At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  King promised a reply that summer. He still chased appointments through clouds of trouble, behind schedule after a graduation address at Wilberforce College, fending off press inquiries about Communism and more complaints about his staff—lately from clergy scandalized by Bevel’s offhand remarks at an ecumenical seminar in Atlantic City that Mary probably was not a virgin and may have conceived Jesus by a Roman soldier—arriving so tardy at Hempstead, New York, on June 13 that distraught Hofstra University officials had been casting about for a substitute commencement speaker, then missing an Ohio reception in his honor, oversleeping, hurrying into robes for graduation at Oberlin College. A dose of levity lingered from the chance selection on King’s previous visit there, amid lockdown tension over death threats, of a first question written by a child—“How do you feel about homework?”—but circumstance stirred new anxiety at the traditionally liberal school founded by abolitionists. “It is not enough to say we must not wage war,” King told the Oberlin audience in a reprise of his Nobel Prize lecture. “We must love peace, and sacrifice for it.” Beneath thunderous crescendos of approval—widely interpreted as dissent from incipient war in Vietnam—ran undercurrents of respectful discomfort for Secretary of State Dean Rusk, King’s fellow honoree on the stage.

  In the short interval before yet another graduation speech that week in Ohio—at Antioch College, Coretta’s alma mater—King gave instructions in Atlanta to some three hundred SCOPE volunteers to fan out through fifty rural Southern counties. SCOPE’s chief trainer and field marshal Hosea Williams introduced Bayard Rustin, who at length introduced Bevel and King. “Negroes have seen what white America has done with its freedom, and are worried,” said Bevel, preaching an antidote of nonviolence by “undiscourageable good will.” King took a mixed tactical line. Publicly, he emphasized the priority of the SCOPE summer mission, which helped him disengage gracefully from his announced boycott of Alabama. Privately, he urged caution on the mostly white volunteers, charging them to avoid risks of injury and repression that the new voting law soon would reduce. He sought to inspire them for greater possibilities, saying the new voters they met would send ripples of freedom outward from the South.

  WITH COMEDIAN Dick Gregory, prisoner Al Raby managed to send a telegram down the Mississippi: “Greetings from the Chicago movement in the 11th Police Station to our brothers and sisters in the Jackson jail.” The wire arrived June 15 along with SNCC chairman John Lewis and two hundred new prisoners joining nearly five hundred already locked overnight in a special stockade. The Mississippi dragnets made front-page news with plainly unsavory details about the treatment of silent marchers to the capitol—hauled away in garbage trucks, confined in livestock barns at the state fairgrounds, some hospitalized for treatment of beatings, all by officers who concealed their badge numbers under electrician’s tape. (Charles Marx, deputy chief of the Mississippi Highway Patrol, publicly called the tape a precautionary habit: “We just been doing it ever since this mess started with those Freedom Rides in ’61.”) Still, reporters drifted away from a story that lacked fresh resonance, in part because of its complex political setting. The Mississippi legislature was quietly repealing a dozen laws that discouraged the Negro vote—hardly from remorse or concession, but to lay tactical groundwork for a double-joined appeal to void the federal voting law as a moot usurpation of state authority. To protest the “stealth” session, movement organizers from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) hastily had redeployed supporters convened in Jackson. June Johnson, the teenager infamously beaten with Fannie Lou Hamer inside the Winona jail two years earlier, was dispatched from Greenwood by her grandmother to find out what happened to her mother, and eventually located her as a fellow prisoner. Parents from New York wrote one white volunteer, who had stayed on since Freedom Summer, that they lied miserably to their friends to avoid trying to explain her incarceration. MFDP chairman Lawrence Guyot urgently wired King for help: “COME TO JACKSON MISS. NOW.” A pastor from Huntsville, Alabama, gained entrance to the fairgrounds long enough to be choked in a rolling wall of gas applied by a “fumigation machine.” With two church colleagues from the national Commission on Religion and Race, he rushed to testify at a congressional briefing the next day in Washington: “We inspected what we can only describe as a concentration camp.”

  THE LATEST, and last, civilian government in South Vietnam fell on June 12 to a military junta headed by Vice Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky, who wore pearl-handled pistols and was described by State Department officials as “absolutely the bottom of the barrel.” The next day, a classified cable from General Westmoreland raised haunting signs of military collapse: “Thus, we are approaching the kind of warfare faced by the French in the latter stages of their efforts here.” This alarm reinforced Westmoreland’s new “bombshell” appeal for wholesale American rescue, superseding already the grim calculation from April that measured reinforcements—still being shipped,* not yet announced—would suffice, in McNamara’s words, “to protect us against catastrophe.” The President bemoaned cumulative, pending requests to raise U.S. troop strength in Vietnam from 33,000 to 175,000 in 1965, “with plans developed,” cabled Westmoreland, “to deploy even greater forces, if and when required.” Simultaneously, Johnson decried hopes for a negotiated settlement as fatuous and unrealistic, confiding to Senator Birch Bayh that “the North Vietnamese just said, ‘fuck you,’ that’s exactly what they said,” to overtures for talks. “And I don’t blame them!” Johnson exclaimed. “I defeated Goldwater by fifteen million [votes]. Now why would I want to give Goldwater half my cabinet? They’re winning—why would they want to talk?” A week later, he growled at McNamara over the failure of experts to devise any strategy “except just praying and gasping to hold on during monsoon and hope they’ll quit. I don’t believe they’re ever going to quit.”

  That night, June 21, McGeorge Bundy debated the Vietnam War on national television, making up for his absence from the May teach-in. His opponent, Columbia professor Hans Morgenthau, stopped short of an argument for American withdrawal, declining to assume straightforward responsibility for Cold War defeat and for the fate of non-Communist Vietnamese. By advocating instead a minimal U.S. intervention, with “face-saving” diplomacy, he became one of many critics and politicians who would open themselves to charges of evasive muddling. Bundy accused Morgenthau of “giving vent to his congenital pessimism,” citing his earlier predictions that the Marshall Plan would fail and that the Kennedy administration could not prevent a Communist regime in Laos. “I may have been dead wrong on Laos,” Morgenthau replied, “but that doesn’t prove that I am dead wrong on Vietnam.” He found himself on the defensive, skewered by the very doubt that was abundant inside the White House.

  President Johnson cared little that pundits thought Bundy won the showdown. Focused entirely on the ramifications of debate itself, he was furious with Bundy for disregarding direct and indirect warnings that candor pushed the administration toward political minefields. “I’m just against the White House debating,” Johnson had told Bundy emphatically. “I’m against us inciting them, and I’m against us inviting them, and I’m against us encouraging it, and I’m against us applauding it.” Formal debate set precedent, he warned, and opened pressure for facts. “I don’t want you reporting to Mendel Rivers,” the President said of the bellicose House committee chairman from South Carolina, reminding Bundy that many like Rivers saw any bad military report as a call for all-out war. (Even moderate House Minority Leader Gerald Ford responded to Johnson’s confidential notice of recent air strikes with alarming nonchalance: “Did we use conventional uh, weapons?”) The President argued that accepting debate with a professor (“the man with the beard…with no responsibility”) made it harder for the White House to resist detailed disclosure to elected representatives. Having commended to Bundy the evasive, nonspecific prognosis for Vietnam that McNamara gave Rivers—“There are some things that I’m above you on”—he saw the television debate as rank insubordination. B
ill Moyers deflected two or three of his volcanic reactions, as usual, but eventually complied. “The president sent me down to fire you,” he told Bundy sheepishly. They reached calm agreement that Bundy would arrange to leave the government by the end of the year.

  Johnson groaned under conflicting pressures on Vietnam. “I am pretty depressed reading all these proposals,” he told McNamara. The CIA assessment was bleak: “If we succeed in not losing the war during this monsoon season (through October, say), what we will have won is a chance to settle down to a protracted struggle.” Undersecretary of State George Ball proclaimed that Johnson faced a “last clear chance” to stop “drifting toward a major war—that nobody wants,” and renewed his plea in a flurry of secret papers: “No one can assure you that we can beat the Viet Cong or even force them to the conference table on our terms no matter how many hundred thousand white foreign (US) troops we deploy…. Once we suffer large casualties we will have started a well-nigh irreversible process…. I think humiliation would be more likely than the achievement of our objectives—even after we had paid terrible costs.” Also at State, McGeorge Bundy’s brother, William, endured “a small state of personal crisis” over Ball’s lone explorations about how to make “cutting our losses” palatable to allied nations, and nearly made common cause, but “still could not accept the idea of early American withdrawal.” Instead, William Bundy sent President Johnson a “middle way” proposal to hold on in Vietnam without reinforcements. Secretary Rusk, though still reluctant to accept American combat, rushed to the White House a note of distress that his own top aides were flirting with retreat. He warned that failure in Vietnam, by threatening peace commitments worldwide, “would lead to our ruin and almost certainly to catastrophic war.” With McNamara, Rusk pushed to restrict the “exceedingly dangerous” knowledge that the Ball position even reached the White House.

  The Vietcong announced on June 24 the execution of a captured Army sergeant, Harold G. Bennett, and blew up a floating Saigon restaurant the next day. From a kind of centrifuge, McGeorge Bundy labored to frame rational choice as the secretly lame-duck National Security Adviser. Preliminary disagreements already estranged him from two influential friends in the press: Walter Lippmann, who thought he was deceitfully pro-war, and Joe Alsop, who scorned him as disgracefully timid. (“I’ve never known him [Alsop] to go to any area where blood could be spilled that he didn’t come back and say more blood,” Bundy complained to President Johnson. “This is his posture toward the universe.”) Inside the government, Bundy and McNamara contained mutual dismay. McNamara winced at Bundy’s description of his recommended troop buildup as “rash to the point of folly,” and wondered how Bundy could suggest in the same memo an alternative threat of nuclear attack. Bundy, for his part, barely concealed shock that McNamara proposed to send Westmoreland forty-four combat battalions in spite of the military consensus that they could achieve no better than stalemate. “What are the chances of our getting into a white man’s war with all the brown men against us or apathetic?” he wrote. “Still more brutally,” he asked the President, “do we want to invest 200 thousand men to cover an eventual retreat? Can we not do that just as well where we are?”

  Minutes before a morning showdown on July 2, Johnson called former President Eisenhower to ask the nation’s most respected general (and Republican) whether it was wise to confine troops within enclaves around airbases in Vietnam. Eisenhower confirmed military advice that such defensive posture made no sense once an “appeal to force” was made. “You think that we can really beat the Vietcong out there?” asked Johnson, in what seemed to Eisenhower a plaintive tone. He encouraged Johnson to go ahead on the combat offensive, with resolve not to be run out of a free country the United States had helped create. Johnson then summoned the contending advisers into the Cabinet Room—McNamara, Ball, Rusk, Bundy—for a cross-examination that ran nearly two hours until he stalled them with orders to scour the earth for alternatives, breaking away to St. Matthew’s Cathedral, site of President Kennedy’s funeral, for a personal event labeled for still greater secrecy in the White House schedule—“STRICTLY OFF RECORD.” A terse public announcement caught the press by surprise once the stoic, tearful family had left Luci Johnson behind for first confession after the baptism that accomplished her conversion to the Catholic faith. “I could not help but think we went in four,” Lady Bird painfully recorded in her diary, “and came out three.”

  The coming of age for the younger daughter, on her eighteenth birthday, also marked exactly ten years since Johnson suffered his 1955 heart attack and one year since he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Under that law, July 2 was the effective date for the Title VII provisions on fair employment, and lawyers for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund filed 476 discrimination complaints when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission opened for business. To their eventual regret, the lawyers initially emphasized Southern paper and textile mills that were declining, anyway, which hampered compliance, but they also targeted racial discrimination by employers and labor unions nationwide—in companies as large as General Motors, Union Carbide, and U.S. Steel, over practices as esoteric as segregated payroll windows and white-only job-site Bible classes. Another 14,000 complaints would overwhelm the fledgling EEOC over its first eighteen months. Lacking enforcement powers, the five EEOC mediators settled 110 of those complaints in that time, and referred only fifteen to the Justice Department for litigation over such issues as the need to prove discriminatory “intent in the state of mind” at hiring, and over the legitimacy of any specific remedy under law—whether any minimum of Negro jobs could suffice, whether any nonminimum number was a prohibited quota. Most of the early cases stayed in litigation past 1970, but NAACP lawyers would win Quarles v. Philip Morris early in 1968. With tobacco unions desegregated by the elimination of Negro locals, a federal appeals court ruled that Philip Morris and the consolidated union must allow seniority to transfer into formerly all-white departments, sparing veteran Negro employees the extra risk of “suicide leap” promotion into newly integrated positions most vulnerable to layoff.

  ONE QUESTION briefly diverted the tumultuous July 2 press conference on the new national commitment to an integrated workforce: “What about sex?”

  “Don’t get me started,” replied Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. “I’m all for it.” By hinting playfully that duty as first chairman of the EEOC would not hinder his personal life, Roosevelt skirted reminders that Title VII also prohibited employment discrimination by gender.

  Nearly all reporters shared Roosevelt’s bemusement, although a few publications did warn that any sex reform would undercut the herculean task of breaking caste restrictions for Negroes. The New York Times detailed a series of outlandish “possible effects” gleaned from interviews with lawyers: “Executive training programs will have to be opened to women, who are almost universally excluded from them; barbershop owners must be prepared to take job applications from women who want to wield razor and scissors.” The New Republic magazine bluntly advised the EEOC not to take seriously “a mischievous joke perpetrated on the floor of the House of Representatives.” (Southerners had introduced sex equality in a failed, last-minute scheme to kill the civil rights bill with chivalry.)

  Some newspapers required prodding under the new law to eliminate racially segregated want-ad sections (“Help Wanted—Colored”). Journals everywhere still divided the want-ads by gender (“Help Wanted—Female,” mostly for nurses, typists, and “Girl Friday” assistants), and even the soberest of them made sport of the sex amendment. Both the Times and The Wall Street Journal published front-page stories about a potential “bunny problem,” imagining, as the Journal put it, “a shapeless, knobby-kneed male ‘bunny’ serving drinks to a group of stunned businessmen in a Playboy Club.” Another news story in the Times mocked a group of women who rallied for access to traditionally male jobs—“Amelia Jenks Bloomer (who gave her name to pantaloons) would have been proud”—and a jocular editorial suggested that Congress
might as well “just abolish sex itself.”

  Within the EEOC, a pose of virile insouciance spared employees from the prospect of opening nearly the entire American workforce by gender as well as race, over decades. “There are some people on this Commission who think that no man should be required to have a male secretary,” the staff director announced shortly to the press. “And I am one of them.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Gulps of Freedom

  July 2–August 2, 1965

  ON July 2, the last of the Mississippi demonstrators obtained bonded release from the makeshift jail at the Jackson fairgrounds. As King passed through Virginia that day, FBI officials were scrambling to fashion a more productive line of attack on him than disappointing wire service profiles in June. These stories had listed King’s accomplishments alongside a litany of charges based on FBI leaks, striking a balance that disgusted Director Hoover. (“A ‘whitewash’ if there ever was one,” Hoover scrawled on a widely published UPI release.) To impeach one conclusion reported by the Associated Press—that King lived modestly, whatever his faults, and worked from a small office with “dingy green walls and a bare floor”—headquarters ordered overseas agents to search for wealth King might have concealed in Swiss bank accounts, but this perennial suspicion was proving groundless when Assistant Director DeLoach grasped a different approach. FBI agents retrieved three separate recordings of Ralph Abernathy’s Atlanta press conference on otherwise commonplace incidents—a SCOPE volunteer and seven Negroes beaten inside Antioch Baptist Church in Wilcox County, Alabama, two SCOPE volunteers cut by flying glass in Americus, Georgia—to verify the reply to one question about how King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference screened associates for Communist ties. “We will check with FBI men and they will tell us if they have a Communist background,” Abernathy exaggerated grandly. “We don’t want anything that is pink, much less anything that is red.”