The message seemed mixed. It was 3 o'clock on the afternoon of
Sunday, Oct. 3, 1965, and President Lyndon B. Johnson had come
to the foot of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor to sign
the unsexily named Immigration and Nationality Act. It was a
grand and sentimental stage for Johnson, who loved the grand and
the sentimental. There he was, less than a year into a term he'd
won in the greatest of landslides over Barry Goldwater, at the
mythic gateway to America, Robert and Ted Kennedy in the
audience, the eyes of the press fixed on him in the shadows of
the nation's most fabled icon of freedom. "Our beautiful America
was built by a nation of strangers," Johnson said, reaching for
political poetry. "From a hundred different places or more they
have poured forth into an empty land, joining and blending in
one mighty and irresistible tide." But the president was openly
ambivalent, too. "The bill that we sign today is not a
revolutionary bill," he said, defensively, almost as though to
reassure white American