At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  A recurring passion in the speech mediated between energized national dreams and his wrenching imperative to let slip the stilled bombers. Johnson pronounced war “a crime against mankind.” It is “young men dying in the fullness of their promise,” he said. “It is trying to kill a man that you do not even know well enough to hate. Therefore, to know war is to know that there is still madness in this world.” The President gained fifty-nine ovations in the House, often with Goodwin’s language harking back to the crossroads of Selma. “Finally, I must be the one to order our guns to fire against the—, against all the most inward pulls of my desire,” Johnson said with a slight catch. “For we have children to teach, as we have sick to be cured and we have men to be freed. There are poor to be lifted up and there are cities to be built and there’s a world to be helped. Yet, we do what we must.”

  The President stayed up late to savor reviews of a triumphant speech said to have “exhilarated the capital,” but he called Press Secretary Bill Moyers long after midnight about an advance news item that Moyers might be longing for his old job at the Peace Corps. “Well, are you happy, or are you unhappy?” Johnson asked in a grave, wounded tone, airing his impression that Moyers “got angry this morning and kind of sulked” through the day, “puffed up like a pouter pigeon.” The chief aide declared wholehearted support for the speech, but the President probed for discontent until Moyers raised a comment among the customary tirades in which Johnson had chided him for currying favor with reporters by encouraging their suspicions of duplicity in the White House. “Well, that hit me like a ton of bricks,” said Moyers. In awkward, glancing protest, he professed a loyalty so resolute that he said it undermined his own reputation and effectiveness as press secretary.

  Johnson kept circling the edge of direct accusation. “I don’t give a damn a whole lot about the Washington Post,” he said softly, “just as long as I understand where I am with you.” He pushed the sleep-starved Moyers for more than half an hour to elaborate a grievance or desire. “Do you want to change jobs?” he asked. “Would you prefer to? Are you, did you make a bad deal when you agreed to stay? Would you rather do something else?”

  “Uh, no, sir,” Moyers answered with repeated sighs. “There’s not another job that I believe I should do right now.”

  “It’s coming from within,” Johnson warned of destructive news. “There’s nothing about it from the outside. The Republicans are not hurtin’ us.”

  MARTIN LUTHER King sent Johnson a telegram of praise for his commitment to seek peace and his “reassuring” determination not to let Vietnam spoil the hard-won domestic initiatives. “In all of these endeavors,” he wrote, “you have both my prayers and my support.” King also wired congratulations to Deke DeLoach for a promotion that lifted him among the few FBI executives whispered to be a potential successor to J. Edgar Hoover. Following the considered advice of Negro elders that flattery was the only known solvent for the Bureau’s imperious hostility, King slathered on a personal touch: “It makes me doubly proud to know that a fellow Georgian has been elevated to such a key position in the federal government.” He reminded DeLoach of discovering a common birth state during their one face-to-face encounter, but of course did not specify that occasion as the scalded truce summit after Hoover had publicly called King “the most notorious liar in the country.”

  Tremors from the war already swallowed up King’s gestures in public anxiety promoted ardently from FBI headquarters. Director Hoover charged that the minuscule American Communist Party played “an ever-increasing role in generating opposition to the United States position in Vietnam,” and DeLoach, in a publicized Chicago speech, lumped civil rights clergy and war protesters together with “racketeers, Communists, narcotics peddlers, filth merchants, and others of their ilk” who spread the “malignant disease” of false freedom. “I refer to the arrogant non-conformists, including some educators,” he added, “who have mounted the platform at public gatherings to urge ‘civil disobedience’ and defiance of authority.”

  On January 14, while King marched for Julian Bond in Atlanta, FBI agents gave Gary Thomas Rowe $10,000 with a carefully scripted message that the payment was a token of gratitude from Director Hoover himself, and should be added to whatever “ultimate settlement” Rowe might receive from the Justice Department for his service as a Klan informant and witness. Rowe “became very emotional,” the lead agent reported to Hoover. “[T]ears came to his eyes, and he asked me to personally thank you for your consideration.” Rowe signed a release for the FBI and wrote Hoover a devoted farewell the same day, expressing nostalgia over “my last official association with the Bureau.” Soon thereafter, his first collect phone call to John Doar’s home triggered an inkling of woe for the Justice Department. Based on the Attorney General’s written promise before the December Liuzzo trial, Rowe demanded attention to debts, quarrelsome relatives, and real or imagined security threats from vengeful Klansmen, Doar advised Katzenbach, and FBI officials dropped a solid curtain of amnesia to rebuff the Justice Department’s plaintive requests for help. “We have no views,” Hoover wrote tersely on a memo from DeLoach. “We settled our obligations to Rowe.”

  Thus the FBI fobbed off Rowe’s future as well as his past. Government lawyers inherited a decade of headache over his ensuing performance as a deputy U.S. marshal working under a protective identity in California, where he slugged and threatened to shoot a black doorman, for instance, rather than sign a building register. “Rowe apparently has a super detective complex,” concluded one evaluation, “and is prone to display his identification, badge, and weapon to almost anyone who will listen when he is under the influence of alcohol.” Years later, during the post-Watergate investigation of intelligence scandals, Rowe’s name surfaced in allegations that FBI handlers had received advance notice of Klan violence long before the Liuzzo murder. This news shocked even Katzenbach, who retained an impression that Rowe had turned informant only after he “got scared” during the lethal ambush. In 1979, Attorney General Griffin Bell appointed a task force solely to investigate the FBI’s complicity through Rowe in a host of Alabama Klan crimes between 1960 and 1965, both infamous and unknown. Despite stale records and obstruction, task force attorneys concluded that Rowe had warned the FBI days ahead of the Klan-police agreement to beat the 1961 Freedom Riders in Birmingham, for instance, and that Bureau officials had condoned the attack to the point of watching Rowe himself become “one of a handful most intensely involved in the violence.” Even so, Justice Department attorneys stoutly defended the FBI against lawsuits for negligent damage. They lost a modest award of $25,000 to Freedom Rider James Peck, whose wounds had required fifty-seven stitches to close, and of $35,000 to the elderly Quaker Walter Bergman, who was confined permanently to a wheelchair since being knocked unconscious in the Birmingham bus station. They won dismissal of a $2 million case when U.S. District Judge Charles Joiner ruled in 1983 that advance approval for Rowe to join the Klan ride that killed Viola Liuzzo “cannot place liability on the government,” and it took a shower of adverse publicity to quell as unseemly the Justice Department’s subsequent counterclaim to recover all its court costs from the Liuzzo family. Renewed security worries placed Rowe back in Witness Protection until he died obscurely in 1998 under the pseudonym Thomas Moore.

  These troubles lay submerged when DeLoach advised Hoover in 1966 that Katzenbach’s unguarded letter “gave the FBI an excellent opportunity to divest us of our responsibilities” for the radioactive informant. Among moves to forestall a parallel congressional inquiry into violations of privacy, Hoover sent DeLoach secretly to argue that Senator Edward Long of Missouri should leave the FBI out of contemplated hearings on bugging policy, despite the scandal in Las Vegas. “It seems a little ludicrous to consider the civil rights of such hoodlums have been violated by microphones being placed on them,” he advised, by his account, “when these same individuals are dealing in murder, racketeering, and complete sadism.” DeLoach returned to headquarters convinc
ed that ulterior motives lay behind claims of congressional duty to learn the facts. “Senator Long thoroughly dislikes Senator [Robert] Kennedy,” he reported, “and will use such information against Senator Kennedy.” Hoover resisted the temptation to abet an attack on Kennedy, whom he despised, and moved first to neutralize the FBI’s vulnerability over its decades of freelance bugging. He sent DeLoach to lobby Katzenbach for three days, playing on his desire to avoid public recriminations, until the Attorney General approved a formal letter to Senator Long late on Thursday, January 20. An investigation not only threatened capabilities essential to national security, he agreed, but would be pointless because bugging practices rested securely on an “understanding” down through the years between the FBI and Attorneys General of both political parties.

  An agitated Katzenbach informed DeLoach early Friday that he had lain awake with second thoughts and wanted to revise the letter. He said the understanding provision might infuriate Robert Kennedy, whose support he needed for bills in the Senate, but DeLoach cut short the misgivings. “I told the Attorney General that I was just as sorry as I could be,” he reported, “however, this letter had been mailed out last night and no doubt would be in the hands of Senator Long either this morning or early this afternoon.” DeLoach also reported, with merciless satisfaction, that Katzenbach instantly declined his offer for the FBI to retrieve the letter from Long with a candid account of his fears about Kennedy. By a combination of bureaucratic skills—patient cultivation of long-range advantage, sealed with masterful control of paperwork—FBI officials fastened Katzenbach to a bugging defense they had constructed from nothing.

  Nevertheless, Hoover cautiously placed a moratorium on new bugs “irrespective of what Long does,” in order to minimize exposure in the unstable climate since President Johnson’s ban on intrusive surveillance. That same Friday, Hoover reacted sharply to notification of hasty installations on King. “Remove this surveillance at once,” he ordered. FBI technicians surreptitiously planted no fewer than sixteen bugs anyway, seeking to intercept significant mischief in various rooms occupied for the weekend by King’s party at the New York Americana Hotel. This frenzied, unsuccessful attempt remains a mysterious lapse of internal FBI discipline, traceable to mixed signals or perhaps anticipated regret that these would be the last microphone intercepts ever targeted at King. The government’s electronic ear would intrude upon the final two years of his life exclusively through the numerous telephone wiretaps authorized by Katzenbach and Robert Kennedy.

  KING PREACHED at New York’s historic Riverside Church once again that Sunday, January 23, which marked the end of a battle truce for the Vietnamese Tet holiday. “The days that follow may well be decisive,” warned an advertisement spread across two pages of the morning New York Times, “in determining whether this brutal, bloody war will be ended or escalated.” King’s name appeared among hundreds of signers drawn from interfaith clergy worldwide, including theologian Karl Barth, rabbis Heschel and Gittelson, Father Daniel Berrigan, Martin Niemoeller of Germany, and bishops from Sweden to Tasmania. Their appeal—headed “they are our brothers whom we kill!”—rebuked both sides for alarming determination to prove sincerity by violence. Thich Nhat Hanh, the monk who had written King about Buddhist theory of nonviolent self-immolation, added the Vietnamese perspective throughout a text circulated by the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation: “Helpless villagers in Vietnam, unable either to escape or defend themselves, recoil from the bombing of one side and from the terror of the other.” The ad called upon the opposing governments to reinstate the 1954 Geneva Accords under a truce leading to a plebiscite on reunification. Thich Nhat Hanh signed as “A Vietnamese Buddhist…whose name is withheld for reasons of prudence.” In hiding—soon exiled for the remainder of the century by the diverse autocracies to govern Vietnam—he wrote that foreign military escalation would reinforce Ho Chi Minh’s reputation for patriotic resistance and conversely would undermine for Westerners the ultimate goal of forging political allegiance, so that by every boost of violence “the more surely they destroy the very thing they are trying to build.” He charged that a million South Vietnamese already lived in refugee camps on whatever portion of the four-cent daily allowance was not stolen in graft.

  King flew home to address internal conflicts centered on Hosea Williams, who had been arrested for drunk driving late Saturday night in Birmingham. No sooner did Williams make bail than he scandalized a public meeting on registration goals, exclaiming “You can’t Jew us down!” to the few interracial stalwarts of the Alabama Human Relations Council, among them several Jews. SCLC aides labored to curb his outbursts and profligate ways, especially in light of the unresolved FBI car theft investigation. “I think that the root of this problem is that you don’t realize the strength of your own personality,” Andrew Young counseled privately. “I am sure that you don’t mean to abuse and humiliate people, but quite often you do.” Still, Williams berated his rival James Bevel for “stealing” King away to Chicago. Determined to recapture the movement spotlight for Alabama by spectacular enrollments of newly registered black Democrats, he excoriated SNCC project directors for what he called their “ignorant, black nationalistic” notion to organize independent parties for selected counties instead. He accused Stokely Carmichael of exploiting sharecroppers with newfangled schemes. “There ain’t no Negro in Alabama, including ourselves, that knows one iota about politics!” he shouted. Carmichael retorted that Williams was herding black voters into a party with “White Supremacy” as its official slogan. Francis Walter, who observed several of the tumultuous parleys, found the question of party loyalty “vexing” and Carmichael unpersuasive but game. “I don’t blame anyone for resisting Hosea’s dogmatic egomania,” he recorded in his diary.

  Sunday afternoon, Walter drove alone into Alabama’s Wilcox County for a mass meeting to map strategy for first-time voters in the May primary. He came upon a visibly charged crowd of Negroes on Highway 41 just outside Camden, held back from an abandoned car by troopers with sawed-off shotguns. Movement supporter David Colson had been poised to turn into the parking lot of Antioch Church when a car behind thumped his bumper. He walked back to investigate, whereupon the driver shot him dead behind the right ear with a .32 caliber pistol and drove away past Mrs. Colson in the car with her small son and three cousins. The crowd calmed slightly when Sheriff P. C. “Lummie” Jenkins announced that J. T. Reaves, a local farmer, had surrendered. Witnesses murmured that Reaves seemed deranged, having bumped into other cars, with Colson the first Negro who dared to inquire like a motorist in an ordinary accident. Reporters arrived from distant cities. “With the pool of blood still fresh outside the windows, the meeting went on after a brief eulogy by [SCLC aide Rev. Daniel] Harrell & Rev. Frank Smith,” Walter wrote that night. “There was crying in the church and a great deal of fear. I was afraid.” Despite pleas not to let terror achieve its purpose, no one agreed to stand for office in the May primary.

  A hundred miles north, King accepted staff advice to avoid contention with SNCC projects over the isolated Black Belt counties plagued with evictions, tent cities, and ingrained fear spiked by the fresh murder in Camden. He confined a hurried visit to Birmingham, where Hosea Williams catapulted Monday morning from the defendant’s table to a personal triumph that made national news. He won dismissal of the drunk driving charge in court just before federal officials arrived as a result of his battered month’s marches to dramatize the slow pace of Birmingham registration. Twenty-three new registrars—nine of them Negroes—took up stations under superseding authority from the Voting Rights Act. King led a small parade of welcome, and Williams invited white people to make use of the registrars, too. “The more people that register,” he grandly declared, “the better government we have.” With aides in bemused debate about whether Williams gained his miracle rescues by providence or lunatic boldness, King toured spontaneous voter rallies. He proclaimed a mission to “democratize the total political structure of the state,” r
eported the New York Times. The detachment of federal registrars worked well into Monday night to process more than a thousand people the first day. A certifying order from Attorney General Katzenbach made Birmingham the thirtyseventh local jurisdiction served—eleventh in Alabama, first in an urban area.

  In Washington that week, also on the legal initiative of John Doar’s Civil Rights Division, Katzenbach quietly approved an effort to ban segregation in the 226 state and local jails that held federal prisoners under contract. He recommended that Constance Baker Motley become the first Negro woman to hold a federal judgeship, partly in recognition of her landmark cases to integrate Clemson and Ole Miss, and he joined President Johnson at the White House ceremony to swear in Robert Weaver as the first Negro Cabinet member, heading the new Department of Housing and Urban Development. The President chided Roy Wilkins about Weaver’s propensity to travel, which he called “the principal defect of Negroes in government.” (“The moment they take an oath, they get an airplane ticket,” he teased, and Wilkins agreed, “They do get around.”) More seriously, Wilkins, Clarence Mitchell, and Whitney Young complained that White House protocol granted no special reward for political loyalty on Vietnam. Vice President Humphrey took note of their quiet tenacity in a favorable memo, asking “why treat all of the civil rights leaders alike when the SNCC outfit engages in the most outrageous attacks on the President and the Administration.”