At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  The President soared off into New Deal memories of hooking up the first electricity in hardscrabble rural Texas so families at last could see at night and farmers could live past forty and farm women could iron clothes without first heating a metal slab in the fire. He rhapsodized on his plans to establish Medicare and attack hopelessness in Appalachia. He said Wallace could do a lot to educate the poor of both races in Alabama—“Your president will help you”—if he would stop harkening back to 1865 and look instead to his legacy for 2065. “What do you want left when you die?” Johnson intoned. “Do you want a great big marble monument that reads, ‘George Wallace—He Built,’ or do you want a little piece of scrawny pine board that reads, ‘George Wallace—He Hated’?”

  Seymore Trammell loyally intervened to say his boss had come there to discuss the growing menace of Communist demonstrations, but he failed to relieve Wallace from the grip of LBJ’s treatment. The President slowly turned and “looked at me like I was some kind of dog mess,” Trammell recalled, then handed him a pencil from the coffee table. “Here, take notes,” Johnson ordered. Picking the most far-fetched item from Katzenbach’s list, he offered Wallace a suggestion to “turn off those demonstrations in a minute” by announcing his commitment to desegregate all of Alabama’s public schools: “You and I go out there right now in front of those television cameras.”

  Wallace looked stricken. On the defensive about his tombstone, he parried the notion by saying that he lacked the power to do so under Alabama law.

  Johnson sparred with Wallace through the items on Katzenbach’s list: a pledge of obedience for federal court orders, a commitment to law enforcement without brutality, a declaration of support for the protected right of peaceful assembly, and a call for biracial meetings between Alabama whites and Negroes. “Are you getting this down?” he prodded Trammell, and finally suggested that Wallace simply affirm the principle of universal suffrage.

  Wallace replied that everybody in Alabama could vote already if they were registered. In that case, Johnson pressed, say everybody including nigras could be registered. “I don’t have that power, Mr. President,” said Wallace. “Under Alabama law it belongs to the county registrars.”

  “Don’t you shit me, George Wallace,” Johnson said sternly. Then he grinned slyly to register a sore point from the 1964 election: “You had the power to keep the President of the United States off the [Alabama] ballot. Surely you have the power to tell a few poor county registrars what to do.”

  They emerged after three hours and fifteen minutes to tell a crush of reporters outside the West Wing lobby that they had enjoyed a frank exchange of views. Wallace called the President “a great gentleman, as always,” and then departed, confiding glumly to assistants on his homeward flight that “when the President works on you, there’s not a lot you can do.” White House aides, by contrast, shelved contingency plans to contain an ugly scene if “the meeting has gone badly,” and later recorded that Johnson’s performance left Wallace “sort of cowed and pliable—of course, it didn’t last more than two days.” Johnson himself gobbled a bowl of soup before announcing outdoors at his thirty-eighth press conference that he would submit voting rights legislation next week. Asked what he had told Wallace, he revealed the last three suggestions from Katzenbach: “First, I urged that the Governor publicly declare his support for universal suffrage.” Asked why he had waited a week to respond publicly to Sunday’s violence, Johnson asserted that he had received a suitable proposal only hours earlier. “I have plotted my course,” he said. From the Rose Garden, the freedom chants of a thousand pickets still could be heard beyond the Pennsylvania Avenue gates.

  A SMALL airplane identified as the “Confederate Air Force” buzzed low over Selma’s blockaded vigil on its fifth continuous day, dropping leaflets that advised white citizens to fire local Negroes—“an unemployed agitator ceases to agitate”—and to support a defense fund for the alleged murderers of James Reeb. Morale suffered on both sides of the line below. Bands of frustrated demonstrators slipped around Wilson Baker’s front ranks toward the courthouse, only to need rescuing by Baker himself from more hostile whites lurking in the rear. Uniformed officers occasionally weakened under the prolonged barrage of nonviolent freedom songs that were personalized for them at close quarters—“I love badge number forty-seven…” Some answered questions about hobbies and trivia, or even expressed confusion about their duty, and a few commanders reportedly asked to have their men relieved by the Alabama National Guard. Sheriff Clark rallied his possemen and Lingo’s troopers to block the first surge of a march to honor Reeb on March 14, but he relented under a truce with Baker to allow small parties through the lines for the limited purpose of attending Sunday worship downtown. Two fresh acquaintances from the vigil arranged to meet at the doorstep of First Presbyterian, where ushers turned them away because one was a Negro. At Central Baptist, much of the large congregation evacuated or avoided the sanctuary until the deacons safely refused several racially mixed groups.

  At St. Paul’s Episcopal, Rev. Frank Mathews missed his own service because of an ulcerous stomach that was aggravated by the expected arrival of twenty aspiring worshipers from the “Berlin Wall,” led by collared clergy. When Rev. John Morris and others had provided a courtesy notice of their intention, Mathews responded by asking whether they thought it would be Christian to bring guests with measles. In his absence, the awkward debate about an appropriate analogy for multiracial worship resumed in confrontation on the church steps. Seminarian Jonathan Daniels acknowledged the frayed nerves all around as signs of genuine spiritual conflict, but theological issues were so urgent to him that he frankly expressed worry about how the leaders of St. Paul’s could hope to secure any standing within Episcopal canon law or any personal comfort from the deeper imperatives of faith.

  For Judith Upham, the only other Boston seminarian who had remained all week in Selma, distress focused more on the tactical disadvantage of having within their group some local people in dirty blue jeans who displayed little respect for Episcopal tradition. She was embarrassed by her own wish that all the Negroes among them could be like the impeccably educated Ivanhoe Donaldson of SNCC, who had been raised Anglican in Jamaica. Finally, the phalanx of ushers and vestrymen from St. Paul’s concocted a “nonracial” policy to admit all the clergy but none of the laymen, including Donaldson. Those blockaded on the church steps retreated to Brown Chapel rather than submit to the mandated division. Three regular members of St. Paul’s walked out of the delayed service to protest the refusal of worship, opening battle within a congregation that included many of Selma’s most prominent citizens.

  At St. Mark’s Episcopal in Washington, Rev. William Baxter preached about his own Selma journey to a congregation that included the Johnson and Humphrey families, as observances spilled widely to mark the week since Pettus Bridge. From San Jose, California, and Beloit, Wisconsin, marchers set off on fifty-mile treks to honor the impeded course from Selma to Montgomery. Twenty-seven ministers conducted a service of reconciliation at the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas, and a thousand people in New Orleans marched through hostile crowds to advocate voting rights. In Massachusetts, twenty thousand attended a “Rally for Freedom” on Boston Common, while opponents burned a ten-foot cross in the fabled revolutionary town of Lexington. A relay of eighteen freedom runners left from New York’s George Washington Bridge bound for Washington, and nuns from the Sisters of Charity, in military formation and Puritan-style habits, joined a procession of 15,000 through Harlem to hear addresses by John Lewis, James Forman, and Bayard Rustin. From All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, where James Reeb had served as assistant pastor until 1964, the morning service emptied into a spontaneous march down Sixteenth Street that gathered another crowd of 15,000 into Lafayette Park for speakers, including Fannie Lou Hamer of Mississippi. “Her plump face shining in the sun,” reported the normally staid New York Times, “she shouted in her mighty voice: ‘It’s time now to stop begging them for what s
hould have been done one hundred years ago. We have stood up on our feet, and God knows we’re on our way!’”

  Noise from Lafayette Park filtered across the street into the Cabinet Room where President Johnson convened seven congressional leaders Sunday afternoon. “You made the White House fireproof but not soundproof,” he observed wryly in the midst of a sober prediction that more would die like Reeb until the government secured the right to register and vote for all citizens “except those in mental institutions.” Senate leaders Mike Mansfield and Everett Dirksen each pressed Johnson not to seem panicky in the face of demonstrations. “This is a deliberate government,” said Dirksen. “Don’t let those people say, ‘we scared him into it.’” Perhaps by prearrangement, House leaders argued that a presidential address to the nation would instill relief rather than panic. “I think it would help,” said Majority Leader Carl Albert of Oklahoma, and Speaker John McCormack invited Johnson to address a joint session of Congress. They fixed Tuesday evening as the earliest practicable time for the President to put his proposals into speech form, but Attorney General Katzenbach allowed that the “unpredictable” King might try to resume the march from Selma earlier the same day. To preclude being upstaged, the leaders resolved to advance the date to Monday—the next evening. Bill Moyers called in emergency help from church leader Robert Spike as well as political strategist Louis Martin, the former publisher of Negro newspapers who worked for Democratic presidents since FDR. Johnson commandeered writers to work through Sunday night, including Horace Busby, author of Johnson’s treasured 1963 civil rights speech at Gettysburg. Busby dismissed the Justice Department draft as “junk,” but the weekend rewrites fared so poorly that the President yanked in a startled new speechwriter, Richard Goodwin, to begin Monday morning from a blank page.

  THAT MARCH 15, as the third calendar Monday of the month, was a day specified in Alabama law for voter registration. At the Lowndes County seat in Hayneville, where surprised officials simply had told Negro aspirants to go away two weeks earlier, registrar Carl Golson consulted widely to prepare this time. He no longer required applicants to produce a testament of character from a current voter, because this custom, as applied selectively to Negroes, was deemed a legal albatross with the Justice Department and the newspapers now in an uproar over voting—especially for a county where no Negro had been registered for at least sixty years. Like the registrars of neighboring counties such as Wilcox, Golson balanced this concession with a special new arrangement for Negro applicants. When more than twenty did present themselves that morning a second time—all from the pioneer thirty-seven who had signed their names to the sheet on March 1—Golson redirected them to line up on a side street about two hundred yards from the courthouse, outside the old county jail.

  None of the applicants had ever been inside the long-abandoned relic of local punishment. A scouting trip by John Hulett and Frank Miles turned up no booby traps or obvious signs of ambush, but did little to calm apprehensions. Just inside the front door, to the left, the old indoor gallows stood with a rope slung over the yardarm. Jesse “Note” Favors reported that a deputy sheriff mused to him, “I wonder if that old thing still works.” Mattie Lee Moorer noticed items other than the rope that seemed to be freshly placed props of crude but resonant intimidation: a shotgun leaned against the wall, a pint of unlabeled whiskey on a bare table in the cellblock. A news photographer later captured the registrar administering a test to a lone applicant at this table beneath the glare of three naked light bulbs. Sidney Logan, who had ventured alone on Tuesday to witness the “turnaround” march in Selma, stayed on outside as a reassuring presence for those obliged to wait under the gaze of passersby. Of the seventeen who completed the registration test by the end of the day, Logan would be rejected weeks later along with fourteen others, and two—John Hulett and the blind preacher, John C. Lawson—would become the first registered Negroes since the reign of England’s Queen Victoria. These numbers were a pittance, and very likely a strategic move by county officials to remove the stigma of absolute racial exclusion. In Lowndes County, however, even the fifteen who persevered to failure vindicated Sidney Logan’s scouting report from Selma that wonders must be afoot.

  CAREFULLY REMOVED from his public schedule that Monday, President Johnson convened the Joint Chiefs and his top national security officials to hear the report of a ten-day, “final” diagnostic mission to Vietnam. Army General Harold K. “Johnny” Johnson, a survivor of the Bataan Death March and three years in a Japanese POW camp, exceeded his own reputation for tough-minded realism by predicting that it would take 500,000 U.S. soldiers five years to “arrest the deterioration” in the military situation. As the President’s chosen leader for the on-site review, he recommended a twenty-one-point program featuring large, immediate troop deployments to forestall what National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy now secretly called the Vietcong’s “current expectation of early victory.” Assistant Defense Secretary John McNaughton, who had accompanied the delegation as McNamara’s chief strategic thinker on Vietnam, was equally candid in his top secret apportionment of U.S. war motives: “70% to avoid a humiliating defeat…20% to keep SVN [South Vietnam] (and then adjacent territory) from Chinese hands, 10% to permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life.”

  The report stunned the assembled commanders in the White House. Even McNamara, who had recommended the mission in order to solidify official support for gradual troop deployments, professed shock to hear the accepted difficulties projected into large, blunt numbers, and the President blanched at the implications of such a war. He warned thunderously against leaks of the sensitive material, then lashed out as though there must be a way to change the projections rather than fulfill them. “Kill more Vietcong,” he ordered the Joint Chiefs.

  President Johnson dismissed the military conclave to keep a Monday afternoon appointment with columnist Walter Lippmann, who represented the opposite pole of his Vietnam predicament. Lippmann was warning in print that military escalation was leading to unnecessary, avoidable disaster: “The reappraisal of our present policy is necessary, I submit, because the policy is not working and will not work.” Over lunch with President and Mrs. Johnson in the White House residence, and then alone with Johnson in the Oval Office, the nation’s foremost public intellectual pressed for national debate about Vietnam to prepare the public for a political compromise. “Your policy is all stick and no carrot, Mr. President,” said Lippmann. “You’re bombing them without offering any incentive for them to stop fighting.” Johnson replied genuinely that he loathed the war and would do almost anything to escape it, but said the Vietnamese Communists were offering him no carrots either, short of a reciprocal invitation to leave.

  The two men argued for competing versions of a middle course in Vietnam—contained war versus negotiated settlement—both of which rested on wishful thinking or fiction. Lippmann probably guessed this, and Johnson certainly knew so from the consistently grim assessments within his own government. Nevertheless, the President favored either course over his actual choice between major war and collapse of the American position. He was keenly aware that Lippman himself publicly ruled out American withdrawal from Vietnam,* which only reinforced Johnson’s political instinct that no President could risk “unmanly” surrender. Honesty about Vietnam would touch off a war stampede and upheaval over blame for weakness, Johnson figured, along with dissent against the notion that humiliation could justify war. He resolved instead to contain political division separately from the conflict itself, using secrecy as a first defense.

  Privately, Johnson railed against Lippmann’s call for open national debate (“He doesn’t understand that I’m debatin’ it every night,” Johnson told Moyers). In person, he presented himself to Lippmann as a reluctant warrior seeking to win in Vietnam by the minimal application of violence, and he entertained belief that Lippmann’s suggested “peace initiative” might yield a surprise settlement. The President buzzed McGeorge Bundy: “Mac, I’ve
got Walter Lippmann over here, and he says we’re not doing the right thing. Maybe he’s right.” Lippmann was elated by the positive reception, which relieved his anxiety about being ostracized after decades of access to Presidents.

  President Johnson reverted briefly to his domestic crisis. Hours before the address to Congress, pages of a new draft were spilling one by one from the office where speechwriter Richard Goodwin had locked himself from the frantic attentions of presidential aides—chiefly Moyers, Katzenbach, and Jack Valenti, with supporting experts and ad hoc advisers. Somewhat to their chagrin, Johnson had insisted upon Goodwin as his last-minute substitute even though he was an urbane Kennedy holdover of the pedigree the President often disparaged as “a Harvard,” known for his dialectical encounter with Cuban revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara and starkly ill-suited to the Texas folkways that Johnson applied to politics. Still, after seeing Lippmann, the President lobbed a hand grenade into the speech stew by buzzing Goodwin ex cathedra with a story from his formative experience as a teacher of young Mexican-Americans in Cotulla, Texas. “I just wanted to remind you,” he signed off abruptly. Johnson saw in Goodwin an outsider with a gift for words, fit for the task of quick-mixing a bubble of presidential memory into the framework of Negro voting rights. “A liberal Jew,” he lectured Valenti, “has his hand on the pulse of America.”