited by the event that she changed her career goal to police-dog handler (she had planned to become an Olympic equestrian).

At the end of the book, McWhorter finally confronts her father on tape. He says he's told friends his daughter is writing a book about "the nigger movement," but says he wasn't in the Klan and was never involved in murdering anyone. She concludes he was a camp follower but not much of an activist.

The rest of the key figures in the story are mostly dead now: Bull Connor died in 1973; Robert Chambliss, until Blanton the only man convicted in the bombing (in a 1977 trial brought by then-Alabama Attorney General Baxley), died in 1985 while serving his prison term. (Baxley ran for governor in 1978 and lost.) The FBI's Klan informant, Gary Thomas Rowe, admitted that he and three Klan members shot and killed Viola Liuzzo on the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march; the killers were acquitted of murder (but not of violating her civil rights), and Rowe went into the witness protection program after the trial and died in 1998. The other Klan bombers died too, until the only ones left seemed to be Bobby Frank Cherry and Tommy Blanton.

Chambliss's 1977 trial exploded back to life early this May with Baxley's New York Times Op-Ed. He wrote that he had "requested, demanded and begged the FBI for evidence" from 1971 through 1977; that his office was "repeatedly stonewalled"; that the bureau practiced "deception," the result of which was that Blanton went "free for 24 years" while the FBI had "smoking gun evidence hidden in its files." He concluded by describing "the disgust" he felt over the FBI's conduct. No state attorney general has ever spoken so forcefully in criticizing the bureau.

Now Blanton has been convicted, but virtually all the other Southern white men who killed blacks during the heyday of the civil rights movement have gone unpunished. In the end the Klan bombers may not be the biggest villains in this story. It's the city and state officials, including the police and the FBI, who tolerated and sometimes encouraged racist violence, and the Kennedy brothers, who didn't want to do anything about it until they were forced to. Diane McWhorter started writing about "growing up on the wrong side of the civil rights revolution"; she ended up with the most important book on the movement since Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters. It should become a classic.

Nick Bromell's Tomorrow Never Knows explores rock and roll in the sixties.

December 8, 2000: It was twenty years ago today that Mark David Chapman shot and killed John Lennon outside the Dakota on West 72nd Street in New York City, bringing whatever was left of the sixties to a definitive and miserable end. Yet Lennon lives on--not just for his now-graying fans, not just for younger kids discovering the Beatles, but in some unexpected and surprising ways.

Case in point: At the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia this past August, as Dick Cheney stepped up to the podium to accept the party's nomination as vice presidential candidate, the band struck up a spirited version of Lennon's song "Come Together." This is the one on the Abbey Road album that begins "Here come ol' flattop" (Cheney of course is mostly bald), and continues, "One thing I can tell you is you got to be free"--a sixties sentiment that meant something quite different from tax cuts for the rich.

Cheney probably didn't know that Lennon started writing "Come Together" as a campaign song--for Timothy Leary's planned 1970 campaign for California governor against Ronald Reagan. Leary never used the song, but Lennon sang it live onstage at Madison Square Garden in 1972 in the midst of another presidential campaign, when Nixon was trying to have him deported to silence a prominent voice of the antiwar movement. Lennon changed the title line to "Come together--stop the war--right now!" and the audience cheered wildly.

The Democrats also played a Lennon song at their convention: They used "Imagine" as the theme of a tribute to Jimmy Carter. While the giant video showed Jimmy and Rosalynn hammering nails and fondling small children, the easy-listening version of Lennon's song omitted the words "Imagine there's no heaven/it's easy if you try/No hell below us/Above us only sky"--not really appropriate for America's first born-again Baptist President.

"Imagine" is a utopian anthem, and the utopian imagination was always a keystone of sixties New Left thought, distinguishing it from the bread-and-butter politics of traditional working-class socialism. "Power to the imagination" was a key slogan written on the walls in May '68. Today the country is full of billboards urging people to "Dial 1-800-imagine." I tried it. You don't get John Lennon singing "Imagine no possessions." Instead you get AT&T Wireless Services: Press 1 to upgrade your wireless plan, press 2 to inquire about new service, press 3 to inquire about an order and, of course, press 4 to hear these options again.

A search of the Nexis database found these variants on Lennon's "Imagine no possessions": a Republican who said "Imagine no estate tax," a television critic who wrote "Imagine no more Regis," a technophobe who wrote "Imagine no computers" and a Democratic pundit who headlined an opinion piece, "Imagine There's No Nader."

Lennon lyrics appear in print in some other unlikely places. When Time put Bill Clinton on its cover at the beginning of his first term, the cover line was "You Say You Want a Revolution." Two years later, when the Republicans won control of the House, the New York Times ran an opinion piece by R.W. Apple Jr. headlined "You Say You Want a Devolution." And just a few months ago, after Joe Lieberman changed his mind about privatizing Social Security, The New Republic headline read "You say you want an Evolution."

The headline writers probably had forgotten that Lennon wrote "Revolution" in response to the May '68 uprisings in Paris, criticizing student radicals for advocating violence. He recorded two versions of the song. The single--the "fast" version--came first. It was recorded on May 30, 1968, and released in the United States in August, shortly after the police riot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. After the opening line--"You say you want a revolution"--it concluded, "count me out." The radical press was outraged. Ramparts called the song "a betrayal"; New Left Review called it "a lamentable petty bourgeois cry of fear." Time, on the other hand, reported that the Beatles had criticized "radical activists the world over," which Time found "exhilarating." The second, "slow" version of the song was released on the White Album two months later. Now, after the line "count me out," Lennon added another word: "in." He later explained, "I put both in because I wasn't sure." A year later he was singing "Power to the People."

Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance" was sung by half a million antiwar demonstrators at the Washington Monument in 1969, but since then it's come in for some revisionism. I remember militant friends back in those days singing "Give the dictatorship of the proletariat a chance." Then there's "Give War a Chance," which pops up every once in a while--the establishment journal Foreign Affairs used it as the title of a 1999 article by Edward Luttwak arguing against US intervention in local conflicts. Frontline broadcast a story on the Balkans in 1999 with the same title, and P.J. O'Rourke used Give War a Chance as the title for a book that became a bestseller. On the other hand, none other than Trent Lott uttered the words "give peace a chance" on the floor of the Senate--talking about Kosovo. Finally, a company called Peace Software (www.peace.com) is using the slogan "Give Peace a Chance."

Lennon's most intense and personal post-Beatle song, "God," a very slow track on his first solo album, contains a litany that concluded, "I don't believe in Beatles." The New York Times ran a full-page interview in September with Philip Leider, the founding editor of ArtForum, that included his own personal version of the lyrics, which took up twenty-three lines of our newspaper of record. Warhol came first: "I don't beleeve in Andy." Then: "I don't beleeve in Haring"; "I don't beleeve in Fischl"; "I don't beleeve in Koons"; and so on through nineteen more current art stars.

Several of Lennon's most memorable lines have not been appropriated by pundits or Op-Ed types: "Instant Karma's gonna get you" remains untouched, at least according to Nexis, and thus far nobody has found a way to use "I am the walrus, goo-goo g'joob." But aside from these notable exceptions, the conclusion is clear: John Lennon may be gone, but twenty years after his death his words and ideas are here, there and everywhere.

On Veterans Day, November 11, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt will appear on the Mall at a spot between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial to break ground for the long-delayed World War II Memorial. The grandiose, triumphal design of the memorial has been criticized widely on aesthetic grounds--it reminds many of the work of Albert Speer, Hitler's favorite architect. But there's a bigger problem: The memorial will break up the country's most important site for protest demonstrations.

This is where 250,000 people gathered to hear Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963. This is where half a million people gathered for the Vietnam Moratorium demonstration in 1969 to sing "Give Peace a Chance." This is where the AIDS quilt--the 40,000-plus panels covering the equivalent of sixteen football fields that commemorates people who have died from AIDS--has been displayed regularly since 1987. This is where the Million Man March met in 1995, the Promise Keepers gathered in 1997 and the Million Mom March against gun violence rallied this past May.

The memorial will occupy 7.4 acres. In that space a private organization headed by Bob Dole plans to build a granite plaza that will include two triumphal arches, each as high as a four-story building, and fifty-six marble columns, each seventeen feet tall and decorated with bronze funeral wreaths and huge eagle sculptures.

Stopping the plan now won't be easy. Originally, the American Battle Monuments Commission selected a site near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. But J. Carter Brown, the chairman of the Commission of Fine Arts, objected that it was "unacceptable" to "tuck [the memorial] away in the woods." The commission approved the Mall plan in late September, in a 7-to-5 vote.

Defenders of the plan argue that the site and design selection process have taken longer than World War II itself and that the memorial should be built now, before all the veterans are dead. But memorials like this are not built for the participants in the events that are commemorated. Memorials are supposed to help posterity remember and honor its forebears. The Lincoln Memorial wasn't even begun until 1914, half a century after Lincoln's death.

Babbitt has the power to overrule the commission, but that's unlikely, given the Clinton Administration's eagerness to please veterans. An organization called the National Coalition to Save Our Mall (www.savethemall.org) mounted a legal challenge in early October based on a historic-preservation argument. The suit refers to a 1986 law establishing criteria for decisions made by the Secretary of the Interior and other agencies, among them the requirement that plans for new historical monuments must "protect, to the maximum extent practicable, open space and existing public use." Open space for public use--where Americans can gather by the hundreds of thousands to address their government--is precisely what this monstrosity will destroy.

Poor Anthony Summers--he writes a 600-page book on Nixon based on massive and exhaustive research, including interviews with a thousand people and 120 pages of documentation--and all the media care about are the couple of pages he devotes to pill-popping and wife-beating. The same thing happened with his J. Edgar Hoover bio, which is remembered mostly for that unforgettable cross-dressing story.

But The Arrogance of Power has historical significance. It shows definitively that during the last weeks of the 1968 election campaign--when Nixon was challenging Vice President Hubert Humphrey--Nixon secretly sabotaged peace talks that might have ended the war at that point. Nixon went on to win one of the closest elections in history, after which he kept the fighting going another five years, during which more than 20,000 Americans and perhaps a million Vietnamese were killed.

The general outlines of the situation were well-known at the time: On October 31, just a week before Election Day, Johnson ordered the bombing halt that the North Vietnamese had said was a prerequisite to their entering into peace talks. Nixon had been eight points ahead in the Gallup poll, but two days after the bombing halt, his lead had fallen to two points. One poll even had Humphrey pulling ahead of Nixon then.

But the talks did not begin, because two days after the bombing halt South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu refused to participate. He had good reasons to prefer a Nixon victory--Thieu's regime was kept alive only by Washington, and Humphrey had told him that prolonged US aid was "not in the cards." Observers at the time, and historians subsequently, have speculated about whether Nixon conveyed private assurances to Thieu in those crucial two days. Of course Nixon denied it, and LBJ's memoirs, published three years later, declared that he had "no reason to think" that Nixon "was himself involved in this maneuvering, but a few individuals active in his campaign were." Among historians, Stephen Ambrose has been the most explicit in making the case, along with Clark Clifford, Defense Secretary for LBJ at the time, in his 1991 memoirs.

But no one had the smoking gun--not until Summers. His chapter on Nixon's maneuver provides a fine example of historical detective work. The key messenger, he argues, was Anna Chennault--the Chinese-born widow of an American World War II hero, 43 years old at the time, a prominent Washington hostess and vice chairwoman of the Republican National Finance Committee and co-chairwoman of Women for Nixon-Agnew. She also had connections to Southeast Asian leaders like Chiang Kai-shek and Ferdinand Marcos, as well as those in Saigon. In interviews with Summers, she said she met with Nixon and his campaign manager (and future Attorney General), John Mitchell, who told her to inform Saigon that if Nixon won the election, South Vietnam would get "a better deal."

Meanwhile, President Johnson deployed the full resources of US intelligence to see whether Nixon was telling Thieu not to go to the peace talks. The CIA had a bug in Thieu's Saigon office, the National Security Agency was intercepting South Vietnamese diplomatic cables and the FBI had wiretaps and physical surveillance at the South Vietnamese Embassy.

It's certainly possible that Anna Chennault was exaggerating her historical importance when she told Summers (and hinted to others earlier) about her role. But here's where the smoking gun appears: Summers reproduces an FBI memo he obtained in 1999 under the Freedom of Information Act. It's dated November 2, and it reports on the results of a wiretap on the phone of the South Vietnamese ambassador: Chennault had contacted the ambassador and "advised him that she had received a message from her boss"--who was described in the memo as "not further identified." The message was "hold on, we are gonna win." Then follows the most tantalizing line: "She advised that her boss had just called from New Mexico." With a little more work, Summers sealed his case: Spiro Agnew made a campaign stop in Albuquerque that day, and the times match. Summers points out that Agnew could not have taken such a crucial step without explicit instructions from Nixon himself.

Summers found that he was not the first to piece this evidence together: Deep in the LBJ Library he found an "eyes only" memo to LBJ showing that national security assistant Walt Rostow had used the same sources to come to the same conclusions. Outraged, Johnson shared Rostow's insight with candidate Humphrey, but they decided not to go public with it in the last days before the election. (They may not have thought the documentation convincing enough and worried that it was too late to have an effect, regardless.) After Election Day, they apparently believed it would be too disruptive of the US political system to reveal what they knew about how the new President had helped himself win.

Wisely, Summers does not argue that his evidence proves Nixon prolonged the war--although he points out that more than a third of all US casualties during the war occurred during Nixon's presidency--a total of 20,763 Americans killed. That was also the period when the most intense bombing occurred, resulting in the deaths of perhaps a million or more Vietnamese. Summers acknowledges that Thieu "very probably" would have balked at peace talks even without prodding from Nixon. However, he argues forcefully and persuasively that it was wrong for a private citizen to interfere with a major diplomatic peace effort for his own political advantage.

Nixon's actions just before the election prolonged the war in a different way: Thieu took credit for Nixon's victory. Thus when Nixon reversed course and tried to push Thieu to the peace table on the eve of the 1972 election, Thieu stalled at the critical moment, arguing that Nixon was in his debt.

The rest of the book amounts to a series of investigations into other suspected crimes or offenses of Nixon's. Here Summers is equally energetic in his research, but with uneven results. For perspective on Nixon's Vietnam policy, the best new analysis is not Summers but rather Jeffrey Kimball's prizewinning book Nixon's Vietnam War, which presents compelling evidence that up to 1971, Nixon and Kissinger believed the war was winnable. Summers's Watergate chapter doesn't add anything of significance to Stanley Kutler's work, and his effort to show that Nixon had a Swiss account linked to a criminal bank in the Bahamas isn't convincing.

The Alger Hiss case was Nixon's first foray into national politics, as a member of HUAC in 1948; it gets a thorough examination by Summers. John Dean, who reviewed the Summers book in the Chicago Tribune, found this section especially noteworthy. Dean occupies a small but significant place in Hiss history for reporting that White House aide Charles Colson remarked that Nixon had told him, "The typewriters are always the key. We built one in the Hiss case"--which, if true, meant Hiss was framed by the FBI, since the crucial physical evidence that he had been a spy came from documents typed on what the prosecution said was Hiss's typewriter. Summers devotes five pages to the forgery-by-typewriter theory; Dean concludes that Summers has "reopened the debate on whether Hiss was framed."

The book has also made news for its reports that Nixon was seen by a psychotherapist while he was President. However, the media excitement over this has missed the more significant story about a President's search for help. The men around Nixon, Summers shows, were alarmed by Nixon's mental condition, especially when he was deciding to invade Cambodia. After meeting with Nixon to discuss a possible invasion, Henry Kissinger told an aide, "Our peerless leader has flipped out." There were disturbing reports of Nixon drinking heavily during these days. And after a Pentagon briefing on the first day of the invasion, Army Chief of Staff Gen. William Westmoreland commented obliquely that "the president's unbridled ebullience...required some adjustment to reality."

It was at this point that Nixon called Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, a psychotherapist who had treated him during the fifties. Nixon had read Hutschnecker's bestseller, The Will to Live, written for people "in the grips of acute conflict." Since Nixon had become President, Hutschnecker had seen him only once, and then to discuss Hutschnecker's views of crime and world peace. Hutschnecker's 1970 White House visit was kept secret, but when the two met, the doctor did not realize that Nixon was seeking treatment. So Hutschnecker started pitching his world peace plans, and Nixon abruptly dismissed him. The President knew he needed help--but didn't get it.

Two days later, with protests engulfing the country, Kissinger worried that the President was "on the edge of a nervous breakdown." This is the point at which the pill-popping story becomes significant. Jack Dreyfus, a Nixon friend and supporter (and founder of the Dreyfus mutual funds), had given Nixon a bottle of a thousand Dilantins--an anticonvulsant Dreyfus claimed helped overcome anxiety and depression. Dreyfus said he told Nixon they should be prescribed by a doctor, but Nixon replied, "To heck with the doctor."

Dilantin had been approved by the FDA, but for the treatment of epileptic seizures. Documented side effects include "slurred speech...mental confusion, dizziness, insomnia, transient nervousness." Instead of getting treatment from the one therapist he trusted, Nixon apparently took the Dilantin Dreyfus had given him. He later asked Dreyfus for--and received--another bottle of a thousand 100-milligram tablets.

Dilantin didn't help: Summers reports that concern about Nixon's mental state in 1974 led Defense Secretary James Schlesinger to order military units not to react to orders from the White House unless they were cleared with him or the Secretary of State.

Ever since Ronald Reagan showed how right-wing a Republican President could be, Nixon-haters have been reconsidering their position. Under Nixon the Environmental Protection Agency and OSHA were created, Social Security payments went up and funding was increased for education, health and the arts. On the welfare issue, Nixon proposed a guaranteed annual family income--far to the left of all his successors, Democratic as well as Republican. And, of course, Nixon ended two decades of official hostility toward China and brought about détente with the Soviet Union. To understand why Nixon took these positions it would be necessary to look beyond Nixon himself to the larger social and political context of the late sixties and early seventies. Summers's narrow focus prevents this kind of broader understanding.