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She was wrong, too, when the Kennedy assassination left her thinking that “what is at stake is no more nor less than the existence of the republic.” Worse was to come. The turmoil of the 1960s made her perpetually ill at ease, wondering if she should start packing her bags again. The Vietnam war was tearing the country apart. Racial tensions were boiling over. The campuses were exploding, the cities deteriorating. Public services like transportation and the mails were falling apart, and crime was out of control. By the start of 1968, she said, she knew of many native-born Americans, not just German-Jewish émigrés, who were thinking of leaving the country. And the nation’s urban problems were having a direct impact: New York City was becoming too much for her. In 1968, she and her husband considered abandoning their Upper West Side apartment to find “more comfort than is possible in big cities,” and a few years later she survived an attempted mugging, though not without psychological damage. She became fearful of venturing out onto New York’s dangerous streets. “For many years now, the law-enforcement agencies have been unable to enforce the statutes against drug traffic, mugging and burglary,” she said. “It looks like the end of the republic,” she wrote to McCarthy.
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