At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  Issues of democratic norms and constitutional balance gave way to sensational headlines across the country: “RFK and JEH” (Little Rock), “Bugs and Justice” (New York), “Which Do You Believe?” (Chattanooga), “Bugging Furor Bad Business” (Sacramento). The Christian Science Monitor called the personality clash a “donnybrook” suited to Washington, “a town which relishes a good fight between public officials almost better than anything else.” Stories from the capital—“President Aloof in Bugging Feud”—suggested accurately that President Johnson was bombarded with FBI allegations against Kennedy. (Hoover went so far as to have DeLoach brief Justice Fortas on indiscretions he said “could destroy Kennedy,” and Ramsey Clark, Katzenbach’s successor at Justice, advised Johnson that Hoover had lined up affidavits from witnesses, “forty or fifty of them,” to say Kennedy was complicit in bugs.) On December 14, James Reston of the New York Times reported that suspicions of officials were so widespread that “nobody in Washington could be sure his telephones were private.” His column surfaced the rumor that “the Government, beginning with the Kennedy Administration, listened in on the telephone conversations of Martin Luther King, the Negro leader, during the racial disorders…. Who authorized the taps? We do not know.”

  Billowing paranoia overshadowed the next day’s Senate hearings on poverty, in which King cited a multibillion-dollar adjustment in the war budget to indict misguided national priorities. “The error alone is more than five times the amount committed to antipoverty programs,” he said. “The bombs in Vietnam explode at home—they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America.” Using the black quarter of the poverty population as a barometer, he charged that “the attainment of security and equality for Negroes has not yet become a serious and irrevocable national purpose.” Robert Kennedy, one of only two senators present, engaged King in a forlornly inquisitive dialogue about why nonviolence seemed to have yielded hope so far only in the South.

  Afterward, reporters who pressed King about the Reston story obtained a dampening reaction: “Dr. King ‘Assumes’ Phone Is Tapped / But Says He Doesn’t Know Why / Embassies Calm.” FBI officials refused comment, but their New York wiretap units, in a compounded irony, monitored the chilled discussions among King’s lawyers about the wiretap news. Stanley Levison said President Kennedy himself had warned King about FBI surveillance in 1963. Harry Wachtel thought King should display less forbearance and more outrage. “When you have a guy doing an illegal act,” he told Levison, “you should not be so sweet about it.”

  HOOVER ESCAPED in melodramas over lost American innocence, including what NBC News anchor David Brinkley drolly branded “the biggest publishing story since the New Testament.” Jacqueline Kennedy, the widowed First Lady, sued on December 16 to block a forthcoming book on the Kennedy assassination because it reopened too many raw wounds. William Manchester, her chosen author, agreed to remove his opening chapter about Kennedy’s earlier trip to Texas, cast as an allegory on frontier manhood, in which Lyndon Johnson inveigled an elegantly squeamish President-elect to kill a deer on his ranch. Otherwise Manchester defended his manuscript and confessed to the widow an abject failure “to suppress my bias against a certain eminent statesman [LBJ] who always reminded me of somebody in a Grade D movie on the late show.” Gossip oozed into the press about whether, why, and how hard Robert Kennedy pressed for revisions. By Christmas, President Johnson fulminated to Fortas and other confidants that leaks from the book mocked him all through the bloodstained transfer of power. “I don’t think I called Mrs. Kennedy ‘honey,’” he told Bill Moyers. “I think that’s their idea of ‘you all’ and ‘comin”—C-O-M-I-N—and this stuff they write about Texas.” Moyers warned of press rumors that Johnson had compiled notes from his White House phone calls to rebut Manchester. “Well, that’s wrong,” Moyers briskly assured the President, “because there are no verbatim transcripts.”

  “Well, no, there are,” Johnson countered. “There are a good many.”

  Moyers stopped short. “I thought—”

  “They don’t think so, but there are a good many,” the President whispered.

  Moyers backtracked. “I thought that Juanita [presidential secretary Juanita Roberts] had said that we didn’t have the equipment in those days,” he said.

  “Well, there are a good many,” Johnson insisted.

  “But he’s talking here about, about,” Moyers stammered, “between you and other people.”

  “Well, there are,” the President solemnly admonished. “There are a good many.” Hidden telephone recorders captured Johnson’s cautionary signal that not even his closest aide knew all his defenses.

  Moyers had just resigned from the White House. The President chided him for cooperating with Manchester’s slanted account, and he fretted privately that Vietnam would push Moyers closer to Robert Kennedy as war debate surged Christmas Day in reaction to the first American news dispatch out of North Vietnam. For the next three weeks, Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times surveyed bomb damage to civilian areas of Hanoi, toured school ruins, and described residential sections of Nam Dinh where the Pentagon alleged no military targets: “The cathedral tower looks out on block after block of utter desolation.” Secretary McNamara’s spokesman spasmodically denounced the reports and then conceded a small error rate quantified at 1.5 civilian deaths per sortie. The Time’s military correspondent defended the bombing as accurate, while the rival Washington Post impugned Salisbury’s integrity: “Ho Tries New Propaganda Weapon…Harrison Salisbury of The New York Times is Ho’s chosen instrument.”

  Streams of vitriol and patriotic zeal sloshed together in January. Published excerpts from the Manchester book relived the national trauma of Dallas just as Jack Ruby, owner of the Carousel strip club, died of cancer while awaiting retrial for the murder of presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. In a void of dignified or satisfying answers, maverick prosecutor Jim Garrison of New Orleans prepared the first conspiracy indictment of shadow devils to feed cynicism for decades. Beginning January 8 in Binh Duong Province, a systematic assault of B-52s, sixty-ton bulldozers, defoliants, and thirty thousand soldiers burned four villages and flattened forty square miles north of Saigon. Operation Cedar Falls, which defied Senator Russell’s maxim on the political folly of detaching the Vietnamese from their land, aimed to move all ten thousand inhabitants to relocation camps in a bold tactical reversal of the search-and-destroy sequence. American casualties set a weekly record at 1,194, including a death toll near the peak of 240 from the 1965 Ia Drang battles. Salisbury’s twentieth dispatch, “North Vietnam Spirit Found High,” reported that popular street songs in Hanoi paid tribute to the obscure war protester Norman Morrison, who had immolated himself outside the Pentagon late in 1965.

  FBI Director Hoover slipped up to Capitol Hill when the 90th Congress convened on January 10. On the House side, away from ceremonial pomp, war frictions, and the tumult of California Democrat Lionel Van Deerlin’s successful drive to bar Adam Clayton Powell from taking the oath, Hoover briefed loyal supporters about the Kennedy dispute. He “pointed out we had many other documents proving Bobby was lying,” according to his aide’s notes, and rejected the idea of court-approved surveillance because “there are many untrustworthy Federal judges, including some in the District of Columbia, whom we would not want to have knowledge of particular installations.” Before a closed Senate committee, Hoover testified formally on the eavesdropping leaks. “None of this misinformation has emanated from the FBI,” he lied. He reviewed eavesdropping since Prohibition, illustrating the meticulous wiretap process with a pregnant reminder that Robert Kennedy had signed the secret order on Martin Luther King, stating falsely that the initiative had been Kennedy’s. He conflated wiretaps with bugs to disguise the fact that he alone had controlled the latter without a speck of due process. He argued at length that Kennedy had seen material he knew came from bugs, or so should have inferred, and on this presumption Hoover spun an invisible tradition of authority stretching
back to the early Eisenhower administration. Quoting only a small portion of his private lodestar, a May 20, 1954, memo from Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Hoover concealed the memo’s dissenting purpose and never let on that it plainly skirted adverse law. (“It is quite clear that in the Irvine case the Justices of the Supreme Court were outraged by what they regarded as the indecency of installing a microphone in a bedroom,” Brownell wrote. “It may appear, however, that important intelligence…can only be obtained…in such a location…. It is my opinion that under such circumstances the installation is…not prohibited by the Supreme Court’s decision.”)

  This tortured rationale for an era of bugs would embarrass free government in future years, with Hoover safely dead, but the living Director silenced Congress and the press alike. His towering image as chief protector from domestic fears was at once too formidable and too fragile for public discussion. William Manchester scarcely mentioned FBI performance in his account of the Kennedy assassination, except to note Hoover’s fury that the Warren Commission dared criticize his Bureau at all. Behind assertions of spotless rectitude, buttressed by the intimidating secret files, Hoover’s fits of eccentric hysteria were so jarring that outsiders kept their rare glimpses to themselves. When Manchester, for instance, asked in a book interview about Oswald’s brief expatriation to Moscow, Hoover launched an oddly defensive tirade against Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. “The Director told Manchester that he had always felt it better to kick individuals like Khrushchev in the shins once in a while rather than to boot-lick them,” recorded DeLoach. “The Director explained that Khrushchev was basically an oriental and that individuals opposing orientals usually lost face in the oriental’s opinion when fear or trepidation was shown.”

  FOR ROBERT Kennedy, fortunes fluctuated amid talk of a 1968 bid to unseat President Johnson. The bugging scandal and Manchester book turned January straw polls from a 53–47 percent Kennedy lead into a 39–61 percent deficit, but the uproar over Salisbury’s bombing series renewed pressure for him to oppose the carnage. Columnist Walter Lippmann asked whether Kennedy could live with a failure to provide a moral alternative. When the senator tried to downplay talk of political insurrection, by referring to Johnson as “a man of compassion,” rival partisans debated which champion better served the poor. In England, where he retreated from the crossfire, Oxford University students who pressed Kennedy to denounce Vietnam extracted no more than an expression of “grave reservations” about the bombing within an overall endorsement for Johnson’s war goal to preserve South Vietnam, but stories emphasized his frank rapport with antiwar students. In Paris, President Charles de Gaulle warned anew that the United States could not prevail against the tide of Vietnamese politics, but he coldly advised Kennedy not to ruin a bright future by contesting a disaster in progress. Columnist Joe Alsop, writing as an “affectionate, admiring, and deeply concerned uncle,” offered identical advice from the opposite pole, and begged Kennedy to avoid involvement in protests that could turn military victory into stalemate. “Anyone who is in any degree implicated in the latter result will never be forgiven,” he warned. Back home, Kennedy confronted a tempest over reports that he brought a North Vietnamese “peace feeler” from Paris. Nonplussed, summoned to the Oval Office on February 6, he guessed that Johnson’s State Department must have leaked a grossly inflated detail from his routine debriefing, about a minor French official who thought an American bombing halt would induce North Vietnam to negotiate. “It’s not my State Department, goddam it!” the President erupted. “It’s your State Department!” The two men called each other names.

  Undersecretary of State Katzenbach witnessed the personal duel, which he later called “a perfectly ridiculous episode.” His frantic search had failed to locate the Kennedy debriefing in State Department records of highly classified peace initiatives, including a current overture from President Johnson to Ho Chi Minh himself, because it had been widely dispersed with other ordinary messages. The President saw conspirators within his government magnifying an illusion that Kennedy could settle Vietnam on nearly painless terms, evading the brutal choice between defeat and war. Kennedy saw an unstable warmonger scheming to make him a scapegoat, and Katzenbach resumed his role from the triangular bugging feud as a battered second for each contender. (“I succeeded in getting both Hoover and Kennedy mad at me,” he recalled.) Hard questions of substance all but vanished once again—first the constitutional standards for surveillance, now the uncertain capacity of American arms to establish political allegiance among the Vietnamese. Director Hoover, having incited the personality diversion, disappeared in a Kennedy-Johnson rift that lasted far beyond their lives. Projections of animus between the two icons became a political language in itself, subsuming relatively small differences on issues. It would symbolize their era’s demise, and substitute for lessons that fell between them.

  The play MacBird!, which opened a hit Off-Broadway that February, previewed an extreme polarization of public debate. Long spurned by publishers, with one reading for investors marred by scuffles and cries of treason, the script presented Johnson as mastermind not only of the Kennedy assassination but also of misfortunes like Adlai Stevenson’s fatal heart attack and Edward Kennedy’s 1964 plane crash. In a burlesque of Shakespeare, the usurper MacBird cavorted on stage with jangling spurs, a feathered scepter, and ludicrous armor borrowed from a baseball catcher’s gear, while the Robert Kennedy character vowed cold-blooded restoration like ancient MacDuff: “At each male birth, my father in his wisdom/Prepared his sons for their envisaged greatness…/Our pulpy human hearts were cut away/And in their place precision apparatus/Of steel and plastic tubing was inserted.” Playwright Barbara Garson, a veteran of student protest at Berkeley, dismissed the visible structure of American politics as a facade to cover a throwback to dynastic powers. Critics and audiences divided over her portrayal of barons turning state crimes and even wars into props for rivalries plotted in frothy speeches of royal entitlement. “Two opposing Americas were rubbing sleeves,” observed The New Republic. Newsweek hailed in MacBird! “the total catharsis of satire.” The New York Times scorned “a crackpot consensus” against responsible government, blended from political left and right. “The cruelty and vulgarity are almost beyond description,” wrote Edith Oliver in The New Yorker, which refused a theater advertisement for the first time in the magazine’s history. “We deemed the whole thing in bad taste,” an executive said to explain the ban, “what with Vietnam and all.”

  SNCC CONTINUED its disintegration behind the fame of black power. A December conference in upstate New York stalled for three rancorous days on a motion from the all-black Atlanta SNCC project to expel the last seven white staff members. Combatants tangled from definitions to dialectics, not excluding the thorny classification of Hispanics and Native Americans. Where established SNCC leaders saw petty distraction, Bill Ware of Atlanta argued tirelessly that revolutionaries against white racism must “cut the umbilical cord” of dependence. Stokely Carmichael and James Forman fought the motion on tactical points, having explained awkwardly to their caucus that it would be unwise to contest black solidarity in principle. Doing so would repeat Martin Luther King’s fundamental error, argued Carmichael, objecting that King stood inflexibly for nonviolence in a violent world. Ruby Doris Robinson supported black nationalism but railed against the separatists for chattering about white people instead of doing any work. Forman, bridling at suggestions of sentimental favoritism for longtime SNCC workers, or his white wife, raged that the historic brotherhood of sit-ins had degenerated into pot-smoking pretenders, and offered a substitute motion to disband SNCC entirely. Nearly half the members left in fatigue or disgust before the anti-white initiative passed by a single vote, 19–18, with twenty-four abstentions. Bob Zellner retreated silently to check out of the Peg Leg Bates Country Club with Jack Minnis, who called himself “a tough old bastard” but went years unable to speak of the scalding result. Clayton “Peg Leg” Bates, the strangely ecumenic
al host for a racial purge, had survived a childhood sharecropper accident to become the one-legged tap dancer for vaudeville’s Harlem Blackbirds and big bands from Duke Ellington to Jimmy Dorsey, a star on The Ed Sullivan Show, command performer at the British royal court, and hotel owner among the Jewish resorts in the Catskill Mountains. Back inside, motions to reconsider the vote trailed off in a fog of irritation, with the blunt Ivanhoe Donaldson muttering vacantly, “If it was so damned painful, why the hell did we have it?”

  Many founders of SNCC had dispersed widely after seven years in the crucible of nonviolence. Two days after Christmas, Diane Nash was the youngest of four American women herded suddenly to a concrete bunker below one of Hanoi’s French hotels, thrown together in an air raid with foreign guests, including by chance correspondent Harrison Salisbury. They watched waitresses put on tin helmets to shoot rifles at American bombers with only the most remote chance of hitting one and marveled at war details so vivid they sowed controversy within the small delegation sponsored by peace groups, which had ventured far across cultures to experience fire from their own country. “There are no innocent civilians in North Vietnam,” one of them provocatively asserted after two weeks’ exposure to total war mobilization in a peasant society—riveted but troubled, with a tinge of admiration. Nash agreed with companion Barbara Deming that Americans must understand the Vietnamese resistance, which was unified even in the face of extermination from the sky. Deming, a journalist for a pacifist magazine, had met Nash less than four years earlier at the height of the Birmingham children’s marches against segregation. Now their delegation met Ho Chi Minh for an hour in the palace of the former French governor, and the venerable pacifist A. J. Muste talked separately with Ho a few days later. The North Vietnamese leader professed admiration for the American people as distinct from their government. “President Ho did not ask us to convey what he had said,” Muste wrote President Johnson, cautioning that Ho’s offer to receive Johnson hospitably for talks did not seem to indicate any weakening of military resolve. Muste and three of the women came home to have their passports seized for illegal travel. Their public comments gained little reaction. Nash delayed her return to the United States, laboring separately to sort out her immense arc since Selma—from the epitome of nonviolent discipline and vision into grudging respect for war, clarity adrift. She refused to speak with white reporters, finding them oblivious to the racial complexities of Vietnam.