CHAPTER 4
Boxed In
March 6, 1965
PRESIDENT Johnson labored under pressure at the White House on Saturday. “Good God, I’d rather hear your voice than Jesus this morning,” he told his bosom friend Richard Russell of Georgia, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Russell had been breathing through a tracheotomy tube for a month, hospitalized with emphysema and pulmonary edema, and Johnson oozed genuine sympathy in his habitual prelude to serious business. “Dick, I haven’t got anybody left like you,” said the President. “I’ve said more prayers about you than I have said since Lady Bird threatened to divorce me two years after we were married…and I’m so glad you’ve come through.” He offered to send an Air Force plane to move Russell during recuperation—“it’ll go above the clouds and everything”—then plunged into his quandary about combat troops in Vietnam. Having commenced regular bombing, and established airbases to support it, Johnson was withholding final authority to send Marines to protect the bases. “I guess we got no choice, but it scares the death out of me,” he said.
Russell agreed on both counts. “These Marines, they’ll be killing a whole lot of friendly Vietnamese,” he told Johnson from his sickbed in a raspy drawl. “They’re gonna shoot everything that comes around those airplanes. They’ve been trained to do that. And that’s their business.”
“Airplanes ain’t worth a damn, Dick,” said Johnson. He and Russell swapped stories on the futility of sending bombers over jungle targets. “Hell, I had a hundred and sixty of ’em over a barracks of twenty-seven buildings,” said Johnson, “and they set two on fire. It’s the damnedest thing I ever saw and the biggest fraud.” Bombing only “lets you get your hopes up,” he added, “that the Air Force is gonna defend us.”
“No, they’re not at all,” said Russell. “Not at all. I know they’re not.”
Summarizing “the great trouble I’m under,” Johnson told Russell that “a man can fight if he’s got, if he can see daylight down the road somewhere, but there ain’t no daylight in Vietnam.”
“There’s no end to the road,” Russell concurred.
“The more bombs you drop, the more nations you scare,” said the President. “The more people you make mad, the more embassies you get mad—”
“We gon’,” Russell interrupted. “We gon’ wind up with the people mad as hell at us that we’re saving by being in there…. It’s the biggest and worst mess I ever saw in my life. You couldn’t have inherited a worse mess.”
“Well, if they’d say I inherited it, I’d be lucky,” Johnson lamented. “But they all say I created it, and you know…”
The President paused, then snapped back to pleasantries at manic full speed. “You go get well and come back and I got a big bed for you and I want to see you and I got three women want to see you,” he said, signing off with regards from his wife, Lady Bird, and their two daughters.
Johnson alternated on Saturday between his morose stall on the Marine orders and hot pursuit of his legislative agenda. He called Vice President Hubert Humphrey to pepper him with lobbying instructions on the record number of 104 bills before Congress, stressing those that had languished in controversy for as long as forty years, such as landmark proposals to establish a medical care system (Medicare) for the elderly and provide the first federal assistance to public education. “If we don’t pass anything but education, and medical care, and Appalachia,” Johnson said, referring to his poverty bill, “we have had a record that the Congressmen can be reelected on.”
The normally loquacious Humphrey struggled to squeeze in a word. “Well, Mr. President, I’ll go right up there and be right on ’em all afternoon,” he said.
“You just be on ’em the next four years,” Johnson prodded. Urgency was his theme. More than once he exhorted his assembled Cabinet not to waste his landslide popular margin of 16 million votes from the 1964 election, predicting that he would lose strength in the polls at the rate of a million votes per month, and he told Martin Luther King of his hurry “to get these big things through” in a brief window of historic opportunity “before the vicious forces concentrate.”
Now the President told Humphrey there could be no excuses: “We’re smarter than they are,” he said. “We’ve got more energy, we can work faster, we got all the machinery of the government.” He dangled a vision of glory for Humphrey from a presidential mandate to handle Congress, which Johnson said Kennedy had denied to him for fear that he, the former Senate leader, would get public credit for success. “You’re the first vice president in the country that had responsibility for the—I don’t care if it’s the Humphrey-Johnson program,” Johnson declared. He personalized the quest for key votes such as that of Representative Edith Green, reducing her qualms about federal aid for education to a stubborn rivalry with a fellow Oregonian in Congress. “She hates [Senator Wayne] Morse,” advised the President, instructing Humphrey to court Green from every angle. “Lady Bird just took her to Florida,” he said. “I’ve had her down here. I’ve bragged on her. But she is just a mean woman, and she’s gonna whip you, and if she does, why then I’m gonna get you in the five-cent cigar business.”
IN SELMA, early Saturday afternoon, Rev. L. James Rongstad of St. John’s Lutheran Church tried to head off a surprise intervention by white people from cities across Alabama. He found seventy-two of them assembled as inconspicuously as possible at Knox Reformed Presbyterian, an old mission congregation established for Negroes in the white part of town, and gained entry to deliver a warning speech that emphasized the Golden Rule. “We did not interfere in your problems, and we do not need your interference in our problems,” said Rongstad, who beseeched them not to provoke further conflict or violence. He addressed a fellow Lutheran minister personally, reminding Rev. Joseph Ellwanger that he was a graduate of Selma’s Albert G. Parrish High School and that crossing lines in a hometown race crisis would upset Ellwanger’s childhood friends, not to mention his parents, who still lived just three blocks away and were members of Rongstad’s congregation. To tighten the pressure, he read a proclamation that only by genuine conversion, not politics or trouble, could the people of Alabama reach the desired “wholehearted willingness to love our neighbors as ourselves.” It was signed by the Negro minister of a local Lutheran congregation and by the man who recently replaced Ellwanger’s father as head of the Alabama Lutheran Academy and College (for Negroes). The clear message to Ellwanger, who pastored an all-Negro congregation in Birmingham, was that he should not “go native” beyond the missionary boundaries of the Lutheran Church, lest he endanger the Negroes themselves and repudiate his own father’s tradition of religious service.
“We are not here to point the finger at Selma,” Ellwanger replied. “We are here to point the finger at the state and at the nation.” He led the white demonstrators from the church in eighteen groups of four, spaced thirty feet apart so as to avoid violating the local parade ordinance. Marjorie Linn walked beside him, despite some grumbling in the group that it was neither wise nor chivalrous to honor the request of an inexperienced woman to share the lead. The prevailing view was that no one else was any more prepared than Linn, a reporter for a suburban newspaper outside Birmingham, and that she fairly represented the women who had worked for this moment since one of them stood up during a semiclandestine speech by King’s aide Hosea Williams to ask how they could help the Selma movement, and Williams had invited them to “take some warm white bodies down there and show that you care.” A handful of women from the Alabama Human Relations Council had mounted a ten-day telephone blitz to recruit these assorted freethinkers—scientists from the U.S. rocket program in Huntsville, a professor of dentistry, a Methodist minister whose dog had been poisoned after sermons favorable to integration, several dozen Unitarians, the head of the university art department in Tuscaloosa—who agreed to go to jail, if necessary, though none had been arrested before and Ellwanger himself never had joined a racial demonstration.
They walked t
welve blocks, from the church on Jefferson Davis Avenue to Broad Street, Selma’s main thoroughfare, down past the bustling Saturday shoppers, who generally ignored them. Turning right on Alabama Avenue toward the Dallas County courthouse, those in front confronted roughly a hundred hostile white people with pipes, clubs, and chains—“most of them sturdily built and roughly dressed,” noted a reporter. They came alive with catcalls at their first sight of Ellwanger’s group, in sharp contrast with the five hundred Negroes who stood across the street in silent contemplation, and some amazement, waiting to behold a white delegation from Alabama make public witness on their behalf. One minute later, as recorded by FBI agents, a battered jalopy stopped in the street with a deafening roar from a throaty engine. Its driver jumped out, threw up the hood, and poured a viscous liquid over the carburetor that sent clouds of acrid smoke billowing outward, first choking and screening the Negroes, then wafting with a shift of wind back over the angry whites. A few of the Negroes stifled laughter over this whimsical turn of menace, which somehow encouraged the Ellwanger group forward.
Chief Deputy Sheriff L. C. Crocker stopped them at the corner of Lauderdale Street, just before the courthouse. With a hand held up for silence, he read a telegram from Dr. Edgar Homrighausen, president of the Southern District Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, declaring that “in no way does Rev. Ellwanger represent the church.” For Ellwanger, this stinging disavowal was unusually swift and public but consistent with previous edicts from Homrighausen, who was effectively his bishop. Before the large funeral for the girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing, Homrighausen had served notice that Ellwanger’s presence at the Baptist service would violate the ban on “unionism,” or joint worship with those outside the fold of Lutheran doctrine. Ellwanger had attended anyway, at the request of his Negro Lutheran parishioner who was father to one of the victims, and this first public witness had marked him not only as an isolated white face in Birmingham police photographs but as a dissident within his ministry. “Insofar as his goal is freedom for all under just legislation, we agree,” Homrighausen’s telegram continued, “but we do not concur with or sponsor his philosophy or action of demonstration in this instance.”
Deputy Crocker finished reading and loudly addressed Ellwanger. “What do you think of that?” he asked.
“He is entitled to his opinion, but we are here to make clear our position,” Ellwanger replied, asking to pass by. Crocker shrugged, and motioned with a withering look of pity to a place on the courthouse steps near the crowd of roughnecks. Once assembled there, Ellwanger tried to shout out a prepared statement that “there are white people in Alabama who will speak out…. We consider it a shocking injustice that there are still counties in Alabama where there are no Negroes registered to vote…” His words were lost, FBI agents cabled headquarters, as “the whites hooted and yelled to such an extent that statement could not be heard.” Ellwanger’s group tried to rise above the hecklers by singing “America the Beautiful,” only to be drowned out again by a spirited rendition of “Dixie.” Louder still, Negroes across the street joined spontaneously in “We Shall Overcome.” Above the cacophony of competing songs, some angry bystanders shouted threats to throw Ellwanger’s race traitors into the nearby Alabama River, and others made lewd comments on their imagined sexual preferences. “Tears trickled down the cheeks of some of the women,” reported an AP correspondent, “as the crowd cursed, insulted, and jeered them.”
Wilson Baker, Selma’s director of public safety, hurried through the yelling crowd to Ellwanger’s side and spoke into his ear, saying he knew his parents and that it would be wise to return by way of Church Street rather than double back through the unruly whites to Broad Street. “You’d best hurry up,” Baker advised.
With the help of others nearby, Ellwanger skipped forward to the concluding lyrics they were determined to reach: “…and crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea.” Then, as he led the marchers forward toward Church Street, angry whites darted in to jostle those behind, and James Robinson grabbed one of two SNCC photographers walking next to the lines. Baker shoved his way through again to arrest Robinson, a member of the violently anti-Negro and anti-Jewish National States Rights Party, who had become a familiar figure in Selma since slugging Martin Luther King after the first voting rights demonstration in January. While Baker stared down the surrounding crowd, the photographers broke away to friends in a passing car, only to have several dozen of Robinson’s cohorts surround them and begin rocking the car to turn it over. They had lifted one set of wheels waist high before Baker arrived to place another man under arrest, which allowed the car to pull away.
Ellwanger’s group escaped the Selma mob toward more subtle retributions ahead. The Methodist minister who had lost his dog would lose his pulpit, and Marjorie Linn would lose her job as well as a car, which vandals soon pushed from a parking space over a steep embankment. For the time being, they shared immense relief at Knox Reformed Presbyterian Church, both crying and laughing at the comic inspiration of James Bevel’s sermon of praise about the celestial meaning of a freedom march by white people. Joyce Ellwanger, pregnant with her first child, made it back to the church in the embattled rear of the line, where her husband had placed her in hope of greater safety. Ironically, in view of Wilson Baker’s exertions, she carried a placard saying, “Decent Alabamans Protest Police Brutality,” but Baker himself made a similar point when he reported breathless to his boss, Selma’s mayor, Joe Smitherman, and learned that Smitherman had agreed to let Governor Wallace handle the next day’s march toward Montgomery. Enraged, Baker said Wallace’s people would brutalize the demonstrators no matter what they promised.
Baker fulminated, threatening to resign. He was a shrewd, sophisticated police leader in the region—a former college professor, mortician, and amateur Bible scholar, known as “Captain Baker” for his commanding presence (offset by a morbid, quirky fear of housecats), and as “The Fat Man” for his nervous compulsion to eat “anything that won’t bite back.” When Smitherman expressed a novice mayor’s trust in Wallace as his towering political mentor, Baker replied that Wallace could not control Sheriff Jim Clark or his “posse” of volunteer militia if he tried. Clark’s primitive itch to attack Negroes was so strong that he had journeyed to Perry County just to be on hand for the night riot of troopers when Jimmie Lee Jackson was killed, and Colonel Al Lingo of the state troopers was as bad or worse in the estimation of Baker, who accused Smitherman of naively abandoning their pact to defeat Martin Luther King by his own nonviolent methods. Their strategy was to defend a kind of progressive segregation by restrained law enforcement, protecting Selma’s reputation along with King’s demonstrators from the violent propensities of Sheriff Clark. If the Negroes must be stopped, Baker preferred to arrest them with his officers before they could reach Clark’s jurisdiction, which included the courthouse and all county areas outside the city limits. For Smitherman, however, that option would require him to break his commitment to Wallace and take on himself the burden of legal and political opposition to King.
A parallel debate raged privately at the governor’s mansion, where soundings on the “laughingstock” plan had turned out badly for George Wallace. Legislators bridled at his notion of relying upon weakness and natural privation to vanquish the protesters. Some doubted that Colonel Lingo could safeguard the marchers long enough to fail, and State Representative Bill Edwards specifically advised that his Lowndes County constituents included stoutly independent sharpshooters and dynamite experts who would never defer to any complicated jujitsu plan regarding Negroes. Wallace reconsidered the blockade option just as a counterstroke landed from the opposing camp. From Atlanta about noon on Saturday, Martin Luther King issued a statement that if the Sunday marchers were stopped, they would “lie down in the road” and seek relief from the federal government. While Wallace recognized that this could be a bluff, he recoiled from being drawn into what would be an uneven standoff with President Johnson. To ra
ise the stakes against King, he summoned a four o’clock news conference to forbid a contest of any kind. “There will be no march between Selma and Montgomery,” Wallace announced personally, saying he had instructed Colonel Lingo to “take whatever steps necessary” to prevent it. His aides quickly secured a public endorsement from Mayor Smitherman that “Negroes should not be permitted to make this senseless march.”
OPTIONS CLOSED upon President Johnson that Saturday afternoon, March 6, once Secretary McNamara reported that Vietnamese Communist units had been sighted near the new airbase at Da Nang. The Joint Chiefs were expecting two Marine battalions to guard the installation, and McNamara, anxious about vulnerability and blame, pressed for final approval to send them.
“The answer is yes, if there’s no other alternative,” the President replied. He consoled himself by reciting one estimate that predicted less than even odds of a big land war in Asia, but fretted to McNamara over the “psychological impact” of landing Marines as the first full combat units in Vietnam. “I know every mother is gonna say, ‘Uh, oh. This is it,’” he complained, adding that Americans pictured the Marine soldier as “a guy that’s got a dagger in his hand, and it’s going to put the flag up.”
Johnson recalled the firestorm reaction to a White House press announcement that Marines were dispatched into Mississippi the previous June, to search for the three civil rights workers who disappeared on the first day of the SNCC summer project. “I damn near had to evacuate the White House,” he said.
“I know it,” said McNamara.
They had calmed that uproar by swiftly substituting Navy units for the Marines, the President recounted—“When I said the boy with the white jersey is coming in, it was a helluva lot of difference”—and he groped for a comparable gesture in Vietnam. If the Joint Chiefs required Marines for the task, he suggested, perhaps they should soften the name by calling them military police.
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