At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  While busloads of CALCAV supporters converged from Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and other neighboring states, advisers in King’s suite at the Americana Hotel fretted all afternoon over their paradoxical success. Their intended buffer of a seminary lecture loomed instead with consequence, and the rumbling signs of a big political event magnified sudden alarm over the neglected speech. Levison and Harry Wachtel, who seldom agreed on political language or style, huddled in the bedroom to draft an emergency substitute for dissent they found too personal and raw. Realizing that noticeable deviation from the press text would be criticized, they collaborated in a futile effort to compress King’s Vietnam stance into a poetic but impregnable new introduction. King used the same charged moments to absorb by remarkable shorthand memory an orator’s rhythm for words he already found comfortable. He discarded the preface as they rushed uptown to Riverside Church, where a processional march of one hundred clergy gathered in the narthex. All 2,700 pew spaces and 1,200 portable seats were filled, and an overflow line stretched toward 120th Street as in the halcyon 1930s when King’s idol Harry Emerson Fosdick first preached at the Gothic cathedral financed by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Wachtel squeezed into a VIP room in the Riverside library, but acute foreboding sent Levison straight home to bed.

  A STANDING ovation died down to cavernous tension before King imposed deeper quiet with a meditation on hesitant voices. “I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice,” he said. Paying tribute to the first line of Robert McAfee Brown’s CALCAV statement on Vietnam—“A time comes when silence is betrayal”—King confessed that the emotional vortex of war left doubters “mesmerized by uncertainty” and had made his pulpit “a vocation of agony” for the previous two years “as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart.” He still felt the forceful admonishment to leave Vietnam policy alone, King allowed, but it left him “nevertheless greatly saddened” that so many people considered the topic a senseless and disconnected shift from civil rights. That presumption fitted those who “have not really known me” or understood the movement, he lamented. “Indeed,” said King, “their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.”

  He undertook to explain “why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church…leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.” Seven reasons began with two lesser ones confined to race. Vietnam had “broken and eviscerated” the historic momentum for justice since the bus boycott, he asserted. Moreover, circumstance compelled poor black soldiers to kill and die at nearly twice their proportion for a stated purpose to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia that remained myths at home, fighting “in brutal solidarity” with white soldiers “for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools.” King derived a third theme from young rioters who had countered his pleas for nonviolence with quips that the nation itself relied on “massive doses of violence” to solve social problems. “Their questions hit home,” he intoned, “and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.”

  This naked pronouncement further hushed Riverside as King moved through reasons centered in patriotism, his Nobel Prize commission, and religious imperative. Just as the movement always had adopted America’s larger, defining goal of a more perfect democratic union—helping to spread concentric ripples of freedom behind rights for black people, liberating white Southerners themselves from segregation—so King argued by reverse synergy that a hardening climate of war could implode toward fearful subjugation at home. “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned,” he warned, “part of the autopsy must read ‘Vietnam.’” He marveled that religious leaders so readily evaded their core convictions to excuse violence. “Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them?” he asked. “What then can I say to the Vietcong, or to Castro, or to Mao, as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death, or must I not share with them my life?” Finally, he declared for Vietnam an impetus broader than American ideals but short of religious apocalypse or perfection. “We are called upon to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls enemies,” he said. “No document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.”

  King quickened his pace to describe decades of nearly continuous war from the viewpoint of ordinary Vietnamese. “They must see Americans as strange liberators,” he said. His historical sketch grew relentlessly more intimate past the “tragic decision” of 1945 to revoke independence with a nine-year attempt to reestablish French colonial control. “Now they languish under our bombs,” said King, “and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, their real enemies.” He filtered out geopolitical labels to highlight personal realities on the ground. “They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps,” said King. “They watch as we kill a million acres of their crops…. They wander into town and see thousands of the children homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals.” Villagers and soldiers degraded each other as Americans subjected their own troops to inner scars beyond the hazards of war. “We are adding cynicism to the process of death,” he charged, “for they must know after a short period…that their government has sent them into a struggle among the Vietnamese….

  “Somehow this madness must cease,” King declared, but he predicted no peace initiatives to match the appetite for war: “The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve.” His audience stirred as from shock when he presented five proposals drawn from Lowenstein’s draft, including a permanent bombing halt and a unilateral cease-fire. Applause first greeted the final brisk point: “Five, set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement.” A renewed wave of approval swept over his immediate call for a national effort to “grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime.” King did not hide from the stigma of military defeat by Communists, nor quibble about negotiating terms. Yet neither did he discount anyone’s yearning for democracy, whether a faceless peasant’s or Lyndon Johnson’s. Instead he offered bare, conflicted remorse for “sins and errors in Vietnam” that had neglected, spoiled, and trampled essential bonds of solidarity in freedom. By treating the Vietnamese more as subject “natives” than citizens, the American example long since undermined a democratic road to independence.

  The Riverside crowd embraced King’s message as though relieved to hear biting reflection sustained with nuance so devoid of malice, and perhaps also because his candid doubts of practical impact rang humbly true. They clapped for his endorsement of draft resistance and again for his praise of seventy declared conscientious objectors thus far from his Morehouse alma mater alone. He said each listener should weigh methods by individual conscience and collective promise—“But we must all protest.” Witness to belief was more important than immediate results, he told them to more applause, “and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing Clergymen and Laymen Concerned committees for the next generation.” The crowd stayed with King through skeins from his speeches since the Nobel Prize lecture. He called Vietnam symptomatic of a tragic impulse to meet rising hope in the world’s “barefoot and shirtless people” with military force disguised as American values. “Communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolution that we initiated,” he declared. Summoning a renewed freedom movement “out into a sometimes hostile world,” seeking to overcome poverty, racism, and war, King’s peroration ran past his text to extol again the biblical vision of the prophet Amos—“when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty strea
m.”

  A second standing ovation gave way to hurried comments by the sponsors. “There is no one who can speak to the conscience of the American people as powerfully as Martin Luther King,” said John Bennett. “I hope that he will make us see the monstrous evil of what we are doing in Vietnam.” Reporters converged afterward to grill King about the chances for nuclear escalation, Communist exploitation, or antiwar sabotage, and one asked how a rabbi could condone any comparison of American policy to Hitler. “I am not aware that Dr. King made such an analogy,” replied Heschel. “He only made reference to concentration camps, which apparently in the mind of this listener conjured up such an analogy.” Among surprise well-wishers pushing through the throng came Morehouse schoolmate and Juilliard musician Robert Williams, who had composed his first published choral work, “I Can’t Turn Back,” one traumatized night during the bus boycott. From Riverside back to the Americana Hotel, Williams reclaimed his old Montgomery role as volunteer escort for a friend now euphoric with relief. Whatever happened, said King, the manifest attention to his speech meant that at least he was making plain to the world his brief for peace in Vietnam.

  KING FIRST blamed distorted news coverage for a rude shock, which one historian called “almost universal condemnation” beyond the walls of Riverside. When he beseeched advisers to defend his real position, Harry Wachtel recruited Rabbi Heschel—and reported back his gratifying pledge that “any attack on you is an attack on him”—to answer Jewish war veterans who branded King’s Vietnam dissent a slander on their resistance to the Nazi Holocaust. When Reinhold Niebuhr, the aged and impaired theologian, managed to write an introduction for CALCAV’s pamphlet of the collected Riverside addresses, King fervently hoped over wiretapped phone lines that “it would help to clarify things” if newspapers would publish excerpts, or even his own statements of correction, but Stanley Levison considered the speech itself an obstacle to public understanding. “I do not think it was a good expression of you,” he bluntly advised, “but apparently you think it was.” With his trademark directness, Levison called it unwise to focus on Vietnamese peasants rather than average American voters. “The speech was not so balanced,” he told King. It was too “advanced” to rally his constituency, and covered so many angles that reporters sidestepped his message by caricature and label. “What on earth can Dr. King be talking about?” wrote a Washington columnist on April 5, wondering how any civil rights leader could overlook the benefits of integrated combat. “If there hadn’t been a war, it would have served the Negro cause well to start one.”

  White House aides reacted strongly to King. Trusted counsel Harry McPherson warned President Johnson an hour before the Riverside event: “Martin Luther King has become the crown prince of the Vietniks.” John Roche of Brandeis, who had succeeded Eric Goldman as Johnson’s academic liaison, far outstripped McPherson’s rare agitation the next day with a shrill judgment that King “has thrown in with the commies.” In an “EYES ONLY” report to the President, Roche claimed inside knowledge that King, “who is inordinately ambitious and quite stupid (a bad combination)…is painting himself into a corner with a bunch of losers.” White House aide Clifford Alexander more diplomatically called King to argue in detail that the administration was maintaining budgetary commitments to equal rights despite soaring Vietnam costs. Alexander and others mobilized civil rights leaders to isolate King’s threat to their White House alliance. Former ambassador Carl Rowan angrily told King that millions of their fellow black people would suffer for his insults against the greatest civil rights President in American history. He ascribed sinister motives to King in a syndicated column later expanded for Reader’s Digest, and King’s folly became a front-page theme within a week of Riverside. “N.A.A.C.P. Decries Stand of Dr. King on Vietnam / Calls It a ‘Serious Tactical Mistake’ to Merge Rights and Peace Drives,” announced the April 11 New York Times, which followed two days later with a headline about United Nations undersecretary Ralph Bunche, the only other black American Nobel Peace laureate: “Bunche Disputes Dr. King on Peace.” When President Johnson pressed to find out what King actually said at Riverside, he had to wait for a text supplied by J. Edgar Hoover.

  King launched crisis consultations on his way to California. Stanley Levison set aside his reservations about the Riverside address to dictate a vigorous defense statement for an overflow press conference at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, calling it a myth that King advocated a merger of organizations or goals, challenging critics to take a “forthright stand” on the war. Pressed for an admission that his peace talk did harm to Negroes, King lapsed into testiness that went unreported: “The war in Vietnam is a much graver injustice to Negroes than anything I could say against that war.” After a speech at Occidental College, he kept telling advisers that the phalanx of rejection left him “temporarily at a loss.” When he called Bunche, King reported, the diplomat had dissembled so miserably that “I felt sorry for him,” Bunche claiming to have misunderstood Riverside as a mandate to “fuse” civil rights with peace groups, promising to make clear now how much he agreed with King on the war itself. “He wasn’t telling the truth and he was trembling and all,” said King. “So I just got off him.” He said even the White House aides half-apologized for their political offensive, complaining of war hawks on the other side. The only consolation King wrung from his plight was a dawning reminder of similar distress “in every movement we have started,” and a night’s reflection clarified the pattern. “This was very true in Birmingham,” he told Levison. From President Kennedy on down, even nonsegregationists had opposed the disruption and protest, and no one had conceded any chance of a positive outcome. “The press was against me,” said King. “The middle-class Negro community was against me, and finally they came around.” The antiwar movement needed to fashion a breakthrough, like the children’s marches or the confrontations on Pettus Bridge.

  Levison cautioned against dangerous hopes. “It will be harder than Birmingham,” he told King, which was disheartening indeed. Levison already conceded that the burden went deeper than specific words of the Riverside address or his own vanity as a speechwriter. American public discourse broadly denied King the standing to be heard on Vietnam at all. It invested mountains of calculation into military prospects but recoiled from any thought of withdrawal, especially on the recommendation of a civil rights preacher, and future generations would remain locked in what Andrew Young called debilitating paralysis between “those who are ashamed that we lost the war and those who are ashamed that we fought it.” King offered a precarious narrow course that demonized neither side, restrained by a nonviolent imperative to find slivers of humanity in the obscene polar conflict. While upholding for his own country, personified by Lyndon Johnson, a supreme but imperfect commitment to democratic norms, he granted the Vietnamese Communists a supreme but imperfect resolve to be free of external domination. On balance among Vietnamese, war by foreigners entrapped the complicit United States in a colonial past that forfeited liberating status. To curtail unspeakable cruelty and waste, Americans must refine their cherished idea of freedom by accepting that they could support but not impose it in Vietnam. To honor sacrifice with understanding, Americans must grant the Vietnamese people the elementary respect of citizens in disagreement. The lesson was at once wrenching and obvious, in the way modern people might be chastened by the centuries it took to establish that the Inquisition’s bloody enforcement profaned rather than championed Christian belief.

  King flew north to San Francisco, still stung. He complained most of featured editorials in two nationally respected newspapers, the Washington Post and the New York Times, respectively a supporter and a critic of the war. While neither paper engaged the substance of his Riverside argument, both archly told him to leave Vietnam alone for his own sake. “Many who have listened to him with respect will never again accord him the same confidence,” declared the Post. “He has diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his people.” Editors a
t the Times pronounced race relations difficult enough without his “wasteful and self-defeating” diversions into foreign affairs. In “Dr. King’s Error,” they summarized the Riverside speech as “a fusing of two public problems that are distinct and separate,” and predicted that his initiative “could very well be disastrous for both causes.”

  The call for segregated silence on Vietnam dashed any expectation that King’s freedom movement had validated the citizenship credentials of blacks by historic mediation between the powerful and dispossessed. It relegated him again to the back of the bus, conspicuous yet invisible. King felt cut off even from disagreement, in a void worse than his accustomed fare of veneration or disfiguring hostility, and he broke down more than once into tears.

  A JOURNEY of parallel emotion swallowed up Robert Kennedy. At the Jackson airport, a waiting bodyguard of a dozen U.S. marshals escorted him on April 9 through Klan flags, epithets, and hostile picket signs: “Send Bobby to Hanoi,” “Race Mixers Go Home.” Nearly a thousand people crowded into the ballroom of the Hotel Heidelburg for an unprecedented drama the next day, when Mississippi’s most widely honored politician—whose youthful courage in the Senate had helped puncture the paranoid hysteria from Joseph McCarthy, and whose long service would gain recognition in the namesake aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis—appeared before a subcommittee of peers to duel unlettered witnesses from the civil rights movement, including Amzie Moore and Fannie Lou Hamer. Stennis renewed his campaign against a “national scandal” of new poverty programs, chiefly Head Start for preschool children, testifying that grant recipients were “throwing money away” on lavish expenses and indirect support for racial agitation. Unita Blackwell of Issaquena County chided Stennis for glossing over the poverty itself. “We have children who have never had a glass of milk,” she said. NAACP counsel Marian Wright rebutted Stennis on charges of fraud. “He is wrong,” she testified, to gasps in the ballroom, citing audits that contradicted the investigators Stennis had sent to scrutinize and shut down the fledgling county efforts run by the poor. Wright challenged the subcommittee to examine people instead of numbers. “Starvation is a major, major problem now,” she testified.