At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  The President introduced the Attorney General to explain the judgment he had just rendered at a press conference initiated and scripted by Johnson—that state and local officials had used “totally unreasonable force” on Sunday. “I have no question that federal law was violated,” Katzenbach declared in the administration’s first substantive response to Pettus Bridge. “We are going to bring charges against those whom we can identify as violators.” This message drew a stinging cross-examination from several legislators, including Representative John Bell Williams of Mississippi, who blasted Katzenbach for siding with Communist agitators to trample on the rights of the South. McNamara and Rusk were having an easier time explaining the administration’s war moves in Vietnam when an aide handed President Johnson a note that James Reeb had been pronounced dead at 6:55 P.M., Alabama time. “Lyndon and I excused ourselves for a helpless, painful talk with Mrs. Reeb,” recorded Lady Bird Johnson. The President insisted that a presidential C-140 airplane take the widow and Reeb’s father back home when they were ready, and he consoled them for fifteen long minutes about their personal loss for a just cause. “But what is there to say?” Mrs. Johnson added in her diary. “When we went upstairs we could hear the Congressional guests and the music still playing below; and out in the front the chanting of the Civil Rights marchers. What a house. What a life.”

  WILSON BAKER, unshaven and haggard from lack of sleep, announced Reeb’s death Thursday night to several hundred Selma Negroes and visiting clergy still standing vigil at the “Berlin Wall” clothesline on Sylvan Street. Behind them, dripping from a second day of steady cold rain, a banner still hung above the Brown Chapel doorway from Jimmie Lee Jackson’s funeral on March 3: “Racism Killed Our Brother.” Prayers and song verses recognized Reeb as the second martyr of the Selma campaign until interrupted by another object hurled from the distance, which struck a demonstrator from Wisconsin in the forehead. Baker helped send him off to Good Samaritan for treatment, maintaining a rapport of gruff civility across his barrier even though he had prevented the demonstrators from building tent shelters—city code, he said—which left them and their patchwork bed of air mattresses soaked in the mud beneath umbrellas, blankets, and flattened cardboard boxes on sticks. (“I’m a segregationist,” Baker told one reporter, “but if I was a nigger I’d be doing just what they’re doing.”) He pledged solemnly to the crowd—as he had promised the Justice Department already—that he would file first-degree murder charges within an hour of Reeb’s death against the four Selma men he had identified as the assailants, one of whom had seventeen prior arrests. When he returned, the bandaged Wisconsin man was already back among demonstrators, who sang between their diversions of fatigue, such as street dances, grandiose debates about fasts to the death, and naps in the dry Brown Chapel pews.

  Governor Collins rushed back to Selma that evening to buffer emotional eruptions from Reeb’s death—only to become disturbed himself by an encounter with Lola Bell Tate, a teenage girl he found on the floor of the Brown Chapel parsonage. Dr. Dinkins explained as he worked to stop the bleeding that a .22 caliber bullet had pierced her lip and knocked out a tooth, but luckily had been too spent to cause more damage. Tate was the third victim so far of potshots fired into the street vigil. Collins made his way back outside past the clothesline and Baker’s police officers to the commander of the state troopers, asking why he deployed his armed men to face inward with weapons trained on the demonstrators rather than upon the marauders who fired and hurled projectiles from the darkness behind. Receiving no satisfactory answer, Collins recovered his official neutrality and went off to seek a negotiated truce that would relax the vigil in return for a one-time memorial service for Reeb at the courthouse. He and his assistants discovered that tear gas grenades had been set off beneath their government sedan. “They attempted to drive it,” reported the New York Times, “but were forced to get out after half a block, their eyes watering.”

  At FBI headquarters, officials maneuvered to minimize the bureau’s public exposure. When both the White House and Justice Department requested an FBI escort for Marie Reeb in Birmingham, Assistant Director DeLoach fended off the courtesy duty with an exaggerated claim that all Alabama agents were “working around the clock in the Selma area.” This earned him a personal commendation from J. Edgar Hoover, who mandated instead a security review of the Justice Department aide suspected to have originated the escort idea. Simultaneously, to forestall any “numbers game” about FBI performance, DeLoach dodged a request to disclose how many agents were assigned to Selma. There were enough to get results, he told White House press secretary George Reedy, but Katzenbach’s press conference late Thursday pitched the Bureau’s internal machinery into reverse alarm. Well into the night, headquarters grilled employees about how the Attorney General could promise federal prosecutions before the FBI provided “any information whatsoever…indicating that any of the police officers involved in the brutal beating of the marchers on Sunday March 7, 1965 had been identified.” Panicky agents “emphatically stated that they had no knowledge,” and parroted the accepted line that matching troopers or deputies with thousands of photographs “has been difficult due to the fact a large majority were wearing gas masks.” When supervisors wrung from the head of the Mobile office an admission that he had shared interim results with John Doar, and thus taken initiative for which “he has no written record of authorization,” the FBI’s disciplinary apparatus isolated and removed him by morning.

  THE SEVERAL crises converged toward showdown on Friday, March 12. In Selma, where rain fell so hard that only eighty at a time maintained the vigil outdoors, the last of the Chicago theology students left for home—Jesse Jackson with a mild case of pneumonia—but newcomers replaced them several times over. Seventy Catholics arrived that day from Chicago alone, and the annual meeting of the Unitarian-Universalist Association adjourned en masse to Selma from Boston, where the symphony honored Reeb with the same piece it had played after the Kennedy assassination, Gluck’s “Dance of the Blessed Spirits.”

  Wilson Baker could not keep his agreement with Governor Collins to secure permission for a memorial service at the Selma courthouse, because his boss, Mayor Smitherman, moved steadily against him into a political alliance with Sheriff Clark, bending to local voters angered by the “appeasement” of Tuesday’s march. On his own, Baker did cut down the “Berlin Wall” with his pocketknife that afternoon. Although he emphasized that there still would be no marches, demonstrators eagerly cut up pieces of the clothesline as souvenirs of a symbol removed. They raised freedom chants along with prayers of conviction that nonviolence would overcome the barriers to Montgomery. The rain finally stopped. Young people invented new verses for their song: “The invisible wall is a Berlin Wall…. The troopers’ cars are a Berlin Wall…”

  In Montgomery, a large truck pulled up outside temporary SNCC headquarters with a surprise delivery of tents, helmets, cooking utensils, and assorted survival equipment. Silas Norman berated Forman for spending many thousands of scarce SNCC dollars unilaterally toward a “grandstand” campaign that the organization had rejected a week earlier. SNCC leader Cleveland Sellers was stunned to learn that Forman had put out a “nationwide call” to Montgomery, mimicking King. Forman, in turn, was dismayed to learn that Stokely Carmichael and seventy Tuskegee recruits abandoned the occupation of Dexter Avenue Baptist as a foothold for demonstrations, under pressure from Bevel and church trustees who cut off the electricity and water. Meanwhile, at federal court in Montgomery, Assistant Attorney General John Doar was “plainly astonished,” according to the New York Times, to hear his own FBI witness blurt out—against the grain of his testimony, and without being asked—that Alabama troopers were “justified in using tear gas” on Bloody Sunday. Unbeknownst to Doar or spectators, rookie agent James M. Barko had misinterpreted the Bureau’s overnight dragnet about helping Doar, and soon felt corrective discipline straight from Hoover’s office for putting the FBI on any side of public controversy a
bout race. Doar, arguing in support of King’s petition for a protected march, tried to recover by offering into evidence a three-minute news film of the violence on Pettus Bridge, and Judge Johnson, visibly affected by footage he had never seen, called a recess as soon as courtroom lights were restored. His demeanor confirmed instincts within Governor Wallace’s inner circle that the judge and the whole country were tilting against them. “The niggers are like cats,” one legislator told a reporter. “They always land on their feet.” Late Friday, yearning to regain public initiative, Wallace wired President Johnson for an appointment to address “some of the greatest internal problems ever faced by this nation.”

  Undercover agents scattered through the outdoor lines for the White House tour on Friday to prevent a recurrence of the previous day’s sit-in. For better than four hours, through lunch, President Johnson sat in the Cabinet Room flanked by Katzenbach and Vice President Humphrey, listening to stories about voting rights from more than three dozen men—a few young activists* and a delegation of clergy from a mammoth ecumenical assembly convened by the Commission on Religion and Race. Many had been to Selma, including Rev. Joseph Ellwanger of the white Alabamian’s march and Rev. Robert Spike from the “turnaround” march on Tuesday. The President took notes. His joke fell flat when he remarked that the picket lines outside were “violatin’ my civil rights” by keeping his daughters from doing their homework, and the audience grew restless when Humphrey recited all the past achievements for which Johnson deserved credit. “Why has it taken so long for you to send a voting rights bill to Congress?” Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore asked bluntly. Stung, Johnson said it was not easy to fashion a constitutional bill that would pass a Congress dominated by hostile Southern committee chairmen, and also deliver the franchise effectively to five million Negroes where all previous measures had failed. When Spike and his delegation returned to the Lutheran Church of the Reformation on Capitol Hill, where the CORR’s nationwide convocation of three thousand clergy itself made front-page news, their reports of impatience with Johnson drew cheers, but descriptions of an “anguished” President received skeptical comments about an LBJ “snow job.”

  Back in the Oval Office, Johnson called for his dog Blanco but found him sick from a rabies shot. To stimulate interest in an upbeat topic, he took Laurence Rockefeller of the White House Conference on Natural Beauty down to the press room—only to find that nearly all the reporters had rushed outside to watch officers haul away two dozen demonstrators who had been rooted out of the tour line but now sat in Pennsylvania Avenue during rush hour, plus a handful of white women who had slipped through the northwest gate to lie facedown on the White House driveway. Johnson told the remaining journalists they could ask Rockefeller anything they wanted, but got few takers. When one of them mentioned that Governor Wallace reportedly was asking to see him, Johnson pounced. Even before the telegram from Alabama was received, his staff arranged and announced a summit conference for the next morning.

  CHAPTER 9

  Wallace and the Archbishop

  March 13–15, 1965

  ON Saturday, March 13, President Johnson prepared for Wallace first by consulting his Secretary of Defense about the heavy pressure from the lobbying clergy to dispatch U.S. soldiers to Alabama. “They all say, ‘we want troops,’” Johnson told McNamara. But troops, he said, really meant sending “some young boy who’s just been drafted or joined in,” and who lacked the ability to handle prosecutions or complex racial entanglements. “Troops don’t do any of that, and we don’t know that we’ve got enough troops but what he [Wallace] could match them if he just called in everybody that he could get.” Johnson added that Katzenbach had “thirty-three lawyers” working on the legal ramifications of using troops in Selma, “all of whom are in this field, and all of them recommend against it.”

  McNamara concurred. “Beyond all the arguments you’ve given, Mr. President, Selma is just one point,” he said. “You have Mississippi, Louisiana, and the rest of Alabama to take care of. You got this bill coming up next week, and troops leave a bitter taste in the mouths of all the people that are in those three states, and in the mouths of all the senators.”

  As applied to Vietnam as well as Selma, these were profound, treacherous distinctions of politics and war. Johnson also leaned against sending civilian U.S. marshals to Selma, which was the option that Martin Luther King strongly preferred. King saw the enforcement mission of marshals as corrective and constructive—treating violent segregationists as errant fellow citizens, with rights—whereas the military mission of soldiers tended to dehumanize opponents into enemies. For King, even armed marshals were easier to square with nonviolence than soldiers, but Johnson worked from practical experience rather than abstraction. Behind the myth of Wyatt Earp, he saw the typical U.S. marshal as a patronage hack with very little training. “He’s just a fellow that carried some senator’s suitcase,” the President told McNamara, “and there are just a hundred or so of ’em in the whole United States.”

  Johnson wanted to rely on seasoned FBI agents as long as possible. DeLoach, his FBI liaison officer, had promised him that the Bureau would bring evidence to prosecute a hundred of the troopers who had run roughshod over the marchers on Sunday. “While this FBI man was getting his head beat in with a club, he was taking pictures…and he got them all on their horses,” the President told McNamara. “We can’t identify ’em with gas masks on, but we’ve got their horses, and we’re identifying the horses they rode.” McNamara expressed no reservations about such a fantastic stalling yarn, which the Bureau would discard when pressure eased, and if he detected a rare gullibility in Johnson he refrained from saying so. Instead, he assured the President that he had troop units on alert for rapid deployment, and endorsed Johnson’s reluctance to use them in a political crisis. “If we did anything wrong in the past two or three years on this,” said McNamara of previous crises in Birmingham and at Ole Miss, “it was to introduce troops too early, and they escalate to a higher level of violence.”*

  With Governor Wallace waiting in the Cabinet Room, Johnson summoned Attorney General Katzenbach alone into his private bathroom while he sat on the toilet. This was Katzenbach’s first exposure to a legendary Johnsonian practice, which power analysts interpreted as a submission drill for squeamish aides such as McGeorge Bundy. To Katzenbach, who may have been eligible for such treatment himself as an Ivy Leaguer, Johnson’s manner seemed wholly one of raw urgency about Wallace, stripped of pretense. “What should I ask him to do?” Johnson demanded.

  Katzenbach stammered. “I don’t know,” he said. “What do you want him to do?”

  “Write down six things for me,” Johnson commanded—make a list, put numbers on it. “I don’t give a damn how outrageous they are,” he said.

  Katzenbach found a pad in the Oval Office. The President glanced at the hastily composed list when he emerged minutes later, then pocketed it on the way to greet the Wallace entourage. There he remarked effusively on Lady Bird’s Alabama roots and made a point of introducing the renowned Secret Service agent Rufus Youngblood as a native Georgian, which reminded him to send for an agent born in Alabama. He grandly announced that George Wallace had at least one thing in common with Martin Luther King, namely, that they were the only two people cheeky enough to ask him for an appointment and notify the press before the request reached the White House, which King had done on leaving the Selma jail in February. Bantering about Southern manners and a President’s prerogatives, he waved off Wallace’s apologies with assurances that he was glad to see him. The summoned Secret Service agent arrived, whereupon Johnson beamed, “Lem, I want to introduce you to your governor.”

  The President soon invited Wallace and one aide to retire privately with him and Katzenbach. He guided the diminutive Wallace to sink low in one of the cushioned sofas in the Oval Office, then pulled his favorite rocking chair close enough to rub knees as he towered over his guest. “Well, governor,” said Johnson, “you wanted to see me?”

>   Wallace defined the problem as malcontent demonstrators trained in Moscow or New York. “You cannot deal with street revolutionaries,” he said. “You can never satisfy them. First it’s a front seat on the bus. Next it’s a takeover of parks. Then it’s public schools. Then it’s voting rights. Then it’s jobs. Then it’s distribution of wealth without work.” For fifteen minutes, he described the hardships created by subersive demonstrators for Alabama and Washington alike, then exhorted President Johnson to join with him in a dutiful alliance to restore public order. “Finally, Mr. President, I’d like to thank you for the opportunity to let me come here,” Wallace concluded, with comments about the White House and other national symbols that bordered on awe.

  Johnson never took his eye off Wallace. His accent thickened as he expressed his own distaste for demonstrations, to the point that Wallace’s aide later claimed he said “nigger” outright instead of the drawled Southern “nigra.” “Those goddam nigras have kept my daughters awake every night with their screaming and hollering,” said Johnson, then slowly shifted from the faults of the demonstrators to their grievances. “You can’t stop a fever by putting an icepack on your head,” he told Wallace, and brutality was no good to “get at the cause” of the fever, of course. “I know you’re like me, not approving of brutality,” said Johnson. He brushed off Wallace’s quibbles about the word “brutality” by snapping his fingers for photographs of the violence on Pettus Bridge. Johnson secured a numb agreement that brutality injured the United States even if Wallace qualified the cause of it, then mused sadly about how the governor strayed so far from his progressive record in public service. “Why are you off on this black thing?” he asked. “You ought to be down there calling for help for Aunt Susie in the nursing home.”