Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February 1990 | Volume 41, Issue 1
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February 1990 | Volume 41, Issue 1
On January 2 the New York Jets signed the University of Alabama quarterback Joe Namath to a $427,000 contract that made Namath the highestpaid first-year player in professional football history. “I realize that the football Giants are better established in New York than we are,” said the Jets’ president, Sonny Werblin. “But I remember that when I was growing up in New York, the baseball Yankees couldn’t get started in this town.…all that changed as soon as the Yankees got their Joe Namath, Babe Ruth.” Namath actually lived up to this comparison when he engineered a victory over the heavily favored Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. That game elevated not only Namath and his victorious team but the entire American Football League in its struggle for respectability against the NFL, with which it was scheduled to merge in 1970.
“We are in the midst of the greatest upward surge of economic well-being in the history of any nation,” said President Lyndon Johnson in his January 4 State of the Union message to Congress. “We do not intend to live—in the midst of abundance—isolated from neighbors and nature, confined by blighted cities and bleak suburbs, stunted by a poverty of learning and an emptiness of leisure.” In outlining his vision of the Great Society, Johnson promised something for everyone. Almost every paragraph of the fifty-minute speech called for a new government action or study. Even after his administration had fallen apart under the weight of its own ambitions, Johnson believed in the principle of the Great Society. “We’re the wealthiest nation in the world,” reflected the former President in 1970. “We need to appeal to everyone to restrain their appetite. We’re greedy but not short on the wherewithal to meet our problems.”
The Johnson administration had been considering an escalation of the war in Vietnam for several months when, on February 7, several dozen Vietcong guerrillas made a night attack on the Camp Holloway American air base at Pleiku. The commandos struck the airstrip and a nearby barracks with hand grenades and mortars, killing 8 Americans and injuring another 126. “I don’t believe it will ever be possible to protect our forces against sneak attacks of that kind,” commented Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara.
In Washington President Johnson immediately held an emergency meeting with the National Security Council to plan the American response. “We have kept our gun over the mantel…for a long time now,” he said. “And what was the result? They are killing our men while they sleep in the night. I can’t ask our American soldiers out there to continue to fight with one hand tied behind their backs.” Johnson ordered U.S. Navy jets to bomb a guerrilla training camp at Dong Hoi in North Vietnam. At the time there was speculation that the Hanoi government had hoped to provoke such a retaliatory raid in order to convince the