At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  President Johnson had summoned Senator Russell the previous week about a pending order to bomb the power station near Ho Chi Minh’s headquarters, which McNamara advocated and Rusk opposed. Russell counseled that all such bomb targets were incidental now, as he believed only a full invasion of North Vietnam would be decisive. Harry McPherson, the sole aide present at the somber consultation, volunteered to inspect the southern war zone as a fresh if amateur set of eyes for his vexed President. He was making notes to himself about the immense scale of the military effort from a Huey helicopter on the way to Da Nang—“an air strike in progress…a division camp here, a battalion forward area there…great areas have been scraped off the hilltops…we have just about paved the road-side for a hundred miles”—when U.S. jets first raided within the city limits of Hanoi to bomb the power plant. North Vietnam scrambled thirty fighters to meet them on May 19, Ho Chi Minh’s seventy-seventh birthday, and Luu Huy Chao would recall antiaircraft ground fire so thick that it downed several fellow MiG pilots along with five Americans.

  That same day in Washington, Secretary McNamara showed the President his draft response to Westmoreland’s request for 200,000 more soldiers. Its central conclusion marked a wrenching turn for McNamara and deeper crisis for Johnson: “The war in Vietnam is acquiring a momentum of its own that must be stopped.” Although McNamara amassed details behind one consoling achievement—“there is consensus that we are no longer in danger of losing this war militarily”—he could see no constructive end. The CIA supported him with maddening new conclusions that nearly total destruction (85 percent) of power plants and petroleum storage had failed to diminish the opposing flow of manpower—and worse, that both major alternatives, more bombs and fewer bombs, would only harden North Vietnam’s popular will to persevere. “Twenty-seven months of U.S. bombing of North Vietnam have had remarkably little effect on Hanoi’s strategy,” McNamara wrote. As for American troops in South Vietnam, he found that massive exertion and heroism generated greater than proportional opposition, while nominal allies from the South Vietnamese army grew “tired, passive, and accommodation-prone.” McNamara stressed that even Westmoreland’s plan for 670,000 soldiers, which would require national mobilization of the Reserves, predicted no North Vietnamese willingness to negotiate until well after the 1968 U.S. elections. He recommended against the additional troops because he foresaw no gain to offset a bloodier stalemate, and warned of pitfalls instead. “There may be a limit beyond which many Americans and much of the world will not permit the United States to go,” McNamara wrote. “The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.”

  These haunted words might have made McNamara welcome in the Mobilization vigil outside the White House fence, which was dispersing from its final day. For President Johnson, who had backed into Vietnam with Cold War inertia bottomed on his naked political fear of being called a coward, apprehensions long shared with his advisers ran into a number more real than any of McNamara’s famous calculations. “I’ve lost ten thousand boys out there,” Johnson kept saying. His war would become “increasingly hostage to the dead,” author Thomas Powers later observed.

  A SUPERSEDING crisis struck before Johnson could devise a course between McNamara and Westmoreland. On Monday, May 22, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt closed the Strait of Tiran, which cut off Israel’s shipping lifeline from the Red Sea into its sole southern port at Eilat. On Tuesday, Secretary-General U Thant complied with Nasser’s legal notice evicting United Nations peacekeepers from the Sinai Peninsula, where the Egyptian army now marched. Arab forces instantly mobilized from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to Libya, and Iraqi units convoyed to support Jordan and Syria. In a single day, wrote historian Arthur Hertzberg, “the mood of the American Jewish community underwent an abrupt, radical, and possibly permanent change.” Outcries went up for U.S. intervention to save Israel. President Johnson, worried that Soviet reaction on the Arab side might draw the superpowers into a world war, appealed publicly for restraint on Wednesday while Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban pleaded to the United Nations. The forces encircling Israel were openly bent upon her annihilation, he said, with a twenty-five-to-one advantage in population plus a three-to-one superiority in war planes and tanks. On Thursday, urging Eban to hold tight for diplomacy, Defense Secretary McNamara offered his confidential military judgment that Israel could defeat the Arab nations on all fronts within a week, despite the numerical odds.

  These war spasms caught Martin Luther King on his way to a peace conference in Switzerland. He was just leaving a retreat at the Frogmore Center in South Carolina, already swamped by fiscal and political demands. Some seventy staff members complained of abandonment by SCLC’s senior executives. Jesse Jackson’s office telephones in Chicago were about to be cut off for unpaid bills. Workers still assigned to beleaguered Grenada, Mississippi, confessed a worn-down commitment to nonviolence even among themselves. “We control ourselves in public,” said one, “and then come home and attack each other viciously or in petty ways.” King listened, then tried to rally spirits grown weary as the movement stretched to encompass Northern projects along with Southern holdovers and broader initiatives to stop war. He preached again on the connection between civil rights and Vietnam, adding for these colleagues a candid confession that he once succumbed to official blandishments about an imminent peace. “I backed up a little when I came out in 1965,” he said. “My name then wouldn’t have been written in any book called Profiles in Courage. But now I have decided. I will not be intimidated.” From stops in Chicago and New York, King flew to Geneva for the Pacem in Terris convocation sponsored by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Soviet delegates suddenly canceled along with Ambassador Goldberg and most American government representatives. King drew large crowds, but James Reston told Times readers that the threat of Middle East war reduced the novel concept of hybrid peace exploration to a “prayer meeting.” Back in New York, FBI wiretappers picked up Stanley Levison’s May 31 lament that Vietnam politics “is suffering badly because half the peace movement is Jewish, and the Jews have all become hawks.”

  Harry McPherson gamely continued westward from South Vietnam across India into Tel Aviv airport before dawn on Monday, June 5. An Israeli general in escort told him after breakfast to ignore air raid sirens and radio warnings of Egyptian bombardment massed from Sinai, which was McPherson’s first hint that preemptive Israeli strikes had just destroyed nearly all Nasser’s war planes on the ground. From the United Nations in New York, Middle East envoy Ralph Bunche woke the Secretary-General at home: “War has broken out!” The Moscow–Washington hotline jangled alive at 7:47 A.M.—in McNamara’s office because the equipment was not yet rigged to the White House. By afternoon, incoming Jordanian artillery opened a second front to a crippling counterattack from the air, and Israeli soldiers swiftly captured all of Jerusalem for the first time in 1,900 years. At 2:30 P.M. on Wednesday, according to war historian Michael Oren, the chief rabbi of the Israeli Defense Forces climbed the Temple Mount inside the walled Old City and emotionally proposed to blow up both Muslim structures built there in the long Jewish exile: Al Aksa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Generals Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Rabin overruled him, but to secure military possession in the ongoing battle they ignored instructions to surrender holy sites to the control of civilian clergy from the three Abrahamic religions. World powers and the belligerents needed three more chaotic days to implement a cease-fire, during which time Israel drove Syria from the Golan Heights on a third front. McPherson returned home Sunday from immersion in two successive wars—one endless, one lightning—amazed by solidarity in Israel. “The spirit of the army, indeed of all the people, has to be experienced to be believed,” he told President Johnson.

  THE SIX DAY WAR spawned lasting shock in world politics. Egyptian citizens heard bul
letins of glorious success toward liquidating “the Zionist entity” only hours before bloody remnants of their army retreated pell-mell across the Nile, leaving 15,000 dead and five thousand prisoner. Ho Chi Minh, who once gratified patriarch David Ben-Gurion with the offer of sanctuary in Hanoi for an Israeli government-in-waiting—back when the Vietnamese independence movement of 1946 was briefly more established than Jewish guerrillas trying to create Israel—proved no more accurate than Radio Cairo with his first-day proclamation that Israelis were “doomed to ignominious defeat” as “agents of the United States and British imperialists.” The ideological force of Pan-Arab nationalism all but evaporated. For the Soviet Union, which had switched its support abruptly from Israel to the Arab nations in 1954, the disaster wasted massive military aid and deflated claims of invincible Communist sponsorship.

  Miracle reprieve shifted Jewish identity. “The whole world fell in love with us,” said Orthodox theologian David Hartman. “To be Israeli was really sexy.” Jews prayed again at the Western Wall of Herod’s Temple as biblical places reentered everyday life. Rabbi Heschel rushed to Jerusalem among pilgrims. “There is great astonishment in the souls,” he wrote. “It is as if the prophets had risen from their graves.” In New York, at a nationwide celebration only two days after the war, the traditional prayer of thanksgiving for another day of life dissolved into waves of nearly universal weeping that Arthur Hertzberg said swept up assimilated Jews previously “remote to the synagogue” and indifferent to Israel. Outdoors in Washington, manning one of the emergency tables that collected an astonishing $100 million, Office of Economic Opportunity official Hyman Bookbinder was struck by a modest woman who donated her savings of $1,700. Bookbinder, a secular Jew born to Polish Bundists during World War I, soon quit government to work for the American Jewish Committee and would join his first synagogue after the Yom Kippur War of 1973.

  A warrior’s exultation hardened the awakening of Jewish spirit. “We grew so fast into a visible central power that the seeds of arrogance as well came in,” observed David Hartman. First news of Israel’s deliverance prompted a vulgar outburst from Abe Fortas in his Supreme Court chambers: “I’m going to decorate my office with Arab foreskins.” The implications of the war were so fantastic as to be hushed in numb realization that tiny Israel not only thrashed the surrounding Arab hosts single-handed, against restraining counsel from Washington, but also administered a sting to her aloof benefactor. For three hours on Day Four, Israeli war planes strafed and torpedoed the plainly marked U.S.S. Liberty spy ship in international waters off the coast of Egypt, killing thirty-four American sailors, wounding 170. Official statements of regret would leave the origin and anatomy of the attack shrouded in secrecy, as if both sides needed to muffle the repercussions. Writer Jonathan Kaufman later analyzed a new strain of “muscular Judaism” that sprouted beside cultured moralism built through many centuries of Diaspora, when scattered communities had relied on Jewish teaching to promote tolerance and social justice in host countries. Immediately after the Six Day War, the American gadfly I. F. Stone charged that the intoxicating rebirth of mighty Samson actually reduced Israel into the clench of her enemies. “Both Israelis and Arabs in other words feel that only force can assure justice,” he wrote. “A certain moral imbecility marks all ethnocentric movements. The Others are always either less than human, and thus their interests may be ignored, or more than human, and therefore so dangerous that it is right to destroy them.”

  In America, the Six Day War crystallized two historic transformations of Jewish political culture—both stoked for a century in the cauldron of ideological ferment that had arrived with destitute immigrant families. Much of the evolving debate applied arcane Marxist vocabulary to competitive polemics over which factions invented, rescued, or betrayed the best comprehensive plan to uplift oppressed people everywhere. Countless theories adapted to the onslaught of the Depression and Holocaust into the Cold War, but few experts or ideologues had expected a significant mass movement to rise from the black South. While Jewish activists participated heavily in the strange inner workings of church-based nonviolent politics, leading writers held back in guarded approval. A seminal essay of estrangement appeared just before Birmingham in 1963, when Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz wrote that although he had grown up paying lip service to civil rights, “I was still afraid of Negroes. And I still hated them with all my heart.” Dismissing integration and democracy as false hopes for “the Negro problem in this country,” Podhoretz saw no solution until “skin color does in fact disappear,” and confessed a desperate fantasy: “it means—let the brutal word come out—miscegenation.” In early 1967, the New York Times Magazine published debate from the premise of a broad divergence in nature. To a screed from James Baldwin, “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White,” Robert Gordis of the Jewish Theological Seminary replied, “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They Want a Scapegoat.” The Six Day War accelerated an ideology of progress projected through rather than against the established power of the United States, allied with Israel as the strong model democracy of the Middle East. Black power served as a foil of squandered potential. Sudden prosperity in arms made ideas more martial, as did fading concern with minorities and the poor, but the pioneer intellectuals still aspired to a visionary outlook. In Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, Irving Kristol traced idealistic political philosophy from his Trotskyite youth to the commanding center of 1980s Washington, with no mention at all of the nonviolent civil rights era.

  A parallel line of influential Jewish thought followed the extraordinary arc of Max Shactman, the Polish-born party leader who on a starry-eyed 1925 delegation to Moscow had hailed the Communist International as “a brilliant red light in the darkness of capitalistic gloom.” From firsthand knowledge, Shactman broke first with Stalin, then with Leon Trotsky for underestimating Stalin’s monstrous perversion of workers’ opportunity, then also with Norman Thomas and A. J. Muste among many “second-rate” anti-Soviet rivals, and finally with the idea of an independent socialist presence in American politics. In 1965, as the spellbinding luminary of backroom New York dialectics, Shactman stunned the regulars in “our socialist loft on 14th Street” with an offhand comment that American stooges running South Vietnam “may be no worse than the thugs in Hanoi.” Bayard Rustin, among many protégés then building a “Shactmanite base” within the American labor movement, chafed under demands from new union employers to support the Lyndon Johnson Vietnam policy. In 1967, Dissent magazine founder Irving Howe made notes on Rustin’s misery under group pressure not only to compromise his lifelong pacifist stance but speak favorably of the American war cause. Rustin pleaded for leeway to salvage his ties within the civil rights movement, where very young leaders like Courtland Cox and Stokely Carmichael, who had idolized Rustin for years, blamed him for the betrayal that spurred their revolt against nonviolence. Unlike Rustin, socialist leader Michael Harrington split with Shactman over Vietnam, and he coined the word “neoconservative” for Shactman’s coalition thrust. As the term gained currency in the intellectual beehive of Manhattan, it suggested strong military purpose with a utopian residue focused on Israel. The powerful neoconservative school in American politics would grow from a merger of labor-wing Shactmanites into the larger movement associated with Irving Kristol.

  Instantly, by contrast, the outbreak of the Middle East war threw the Vietnam peace movement into a political crossfire. Martin Luther King, back from Geneva, smarted from criticism that he had abandoned nonviolence by lending his name with Reinhold Niebuhr and other religious leaders to a prewar New York Times ad that sounded alarm over the hostile Arab encirclement. As he hopscotched between Cleveland and Chicago, King complained that “the Times played it up as a total endorsement of Israel.” On Day Two, Stanley Levison told King that people were too emotional to see that war “settles nothing” beyond survival. On Day Five, J. Edgar Hoover rushed to the White House a report suggesting that King’s subversive advise
rs would risk Israel to undercut President Johnson in Vietnam. Meanwhile, Rabbi Heschel endured mounting criticism on the same point. Israeli emissaries warned that his Vietnam protest threatened vital American protection, and colleagues at the Jewish Theological Seminary further ostracized Heschel in their zeal for both wars. Movement leaders compressed decades of agonizing reappraisal into the short week of battle. Andrew Young told King he feared Israel would not compromise on its conquest of Jerusalem. Levison and Harry Wachtel said the great powers should impose a comprehensive peace—but would not do so. By June 11, one day after the cease-fire, King complained to advisers that he had interpreted his nonviolence to support Israel’s right to exist, “and now Israel faces the danger of being smug and unyielding.”

  Doubts about consistency so plagued the antiwar clergy that several times they gathered secretly at the Union Theological Seminary office of John Bennett, chief organizer of the prewar ad in the Times. Could they oppose one war and praise the other in good faith, and exactly how should they draw the distinction? Rabbi Heschel, who was pouring forth a book of joyful meditation on Israel, fared badly with his first efforts to justify the Israeli war by character as well as circumstance, stating almost giddily that the Jewish soldiers were reluctant and hardly meant to hurt anyone. Harry Wachtel would recall that Heschel was “roughly handled” for such effusions by colleagues who normally deferred to him. Heschel and the priest Daniel Berrigan fell into temperamental strain. King mostly listened. Rabbi Balfour Brickner said the CALCAV group should pursue settlements for Vietnam and the Middle East, arguing that immediate peace advocacy was the surest way to keep legitimate self-defense from becoming a loophole for violence. Most participants thought the combination would make two difficult tasks impossible. Heschel, from his delicate experience as a Jewish contact inside the Vatican Council, said a religious peace campaign for Israel would provoke anti-Semitism. John Bennett sent Al Lowenstein and others a running tally of the contrasts between the two wars, but pragmatism recommended separate treatment. Heschel preserved his ecumenical wonder in his new book—“All men are created equal, yet no two faces are alike”—which would include a stern rebuke from the Talmud: “When the Egyptians who had enslaved the children of Israel were sinking in the Red Sea, the angels were jubilant and wanted to sing a song of praise and triumph. But God, the Father of all men, said to the angels, ‘My creatures are drowning—and you sing!’”