Fresh Air Interview: Don't 'Sanitize' How Our Government Created Ghettos

“We have a myth today that the ghettos in metropolitan areas around the country are what the Supreme Court calls ‘de-facto’ — just the accident of the fact that people have not enough income to move into middle class neighborhoods or because real estate agents steered black and white families to different neighborhoods or because there was white flight,” Rothstein tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross.

“It was not the unintended effect of benign policies,” he says. “It was an explicit, racially purposeful policy that was pursued at all levels of government, and that’s the reason we have these ghettos today and we are reaping the fruits of those policies.”

How JFK made NASA his secret weapon in the fight for civil rights in America

Most Americans know the name of the first black player in professional baseball — Jackie Robinson. But how about the first black professional in the US space program? 

That was Julius Montgomery. He was part of a small cadre of African American mathematicians, engineers and technicians who helped power the space race — at a time when laws kept them from using the same toilet as their coworkers. (Later, he also integrated the Florida Institute of Technology.) These men were the vanguard of what became a government strategy to integrate the South.

Minimum Wage Was Once Enough To Keep a Family of 3 Out of Poverty

Since the 1980s, the federal minimum wage has kept pace with neither inflation, nor the rise of the average worker’s paycheck. That means that while a federal minimum wage in 1968 could have lifted a family of three above the poverty line, now it can’t even do that for a parent with one child, working full-time, 40 hours a week and 52 weeks a year (yes, this calculation assumes that the parent takes no time off).
 

Conspiracy theories about JFK’s assassination don’t stand up to scrutin

50 years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, 59 percent of Americans still believe it was the work of a conspiracy. I was once among them…

Then, one day, I looked up the footnotes in those books, most of them leading me to the multivolume hearings of the Warren Commission. I was shocked. The authors had taken witnesses’ statements out of context, distorted them beyond recognition, and in some cases cherry-picked passages that seemed to back their theories while ignoring testimony that didn’t. It was my first brush with intellectual dishonesty.

But it’s worth recounting the conspiracy buffs’ arguments that I found most persuasive—and why they collapse under scrutiny.

Kennedycare

In the spring of 1962, President John F. Kennedy launched a bold effort to provide health care for the aged—later to be known as Medicare. It culminated in a nationally televised presidential address from Madison Square Garden, carried on the three television networks. It was a flop. The legislation foundered amid charges that it was an attempt to socialize medicine and a threat to individual liberty—the same charges President Obama encountered over the Affordable Care Act five decades later.
 

Johnson tapes: Richard Nixon's 'treason

Declassified tapes of President Lyndon Johnson’s telephone calls provide a fresh insight into his world. Among the revelations – he planned a dramatic entry into the 1968 Democratic Convention to re-join the presidential race. And he caught Richard Nixon sabotaging the Vietnam peace talks… but said nothing.

“…It begins in the summer of 1968. Nixon feared a breakthrough at the Paris Peace talks designed to find a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam war, and he knew this would derail his campaign.
He therefore set up a clandestine back-channel involving Anna Chennault, a senior campaign adviser.

Chennault was despatched to the South Vietnamese embassy with a clear message: the South Vietnamese government should withdraw from the talks, refuse to deal with Johnson, and if Nixon was elected, they would get a much better deal.

So on the eve of his planned announcement of a halt to the bombing, Johnson learned the South Vietnamese were pulling out….”

Party politics at it’s finest, my friends!

Fastest Courtship in the West: How LBJ Won Lady Bird

Lyndon Baines Johnson and Claudia Alta “Lady Bird” Taylor conducted their courtship at breakneck speed. They met in Texas in September 1934 and were engaged by November. The pair was married on Nov. 17, 1934, and remained together until LBJ’s death parted them in 1973.

LBJ, smitten, proposed marriage on their very first date. Lady Bird held back, heeding the voices of her relatives, who counseled caution. In the letter below, dated early November 1934, she wrote to her suitor: “Everybody is so constantly urging me to ‘wait two or three months,’ ‘wait-wait,’ ‘two months isn’t long enough to have known the man you’re to marry.’ ”

Much of their courting took place via mail, as LBJ was in Washington working as a congressional aide, while Lady Bird remained in her hometown (Karnack, Texas). LBJ’s letters were honest and surprisingly sentimental. On Oct. 24, 1934, he wrote to her:

Have been intending to tell you everyday about a little orange comb I carry in my billfold. It is the only thing I have from my little girl at Karnack and when I get lonesome and blue or happy and ambitious I always get pleasure when I look at the little comb and think …just think.

The LBJ Library has just opened a new Web exhibit where you can read more courtship letters between the two Texans.

Lyndon Johnson: That day that changed everything

The weeks after the assassination may have been the “finest moment” in Johnson’s life, argues Robert Caro in this fourth—but not final—volume of his defining series on one of America’s most complex and compelling politicians.

By blending the outpouring of goodwill from the tragedy with his own legislative mastery, Johnson had got Kennedy’s stalled programme of legislation moving again in less than two months. That included the landmark civil-rights bill, which would forever bar discrimination in hotels and other public venues.

Johnson, Mr Caro writes, refused to campaign actively until it was too late because, much as he desired the presidency, deep down he feared the humiliation of losing—and not trying meant not losing. And so, indeed, he lost out to Kennedy, a man he described at the time as a “little scrawny fellow with rickets”.

Indeed, writes Mr Caro, in 1960 he told his staff to look up how many presidents had died in office. The answer was seven out of 33—and several more vice-presidents got elected in their own right after their predecessor left office.

Johnson took the odds, but the nearly three years he spent under Kennedy were sheer misery. He gave up enormous power as Senate majority leader to assume the sideline role of vice-president.

But the Kennedys shut him out. He became mocked around Washington as “Uncle Cornpone” and was left off the invitation lists for Camelot’s decadent parties (thrown by the “Harvards”, as Johnson called the Kennedy set).

Johnson in the vice-presidency is described as a “bull castrated very late in life” (Daniel Patrick Moynihan), a “great horse in a very small corral” (Bill Moyers), and a “cut dog” (Johnson himself).

By November 1963 things looked especially dire for Johnson. A former aide was under investigation for bribery, and journalists had begun looking into Johnson’s own business dealings. Washington chatter held that Kennedy might drop him from the 1964 ticket.

But when the president was shot, Johnson took over with preternatural calm.

He made a huge effort to retain Kennedy’s advisers, even those who had previously spurned him. And he gave new hope to black leaders, who emerged from his office amazed (and heartened) that a Texan would be so committed to desegregation. The odds against passing civil-rights legislation had been high because of the chokehold Southern senators had on Congress, yet Johnson schemed and cajoled and threatened, and in the end got it done—something Kennedy, for all his eloquence, had not managed.
From book review of The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

Johnson's Oath

Jacqueline Kennedy wears her pink Chanel suit, still stained with the blood of her husband, as Lyndon Johnson takes the oath of office in Air Force One.

According to Lady Bird Johnson, who was also present:

“Her hair [was] falling in her face but [she was] very composed … I looked at her. Mrs. Kennedy’s dress was stained with blood. One leg was almost entirely covered with it and her right glove was caked, it was caked with blood – her husband’s blood. Somehow that was one of the most poignant sights – that immaculate woman, exquisitely dressed, and caked in blood.”

Dirt on JFK, LBJ, and Nixon

Harvard Crimson Book Review: Morrow probes dirty details of White House occupants’ tactics—and sex lives…

He goes to great length to find similarities among the three main characters. Both Kennedy and Nixon had siblings who died young, for example. JFK and Johnson both had voracious sexual appetites—as Morrow reminds us time and time again. Kennedy said he could not sleep without having had sex. While his wife Jacqueline was delivering their first child stillborn, JFK and a fellow senator were entertaining women on a yacht in the Mediterranean.

Johnson too had many affairs, but he stands out more for his trademark crudeness. “[H]e liked to discomfit ‘the Harvards’… by forcing them to confer with him while he sat on the toilet, and he was a lifelong exhibitionist who in college had dubbed his penis ‘Jumbo,’” Morrow relates.

Nixon, like Johnson, had a habit for making those around him uncomfortable. While drinking cocktails with the owners of the Los Angeles Times in 1967, Nixon blurted: “I probably shouldn’t tell this…But…Why did the farmer keep a bucket of shit in his living room?”

The punch line: “Because he wanted to keep the flies out of the kitchen!” A shocked silence ensued. The hostess said: “You’re right, Dick, you shouldn’t have told that.”

The Paradox of the New Elite

It’s a puzzle: one dispossessed group after another — blacks, women, Hispanics and gays — has been gradually accepted in the United States, granted equal rights and brought into the mainstream.

At the same time, in economic terms, the United States has gone from being a comparatively egalitarian society to one of the most unequal democracies in the world.

The two shifts are each huge and hugely important: one shows a steady march toward democratic inclusion, the other toward a tolerance of economic stratification that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

It’s a surprising contradiction. Is the confluence of these two movements a mere historical accident? Or are the two trends related?