At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  THE ALABAMA marchers sloshed that afternoon into campsite three, which the FBI classified as “a sea of mud” on pastureland owned by Birmingham entrepreneur A. G. Gaston at the eastern end of Lowndes County. Army demolition units sank to their ankles combing the field for bombs. The logistics committee located level high ground to pitch only two of the four field tents, which were uninhabitable until donated bales of hay and straw could be heaved from trucks by chain relay and spread into flimsy rafts of dryness. Conditions blotted out group activities including a “community sing” for morale. Folksinger Odetta found Pete Seeger curled up asleep.

  Episcopal priest Morris Samuel of Los Angeles recruited seminarian Jonathan Daniels among extra security marshals for a night of stress. One marcher who broke down into shouts and seizures was hauled off to treatment for “emotional exhaustion.” Another fell violently ill, and FBI inspector Joseph Sullivan only partly calmed fears of deliberate food poison by tracing a strange taste to extra creosote cleaner in a rented water truck, which previously had hauled sewage. (The U.S. Army supplied water the rest of the way, despite the misgivings of some marchers and the legal scruples of John Doar.) Wet Guardsmen on perimeter duty broke discipline to call people “nigger,” and one reportedly spit in the face of a priest. A Northern white pilgrim, desperate for sleep, quarreled vainly with the perpetual singers, shouting, “You goddam kids, shut up!” Two photographers scuffled for position to catch a tilted Unitarian, who had dozed off seated, at the instant he toppled into the muck.

  In Cleveland that evening, a police guard arrested one of twenty-eight pickets at the Hotel Sheraton for charging with a Confederate flag up to King’s room on the ninth floor. Downstairs in the giant banquet hall, energy from compressed history piled newer agendas ahead of recent ones. King told 2,200 paying guests that proceeds intended to honor his Nobel Prize would be used to defray SCLC’s $50,000 cost for the Selma-to-Montgomery march, and that beyond a second landmark law on segregation he looked soon to address “unjust conditions” of race nationwide, outside the South. “In the world as it is today,” he said, “America can no longer afford an anemic-type democracy.” The governor of Ohio sent a personal donation to the banquet for presentation by Negro publisher William Walker, whose family in Selma once owned the café where Rev. James Reeb ate supper before the ambush two Tuesdays earlier. Ohio’s largest newspaper, the Plain Dealer, highlighted blistered feet on the front page—“Dr. King, in Cleveland, Tries Not to Limp”—and reported as a breakthrough that the diocese authorized Catholic clergy to march over the objections of the Alabama archbishop. Well after midnight, King and his traveling aide Bernard Lee made room for two Ohio priests on the chartered flight back to Montgomery by way of Pittsburgh and Atlanta.

  The Alabama columns followed Andrew Young out of Gaston’s pasture before seven o’clock Wednesday morning, mostly soggy and miserable but relieved to be on the move. Jonathan Daniels hitched a ride back to the rearguard bustle of Selma and the clutter of signs posted throughout Brown Chapel—“All those who wish to take hot baths, contact Mrs. Lilly”—looking for sleep after all-night security duty. His seminary companion Judith Upham crossed in the other direction to join the ranks past the first mile, where Highway 80 opened to four lanes and the court order no longer restricted numbers. The march doubled to 675 people by nine o’clock. Those with transistor radios heard descriptions of the last close-up photographs transmitted from the exploratory satellite Ranger 9 before crash impact on the moon crater Alphonsus, and station WHHY broadcast news of fresh resolutions by the Alabama legislature declaring the march to be a pestilence of sex orgies and vulgar language, specifying that “young women are returning to their respective states apparently as unwed expectant mothers.” John Lewis joked to reporters that segregationists were preoccupied with interracial sex, which was “why you see so many shades of brown on this march.” Harris Wofford “almost welcomed the wild charges” as relief from sentimentality, noting privately that some Northerners babbled naively about the rustic glory of abject poverty, like “Peace Corps Volunteers during their first week abroad.”

  WITH ABERNATHY and Coretta, King rejoined the columns at eleven o’clock in Montgomery County, beyond the Lowndes boundary about halfway through Wednesday’s sixteen miles. He welcomed some of the constant arrivals who had swelled the ranks above a thousand, dropped off by bus and car—long-lost preacher friends from Crozer Seminary, a Jewish delegation from the Anti-Defamation League. The grime of bedraggled permanent marchers dispersed in a sea of clean new faces and fresh shirts, some unwisely attached to suitcases. FBI agents recorded the presence of more celebrities—singer Tony Bennett, actor Anthony Perkins and his wife—among numbers that doubled again before thunderstorms at 1:30 drenched lines stretched more than a mile. Coming out of open country, they passed Montgomery’s Dannelly Airport, headquarters for military escort Team Bravo, where officials processed a rash of unseen threats to firebomb the women’s tent, blow up Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, and to shoot King from the roof of a downtown building. By three o’clock the lead vehicles approached campsite four at the City of St. Jude, a Catholic compound on the outskirts of Montgomery. “The latest estimates ran between 4,000 and 5,000 just before entering the bivouac area,” Joseph Califano informed government leaders from the Pentagon.

  Above the drone of helicopters, nuns and schoolchildren of St. Jude sang with crowds of Negroes from the surrounding neighborhood, greeting not only the marchers from Highway 80 but also thousands who converged for Thursday’s final push to the capitol. C. Vann Woodward and John Hope Franklin arrived in a delegation of twenty prominent historians. A trainload of 117 Washingtonians, stranded all night by balky crews on their Atlanta–West Point special, hiked wearily from the railroad station. Two hundred students came straight from Kilbey State Prison and nearby jails, released on bond a week after James Forman’s Montgomery demonstrations. Assorted columns filed for hours into the fenced grounds of St. Jude with “a grandeur that was almost biblical,” reported the New York Times. Even troubles acquired epic scale. Hands passed food above heads jammed close on a St. Jude lawn trampled to mud. Pastors joined volunteers trying to repair a failed generator. Poles snapped on two of the field tents.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Stakes of History

  March 24–25, 1965

  OUT of a Wednesday afternoon nap, President Johnson called Henry Cabot Lodge about filling a Republican vacancy at the new Communications Satellite Corporation, saying he refused to let him “sit on your tail up there in Boston” while Republicans were out of power. “I got lots of Republican votes ’cause you weren’t nominated,” he teased, alluding to massive gains in his Goldwater race above the stiff competition from the GOP’s Richard Nixon–Henry Cabot Lodge ticket of 1960, and he complained that the Republican National Committee made it hard for him to hire top-quality government executives. “Dogs,” he called their suggested political appointments—“somebody somebody’s owned for twenty years out in Ohio or somewhere…or somebody that hates everything”—and Lodge agreed, “Just deadbeats, yes.” Above all, Johnson cooed and wooed the Republican scion to “lead them down a good path of public service,” back in harness. “I waked up here, and I just thought of something out of heaven almost,” he said, opening a barrage of flattery about how badly he missed contact with a peer statesman to “walk around with our dog and philosophize some, because I get pretty lonesome around here sometimes.” In passing, he asked for confidential advice about replacing General Maxwell Taylor in Lodge’s former post as U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam.

  Lodge answered briskly that Vietnam needed “a politically minded civilian” of stature. “There are a lot of things that a military man just doesn’t see,” he argued, though conceding that Johnson rightly had sent Taylor as “your number one soldier” to neutralize Vietnam as a campaign issue in 1964. “I certainly will, will think about it,” Lodge promised, then stopped, chuckled, and coughed. “But maybe the thing to do is to send
me back.”

  “Well, might be,” Johnson replied. “Might be, might be.” Lodge said he spoke fluent French and knew how to handle the military, which was “very important out there.” Johnson renewed his pitch for the COMSAT board, masking any targeted recruitment for Vietnam with a general enthusiasm that betrayed no hint of his prior disparagement of Lodge. On becoming President sixteen months earlier in Dallas, he had flayed Lodge to confidants as an overbred patrician, telling Senator Richard Russell that he “ain’t worth a damn” and Senator William Fulbright that he had “things screwed up good” in Vietnam. Johnson blamed Lodge for conniving like Lady Macbeth in the fateful coup against South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. McNamara considered him a self-important “loner,” and Russell whispered to Johnson that Lodge “thinks he’s emperor out there…dealing with barbarian tribes.”

  What had changed since was Johnson, not Lodge. Now that the President himself grimly had “crossed the Rubicon” on direct intervention, as Ambassador Taylor put it, Lodge’s impulse to command looked more necessary than inept. “The Vietnamese have no tradition of national government,” he had advised Johnson recently as a secret consultant. “They do not do it well.” Still regarding Communist subversion as an apocalyptic danger—“a bigger threat than the nuclear”—Lodge urged the President to ignore or work around the Vietnamese government rather than “hamper ourselves by the classic, diplomatic idea that for us to deal with anything below the national level is interference in internal affairs.” By contrast, Ambassador Taylor consistently opposed the introduction of U.S. ground troops as politically and militarily self-defeating. Not only would the prospect of American rescue “sap the already flaccid purpose of the Vietnamese” military, he feared, but Vietnamese civilians would come to resent and resist the “white-faced soldier, armed, equipped and trained as he is,” as successor to the hated French colonialists. Taylor offered Johnson a soldier’s loyal realism, but Lodge offered boundless confidence, plus partisan cover as a Republican of presidential stature.

  “Don’t you mention this other thing to another human,” the President instructed.

  “Can I call you tomorrow?” asked Lodge.

  “I wish you would,” said Johnson. “Call me early in the morning as you can.”

  FACULTY ORGANIZERS had averted the wrath of the state legislature by moving their planned “work moratorium” out of regular class time at the University of Michigan, and relieved administrators helped female dorm students secure permission to stay out late Wednesday night in Ann Arbor. This boosted attendance, as did the theatrical energy of needlers who showed up chanting “Better Dead Than Red,” with sarcastic signs of “Defoliate the Arb, Deflower the Thetas,” and “Drop the Bomb.” Still, no one expected more than a small fraction of the three thousand students who overflowed ten volunteer seminars on aspects of the Vietnam War—basic geopolitics, revolutions in Asia, theories of guerrilla warfare, history of American involvement. Hecklers and curious couples alike stayed on to question professors debating as citizens. In one of the featured lectures, Arthur Waskow was presenting the war as misguided—“we have not yet learned that the political freedom of the Vietnamese people cannot be advanced by a military policy”—when helmeted police evacuated Angell Hall because of bomb threats. The whole assembly moved outside before midnight to loudspeakers set up in the snow, first to hear Waskow complete his lament that “we might have to pay the cost of our delay.” He quoted Thomas Jefferson’s premonition on blinkered democracy and slavery: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”

  By then in Montgomery, the afternoon’s celebration was deteriorating into confusion on the verge of panic. Equipment failure left the St. Jude campsite almost entirely in darkness, and a crowd grown from ten thousand close to thirty thousand by FBI estimate jammed against the makeshift stages until some fifty-seven people collapsed of illness, exhaustion, or injury. Marshals pushed through with twenty of them on stretchers before the jerrybuilt sound system sputtered to life late in the evening, allowing Harry Belafonte to sing one of his signature calypso hits, “Jamaica Farewell.” To restore order and spirits, Belafonte presented a midnight gala featuring Nina Simone, Alan King, Billy Eckstine, Johnny Mathis, the Chad Mitchell Trio, Leonard Bernstein, James Baldwin, and many others. Coretta King read a Langston Hughes poem in a rare joint appearance with her husband, saluting the large contingent of marchers from her native Perry County—“I was born and reared just eighty miles from here…” Before the rally ended at two o’clock, overflow marchers dispersed through Montgomery to seek dry pallets in Negro homes and church pews. Viola Liuzzo of Detroit slept in her car. King withdrew to Richmond Smiley’s home for another contentious late staff meeting. From predawn flights—a delegation of 293 landing at 4:45 A.M. from Burbank Air Terminal, for instance, and charters bearing four hundred people from New York City alone—a long line of rumbling buses stirred the campsite before breakfast.

  In Ann Arbor, meanwhile, six hundred students lasted all through the night, extending the Vietnam seminars until the university tower struck eight o’clock Thursday morning. A contagion was spreading already from the advance buzz about the first “T-Day” or “Teach Day,” which had been proposed less than two weeks earlier on the conscious model of SNCC’s Freedom Schools from the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project. The “teach-in” phenomenon instantly acquired a name from another antecedent in the movement, and would crisscross major universities even more rapidly than the sit-ins of 1960 leapt between Negro colleges. Columbia University in New York hosted a Vietnam teach-in the very next day, Wisconsin the next week. Within two months, there would be simultaneous teach-ins on more than a hundred campuses.

  IN WASHINGTON, Lodge indeed called the White House early: “Good morning, sir, how did you sleep?” As President Johnson replied that he was already going through reports on the Alabama march—“Today’s the big day…very potentially dangerous”—Lodge promptly announced his readiness to serve again as ambassador in South Vietnam. The President regretted that he had to send anyone “back in the swamp holes,” but reported that he and his top advisers were overjoyed to learn of Lodge’s willingness. “McNamara was just almost ecstatic last night…said it just solves all of our problems,” Johnson declared. He urged Lodge to keep quiet for a few months—“don’t even say to anybody that we even talked”—until Taylor’s replacement could be arranged as routine. From there, Johnson interrupted a telephone briefing on Alabama to console Attorney General Katzenbach personally—“it’s been an ordeal, I know”—warning him about the risk of heavy cigarette consumption through the late-night vigils.

  “I am smoking too many of them, Mr. President,” Katzenbach confessed. He asked for personal advice about how Johnson had quit tobacco, looking to find “the guts” to do so when pressure relented. If they could get through the grand finale on the steps of Wallace’s capitol, Katzenbach reported hopefully, “I think King would like to take a little rest—he’s got some sore feet.” Johnson dissected legislative prospects on the voting rights bill, then soon called young Senator Edward Kennedy about the upcoming 750th anniversary of the Magna Carta at Runnymeade field, where Queen Elizabeth would dedicate “an acre of English ground” in memory of President Kennedy. He invited Kennedy to represent the United States along with Robert Kennedy and their widowed sister-in-law, Jacqueline, at the royal ceremony in May. Kennedy responded warmly, and joked about how hard it could be to reach his brother “in that remote area, as you probably know.” (Concluding a perilous expedition in the Far Yukon Territory, Senator Robert Kennedy only the day before had planted three PT-109 tie clasps at the summit of the previously unnamed and unclimbed Mt. Kennedy.) Johnson traded quips with the younger brother, then switched still laughing to fraternal challenge. “Where is my immigration bill, goddam it?” he roared. Kennedy, still merry but sputtering, said his allies in the Judiciary Committee had “lost four weeks” to intervening hearings on voting rights. Johnson exhorted him to push immig
ration in tandem, while Selma had the Southern senators on their heels about racial exclusion.

  From the Pentagon, Joseph Califano wrote Thursday morning that the “Army force of 2,966 personnel has been split into three teams”: roadblock units along the march route, security deployments at the rally site, reserves to the north and east. “The tents have been taken down and the camp site is being policed,” advised his “Report No. 12” as of ten o’clock in Washington, which in Montgomery was the scheduled start time of nine. Moving to the White House Situation Room, Califano prepared a bulletin an hour later that “some 2,000/4,000 marchers are now milling around, unorganized,” with the start delayed in light rain, and he scrawled a hasty addendum on delivery to President Johnson: “11:35 A.M. Still milling around. Est. 10,000 people.”