At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  The next afternoon, March 2, Robert Kennedy proposed to suspend the bombing of North Vietnam. After weeks of fitful preparation, Kennedy carefully chose words from divided contributors, including Richard Goodwin. He opposed military withdrawal, affirming “determination and intention to remain in Vietnam until we have fulfilled our commitments,” but he urged risks to end the horror he confessed helping to create there under President Kennedy. “It is we who live in abundance and send our young men out to die,” he said. “It is our chemicals that scorch the children and our bombs that level the villages. We are all participants.” If a bombing halt did not succeed, he argued, it would shift the onus for war more clearly upon North Vietnam. While Kennedy addressed a packed Senate gallery, the President tried vainly to overshadow him in the news—visiting Howard University by surprise to reiterate his goal of redress for segregation, holding a spontaneous press conference, disclosing an expected first grandchild. More successfully, Johnson arranged instant rebuttals and prodded senators from both parties to cross-examine Kennedy before he left the Senate floor about bombing halts already tried and failed. (“All right,” Richard Russell promised. “I have some misgivings about getting into a debate with the little piss-ant, but I’ll see about it.”) More ominously, having ordered a compilation of FBI secrets two weeks earlier, Johnson signaled grave political retribution at stake. Headlines about Kennedy’s Vietnam speech coincided with the next day’s first corrosive story alleging his secret involvement in CIA assassination plots against Fidel Castro, which may have “backfired against his late brother.” (“President Johnson is sitting on an H-bomb,” wrote Drew Pearson.) Republican presidential contender Richard Nixon needed no cue to denounce Kennedy for “prolonging the war by encouraging the enemy.”

  King followed the uproar into New York for a March 6 consultation at Harry Wachtel’s law office on Madison Avenue. The scheduled agenda—last-minute revisions for King’s book, chronic money trouble, and deferred crisis over Hosea Williams—gave way to a renewed deadlock on the April 15 antiwar march to United Nations Plaza. All senior advisers strenously opposed King’s participation. Bayard Rustin said it would ruin any hope of future cooperation with President Johnson. Historian Lawrence Reddick among others said the march would be sectarian and ineffective because the organizers welcomed all voices, including partisans of the Vietcong. Andrew Young joked that a Communist was said to be the most rational voice in the protest coalition. King first rescued the subject from swift oblivion with comments of critical sympathy. His recurring doubts extended debate past mild surprise into vexation, provoking wary looks at James Bevel as the sole advocate for the march. Stanley Levison, who rarely repeated what his unique access allowed him to tell King alone, stressed that the absence of elected officials on the platform would leave King foolishly weakened among a “squabbling pacifist, socialist, hippie collection,” and Cleveland Robinson agreed even though he was a march sponsor himself. Concerted objections wore down but failed to break King’s refrain that it would be cowardly to shun a just cause for fear of isolation. Agreeing only to postpone his decision a few days, he rushed an hour late to an evening fund-raiser hosted by wealthy New Yorkers. After a distracted presentation there on civil rights history since Rosa Parks, King hinted privately at his dilemma. William vanden Heuvel, a Kennedy adviser who had accompanied Edward to Mississippi and Robert to South Africa, told him to expect a vale of woe for any public break on Vietnam.

  King flew home to manage a daring internal counteroffensive by Hosea Williams, who lodged a manifesto blaming Bevel for personal dissolution and leadership failures throughout SCLC: “Our staff problems are unbelievable.” His travels had him return through Washington on March 13, but King abruptly canceled an appointment he had secured with the President for that day. From his close reading of Johnson—a volatile mix of regret and determination being dragged from civil rights to Vietnam—King mingled distress about how to approach him with stewing delay over his own protest stance. The latest weekly report of 1,617 American war casualties—232 killed, 1,381 wounded, four missing—broke the January record by four hundred. In the wake of Robert Kennedy’s Vietnam speech, headlines tracked extraordinary press competition to unearth details of the Oval Office encounter a month earlier. The New York Times borrowed news from Time magazine’s current issue: “Discussion with Johnson Bitter, a Time Article Says.” Anonymous sources said the two men had accused each other of spilling innocent blood, with Kennedy calling Johnson a son of a bitch and Johnson vowing “all you doves will be destroyed” within six months. A historian of the feud later catalogued the excited phrases by political reporters who “raided their arsenals of hackneyed military metaphors” about throwing down gauntlets and crossing the Rubicon.

  In New York, King’s advisers frantically canvassed potential antiwar leadership. Their ostensible mission was to broaden the April 15 mobilization rally, but their real hope was to break the spell of King’s compulsion to be there. They offered pained reminders of Bevel’s unstable history, including his latest “visit from Jesus,” and gathered new evidence to reinforce their argument that King should not fall sway to a lunatic “over-simplifier.” As march coordinator, Bevel did compensate for his mercurial style by hiring Bernard Lafayette and Paul Brooks, a biracial team of Freedom Riders steeped in nonviolent diplomacy from James Lawson’s Nashville workshops. Co-workers complimented Bevel’s “way of shaking cobwebs from the mind,” and he gained publicity with a colorful vow that a peace movement “must take the position of the folks whose kids were burned up this morning.” On the other hand, he flummoxed Mobilization headquarters with strange edicts—“What this demonstration needs is some Indians!”—and unsettled activists who had expected a civil rights figurehead of reverent appeal. The local chapter of Women Strike for Peace complained to Bevel of his “emphasis on ‘mass murder’ and talk of sending a ship of volunteers to North Vietnam.” He fared worse with novel shock theater, barging in on the CALCAV founders with plaintive cries that his brother had died that day in Vietnam, cultivating shared personal grief until he unveiled a trick lesson that the movement should treat every soldier and victim as family. “Jim Bevel has scared the daylights out of John Bennett and Abraham Heschel,” a CALCAV letter confided. Not even these committed religious leaders would go near the Mobilization protest, reported Levison, Rustin, and Wachtel, strengthening their unified insistence that King must find another venue, and word of his contrary resolve on March 14 pitched them into disbelief bordering on rebellion. “I’m gonna march,” said King. “I promised Bevel.”

  ANDREW YOUNG sent out a resigned note that King “feels conscience-bound to participate,” then scrambled with colleagues to limit the damage. Their first move was a tactical demand that King speak first and leave early, lest his usual closing slot trap him on the platform through inflammatory speeches by Stokely Carmichael and others. Young also solicited from John Bennett an invitation for King to lecture in the chapel of Union Theological Seminary a few days beforehand, hoping to cushion the anticipated hostile reception with a controlled presentation of his Vietnam message.

  Bennett assigned arrangements to CALCAV’s executive secretary Richard Fernandez, which became a mixed blessing for King’s advisers. Fernandez was an awkward career misfit among Congregationalist clergy—son of a Boston oil executive, not quite accepted to lead any congregation because he carried a Hispanic surname but spoke no Spanish. He had hitchhiked to interview King and Abernathy for a term paper on the bus boycott, gone to jail with fellow New England seminarians in North Carolina, and ventured on his spring leave as a campus chaplain into Birmingham’s nonviolent youth workshops just before the seminal marches of 1963. When interviewed in 1966 for the CALCAV position, Fernandez brashly informed Bennett, Heschel, and Coffin that they would never turn public opinion against the war with theological pedigrees and sermons. Within a year, he raised the number of active CALCAV chapters from eight to sixty-eight by goading clergy into systematic outreach bey
ond the comfort of friends. Within a week of the King assignment, Fernandez informed Bennett and Young of three requirements to build effective “cover” for the intended march with Bevel. First, they should transfer the preview lecture into the immense Riverside Church, which CALCAV secured for the evening of April 4. Second, they should engage a professional publicist, Fred Sontag, who would donate his services on a final condition: King must agree for once to submit a speech text at least five days in advance. “This would give us a maximum amount of time,” Fernandez wrote with demanding emphasis on March 21, “to reproduce it for the press.”

  Stanley Levison flew to Atlanta with an appeal to reconsider the Vietnam thrust altogether. (“I lost,” he reported home over his wiretapped phone line, “and we’ll just have to live with the consequences.”) King departed for Chicago behind schedule on March 24, leaving Young only a four-part outline of the Riverside Church address. For an orator trained in synthetic improvisation, who often conceived speeches on a last-minute briefing, the imminent deadline would have been a shock even without extra handicaps. Trusted assistants stalled the project, which obliged Young to farm out the drafting assignment to scattered volunteers, including professors Vincent Harding of Spelman and John Maguire of Wesleyan. King tried to relay comments from the maw of a floundering movement in Chicago, where he apologized for his three-month absence at a rally packed into Liberty Baptist Church. A press conference followed with volleys of skeptical questions about the stalled summit agreement, a “miserably failed” registration drive, the chance of riots, and Mayor Daley’s public charges that King’s return was a “politically inspired” trespass into the mayoral campaign. “I have made it clear over and over again that the issue in Chicago is injustice,” King replied. “It was injustice before Mayor Daley was elected. If he is re-elected, it will be injustice then.” He punctuated a blur of private councils with a March 25 speech at the Chicago Theological Seminary, praising standout progress in the drive to integrate the workforces of all-white companies under Jesse Jackson, the precocious director of SCLC’s local Operation Breadbasket. At noon, King and Dr. Benjamin Spock led five thousand supporters in a Chicago Area Peace Parade from Wacker Drive along State Street through the downtown Loop. A few hecklers seized passing placards—“Draft Beer, Not Boys,” “Would Napalm Convert You to Democracy?”—and threw them in the Chicago River. At the Coliseum on South Wabash, King earned standing ovations with a reprise of his Beverly Hills speech on Vietnam. “This war is a blasphemy against all that America stands for!” he cried.

  White House officials noticed the reemergence. “He’s canceled two meetings with me, and I don’t understand it,” dictated President Johnson, wondering in the midst of greater war travails why his aide Louis Martin did not bring King to see him. The latest Pentagon figures of March 23 put the week’s American casualties above two thousand for the first time at 2,092, with 211 killed. Famed British historian Arnold Toynbee declared victory in Vietnam an illusion “unless the American army is prepared to stay there forever.” North Vietnam released worldwide the recent exchange of secret letters in which Johnson’s offer of peace talks and a bombing halt, on condition of a military freeze, met plainspoken rejection “Vietnam is thousands of miles from the United States,” wrote Ho Chi Minh. “The Vietnamese people have never done any harm to the United States…. They will never accept talks under the threat of bombs.” Worst for Johnson, General Westmoreland had just contradicted the administration’s public assurance of military headway with a classified request for another 200,000 soldiers, which would raise the authorized troop ceiling to 670,000.

  Levison, far from reconciled to King’s plans, called Chicago after midnight with a new battery of arguments. Contributors would feel betrayed because SCLC’s fund-raising letters had never solicited for protest against the war, he said, and King’s civil rights currency was so weak that literary agent Joan Daves could not find even a small magazine to publish a promotional excerpt from the new book. Most harshly, Levison reported an angry aside from Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins that wrongheadedness on Vietnam would reduce King’s reputation to mud. “I anticipated some of this,” King replied, “and it doesn’t bother me at all.” He tried to mollify Levison on March 27 with a cheerful report that at least a thousand Negroes joined the Chicago march, easing fears that King would become a token leader for white ideologues. Levison vacillated between approval and despair over King’s public emphasis that he was protesting out of love for America. That positive message was a weak candle, Levison feared, against a Vietnam storm darkening right over the stubborn end of segregation, causing anger in young people so intense that it “does boil down” to alienation from the entire country. “You can’t be identified with that,” Levison pleaded. “I’m not just talking opportunistically. It’s not sound thinking.” He declined King’s urging to pursue the issue among the long-winded SCLC preachers assembling in Kentucky.

  Muhammad Ali, with improbable assistance from Hosea Williams, had his hometown brewing over race and Vietnam before King reached Louisville late on March 28. In the ninth defense of his heavyweight championship, a frustrated, vengeful Ali toyed with Ernie Terrell through six rounds once the challenger stood woozy and aimless, with Ali shouting “What’s my name?” over jabs, punishing the scornful denial of his right to name himself. Purple headlines detected fiendish cruelty in the ring: “Cassius Reveals His Wickedness.” Jimmy Cannon of the New York World-Journal & Telegram acidly concluded that “Cassius Clay had a good time beating up another Negro”; Arthur Daley of the Times called him “a mean and malicious man.” Ali compounded the press furor by announcing that he would defy on religious grounds his conscription order to report for Army duty in April, and King escaped the tempestuous SCLC board for two hours on March 29 to meet privately with Ali about the likely repercussions—being deprived of his boxing title and sent to prison. Chafing that the sectarian Nation of Islam forbade participation in America’s “slavemaster” politics, including war protest, Ali whispered that he might disobey Elijah Muhammad and appear at the April 15 Mobilization. When they emerged, King deflected personal questions into more general controversy. “My position on the draft is very clear,” he said. “I’m against it.”

  Irrepressible Ali chided the jostling reporters for getting “shook up” that such diverse black men could talk civilly, “like Kennedy and Khrushchev,” but he revealed one sharp disagreement: he had spurned SCLC’s local campaign to break out of segregated neighborhoods. “Black people should seek dignity and self-respect before they seek open housing,” Ali said, and dismissed journalists with Elijah Muhammad’s separatist gibe that Negroes still “lost” to self-hatred could turn mansions into slums within a day.

  Offsetting Ali’s scorn, the local integration drive received a boost in publicity from Hosea Williams, who with a dozen staff aides had mounted a shrewd retreat from Chicago ahead of the SCLC board meeting. Williams vowed in the midst of the demonstrations that unless Louisville broke the racial confinement into city areas called Parkland, Smoketown, and Little Africa, where black families still raised hogs and chickens, SCLC would send pickets and protest dashers into the manicured glory of the May 6 Kentucky Derby. The very thought scandalized Kentuckians, including many civil rights leaders, but it won surprise endorsement from Rev. A. D. King. “We can start by planning to disrupt the horses,” he said, “since white folks think more of horses than of Negroes.”

  The younger King, who was hosting the SCLC board sessions at his Zion Baptist Church, carefully picked another moment to extricate his brother for a scripted personal word with Georgia Davis, the candidate soon to be elected Kentucky’s only black state senator. “Martin has been thinking about you since you last met,” he told her. “After the meeting tonight, ride with me to the Rodeway Inn and meet him there.”

  The stark proposition froze Davis. The elder King studied her and said only, “Yes, I’d like for you to come,” before hurrying on. Davis, who had been on th
e charter flight that picked up King in Atlanta for the final leg of the Selma march, contemplated her choice with starstruck savvy about the terms of discretion available to black females. Toward midnight, she cringed inwardly as A. D. King vouched for her past a posted police guard she knew by name, and King soon arrived with apologies for the precautionary approach through his brother. “I had no choice,” he said with a sigh, beginning a furtive, occasional affair.

  The next day, March 30, some SCLC board members accused King of trying to impose his Vietnam resolution like a bishop. “This is no Methodist Church!” shouted Rev. Roland Smith, proclaiming himself a staunch supporter of his government’s anti-Communist crusade. Parliamentarians stalled with quibbles about the composition and voting status of the fifty-seven-member board. Someone complained that lunch was getting cold. Hosea Williams would recall that Daddy King himself helped vote down a resolution that approved SCLC resistance to the war, but a weaker version passed amid calls not to embarrass SCLC’s president. King, breaking away for an interview with New York Times correspondent John Herbers, confirmed plans to give “a major policy paper” about Vietnam the next Tuesday at Riverside Church.

  On April 2, when his interview appeared on the front page of the Sunday Times, King preached at Ebenezer while cobbling together speech changes past the deadline crunch. Andrew Young telephoned revisions for three sections submitted from Atlanta, but Al Lowenstein delivered his negotiated draft of a fourth part straight to CALCAV headquarters in New York. Richard Fernandez rushed assembled copies to Rabbi Heschel and Union Seminary president John Bennett, who had agreed to close the eight o’clock Riverside program with commentary on King’s speech. A third responder, historian Henry Steele Commager, received his copy on arrival from Cambridge, England. By Tuesday morning, promotional releases drew a full turnout for King’s preview reception at New York’s Overseas Press Club, where publicist Fred Sontag distributed embargoed speeches and promised “live and remote pickups” for broadcasts.