Changing of the Juntas

LYNDON JOHNSON HAD this little game he liked to play. He would call in one of his more uptight, straightlaced Ivy-League advisors, like Douglas Dillon, and then would conduct a perfectly normal discussion of some current issue--while LBJ sat on the toilet. LBJ enjoyed watching his advisor squirm and would bark something like "What's the matter with you, boy?" if the aide's discomfort became too obvious.

According to Kirkpatrick Sale, Johnson's scatological hijinks can be explained in terms of a structure of economic and political power that has arisen in the United States since World War II. This structure, which Sale refers to as "The Southern Rim," has a character, morality, culture and interests distnct from those of the Eastern Establishment, dividing the nation into "rimsters," or "cowboys," and "yankees." Sporadically, this tension bursts into the open, as it did in the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy '40 and in the drive to impeach Richard Nixon.

The Southern Rim, says Sale, stretches from Southern California to Florida, and is built upon "six economic pillars:" agribusiness, defense, advanced technology, oil and natural gas production, real estate and construction, and tourism and leisure. Sale's evidence is persuasive--defense expenditures have risen from $12 billion in 1945 to $86 billion in 1975, the aerospace industry has received a total of $80 billion, and leisure has become a multibillion-dollar industry.

The Rim differs from the eastern manufacturing and financial establishment in a number of ways. Because of the huge defense industry, the Rim depends heavily on government spending. The defense industry alone receives about $16 billion annually in government subsides, and the government spends about $70 billion each year for the six economic pillars.

The other major source of funding for Rim industry has been organized crime, which Sale estimates has about $80 billion in investment capital. Many mobsters were forced out of the East by state prosecuters in the 1950s, but they found suitable watering holes in the relatively unsettled Rim. In many cases, they were able to create their own cities, Las Vegas being only the most obvious example. In addition to interests in gambling casinos and recreation areas like La Costa Country Club in San Diego, organized crime has made investments in Florida hotels, real estate, and oil.

SALE ENGAGES IN some sociological speculations on why, in his view, the Rim has higher rates of crime, fraud, political corruption, and generally lower standards of ethics than the East. He theorizes that where there is a high rate of migration (450,000 annually), no stable class structure, and no traditions by which people's actions can be judged, a sort of moral vacuum results and the only principle held inviolable is profit. The population of the Rim has doubled since World War II, from 40 million to 80 million, primarily from an influx of what Sale terms "the discontented classes." Sale advances Nathaniel West's argument in The Day of the Locust: people go west out of frustration, because they are unhappy with their small town existence and hope that in the sunshine of Florida or California they will find the good life that has always eluded them. Such an outlook creates a society where people are concerned primarily with making their own fortunes, where the prevailing attitude is "I've got mine, Jack," and corruption, political and moral, becomes the rule.

And so we witness the rise of cities like San Diego, into which the Navy and the Marines pour $700 million each year in payrolls alone and the government feeds $1 billion annually into the local aerospace industry and $100 million into ship-building. The leading citizens of San Diego include John Alessio, a former bookmaker turned racetrack operator and C. Arnholt Smith, a highlevel con man chosen "Mr. San Diego of the Century" by the local paper. Smith used the money from his bank, U.S. National, to run deals with organized crime in California, taking a healthy chunk out to support himself and his friends. Among his friends is Richard Nixon.

Sale ties Nixon very closely to Southern Rim support. Nixon's pals--like Smith, Bebe Rebozo, John Connally, and Walter Annenburg--are all from that peculiar class of men with new money made outside the Eastern establishment. They cling to what Gary Wills in Nixon Agonistes called "the iron morality of the rails", the conviction that through hard work, unimpeded by traditional ethics, success achieved.

THESE MEN, coming mostly from Texas and California, and farming the backbone of the Rim economy in oil, real estate, leisure, and defense, contributed 75 per cent of Nixon's reelection campaign funds. He had served them well, continuing the Vietnam War for four years, increasing defense spending from $80 billion to $95 billion, developing Project Independence which injected $10 billion in energy programs, and halting efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency to control private land development.

But, Sale argues, Nixon went too far, extending the powers of his presidency in order to implement his program of cowboy reforms and antagonizing important yankee interests in the process. He attempted to turn the clock back to the pre-FDR era by making sizable cutbacks in welfare allocations, sometimes even impounding funds to prevent the implementation of congressional actions. The Establishment thought these minimal forms of income redistribution were necessary to preserve social order, Sale argues, while Nixon preferred to "guarantee domestic tranquility" through overtly repressive means. The expansion of FBI domestic surveillance, abuse of the Internal Revenue Service, and the creation of a special White House unit for "dirty tricks" were all part of a general plan to stifle opposition to his policies.

The yankee counterattack began in 1968, when many important Wall Street brokers began worrying about the effects of the Vietnam War on the nation's economy. Sale makes the generalization that cowboys are more concerned about inflation, which threatens to reduce the level of government funding, than yankees, whose manufactured products depend on the purchasing power of the general public, making them more fearful of a recession.

For these reasons, Nixon found himself con fronted by the powers of the Eastern Establishment. Not in a well-synchronized plot, but through simple momentum, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Rockefeller foundation, and Common Cause joined in the clamor that resulted in Nixon's downfall. (Sale suggests in a footnote that the break-in itself may have been deliberately bungled by James McCord on orders from the old Rockefeller-CIA network which sought revenge for Nixon's conversion of the Company into his personal political tool).

MUCH OF SALE'S book is poorly substantiated and irresponsible. In his speculation on the assassination of JFK, Sale makes no specific accusations, only notes that there were certain Rimsters who had plenty to gain from his death--Carlos Marcello of the New Orleans Mafia and Jimmy Hoffa, both under investigation by Attorney General Robert Kennedy '48, anti-Castro elements in Florida, those who suspected that the President was wavering in his commitment to South Vietnam, and Lyndon Johnson. These sorts of charges, lacking the necessary circumstantial evidence, lend credence to charges that Sale is just another left-wing paranoid kook.

And there are other passages in which Sale actually seems to glory in the contradications of his theory instead of attempting to rationally account for them. He lumps together George Wallace, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon, Lloyd Bentsen, Fred Harris, and Morris Udall as representative of the new breed of Rimster politicians. But later on he notes that in 1974 Udall pushed a land-use bill restricting real estate developers--very much an anti-cowboy measure. Sale also fails to give an adequate description of the structure of Eastern Establishment interests, nor does he consider the ways in which the interests of yankees and cowboys may become intertwined.

BUT ONE DOES COME away from the book convinced of the existence of two very different and hostile power blocs in America. If one doubts it, one need only recall the conversation of a frightened, not-quite broken president in March, 1973. "There is a lot of Watergate around in this town, not so much our opponents, even the media, but the basic thing is the Establishment," says the beleaguered Nixon. "The Establishment is dying, and so they've got to show that despite the successes we have had in foreign policy and in the election, they've got to show that it is just wrong, just because of this. They are trying to use this as the whole thing."