At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  King departed for northern England to accept an honorary degree from the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, known for Roman antiquities at the far outpost of Emperor Hadrian’s stone border. He left his country stirred senseless by upheavals from silly to profound. The New York State Journal of Medicine released a scientific study of young people who smoked dried banana peels, finding their craze entirely a “psychologic elaboration” because the chemicals were inert. The editors of Newsweek, openly proclaiming an advocacy stance for the first time, published a special issue on the crisis of race—“What Must Be Done”—with stories dissecting massive barriers to keep black people poor and invisible: “The Cold Fact Is That the Negro in America Is Not Really in America.” Newsweek’s task force recognized that the most immediate obstacle to its uphill agenda “is obviously Vietnam,” but nothing made the war an exclusive or supreme priority. Indeed, for King, the cognitive force of Newsweek solidified two reasons behind his instinctive preference for a poor people’s campaign. Whereas Vietnam protest strongly implied a negative or limited purpose to desist from war, the poverty crusade sought constructive change grounded in civil rights exhortations for America to “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.” Tactically, antiwar protests already teemed with chaotic energy, including groups intoxicated by violence themselves, but the anti-poverty field remained fallow and fertile for movement discipline. King let Stanley Levison draft arguments why black people remained the vanguard of nonviolence, and dropped any pretense of neutrality about his next passion.

  HE VOWED to lead a “camp-in” of poor people to Washington. “I’m on fire about the thing,” King told seventy SCLC staff members at the Penn Conference Center in Frogmore, South Carolina. He said reflection and prayer made him wish they had extended their 1966 anti-slum campaign into Cicero, so that, by enduring the brutality that loomed there, they could have raised a hopeful standard of urban witness before the riots of 1967. King said they must rise above violent symptoms spreading from foreign war and domestic despair. At the week-long retreat, beginning on November 26, he warned that only hysteria looked for rage to sustain idealism. “Violence has been the inseparable twin of materialism, the hallmark of its grandeur,” he said. “This is the one thing about modern civilization that I do not want to imitate.” He confided that he had just met with Olympic athletes trying to craft a protest of racism for the Mexico City Summer Games, only to find them disillusioned and abused by a black power conference at which delegates threatened to beat each other. Their ordeal underscored a lesson for King that “hate has no limits.” He said, “I refuse to hate. Many of our inner conflicts are rooted in hate.” King declared a moral imperative to dispel national hostility now clouding miracles from the civil rights movement. If resistance in Washington exceeded the travail of Birmingham or Selma, he pledged to intensify sacrifice accordingly. “So I say to you tonight that I have taken a vow,” he announced at the retreat. “I, Martin Luther King, take thee, nonviolence, to be my wedded wife.”

  Bevel objected that no dramatic plunge could rescue a misguided strategy. Predicting that Americans would ignore the “camp-in,” he argued that Vietnam rightly demanded the focused energy of a movement devoted to democratic values. Bevel disputed King’s constitutional basis for a campaign to raise the standard of living, and preached so vigorously that FBI intelligence reports of leadership friction reached President Johnson within days: “[Bevel] addressed the retreat at great length opposing King’s plans…. King was visibly angry at Bevel for opposing him in this regard.” Jesse Jackson criticized King more subtly. He said the plan rested too narrowly on demonstrations and support from the poor, then broke away to meet top investment bankers in New York. An Episcopal bishop had interceded by telephone and letter for King to excuse Jackson from South Carolina in light of his precocious skill with important donors—“his ability to confront without repelling.” Hosea Williams, meanwhile, opened a third line of attack. While reserving judgment on the Washington campaign itself, he alone rebelled when King went around the room for endorsement of the new SCLC executive director, William Rutherford, lately of Zurich, Switzerland. “I can’t support you,” said Williams. He exploded against every credential King cited for Rutherford as the proven administrator SCLC grievously had lacked—his management companies, his roots in Southside Chicago, his doctorate from the Sorbonne. Williams bridled against supervision by a big shot virtual foreigner without a day’s experience in civil rights. Privately, he answered King’s wounded appeals with a raw howl against Rutherford: “That nigger don’t know nothin’ about niggers!”

  Andrew Young settled the retreat with an analysis of civil disobedience that might arise in Washington. More than Birmingham’s blatant color line, or Selma’s biased voting standards, Young said the staff should prepare for actions to explain and carry out “noncooperation” with otherwise just laws—targeted demonstrations to dramatize smothered rights and misplaced priorities, general ones to impede normal life in the capital. When staff members examined Young about philosophical distinctions, or questioned the value of blocking access to the Agriculture Department, King urged them to work through their misgivings. “The great burden of this will be on you,” he said. “I can’t do it by myself. Andy can’t do it by himself.” He said he would try to neutralize rivals and doubters in advance by letting them “curse me out about the ineffectiveness of this.” No one yet could show that nonviolence was unsuited to intractable economic issues, he argued, any more than a single bucket on a burning house proved water could not quench fire. King pictured starting with one delegation of unemployed people to present demands for jobs or income at the Labor Department, then spread out to lobby Congress while other poor groups made their way to Washington from ghettoes and Indian reservations and white Appalachia and rural plantations, some walking or riding mules “through the tough areas, that’s drama right there.” They could invite allies to join nonviolent witness in the capital—clergy, college students, President Johnson’s poverty experts, Newsweek readers, the peace movement. “Now they may not respond,” said King. “I can’t promise that, but I do think we’ve got to go for broke this time.” The alternative was surrender or riots. “I figure our riots last about four days,” he said forlornly, “and then you see these helpless mothers standing in line trying to get some milk for their children.”

  King and Young stepped aside beneath the Penn Center pine trees to check for culture shock in Rutherford, who had expatriated to Europe in 1949 with a steamer trunk and a one-way boat ticket, pulled apart by race. (His sister worked as a maid; his parents rebuffed white friends he brought home as one of only seven black students at the University of Chicago.) Eighteen years later in Geneva, when Rutherford translated spontaneously for French and German reporters who surrounded King at the Pacem in Terris convention, the chance introduction turned into a swift agreement for him to sell or license his businesses, resign the publicity chairmanship of the Swiss-American Chamber of Commerce, and leap home into the revolution he had missed. The new partners exchanged confidences. King brushed aside Rutherford’s cautionary disclosure of car theft buried in his childhood past as a Chicago gang apprentice called “Wild Bill.” When Rutherford confessed discomfort to see his revered chief executive sit through blistering criticism from subordinates, King replied that movements ran on tempered lunacy, which demanded respect for anyone who inspired others to risk nonviolence. Bevel should be accepted as a free spirit, King advised, but he greeted Rutherford with two secret assignments steeped in suspicion. First, he asked how Hosea Williams and SCLC comptroller James Harrison managed to keep an extra apartment on their meager salaries, and whether Williams was involved in any embezzlement to pay the rent. “I want you to find out,” King said. Second, he charged Rutherford to determine whether Jesse Jackson’s vexing independence sprang from breakaway ambition. “I either want him in SCLC or out,” he ordered bluntly. “You go whichever way you want.” Rutherford promised to hone SCLC for King
’s purpose so long as he kept the one chisel he had demanded: the unfettered authority to fire staff. “Even Lillian?” asked King, of the indispensable office manager Lillian Hunter, then numbly confirmed his assent.

  The poverty campaign stagnated all week in the Frogmore workshops. Only Bernard Lafayette, SCLC’s new program director, pitched himself into the operational plans for his mandate, and Rutherford, the enthusiastic technician, found the mood of his native country distinctly unfavorable. (“Public preoccupation with Vietnam is stunning,” he told Young.) King worked from a blackboard, batting down objections. “The day of the demonstration isn’t over,” he said. “And I say to you that many of our confusions are dissolved—they are distilled in demonstrations.” He denied that the campaign slogan, “Jobs or Income,” was indecisive or inadequate. Their public goals had been simple in Birmingham and Selma, King insisted, and the program of Jesus himself boiled down to the word repent. “You see, I don’t care if we don’t name the demand,” King declared. “Just go to Washington!” He said more than once that this might be the last campaign, because poverty was bigger than race. One of King’s remarks—“the victory we seek, we’ll never win”—provoked an eruption from Hosea Williams that it was wrong to stir up vulnerable people for a losing battle. (“I got really upset,” Williams recalled. “I just get cooking.”) King pleaded with the staff not to shrink from lost causes or association with outcasts—“I would hope that we in SCLC are the custodians of hope”—in exhortations that rambled at times into distracted theology. “I’m not talking about some kind of superficial optimism which is little more than magic,” said King. “I’m talking about that kind of hope that has an ‘in spite of’ quality.” A distinctive rendition of one Bible verse bubbled up: “There is something in the book of Revelation which says, ‘Make an end on what you have left, even if it’s near nothing.’”

  King overrode doubt and dissent. He went straight home to a press conference on Monday, December 4—exactly eight months since taking on the furors of Vietnam at Riverside Church, one day before the twelfth anniversary of his debut speech for the bus boycott. Unlike the reluctant spokesman whose thunderclap oratory first caught up with Montgomery’s local protest, now he conjured up a resurgence by sheer force of will. “The Southern Christian Leadership Conference will lead waves of the nation’s poor and disinherited to Washington, DC next spring,” King announced. The campaign would begin with three thousand pilgrims “trained in the discipline of nonviolence,” and last until the country responded. “We don’t know what will happen,” he declared. “They may try to run us out. They did it with the Bonus Marches years ago, you remember.” Fielding questions about potential clashes, he vowed to desist only if the protesters themselves indulged in violence. “The Negro leader’s mood seemed deeply pessimistic,” reported the New York Times, and the front page heralded trouble: “Dr. King Planning to Disrupt Capital in Drive for Jobs.”

  CHAPTER 37

  New Year Trials

  December 1967–January 1968

  LEADERSHIP conflict seized the country while King labored to galvanize his small staff. On November 26, far from the obscure retreat at Frogmore, Senator Robert Kennedy vacillated openly between apology and disgust. “We’re killing innocent people because we don’t want to have the war fought on American soil,” he told television viewers, “or because they’re 12,000 miles away and they might get 11,000 miles away. Do we have that right?” When journalists pressed him to reconcile his scathing reproach over Vietnam with his public support for President Johnson’s reelection, Kennedy shrugged. “I don’t know what I can do to prevent that, or what I should do that is anything different,” he said, “other than try to get off the earth in some way.” His morbid candor silenced the CBS broadcast of Face the Nation until its moderator found a soothing comment: “Senator, nobody wants you to get off the earth, obviously.”

  Kennedy said personal history made him reject overtures to run in 1968 against his late brother’s successor. “It would immediately become a personality struggle,” he declared, and paint him “an overly ambitious figure trying to take the nomination away from President Johnson, who deserves it.” He welcomed a potential quest by Senator Eugene McCarthy, however, to provide a healthy political choice for millions of people who opposed the war, and “Dump Johnson” activist Allard Lowenstein celebrated McCarthy’s agreement to run on Meet the Press the following Sunday, December 3. “Aren’t you still waiting for Bobby?” a panelist objected, alluding to Lowenstein’s chronic solicitation of Kennedy. “In fact, isn’t Senator McCarthy still waiting for Bobby?” Lowenstein gamely insisted that no citizens’ challenge to an incumbent wartime President could afford hesitation. The previous night, before the insurgent Conference of Concerned Democrats at Chicago’s Sheraton-Blackstone Hotel, Lowenstein had lifted 12,000 delegates repeatedly to their feet with his firebrand eloquence on bedrock democracy—blasting Vietnam as stealthy moral corruption by executive tyranny—while the candidate-in-waiting seethed offstage. Senator McCarthy, unhappy to be eclipsed by his own introduction, followed with learned but meandering remarks on the folly of war and the peril of dissent. His announcement projected a whimsical reserve, suggesting that Johnson’s hunger for power was itself a root cause of woe in Vietnam. Intense public scrutiny generated both admirers and detractors for McCarthy’s poetic detachment, which seemed either a fresh virtue or quixotic flaw. Circumstance sparked friction between him and Kennedy as reluctant, rival puritans—one barely in the race, the other still out.

  Quite apart from electoral revolt, Lady Bird Johnson bemoaned a pall of loss that descended with the final month of strain for Robert McNamara. On two successive days, he came alone to Johnson with appeals for reduced military action in Vietnam. The President withheld McNamara’s stark shift from all national security officials, including the Wise Men consultants who ratified the escalation strategy unaware. For McNamara, the suppression of his views breached confidence and raised tension “to the breaking point.” For Johnson, signs of emotional distress in McNamara led to whispers that “we could even have another Forrestal on our hands,” in an ominous reference to the breakdown and suicide of the first Defense Secretary, James Forrestal. Johnson ordered National Security Adviser Walt Rostow to collect evaluations of McNamara’s written dissent without disclosing his authorship, and the Wise Men rejected it almost uniformly. “I can think of nothing worse than the suggested program—stating that we are going to ‘stabilize’ our level of military effort and halting the bombing,” wrote Justice Abe Fortas. “This is an invitation to slaughter. It will, indeed, produce demands in this country to withdraw—and in fact, it must be appraised for what it is: a step in the process of withdrawal.” President Johnson, buttressed anew with secret consensus, let slip to reporters that the Defense Secretary was off to head the World Bank. This amounted to deft political euthanasia for Vietnam’s chief architect, and McNamara’s puzzlement would survive in a stricken memoir nearly three decades later: “I do not know to this day whether I quit or was fired.”

  The President retained the haunted skepticism he had expressed privately for years, especially about the recurrent promise of victory by more and bigger bombs. “I am beginning to agree with Bob McNamara,” he told military commanders, “that it does not appear the targets are worth the loss in planes.” Having ruled out both withdrawal and stalemate, Johnson simply demanded what McNamara no longer could sustain: public faith that battle was securing control of Vietnam. Officials followed the prime recommendation of his Wise Men to “show some progress.” They emphasized themes to supplant what McGeorge Bundy called a negative drone of “deaths and dangers to the sons of mothers and fathers with no picture of a result in sight.” General Westmoreland publicly predicted troops could start home within two years. Ellsworth Bunker, the new U.S. ambassador in South Vietnam, announced momentum to “accelerate the rate of progress,” and seldom did military judgment strike a clanging note. Colonel John Paul Vann, a legendary
warrior who had spent five years developing counterguerrilla strategy in Vietnam, was feted during home leave until the National Security Adviser asked for private assurance that the worst fighting could be over in six months. “Oh, hell no, Mister Rostow,” Vann replied on December 8. “I’m a born optimist. I think we can hold out longer than that.” His plucky gloom stung Walt Rostow, who remarked curtly that such an iconoclast did not belong in government service. (Vann returned to Vietnam duty, and would be killed there in 1972.)

  President Johnson restrained an impulse to brand the war critics unpatriotic, but he did prod his government to harass them in private. He reacted viscerally to King’s first fund-raising appeal for the anti-poverty drive on Washington, for instance, which framed SCLC’s campaign in language drafted by Stanley Levison: “Nonviolence can be adapted to militant forms of protest that embody creative disruption while avoiding physical or moral destruction…. The riots and the cancer of war can destroy the democratic core of American life. However, there are constructive forces that can be organized.” On this letter, the President himself scrawled specific instructions to investigate retaliation through the tax code. Sheldon Cohen, Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, replied on blank stationery that his agents had audited King and his SCLC foundation “for the last three or four years” but found no legal leverage. Justice Fortas and his wife, tax lawyer Carol Agger, secretly concurred that King’s conduct would not sustain fraud charges or revocation of the tax-exempt status they helped secure in happier times. Almost simultaneously, Johnson received a classified FBI report that the Ford Foundation soon would announce a grant of $230,000 to King for leadership training of minority preachers in scattered cities. When the President asked Hoover for an explanation, being unwilling to inquire directly, Hoover concealed the painful truth that McGeorge Bundy at Ford had rebuffed FBI maneuvers to scuttle the grant. Instead, DeLoach fed Johnson a bald tale that the softhearted Bundy had earmarked no less than $4 million for King until the FBI silently intervened.