At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  King tried to escape his long-standing commitment, then gave in to fear that Powell “would use it against me” if he did. Overriding Levison’s protest that middle-class supporters would not understand, King responded also to pleas from Wyatt Walker. He sensed no chance to undo the humiliation of Walker’s public dismissal as assistant pastor, but he did hope to dispel malicious rumors from Powell that he, King, despised Walker, never wanted to see him work again, and had insisted that Walker refer to him as America’s number one Negro. If Powell declined to appear as host, as appeared likely, King resolved to bring the banished Walker back to Abyssinian on his own guest authority for a farewell “gesture of reconciliation.”

  Powell swooped into the robing room at the last minute, obliging Walker to wait outside while King pleaded his case alone. Expectant shouts rose from five thousand worshippers before the two Baptist legends appeared together after all on the broad marble platform. Powell, introducing “the greatest living American, black or white,” exhorted King with winks and orotund double meaning to expand his work “into the vacuums of leadership” nationwide. He suggested Newark, New Jersey. They hugged and King preached, which earned a front-page headline in the New York Times: “Powell, Denying Rift, Welcomes King to Harlem.”

  Powell wrote King a note to express satisfaction “that we could present a united front.” King did not disclose what transpired to thwart the appearance by Walker, but his signature forbearance slipped with a hint of frustration heavier than all the compressed burdens of the movement. “Adam,” he told Walker numbly, “is going to hell.”

  IN A syndicated column titled “Power’s Long Arm,” correspondent Joe Alsop praised spectacular deployment to forge history from the staples of iron and blood. Recalling vivid images of Vietnam’s Cam Ranh Bay “as it was in the French time…lying blue and empty of all shipping except a few fishing shacks,” he described by contrast “the staggering reality” of military engineers “making a sandspit into a port capable of handling 10,000 tons a week”: mammoth cranes towed by sea from Okinawa, “bulldozers literally big enough to move mountains…landing craft of every sort…at every turn there was something to make one’s eyes pop out.” Alsop flew with General William Westmoreland to An Khe, “a wide green vale among the hills” of central Vietnam. “The great sight here,” he wrote, “was the actual delivery halfway round the world of an entire U.S. division in complete fighting trim.” Lieutenant Colonel Harold “Hal” Moore, a battalion commander of the new 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), explored by jeep along the winding Highway 1 that war historian Bernard Fall memorialized in his book Street Without Joy, and located from Fall’s book a stone obelisk commemorating French and Vietnamese combatants fallen more than a decade earlier in a remote field still littered with shell casings and fragments of bone. Alsop told American readers that “the key dominant problem”—“grossly insufficient resources”—“no longer exists as it did in the French time.” More than 200,000 U.S. soldiers would arrive by Christmas. “The importance of this change that is now going on can hardly be exaggerated,” he concluded. “It does not mean, alas, that the war is being won…but it does mean that at last there is light at the end of the tunnel, and that is always something.”

  On November 14, the Sunday when King preached for Adam Clayton Powell in Harlem, Colonel Moore landed at a forest clearing big enough for eight helicopters per drop in the dense Ia (River) Drang Valley, where the Ho Chi Minh Trail turned east from Cambodia through mountainous South Vietnam. His brigade of the 1st AirCav had been awarded a special, honorary designation as the 7th Cavalry, inheriting the spirited “Garry Owen” quick-step that Royal Irish Lancers had brought from Limerick pubs to become the namesake march for the most storied Army unit in the Old West, once commanded by George Armstrong Custer. While Moore claimed a crude field command among brick-hard termite mounds taller than soldiers, 7th Cavalry squads in Operation Silver Bayonet jumped from giant Huey gunships instead of horses, with orders to “search for and destroy the enemy.” A popping crescendo greeted skirmishers headed to form a tree-line perimeter, and an experienced captain recognized more regular North Vietnamese Army troops than Vietcong guerrillas. “Every man in the lead squad was shot,” recorded Sergeant Steve Hansen of Alpha Company’s 3rd Platoon. “From the time we got the order to move to the time where men were dying was only five minutes. The enemy were very close to us and overran some of our dead.”

  Lieutenant Henry Herrick, son of a UCLA astronomy professor, charged after the Vietnamese up a hill into scrub brush until his second platoon of Bravo Company disappeared even to radio contact beyond surges of sniper bullets, colliding forays, and blind crossfires. Colonel Moore identified three opposing regiments of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), which comprised two thousand troops, and relied heavily on one glaring imbalance to offset the superior numbers commanded by Lieutenant General Nguyen Huu An: “I had major fire support and he didn’t.” An American artillery base five miles away sent four thousand high-explosive howitzer rounds into the surrounding hillsides the first day. Skyraiders swooped close with napalm and five-hundred-pound bombs. Bullet-riddled Hueys mangled the forest with suppressing fire as they discharged reinforcements. Thirty hours later, a lull in the raging attacks allowed a search party of Bravo Company to find Herrick’s lost platoon entirely prostrate. “Even the men who could stand up were so traumatized by what happened to them they preferred to lay down,” reported a rescuer. One refused to budge until someone moved a transfixing scarlet object a few feet away that proved to be one of many recovered battlefield diaries, with a final entry later translated from Vietnamese: “Oh my dear, when the troops come home after the victory and you do not see me, please look at the proud colors. You will see me there and you will feel warm under the shadow of the bamboo tree.” Near the diarist, Lieutenant Dennis Deal studied a North Vietnamese soldier with a severed trunk who had booby-trapped a grenade to his rifle stock while bleeding to death. “If we’re up against this,” muttered Deal, “it’s gonna be a long-ass year.”

  Two American relief battalions entered the ghastly buzz of landing zone X-Ray on the third morning, November 16, helping first to stack the closest Vietnamese bodies six feet high between persistent assaults. Colonel Moore responded to numbers pressure by lopping off two hundred from his subordinates’ estimate of 834 Vietnamese dead from infantry fire, then adding an arbitrarily precise guess of 1,215 killed beyond sight by aerial support, to report a total enemy body count of 1,849. The U.S. casualty list so far was smaller and more reliable—seventy-nine killed, including Lieutenant Herrick, with 121 wounded—concentrated in the units originally enveloped. Charlie Company lost all five officers and more than half its 106 men, many of whom still awaited evacuation in the care of fresh replacements for two slain medics. Army Specialist 4 Hank Thomas of St. Augustine, Florida, lifted each of the lined-up ponchos to collect information for his first twenty-five death tags. He found only two corpses with closed eyes, the others gaping in arrested stares. Mutilations from the high-powered weapons overwhelmed his training to the point that at first he welcomed cries of “Medic!” so he could crawl away with bandages and morphine for the living wounded. Thomas had disclosed to no fellow soldier that he led the first Freedom Riders into Mississippi jails in 1961, when he was a cellmate and still nonviolent mentor for Stokely Carmichael, in part because he could not justify the conscription-driven change to himself. Night volleys rattled him awake from a depleted stupor to a ground’s-eye view along his row of motionless heels.

  Americans vacated X-Ray Wednesday morning, November 17, to let B-52s from Guam drop two hundred tons of ordnance on the mountain range thought to conceal the withdrawn Vietnamese. Moore’s sister outfit of 7th Cavalry, the 2nd Battalion, marched six miles toward a larger clearing called Albany, where Lieutenant Colonel Robert McDade gathered his commanders to plan the defense of scheduled helicopter lifts just before three battalions of North Vietnamese struck the leaderless companies stretched for fi
ve hundred yards along the trail behind, swarming through defenders who fired in all directions from pockets of visibility no bigger than kitchens. Those who died seemed to be shot most often in the midsection. “I don’t know why, but when a man is hit in the belly, he screams an unearthly scream,” recorded Army Specialist 4 Jack Smith, son of ABC News anchor Howard K. Smith. “They didn’t ever stop for breath. They kept on until they were hoarse, then they would bleed through their mouths and pass out. They would wake up and start screaming again. Then they would die.” An hour later, desperate lieutenants averted greater disaster by calling in napalm on their own positions judged decimated already. Smith’s company suffered 93 percent casualties. He and other wounded men survived an endless sixteen hours by playing dead among night stalkers who detected and shot Americans by listening for their telltale groans. Volunteer retrievers, heaving survivors toward the rear lines, paused in clouds of smoke as Captain George Forrest* urged them forward with cries for the safe entry of friendlies, all radios being disabled. He stood to shine a homing flashlight on his own dark face—and lived—but one stray soldier in the chaos mistakenly emptied a full clip into the first movements by returning compatriots. Thursday morning, as air strikes hit the Vietnamese reserves massed nearby, the carnage included some hundred PAVN snipers hanging from the ropes that had secured them in the treetops.

  At headquarters, the 7th Cavalry brigade commander neglected to mention unsatisfactory and incoherent reports of a second major attack in his personal briefing for General Westmoreland, but journalists reached the Albany landing zone in time to file vivid stories about the combined Ia Drang battles as the first large-scale U.S. engagement in Vietnam, a costly victory by the numbers. The front page of the November 19 New York Times featured three AP photographs of captioned war drama: “U.S. Casualties Strewn over Vietnamese Valley…Wounded American crawls toward medic…Dead and injured Americans are illuminated by flares from U.S. planes that came to aid.”

  The adrenaline of war stirred martial fervor in both countries, whose leaders praised military performance while masking internal strategic debates. Vietnamese generals credited American soldiers with determination far beyond the effete “paper tigers” scorned in Communist propaganda, yet welcomed empirical proof that peasant soldiers would stand up to lethal punishment from advanced weapons and “helicopter cavalry” tactics. Ho Chi Minh, while favoring remorseless war to drive Americans from Vietnam, conceded doubt about recent orders to initiate sustained large-scale engagements in a “heaven-storming” final push. Commanding general Nguyen Chi Thanh and Communist Party first secretary Le Duan, having dared to belittle as a “scared rabbit” even General Vo Nguyen Giap, the legendary architect of Dien Bien Phu, lost momentum to Giap’s renewed argument that the huge U.S. buildup recommended more years of patience with hit-and-run guerrilla warfare.

  On the American side, professionals frankly respected the disciplined motivation of Communist soldiers. CBS News, in a special report that characterized the Ia Drang casualties as “light,” aired the straightforward longing of Special Forces Major Charles Beckwith to have two hundred such adversaries under his command: “They’re the best I’ve ever seen.” General Westmoreland focused on attrition ratios rather than long-term commitment to a standoff in valor. With Vietnamese battle deaths reckoned at least ten times the 305 Americans killed in the five-day campaign, he calculated that intensified combat would impose unsustainable losses on the Communist side. Sensing a military advantage to be pressed, he absorbed the painful but instructive ambush as no more threatening to long-term success than Custer’s Last Stand of the 7th Cavalry at the Little Big Horn in 1876, which scarcely had destined Sitting Bull to govern the Dakotas. Westmoreland cautioned against “headlines about victory.” He warned in a radio interview of danger that Americans “will be overwhelmed by a certain feeling of optimism and may lose sight of what I consider a true appraisal of the situation.”

  ON NOVEMBER 16, amid early battle reports from Vietnam, a political crossfire sorely tested the hard-won promise in Washington to eradicate the effects of white supremacy. “I welcome all of you to two days of intense labor for your country,” President Johnson told 250 delegates gathered to prepare his spring conference on civil rights. “The tide of change is running with the Negro American on this mid-November evening. Neither the ignorant violence of the Ku Klux Klan nor the despairing violence of Watts can reverse it. For this tide is moved by decency and by love and by justice.” To thunderous applause, Johnson saluted the 200,000 Negroes registered in ten weeks since passage of the Voting Rights Act, and he announced that Attorney General Katzenbach would introduce new civil rights legislation to attack discrimination in the justice system. “We intend to make the jury box, in both state and federal courts, the sacred domain of justice under law,” he declared. To less enthusiasm, Johnson said he would order the Commission on Civil Rights to give “careful attention to the problems of race and education in all parts of this country.”

  The President shook hands through the East Room with encouraging words for the assembled scholars, civil servants, activists, and leaders he called “the captains of peaceful armies.” Aaron Henry, board chair of the Mississippi NAACP, was one of many sober personalities turned bubbly. “We’re eating barbecue at the White House!” he told friends, but working constraints clamped down on the gilded deliberations to follow. White House aides blocked votes on resolutions deemed critical of the administration. In the education workshop, Al Raby argued from his Chicago experience that class sizes in poor Northern schools must be cut in half, that government must eliminate rather than study de facto segregation, and that an essential first step was to reverse October’s preemptive assurance of federal funds to Superintendent Willis. Such notions were tabled as premature. Martin Luther King, groping for a productive balance, spent two days in the jobs workshop without making quotable remarks for or against the pace of achievement. Clarence Mitchell of the NAACP urgently pressed a resolution from the justice panel that President Johnson should “speed up the lagging enforcement” of both landmark civil rights acts. “People in the South are in danger of being exterminated,” he told a plenary session. “It is a matter of life and death.”

  Conference co-chair A. Philip Randolph ruled his friend’s motion out of order, but White House aides worried that Bayard Rustin and Randolph himself were circulating for spring consideration a supplemental “Freedom Budget” that sought a national investment of $100 billion over ten years in schools, housing, and jobs. The proposals exposed stark gaps between racial reality and the ringing commitment to equal opportunity proclaimed by President Johnson in the War on Poverty as well as his Howard University speech. The sheer scale of accepted tasks made the administration seem overmatched, which threatened its posture of sovereign control. Johnson abhorred intimations of frailty or doubt as the first symptom of failure in national politics. By the same predilection, J. Edgar Hoover’s ingrained rejection of the slightest alleged error had doomed White House entreaties for FBI observers at the exploratory, off-the-record workshops. Assistant Director DeLoach refused to supply agents to hear any anticipated “critical or unjustifiable statements concerning the FBI,” and suggested instead that if conference participants “didn’t know what they were talking about, or falsely accuse the FBI, they should shut up.”

  White House aides vigorously promoted three alternative workshops on community, welfare, and the family. The panels opened topics not yet digested into budget-busting agendas or daunting politics, with a social science approach that was congenial to the majority of delegates with backgrounds in academics or government. Civil rights veterans resisted these attractions as a diversion or worse that devalued the cumulative experience and purpose of the movement. Of the few delegates who spoke publicly against the shift of focus, Andrew Young defended the Negro family as perhaps unorthodox—often with extra mothers, grandmothers, cousins, “and no father”—yet strong enough to have sustained both the civil rights m
ovement and a vibrant institutional church. “We are not being deprived of family life,” he told reporters. “We are being deprived of justice, education, and jobs.”

  A joke relieved undercurrents of tension among experts trying hard to be polite. “I have been reliably informed,” announced a conference moderator, “that no such person as Daniel Patrick Moynihan exists.” Peals of laughter confirmed the target of obsessive gossip suffused with race, and Moynihan broke silence the second day to lodge “a point of personal privilege” against one comment that he had undertaken his study of the Negro family in order to explain Watts. Granting that the report had been completed weeks before the riots, Dr. Benjamin Payton of the New York Protestant Council disputed Moynihan’s deeper application of cause and effect, and quoted the study’s thesis that family deterioration rather than the legacy of discrimination “is the fundamental source of weakness in the Negro community.” Heated exchanges receded again into whispered caucuses. In a compounded irony, news outlets made the bow-tied new Wesleyan University professor himself a symbol of civil rights. The Washington Star declared Moynihan “The ‘Non-Person’ at the Rights Parley,” and a headline—“Moynihan Conspicuously Ignored”—fashioned for him a white celebrity version of the invisible cage that novelist Ralph Ellison had portrayed at the heart of the black condition.