Kautzman’s AP GO PO Blog

 

LBJ. RFK. MLK. In a year of tumult, one five-day span in early spring ‘68 was disorder distilled.

By Evan Thomas

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 3:03 PM ET Nov 10, 2007

Lyndon Johnson’s presidency was collapsing. By day, LBJ watched as the Vietnam War worsened and his polls and credibility plummeted. Brave boasts by the generals that they could see the light at the end of the tunnel in Vietnam had been swept away; now even establishment figures like CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite were saying the United States had to begin winding down the war. In the New Hampshire primary in mid-March, an upstart peace candidate, Eugene McCarthy, a senator heretofore known more for his poetical moods than his legislative achievements, had nearly upset the incumbent president. As the winter of 1968 turned to spring, LBJ’s aides were telling him he would lose the Wisconsin primary to McCarthy on April 2.

Johnson dreaded the nights. He dreamt that he was lying in the Red Room of the White House, his body wasted and numb. His grandmother had been paralyzed in her last years, and so had Woodrow Wilson, another president who had struggled with the burden of war. Waking from his tortured sleep, LBJ would take a small flashlight and walk the halls of the White House until he found the portrait of Wilson. Touching the painting, he would be soothed, for the moment, and go back to bed.

Johnson was bitter. “How is it possible,” he repeatedly asked, “that all these people could be so ungrateful to me after I had given them so much? Take the Negroes. I fought for them from the first day I came into office. I spilled my guts in getting them the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress … I asked so little in return. Just a little thanks. Just a little appreciation. That’s all. But look what I got instead. Riots in 175 cities. Looting. Burning. Shooting …” On and on, Johnson would rant, against the students and poor people who had turned against him, despite all he had done for them, “young people by the thousands leaving their universities, marching in the streets, chanting that horrible song about how many kids had I killed that day …” (”Hey! Hey! LBJ! …”)

Johnson’s worst dream, the most violent and diabolical, began with a twisted take on a cattle stampede. “I felt,” Johnson later confided to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, “that I was being chased on all sides by a giant stampede coming at me from all directions.” There were “the rioting blacks, demonstrating students, marching welfare mothers, squawking professors, and hysterical reporters. And then the final straw. The thing that I had feared from the first day of my Presidency was actually coming true. Robert Kennedy had openly announced his intention to reclaim the throne in the memory of his brother. And the American people, swayed by the magic of his name, were dancing in the streets.”

Sen. Robert Kennedy had announced for the presidency on March 16. On Sunday evening, March 31, Johnson was scheduled to go on national television to address the nation. The speech was supposed to be about Vietnam, and it contained some surprising news on the war front. Johnson announced that the United States would cease bombing in almost all of North Vietnam, and he invited the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table. But as evening air time approached, the speech still didn’t have an ending. At about 5 p.m., as Johnson’s speechwriter, Harry McPherson, was laboring over a draft, the president phoned McPherson to tell him he had written his own peroration. McPherson instantly guessed what it would say. “I’m very sorry, Mr. President.” “Well,” Johnson replied, “I think it’s best. So long, podner.”

March 31, 1968, was the beginning of one of the worst weeks in American history. From works by historians like Goodwin, Taylor Branch and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., it is possible to reconstruct the inner thoughts of the major players who staggered on- and offstage that week, like doomed actors in a Greek tragedy.

Speaking somberly, slowly, to a nationwide audience that night, Johnson recalled how the country had unified behind the presidency when JFK was shot in 1963. With the country now divided by distrust and suspicion, this was the wrong time, LBJ reasoned, for the president to plunge into partisan politics. “Accordingly,” he concluded, “I shall not seek, and will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

“You’re kidding,” Robert Kennedy said when he heard the news as he landed at La Guardia Airport that night. On the way into Manhattan, he was silent, lost in thought. “I wonder if he would have done this if I hadn’t come in,” he finally said. At his apartment at the U.N. Plaza, he glared at his boisterous aides when their revelry drowned out the sound of the TV news. RFK said he didn’t want to hear any champagne corks popping, so his wife, Ethel, brought out the Scotch instead. Ethel, at least, was in a buoyant mood about LBJ’s decision not to run again. “Well, he didn’t deserve to be president anyways,” she remarked. Ethel Kennedy gave her anxious husband what he most craved, unquestioning loyalty and love. Her husband could be a stiff-necked moralist. But he was also a brooder, who kept tattered copies of the Greeks and Shakespeare in his pocket, and he was well acquainted with the darker shades of life.

Kennedy had anguished over the decision to run. He was afraid he might tear apart the Democratic Party and be seen as a political opportunist. As President Kennedy’s top adviser and all-purpose hatchet man, he had gained a reputation, not undeserved, for “ruthlessness.” He was sure to be criticized as a power-grabber vainly seeking to restore Camelot. More deeply, he wondered if he could ever live up to his brother Jack—and whether he might suffer the same fate. He had moped and sulked and hated those signs held up by students who wanted him to run: RFK: HAWK, DOVE—OR CHICKEN? read one. Robert Kennedy could not abide being called a coward.

His entry into the presidential race had loosed a riot of popular emotion. Traveling around the country in late March, he had been mobbed. KISS ME BOBBY read the student placards in Kansas. “The crowds were savage,” recalled John Barlow Martin, an adviser. “They pulled his cuff links off, tore his clothes, tore ours. In bigger towns, with bigger crowds, it was frightening.” In Michigan, a housewife leaned into Kennedy’s car and calmly removed his shoe, which she displayed to the reporters as a trophy of war. Kennedy’s bodyguard, Bill Barry, hung on to Kennedy as the motorcade inched through the tumult. “Not so tight,” Kennedy cried out. “You’re going to break my back.” At the podium, Kennedy’s hands shook; his voice was reedy and often mournful, or hot and petulant. But it didn’t matter. Poor whites and poor blacks, rarely political allies, turned out for him. They could hear, beneath the high-flown rhetoric Kennedy’s polished speechwriters handed him, his own vulnerability and pain and genuine empathy. It gave them—some of them, anyway—hope.

Kennedy was a practical politician. He asked to have a meeting with President Johnson—to thank him and praise him, but really to try to get a feel for how hard Johnson would work against him. LBJ’s initial reaction was, “I won’t bother answering that grandstanding little runt,” but on April 3, the abdicating king and his dreaded usurper met at the White House. “I am no kingmaker,” LBJ told Kennedy, “and I don’t want to be.” Kennedy said to Johnson, “You are a brave and dedicated man.” Speaking in a near whisper, Kennedy seemed to choke on the words and had to awkwardly repeat them. Johnson was gracious, if noncommittal, but Kennedy was not fooled. Johnson did not immediately endorse his vice president, Hubert Humphrey. But the president lost no time working against RFK. A couple of hours after he had met with him, LBJ greeted Senator McCarthy, who had also stopped by the Oval Office to gauge the president’s intentions. When Kennedy’s name came up, Johnson said nothing. Then he drew the side of his hand across his throat, in a slashing motion.

While Robert Kennedy was meeting with Johnson at the White House, Martin Luther King Jr. was sitting on a plane at Atlanta’s Hartsfield airport while dogs sniffed for a bomb. The threat was aimed at King. The civil-rights leader was on his way back to Memphis to rally striking sanitation workers. “Your airline brought Martin Luther King to Memphis, and when he comes again a bomb will go off, and he will be assassinated,” was the message left by an anonymous caller to Eastern Airlines. The pilot of the flight to Memphis helpfully told those onboard they were being held up by a bomb threat to their fellow passenger, Dr. King.

King was still preaching nonviolence, but in the feverish atmosphere of 1968, his brave benevolence was hard to sustain. King had been down, slightly adrift, as the black-power movement became angrier and more militant. On Sunday, March 31—the day LBJ announced he would not run—King had given a moving sermon at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Having won the battle against Jim Crow and legal segregation, he was now urging his people to struggle against the even-harder targets of poverty and violence. He had told a packed cathedral that mankind must face a moral reckoning. “One day we will have to stand before the God of history, and we will talk of things we’ve done,” King said. “Yes, we will be able to say we have built gargantuan bridges to span the seas. We built gigantic buildings to kiss the skies … It seems to me I can hear the God of history saying, ‘That was not enough! But I was hungry and ye fed me not. I was naked and ye clothed me not …’ ”

The week before, a march for the striking sanitation workers in Memphis had turned violent, leaving a 16-year-old boy dead. Waiting for King that afternoon in Memphis when he finally arrived at room 306 of the Lorraine Motel was a delegation from the Invaders, a local youth gang that postured with black-power slogans and paramilitary swagger. The Invaders wanted King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference to give them $200,000 to start a “Liberation School” that would teach guerrilla warfare and martial arts. King’s aides coolly regarded the Invaders as shakedown artists. According to King’s biographer Taylor Branch, one of King’s aides, Andrew Young (later mayor of Atlanta and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations), fended off the young hotheads. “How many people did you kill last year?” he asked the Invaders, in a gently mocking tone. Last week? What are you waiting for? Why not try something real in the meantime? He offered to help them write a funding proposal that King might actually endorse. The meeting ended uneasily.

King was scheduled to speak that night at the Mason Temple at the headquarters of the Church of God in Christ, but he begged off, asking his No. 2, Ralph Abernathy, to stand in his place. The night was thunderstormy, with tornado warnings, and the crowd at the enormous Temple auditorium was disappointingly small. From a pay phone in the vestibule, Abernathy implored King to come, to keep faith with the sanitation workers who had turned out on the cold, wet night. King’s entrance caused an “eerie bedlam,” wrote Branch. “Cheers from the floor echoed around the thousands of empty seats above, and the whole structure rattled from the pounding elements of wind, thunder, and rain.” King came to the microphone at about 9:30, just as the storm was cresting, and launched into a rambling, rather unremarkable speech, until he came to the ending. King mentioned the bomb threat on the flight, and added, “but it doesn’t matter now.” Branch describes what happened next:

“King paused. ‘Because I’ve been to the mountaintop,’ he declared in a trembling voice. Cheers and applause erupted. Some people jerked involuntarily to their feet, and others rose slowly like a choir. ‘And I don’t mind,’ he said, trailing off beneath the second and third waves of response. ‘Like anybody I would like to live—a long life—longevity has its place.’ The whole building suddenly hushed, which let sounds of thunder and rain fall from the roof. ‘But I’m not concerned about that now,’ said King. ‘I just want God’s will.’ There was a subdued call of ‘Yes!’ in the crowd. ‘And he’s allowed me to go to the mountain,’ King cried, building intensity. ‘And I’ve looked over. And I have s-e-e-e-e-e-n the promised land’.”

King’s eyes were brimming now and a trace of a smile crossed his face. “And I may not get there with you,” he shouted, “but I want you to know tonight, ['Yes!'] that as a people we will get to the promised land!” By now the crowd was clapping and crying and preachers were closing in behind him. “So I am happy tonight!” King exclaimed, rushing into his close. “I’m not worried about anything! I’m not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!” He broke off and “stumbled sideways into a hug from Abernathy,” writes Branch. “The preachers helped him to a chair, some crying, and tumult washed through” the Temple.

The next day, April 4, an escaped convict named James Earl Ray moved into a rooming house at 424? South Main Street. A guest staying next door to Ray noticed that he was taking frequent trips to the toilet. A small window in the bathroom overlooked the Lorraine Motel. A little before 6 p.m., Ray closeted himself in the bathroom and propped a 30.06 rifle on the window ledge.

Just below, in the motel courtyard, two King aides, Andrew Young and Jesse Jackson, were talking and joking with a local musician, Ben Branch. Dr. King emerged on the balcony and Jackson called up to him: “Doc, you remember Ben Branch?” King greeted the Memphis saxophonist and song leader. “Ben, make sure to play ‘Precious Lord, Take My Hand,’ in the meeting tonight. Play it real pretty.”

“OK, Doc, I will,” replied Branch, just before a single round from Ray’s hunting rifle tore a three-inch hole in King’s face.

If Martin Luther King was the black man who had done the most for the cause of civil rights in America, then Robert Kennedy was the white man. King had carried the cause with passion and vision and even ecstasy, while Kennedy was far more guarded and grudging, at least at first. But Kennedy was experiential, and the more he saw of discrimination and its cruel impact as he toured the South in the 1960s, the more he was moved and galled into action. It was Robert Kennedy, more than anyone, who pressed his brother, President John F. Kennedy, to introduce what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended legal racial discrimination in the nation.

King and Kennedy should have been natural allies, brothers in the cause, but they were not. Kennedy was irritated at King for riling up the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover by not getting rid of an accused communist spy in his ranks (Stanley Levison, falsely accused). Kennedy would later deeply regret the FBI wiretaps he authorized against King. Then there was a matter of style. King was a Prince of the Church, and regarded Kennedy as fellow royalty. He spoke to him in a grave, dignified manner that Kennedy found unctuous and cloying. When King warned of physical danger to himself and his followers, Kennedy faulted him for not showing the sort of tough-guy insouciance that Kennedy himself would have shown (or wanted to show) in times of danger. In truth, King had a rollicking sense of humor, but Kennedy never saw it.

Still, Kennedy wanted King’s political support, and he was on the verge of getting it. King was preparing to endorse Kennedy for president. Kennedy’s reaction to King’s assassination was a mixture of shock, disappointment, bitter memory of his own brother’s death and revelation about the meaning of tragedy.

It was a New York Times reporter, R. W. (Johnny) Apple, who first told RFK King had been shot. He delivered the news to the candidate as the campaign plane was preparing to fly from Muncie to Indianapolis, Ind., where Kennedy was contending in his first primary. Kennedy “sagged,” recalled Apple. “His eyes went blank.” Arriving in Indianapolis, they learned that King was dead. Kennedy seemed to “shrink back,” remembered NEWSWEEK reporter John J. Lindsay, “as though struck physically.” He put his hands to his face. “Oh God,” he said, “when is this violence going to stop?”

Kennedy was scheduled to give a speech in a poor, black area in the inner city. The chief of police warned the Kennedy entourage to stay out of the ghetto; he refused to be responsible for their safety. Ethel begged her husband not to go, but he sent her back to the hotel and went ahead. The police escort peeled off as they entered an area of run-down buildings.

The night was cold and gray, but the crowd was in an almost-festive mood. Kennedy, clad in a dark overcoat with the collar turned up, climbed onto a flatbed truck. He pushed away a speech draft offered by his aide Adam Walinsky, and pulled out of his pocket some crumpled notes he had written himself.

In this pre-instant-news era, the crowd was ignorant of King’s death. It fell to Kennedy to tell them. As the wind whipped at his hair (recently cut short, to signal he was no wild-eyed radical), he looked slightly hunched over and frail. “I have bad news for you,” he began.

In the crowd, a Kennedy adviser named John Lewis anxiously watched the strange scene. Lewis was a hero and a martyr of the civil-rights movement. Practicing King’s creed of nonviolent resistance, he had been beaten bloody as he knelt and prayed at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in March 1965. In March 1968, he had joined RFK’s campaign because of Kennedy’s concern for the “invisible poor” and his commitment to civil rights. “The America Bobby Kennedy envisioned sounded much like the Beloved Community I believed in,” Lewis later wrote in his memoirs. Lewis had come to Indiana to help get out the black vote, and now, still reeling from the news of King’s death, he watched transfixed as Kennedy’s soft, weary voice rose over the crowd, which was still talking and laughing as Kennedy plunged ahead.

“I have bad news for you, for all our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world,” said Kennedy. Lewis noticed that a few faces had gone somber in the front rows of the thousand or so people gathered there. “… [A]nd that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight.”

“No!” gasped voices in the crowd. People began to weep and drop to their knees. Farther back, people were still talking and laughing, oblivious.

Navigating the tricky shoals of race, Kennedy stumbled a little at first as he tried to relate King’s death to the killing of his own brother. RFK had never before spoken publicly about JFK’s assassination, and he could hardly bear to speak of it privately, though the death of the president had gloomily filled his thoughts for months and years. “For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and disgust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say,” he began, “that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my own family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times,” he said, his voice gaining in strength as he found his peculiar comfort zone, the realm of myth and tragedy. Kennedy was not an articulate intellectual, but he was surprisingly well read, and he could quote the texts he carried in his pocket.

“My favorite poet was Aeschylus,” Kennedy told his audience, not many of whom had graduated from high school, but who now listened with rapt attention. “He wrote, ‘In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or black.

“So I shall ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, that’s true, but most importantly to say a prayer for our country, which all of us love—a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke …

“Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and to make gentle the life of this world.

“Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.”

That night, as the news of King’s death spread through the blighted parts of the land, there were riots in 110 cities causing 39 deaths and injuring 2,500. But in the city of Indianapolis, where Kennedy had spoken, it was quiet.

Kennedy had trouble sleeping that night. He wandered around the Marriott hotel, stopping in to talk to some young staffers, tucking in a young speechwriter named Jeff Greenfield at about 3 a.m. “You’re not so ruthless,” said Greenfield. “Don’t tell anyone,” said Kennedy.

The Kennedy campaign quietly arranged to have King’s body flown from Memphis to King’s hometown of Atlanta. Before the funeral, young John Lewis took Bobby and Ethel into a darkened church at 1 a.m. to view King’s body in an open casket. Kennedy wordlessly crossed himself. “I said to myself, ‘Well, we still have Robert Kennedy’,” recalled Lewis.

But he didn’t. On June 4, on the night he won the California primary, an important milestone on the march to the Democratic convention in Chicago, Robert Kennedy, too, was shot. He died two days later.

CORRECTION (ADDED Nov. 20, 2007): This story originally said that Dr. King gave his final speech at the Masonic Temple in Memphis. In fact, the speec took place at Mason Temple at the headquarters of the Church of God in Christ. NEWSWEEK regrets the error.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/69542

 

There’s wide support for a death penalty, but those who carry it out are increasingly uncomfortable.

By Evan Thomas and Martha Brant

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 4:31 PM ET Nov 10, 2007

Texas has long been the Hang ‘em high state. In 2000, it executed convicted prisoners at the rate of almost one a week. Gov. George W. Bush seemed to take pride in turning down appeals for clemency. The “Decider” was known for spending as little as 15 minutes reviewing a death case. In a Talk magazine piece, Tucker Carlson reported that Bush mocked the plea of one double murderer on death row, pursing his lips in mock desperation and whispering, “Please, don’t kill me.” (Bush later said Carlson had “misread, mischaracterized me.”)

Texas still accounts for more than half of all executions in the United States. But a strange thing is happening in the state that has executed more prisoners than any other since the U.S. Supreme Court revived the death penalty in 1976 after a brief hiatus. Texas prosecutors are less willing to seek, and juries are less willing to grant, capital punishment for aggravated murder. In 2006, only 15 Texas convicts were sentenced to death, down from 34 a decade earlier. Texas mirrors a national trend: death-penalty sentences in the 38 states that allow capital punishment dropped from 317 in 1996 to 128 in 2005, the latest year for which statistics are available.

Why the reluctance to populate death row? Polls show popular support for capital punishment stays relatively high, at about 65 percent. But when it comes to carrying out death sentences, the people involved—judges and juries, prosecutors and prison officials—are starting to recoil, or at least pull back. What is acceptable in theory seems less and less tolerable in practice. Indeed, the Supreme Court has called at least a temporary halt to executions while it examines the fine points of killing convicts by pumping lethal chemicals into their veins. “The death penalty may go out with a whimper, not a great moral revolution,” says Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C.

The new reluctance to punish by killing is part of a historical trend. There was a time when death and torture were spectator sports, when crowds flocked to see prisoners drawn and quartered or beheaded. In some parts of the world, flogging and stoning are still public spectacles. But in the 19th century, supposedly “enlightened” states began looking for more-humane ways to serve final justice—to kill people without causing too much suffering to either the victims or their executioners. The authorities tried hanging, firing squads, electrocutions, gas chambers and, more recently, lethal injection. Each method was supposed to be an improvement over the last.

But the results could be ghastly. Too much depended on the uneven skills of the executioners. The hangman’s noose has to be handled just so. Too short a drop and the prisoner slowly strangles. Too long a drop and the prisoner can be decapitated. Witnesses to executions in the electric chair have watched, horrified, as flames shot out of the head of the doomed prisoner. In Arizona in 1992, the state attorney general vomited and the prison warden threatened to quit after observing the agonizingly slow death of a man in a gas chamber. Today not many doctors are willing to play any part in an execution, and prison guards often complain of little or no training.

Lethal injection is less violent than a firing squad and less grisly than the electric chair. In most states, the prisoner is given a “three-drug cocktail”: a sedative to put him to sleep, a paralyzing agent to stop him from struggling (or breathing) and a drug to stop his heart. But, hands shaking, guards sometimes botch inserting the needle, and veins can be hard to find if the inmate was a drug addict. In Ohio, a prisoner raised his head to announce, “It’s not working,” and in Florida, a prisoner sustained chemical burns on his arm while he grimaced for almost a half hour. Inevitably, defense lawyers began to attack the cocktail as “cruel and unusual punishment,” banned by the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution.

The Supreme Court has imposed a de facto moratorium on lethal injection while it waits to hear oral arguments this January in Baze v. Rees, a case that could determine whether, or under what conditions, lethal injection can be used as capital punishment. It may be that states will resort to giving prisoners a massive dose of barbiturates—the preferred method for putting down sick pets. In theory, at least, the high court will uphold a “better” form of lethal injection, setting off a wave of executions. But whether state officials and juries will want to dispose of humans like dogs remains to be seen. A single drug might take longer to work—prolonging the death throes.

Jurors and prosecutors are steering away from the death penalty because they are both more and less afraid: more apprehensive about killing the innocent and less fearful of crime. Over the past decade, the use of DNA testing on wrongly convicted criminals has overturned prison sentences for at least 200 inmates nationwide (about 15 of them sentenced to death). In 2000, Illinois declared a moratorium on executions after 13 death-row inmates were exonerated. Back in the ’80s, when violent crime was surging along with crack-cocaine addiction in cities, Americans demanded retributive justice. But as crime rates fell in the ’90s and the first few years of the new century, jurors became more lenient in capital cases.

At the same time, prosecutors began to be wary of seeking the death penalty. A series of court decisions required that more states provide competent lawyers for the criminally accused in death-penalty cases. Better defense lawyers could stall and maneuver, running up the cost to the state of bringing a capital case. The more-clever lawyers have been especially good at introducing “mitigating circumstances” into these cases, arguing that the abuse suffered by the killer as a child helps to explain the horrible crime he or she committed. Since 1982, according to New Jersey Policy Perspective, a think tank, the state has spent more than $250 million on the death penalty, or about $11 million a year—without executing a single prisoner. With legal costs soaring in death cases, states are finding it cheaper to pay for lifetime prison sentences.

In many states, jurors chose the death penalty because they feared the convicted murderer might get out on parole and kill again. But in Texas, and many other states, jurors can now sentence the convicted to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. (The motives of the Texas Legislature in passing this law two years ago were not altogether humane: when the Supreme Court did away with the death penalty for juveniles in 2005, some Texas lawmakers wanted to find a way to put away youthful killers forever.)

Opinion polls show that about 70 percent of Texans still favor the death penalty. But in Dallas, the district attorney, Craig Watkins, is not sure how he feels. “It depends on which day you ask me,” says Watkins, 39. “I’m sitting here at my desk looking at some autopsy photos. So, yeah, I’m for it.” (He was reviewing the 1996 case of a woman who killed her son and now sits on death row.) “But when I come out of church on Sunday morning, I’m against it.”

Two decades ago Watkins could not have been elected in Dallas. He is black, a Democrat and a former defense lawyer. His most famous, or notorious, predecessor was Henry Wade, the Dallas D.A. from 1951 to 1986. The year Wade left office, The Dallas Morning News found a manual used by city prosecutors. It stated: “Do not take Jews, Negroes, Dagos, Mexicans, or a member of any minority race on a jury, no matter how rich or well educated.” Minorities have been disproportionately sentenced to death— especially if the victim was white. Wade apparently wanted to make sure they got no sympathy votes. Wade, says Watkins, choosing his words judiciously, was “a product of his time.” Watkins is a product of more recent times. In the 2006 election, tough-on-crime didn’t work in Dallas. “My opponent wore the number of people he had sent to death row like a badge of honor,” says Watkins, about the Republican incumbent he beat last year. Watkins’s more benign approach—stressing justice, not vengeance—was mocked as “hug-a-thug” by detractors, but Watkins won. “I see a change in mentality,” he says. “We’ve had a lot of folks coming out who didn’t commit crimes and that gives people pause.” Dallas leads the nation in the number of DNA exonerations for all counties in the United States (14). “In the near future, we will see the death penalty rarely,” he says.

There may be no such thing as a foolproof system for killing people fairly and painlessly. The smallest glitch can make too much of a difference. The last execution before the Supreme Court imposed its moratorium is a case in point. Harris County, Texas—encompassing the city of Houston—has far more executions than most states, so it has had plenty of practice. At 9 a.m. on Sept. 25, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would hear the Baze case challenging the constitutionality of lethal injection. Michael Richard, convicted of rape and murder in 1986, was scheduled for execution that night. His lawyers rushed to file a new motion based on the high court’s ruling, but their computer crashed and they missed the 5 p.m. filing deadline. A judge refused to keep open the state court. Richard was executed at 8:22 p.m.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/69546

 

Bill archenemy Richard Mellon Scaife now has ‘admiration’ for him. Huh?

By Mark Hosenball

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 4:21 PM ET Nov 10, 2007

Bill Clinton is never at a loss for company. When he’s not globe-trotting or charming audiences for as much as $400,000 a speech, he’s often schmoozing visitors in his suite of offices in Harlem. Last July, the former president sat down with a billionaire impressed with the William J. Clinton Foundation’s campaign against AIDS in Africa. The two men chatted amiably over lunch for more than two hours, and the visitor pledged to write Clinton’s foundation a generous check. But there was something unusual, if not plain weird, about the meeting. NEWSWEEK has learned that the billionaire so eager to endear himself to the former president was Richard Mellon Scaife—once the Clintons’ archenemy and best-known as the man behind a “vast, right-wing conspiracy” that Hillary Clinton said was out to destroy them.

Scaife was no run-of-the-mill Clinton hater. In the 1990s, the heir to the Mellon banking fortune contributed millions to efforts to dig up dirt on President Clinton. He backed the Clinton-bashing American Spectator magazine, whose muckrakers produced lurid stories about Clinton’s alleged financial improprieties and trysts. Scaife also financed a probe called the Arkansas Project that tried, among other things, to show that Clinton, while Arkansas governor, protected drug runners.

The Arkansas Project largely came up empty, and most of the stories were ignored by all but the most avid Clinton antagonists. But one Scaife-backed conspiracy theory got widespread attention. In 1993, White House aide and Clinton friend Vince Foster was found dead of a gunshot wound in a park outside Washington, D.C. Three official investigations concluded the death was a suicide. Yet Scaife dollars helped promote assertions that Foster had been murdered—the not-so-subtle subtext being that the Clintons had something to do with it. Scaife hired Christopher Ruddy, a reporter who doggedly pursued the conspiracy theory in a Scaife newspaper, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Though discredited, the story resonated with people who believed Clinton was hiding dark secrets. Scaife and Ruddy later started Newsmax, a Web site and magazine that attacks their enemies and lauds their heroes.

Bill Clinton now finds himself the unlikeliest of Scaife heroes. Last month Ruddy posted a softball interview with Clinton on the Newsmax site (sample question: “What is the best thing about being an ex-president?”). A worshipful cover story followed in the current edition of the magazine. Clinton, it gushed, is “a political and cultural powerhouse” who is “part Merlin and part Midas—a politician with a magical touch.”

What is going on here? Scaife declined to comment, but Ruddy tells NEWSWEEK he and Scaife believe Clinton’s life since leaving office has been “very laudable,” and that he is doing “very important work representing the country when the U.S. is widely resented in the world.” He said they never suggested Clinton was involved in Foster’s death, and insisted they were not among those hyping alleged Clinton sex scandals, though he acknowledged their work may have encouraged others.

Whatever the reasons for Scaife’s change of heart, it’s not hard to figure out why the Clintons would embrace a former nemesis. As they prepared for Hillary’s presidential run, the Clintons made quiet attempts to disarm, or at least neutralize, some of their most vocal opponents. Last year Hillary accepted an offer from Rupert Murdoch (who always hedges his bets) to host a fund-raiser for her Senate campaign. The New York Times reported that the Clinton camp has also made efforts to open a line of communication to blogger Matt Drudge, who has served as a conduit for anti-Clinton GOP leaks.

Ruddy, who accompanied Scaife to the Clinton lunch, says the peacemaking meeting came about after former New York City mayor Ed Koch offered to put the two together. (Koch declined to comment.) Clinton, pouring on the charm, greeted Scaife like an old friend. “President Clinton believes in redemption and moving forward,” says spokeswoman Jennifer Hanley. Ruddy says they talked about Clinton’s charitable work and avoided opening old wounds. After receiving the full Bill treatment, Scaife left with a new outlook on the man he had once set out to crush. Scaife isn’t ready to sign on to Hillary’s campaign—he’s still a Republican. But his lawyer, Yale Gutnick, says Bill Clinton and Richard Mellon Scaife are now members of a “mutual admiration society.” Cue the apocalypse.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/69545

 

Just 40% of Americans go to church weekly, but 70% want a president with strong religious faith.

By Lisa Miller

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 1:39 PM ET Nov 10, 2007

Over the past three years, Sen. John Kerry has had a lot of time to think about his God, and at a meeting with journalists in Washington earlier this month he shared those thoughts. He grew up in a Roman Catholic home before Vatican II; though devout, he prayed in private behind his closed bedroom door, as was the custom at the time. In Vietnam, he prayed to God to save his life, and when he came home some of his foxhole promises no longer felt so pressing. Kerry, a divorced, pro-choice Democrat with a foreign-seeming wife, ran for president in 2004 against an incumbent whose personal Christian-conversion story was intricately woven into his public persona. Yet, out of principle or stubbornness, Kerry chose not to expound upon his own faith until late in the race—too late, he says in retrospect. In the spring and summer of ‘04, a handful of U.S. Catholic bishops announced they’d refuse Kerry holy communion on the grounds that his stance on abortion went against church teachings, and Kerry suddenly found himself having to answer fundamental questions about who he was and what he stood for. “I should have started earlier to introduce who I really was—in ‘02 or ‘03,” he told NEWSWEEK last week. He gave a big Catholic-values speech in Florida in October, but by then it was too late. “October is October. You’ve got to do this earlier,” he says. “People have to have a sense of this as a continuum. Explaining how Catholicism has shaped my view of public life—it would have made a difference.”

These revelations should be instructive to the field of ‘08 hopefuls, who as a group represent a dramatic range of religious views and observance, from Catholic to Mormon to— potentially—Jew, and from extremely orthodox (Mitt Romney) to much less so (Rudy Giuliani). Despite their religiosity or lack thereof, all will have to tell a convincing faith-and-values story to the American public—for Americans, though cynical about politicians, still love public piety. Although just 40 percent of Americans go to church every week, 70 percent say they want a president with strong religious faith, and 94 percent believe in God, according to an August survey by Pew. Kerry believes that a candidate doesn’t have to be a regular churchgoer to be elected, but cannot under any circumstances be an atheist or agnostic. John Green, a fellow at Pew, agrees. “Supporting a candidate who’s religious is shorthand for supporting a candidate with values and principles,” says Green.

If Kerry is right, then a successful candidate must neither remain mute on the faith question nor pander, but tell an authentic personal-values narrative early and often. The thrice-married Giuliani, who told values voters last month that “I don’t easily publicly proclaim myself as the best example of faith,” seems to have passed the authenticity test: last week Pat Robertson endorsed him despite their many ideological disagreements.

Americans have elected and loved secular presidents before, from Thomas Jefferson, who decided to edit the miracles out of the Gospel stories, to Ronald Reagan, who, though a movie actor and not a regular churchgoer, was able to convince people of his sincerity and commitment to high principles. In the absence of an orthodox religion story, Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow suggests that candidates tell a story about “a sense of rebirth or change or insights or awakenings.” As the religious right scrambles to cohere, perhaps this is a good moment to remember that authentic belief in God is a personal matter, and if half of Americans can’t find God in church, maybe the president doesn’t have to, either.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/69531

By KATHY BARKS HOFFMAN
The Associated Press
Wednesday, November 21, 2007; 12:47 PM

LANSING, Mich. — Michigan’s Jan. 15 presidential primary can go forward, the state Supreme Court decided Wednesday, keeping alive the state’s bid to be one of the 2008 campaign’s first contests.

The court decision should make it easier for New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner to schedule that state’s primary, which New Hampshire law requires to be the nation’s first. Gardner has been waiting to see what the Michigan courts would do.

The high court’s decision should clear the way for the Republican and Democratic parties to take part in the Jan. 15 primary. Both have already filed letters with the secretary of state saying that’s their plan.

However, by holding its primary so early _ in violation of the national parties’ rules _ Michigan stands to lose half of its delegates to the Republican National Convention, reducing the number to 30, and all of its 156 delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

The national parties have imposed similar penalties on other states as party leaders have struggled to regain control of a chaotic nominating calendar.

If Michigan has its primary on Jan. 15, that would put it behind only Iowa’s caucuses on Jan. 3, Wyoming’s caucuses on Jan. 5 and _ according to many expectations _ New Hampshire’s primary on Jan. 8.

Democrats in Michigan have kept open the possibility of picking their presidential favorite through a party caucus, even if the primary is held.

That could delay a decision on the New Hampshire date even further. Michigan Sen. Carl Levin has suggested holding the Michigan caucus the same day as the New Hampshire primary, so Gardner doesn’t want to make a decision until that issue is settled. A message seeking comment was left with his office. His deputy, David Scanlan, could not say when Gardner might set the New Hampshire date.

In its 4-3 decision Wednesday, the Michigan Supreme Court overturned lower court rulings that said the law setting up the primary was unconstitutional because it would let the state political parties keep track of voters’ names and whether they took Democratic or GOP primary ballots but withhold that information from the public.

Michigan GOP Chairman Saul Anuzis said he was pleased the primary would be held and said Republicans would participate even if Democrats switched to a caucus.

“This is good for Michigan, this is good for Republicans and it’s good for the process,” he said.

Anuzis would like to see state House Democrats next week pass a bill that would restore the names of four Democratic presidential candidates who have withdrawn from the ballot. Barack Obama, John Edwards, Joe Biden and Bill Richardson pulled their names because the state violated Democratic National Committee rules by moving up the election.

A state Senate-passed bill would require all candidates’ names to be on the ballot, although it also would give them the chance to withdraw again.

East Lansing political consultant Mark Grebner, one of several people who brought the suit arguing it was wrong to let only the political parties have access to the primary voter information, said he didn’t plan to take any additional action at this point.

He doesn’t object to the primary being held, but said other people should have access to the records because the information was obtained through an election paid for with public dollars. The circuit and appeals courts had agreed with his reasoning.

___

Associated Press Writer Joe Magruder in Concord, N.H., contributed to this story.

By Dan Balz and Jon Cohen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, November 21, 2007; A01

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, buoyed by strong support from Christian conservatives, has surged past three of his better-known presidential rivals and is now challenging former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney for the lead in the Iowa Republican caucuses, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News Poll.

Huckabee has tripled his support in Iowa since late July, eclipsing former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, former senator Fred D. Thompson (Tenn.) and Sen. John McCain (Ariz.). Huckabee now runs nearly evenly with Romney, the longtime Iowa front-runner.

Huckabee’s rise from dark horse to contender in Iowa is one more unexpected twist in a race that has remained fluid throughout the year and adds another unpredictable element to the competition for the GOP nomination. His support in Iowa appears stronger and more enthusiastic than that of his rivals.

Still, there are other signs in the poll suggesting that Romney remains the candidate to beat in the state and that gains for Huckabee may be harder to achieve in the next 43 days than they were over the past four months.

Romney outperforms Huckabee and other Republicans on key attributes, with two notable exceptions — perceptions of which candidate best understands people’s problems and which candidate is the most honest and trustworthy. On both, Romney and Huckabee are tied. At the same time, Iowa Republicans see the former Arkansas governor as less credible than Romney, Giuliani or McCain on some top issues.

The poll found that overall, 28 percent of likely GOP caucus-goers support Romney, while 24 percent support Huckabee. Thompson ran third in the poll at 15 percent, with Giuliani at about the same level, with 13 percent. McCain, whose Iowa campaign appeared to derail earlier this year over his stance on immigration, had 6 percent and was tied with Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.), who rose from 2 percent in July.

Huckabee’s gains were concentrated among the party’s conservative core. He saw a 28-percentage-point jump in support from evangelical Protestants, to 44 percent, and a 19-point rise among conservatives, to 30 percent. Among previous caucus attendees, his support increased from 9 percent to 29 percent.

Huckabee probably benefited from the decision of Sen. Sam Brownback (Kan.) and others to quit the race. Brownback and Huckabee had been competing for many of the same religious and conservative voters. Moreover, Huckabee’s gain in this poll does not come at the expense of those still running, all of whom are faring about the same as they were in July.

But almost half of Huckabee’s supporters (48 percent) said they would definitely vote for him in January and only a quarter said there was a good chance that they would change their minds before the caucuses. In contrast, just 29 percent of Romney’s backers said they would definitely vote for him, while 42 percent said there was a good chance that they could vote for someone else at the caucuses.

The enthusiasm among Huckabee supporters was striking, particularly in a year in which Republicans have been considerably dissatisfied with the field of candidates. Half of those who now back the former Arkansas governor said they are very enthusiastic about him, compared with 28 percent of Romney’s backers.

But despite these advantages, Huckabee’s support comes almost exclusively from certain groups of voters. His challenge will be to expand his appeal.

Nearly seven in 10 of his backers are evangelical Protestants, and nearly three-quarters attend religious services at least weekly. Just 5 percent of moderate and liberal GOP voters back his candidacy. Romney, by contrast, has wider support.

It is also primarily social issues that galvanize Huckabee’s backers.

More than four in 10 Huckabee voters call abortion or broader moral or values issues the race’s top one or two concerns. That is nearly double the number of Romney supporters to highlight these issues. Overall, three-quarters of likely GOP voters think that abortion should be illegal in most or all cases, and among the 24 percent who want the procedure to be unlawful in every instance, 36 percent support Huckabee and 22 percent Romney.

But a slew of issues drive likely GOP caucus-goers. A quarter of those surveyed said immigration is their biggest or second-biggest concern when considering whom to back on Jan. 3. The same percentage, 24 percent, highlighted the war in Iraq, and nearly as many, 21 percent, singled out terrorism and national security.

Ten percent or more cited five other issues: the economy, health care, abortion, taxes, and morals and family values. Overall, eight issues ranked in the double digits, making the discussion in the Republican contest potentially more wide-ranging than that on the Democratic side. Among likely Democratic caucus-goers, only three issues reach 10 percent, and two — Iraq and health care — dominate voters’ concerns.

On immigration, Romney has an edge: 27 percent said the former Massachusetts governor is best on the issue, while Huckabee and Rep. Tom Tancredo (Colo.) each received 13 percent. No candidate is clearly preferred on the other top issue, Iraq, with Giuliani, McCain and Romney each considered the best by about two in 10. Giuliani doubles up the competition, however, on handling the terrorism fight.

Romney tops the field as the candidate most trusted to handle the economy and the federal budget deficit. He and Huckabee are preferred by about equal percentages on social issues, such as abortion and same-sex civil unions.

Campaign activity on the GOP side appears to be more subdued than it is among Democrats, perhaps in part because national leaders Giuliani and McCain are not prioritizing Iowa’s caucus.

About six in 10 likely caucus-goers said they have been called by one of the campaigns. Twenty-nine percent have attended a campaign event, up six percentage points from July, but far less than the percentage of Democrats who have attended an event (52 percent). A third of GOP voters have visited one of the candidates’ Web sites and 29 percent have received e-mail. About one in five has spoken with or shaken hands with one or more of the GOP candidates. Fifteen percent have contributed money.

Romney, who has pinned his bid for the nomination on success in Iowa and New Hampshire, is widely seen as the candidate who has made the biggest effort in the Hawkeye state. More than six in 10 said that he has “campaigned the hardest in Iowa.” That’s up 14 percentage points from July, and no other candidate scored in the double digits on that question.

Romney has an advantage on the question of who has the “best experience to be president,” after a 10-point increase from July, when he was about even with Giuliani and McCain. Romney had held a marginally significant edge on “best understands problems of people like you,” but while he has stayed at 21 percent on this question, Huckabee has soared from 10 percent to 25 percent.

In July, Romney had the lead on “most honest and trustworthy” at 21 percent. He has risen to 25 percent, but Huckabee jumped from 10 percent to 26 percent.

Romney and Giuliani share the top spot as the field’s “strongest leader” and as the Republicans with the best shot at capturing the White House in November 2008. About one in eight said Huckabee is the most electable Republican, while 1 percent thought so in July. About a quarter of evangelical Protestants now think Huckabee is the GOP’s top option; four months ago, that percentage was less than 1 percent.

The poll was conducted by telephone Nov. 14 to 18 among a random sample of 400 likely GOP caucus-goers. The results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus five percentage points.

Polling analyst Jennifer Agiesta contributed to this report.

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