At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  A recompense to Hoover was the signal of the President’s controlled fury, despite King’s vital support for his Great Society agenda, which added a margin of safety for the FBI’s intensified clandestine attacks. Hoover listed King and SCLC prominently among targets in a formal directive for all FBI offices “to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist hate-type organizations.” This was the third full-scale COINTELPRO (Hoover’s acronym for “counterintelligence program”) in FBI history. Already agents were leaking propaganda to favored journalists—“FBI’s Report on King Ready”—and supplying grist for a lengthy congressional speech by Representative John Ashbrook that portrayed King as a “power-hungry tyrant.” In December, Hoover explored ways to revive the King wiretaps shut down on Johnson’s orders.

  ON SUNDAY, December 10, King drew an overflow crowd in Montgomery for a ninetieth anniversary service at his first church. “Even some of the members are here for the first time,” joked the current pastor, Murray Branch. From the pulpit, King introduced his diagnosis of a nation sick with racism, “obsessive materialism,” and militarism—“headed toward its spiritual doom”—then preached on the meaning of hope. Focusing on the middle word from Paul’s biblical litany of faith, hope, and love, he distinguished hope from desire along a social dimension, and argued that real hope could not be selfish. “You may desire a new beautiful house, but you hope for freedom,” said King. “That has a ‘we’ quality. You may desire sex, but you hope for peace.” He parsed hope from optimism and magical expectation by invoking internal commitment. “Genuine hope involves the recognition that what is hoped for is in some sense already present,” said King. He tried several illustrations and quoted Jesus: “The kingdom of God is in you.” He recalled discussions with “some of my nationalist friends” in which King claimed to pinpoint at hope’s swinging gate the fateful divide between doctrines of violence and nonviolence. Finally, he appealed to history’s foremost specialists in hope. “They were our slave fore-parents,” he said. “Think about it.” He contrasted the brutal slave centuries with the miraculous vitality born in spirituals. “Every now and then, I feel discouraged living every day under the threat of death,” said King, opening his peroration on a balm of hope in Gilead. After the somber address, he followed the congregation from Dexter Avenue Baptist into close view of a Ku Klux Klan rally just outside at the foot of Alabama’s capitol. Grand Dragon James Spears denounced draft dodgers, gun control laws, and “Martin Lucifer King,” plus Dean Rusk for permitting an interracial marriage. A wiry Klansman in hooded regalia paraded grimly with a misspelled placard: “Our Forefathers Got Us the Rights to Bare Arms.”

  King rushed to Chicago for another speech that evening, then made his way back home. At a Wednesday press conference in Atlanta, he introduced SCLC program director Bernard Lafayette with the mandate to coordinate a spring “Poor People’s Campaign for Jobs or Income.” News stories emphasized that Lafayette, twenty-seven, was a SNCC founder and Freedom Rider who had “left the student committee before it embraced the black power doctrine.” King also presented William Rutherford, his new executive director for internal administration, and an FBI wiretap in New York picked up ripples of impact. “He’s done in a week what hasn’t been done in two or three years,” King told Stanley Levison that afternoon. “He’s really working hard.” Staff workers went through mail stacked away randomly in boxes, finding contributions unopened for months and a yellowed letter of introduction from Rutherford himself. Tracers discovered stray rental cars in Virginia and Kentucky. Rutherford dismissed the daughter of an SCLC board member for running up huge entertainment bills during the Belafonte concert tour. He confronted Atlanta’s only black financial broker over his discretionary investment of SCLC funds in gold Krugerrands from apartheid South Africa, and when the broker contrarily observed that no one ever questioned the dividend checks, fired him, too.

  “Hosea offered his resignation again,” King told Levison. Williams hotly defended his stance with an uncharacteristic flurry of memos, including three long ones on December 15 alone. “I would also like to register my indignation and displeasure at your attempt to evaluate my character,” he advised Rutherford. That same week, when Jesse Jackson skipped the first executive staff meeting on the poverty campaign, Rutherford imposed a system of fines for unexcused absence and tardiness. “You promised me your full cooperation,” he complained in a letter of notice, which, while conceding that fines “appear a bit juvenile,” asked how they could organize all America if SCLC could not assemble its own staff. With Andrew Young, Rutherford flew to parley with Jackson in Chicago, leaving behind a positive report on his second confidential assignment from King. Locks now secured James Harrison’s finance office, and a new transaction window allowed SCLC employees to conduct business without wandering among desks stacked with money. Discreet audits balanced the daily cash flow, satisfying Rutherford that no movement funds were being siphoned into the hideaway apartment for Harrison and Hosea Williams. Thus reassured, King lost interest in the mysterious luxury. Neither he nor anyone else at SCLC suspected that Harrison had been a government spy for two years—meeting agents furtively with tips and purloined reports, more than doubling his salary from King with FBI payments to his informant account coded AT-1387-R.

  ON FRIDAY night, December 15, core issues of violence and power attracted unusual press interest to a forum of one hundred intellectuals in New York’s Greenwich Village. “Generally speaking, violence always arises out of impotence,” declared Hannah Arendt, author of The Human Condition and Eichmann in Jerusalem. She disputed the close association of power with violence, as in the common definition of government itself as a monopoly of legitimate physical force. (“All politics is a struggle for power; the ultimate kind of power is violence,” wrote sociologist C. Wright Mills.) She also doubted classical doctrines that put violence at the heart of natural processes, such as Karl Marx’s vital birth pangs of history and Georges Sorel’s essential shock for social innovation. “And now we hear from Sartre that not labor but violence creates man,” Arendt caustically observed. She argued against “mirages of violence,” and invoked a surprise warning from Frantz Fanon, the African voice for anti-colonial warfare, that brutality most often churned into cycles of revenge. Fellow panelists praised Arendt but qualified her sensibility with slivers of justification for the sword. Author Conor Cruise O’Brien wryly quoted an Irish agitator that “violence is the best way of insuring a hearing for moderation.” Linguist Noam Chomsky said he could point easily to circumstances “in which violence does eliminate a greater evil.”

  Writer Susan Sontag objected from the floor that theoretical gymnastics dodged the burning issue of their time: “whether we in this room, and the people we know, are going to be engaged in violence.” Chomsky responded with three cogent reasons why protesters should remain nonviolent: practical futility against superior government force, political recognition that “violence antagonizes the uncommitted,” and understanding that “immense harm is done to the individual who participates in violent action.” Against Chomsky, dissenters cited undercurrents of rebellion gaining strength since Watts. Indeed, the New York Times published front-page survey results that same weekend—“A White Liberal Shift on Integration”—indicating that black power doctrines were becoming fashionable. Intellectuals warmed to rationales that riot and separate development could relieve humiliation. Thomas Pettigrew of Harvard sighed that academic supporters were turning against integration just when opponents began to give ground. The Times quoted Daniel Moynihan mimicking professorial barbs across the color line: “Well, you just won Newark, so we’ll take Princeton.” Norman Mailer expressed consoling gusto that “war may be the last of the tonics.” Bayard Rustin bemoaned a precedent for smoke screen disengagement, asserting that when Reconstruction had exposed the urgent need to include four million ex-slaves in the nation’s homestead offer of forty acres and a mule, “that was difficult to br
ing about, so people turned their interest away from the Negro.”

  Tom Hayden challenged Hannah Arendt at the Greenwich Village forum. “You may put me in the position of a leper,” he said, “but I say a case can be made for violence in the peace movement.” Still youthful at twenty-seven, Hayden had gone to jail in the civil rights movement before helping create SDS in 1962, and, from rare experience as a white poverty worker based in Newark, he also defended the violence of rioters “getting mattresses and clothes and a supply of liquor for the winter.” Pointing to historical examples in Spain and Cuba, he insisted that if dissidents laid a strong political foundation, violence could be legitimate and positive. Besides, he argued, American protesters had exhausted peaceful democratic channels. “It seems to me,” Hayden told Arendt, “that until you can begin to show—not in language and not in theory, but in action—that you can put an end to the war in Vietnam, and an end to American racism, you can’t condemn the violence of others who can’t wait for you.” Like Stokely Carmichael, he won much of the crowd with his upstart passion, and the eminent philosopher struggled to articulate her point that history’s forward push on the strength of nonviolence was sadly overlooked. “And if we look at the revolutions that have taken place,” Arendt added, “I’m not at all sure that the success has been based on the violence.”

  Over the next year, spurred by wars and nearly worldwide political crisis, Arendt would rethink her positions, finding it “insufficient to say that power and violence are not the same.” In her book, On Violence, she framed an original thesis against assumptions ingrained from high theory down to common instincts in everyday life. “Power and violence are opposites,” she asserted. “Where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent…. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creatingit.” Arendt debunked violence. She omitted the ritual draping of force with noble ambition and moral regret, to proclaim instead a dawning historical reality of impotent destruction. She defined violence as the negation of consent, which is the constructive material of modern politics, and branded as “philosophical prejudice” the belief that violence by armies and movie heroes is a necessary evil toward greater good. “Such time-honored opinions have become dangerous,” Arendt wrote, “for the simple reason that they inspire hope and dispel fear—a treacherous hope used to dispel legitimate fear.”

  A WEEK before Christmas, President Johnson composed a unique “Memorandum for the File” on McNamara’s written defection from the administration’s Vietnam strategy. “I have read it, and studied it, with utmost care,” he wrote, then set forth why he believed the stabilization plan “would be read in both Hanoi and the United States as a sign of weakening will.” Johnson treated his memo like a final testament—isolated from staff review, preserved with a note tasking National Security Adviser Walt Rostow to “read the attached very carefully”—and left the next day for an odyssey abroad. From funeral services for the late Australian prime minister Harold Holt, and war talks in Melbourne with Asian leaders, he veered north for a ten-hour flight to Khorat Air Base in Thailand, where he saluted hastily assembled American pilots at midnight: “A mere handful of you men are pinning down several hundred thousand North Vietnamese.” After a similar speech to enlisted air mechanics before dawn, Johnson flew on to review troops in South Vietnam by mid-morning that Saturday, December 23—“We’re not going to yield, and we’re not going to shimmy!”—then headed west by surprise, dragging a planeload of reporters infuriated over the blind itinerary. A one-hour runway summit in Pakistan interrupted airborne logistical snarls radioed back secretly from Rome. To avoid Italian war protesters, massed already on rumors of an impromptu visit, Johnson transferred into a helicopter Saturday night for an unrehearsed garden landing inside the walls of Vatican City. He hurried with a lone aide to meet Paul VI in the papal library.

  For seventy-five minutes, Johnson described a war policy aimed toward peace so that the United States could return to human priorities in education, health, and justice. “My right hand keeps the pressure steady,” he told the Pope, “and with my left hand we seek negotiations.” On the premise that “Hanoi is simply not going to the conference table,” the President mounted a sensitive request for the Vatican to convince South Vietnam’s minority Catholic rulers, including the new President Nguyen Van Thieu and most of Thieu’s fellow military officers, that they must initiate their own secret accommodations with the Vietcong. While Johnson pressed the perilous scheme to split the Vietnamese Communists politically, North from South, Paul VI noticed one sentence in the joint statement predrafted for reporters: “We will never surrender South Vietnam to aggression or attack.” He objected gently. “I very clearly understand your good intentions and good hopes,” said the Pope, “but you must understand I can never agree to war.” On the contrary, he suggested a halt in American bombs—“to make it a more defensive war instead of an offensive war. It will strengthen your moral position in the world.” Johnson refused the Pope’s plea to extend the upcoming holiday truce, citing the unified contention of his military leaders that Ho Chi Minh would exploit any chance to move reinforcements safely in “trucks lined up bumper-to-bumper.” During a thirty-seven-day bombing pause, the President charged, the Vietnamese Communists had amassed a seven-month supply of equipment to kill American soldiers.

  Paul VI indirectly questioned the vise grip of war logic. “Where do they get their men, their means, their matériel?” he asked.

  Johnson dodged the hint of popular cooperation against him. “By terror they are recruiting in the South,” he replied, “and they are now down to fourteen-year-old boys.” The President, insisting that his enemy was militarily desperate, nevertheless pushed his politically desperate idea for the Pope to induce settlement talks by South Vietnamese Catholic allies, “in their own way.” The Pontiff said that he would do anything possible. They both knew that the South Vietnamese leaders, viewing contact with Communists as suicidal treason, preferred to rely on American arms. Johnson secured permission to release their joint statement “with the one sentence removed,” and rushed back to Air Force One. It was still Saturday of the longest presidential day on record, which one bleary-eyed White House assistant later called “a Phineas Fogg adventure.” The homeward flight again chased the spin of the earth to reach Washington early December 24, bearing a Christmas Eve message centered on President Johnson’s inexhaustible desire to resolve the Vietnam conflict. He soon exploded with rage, however, over news reports from Vatican sources that the Pope questioned his commitment to peace.

  NEW YEAR celebrations displayed a culture of youthful exuberance shadowed by anxiety. The national census meter clicked proudly past two hundred million citizens heading into 1968, which would be the first year in history without a legal execution anywhere in the United States, state or federal. The price of a first-class postage stamp rose on January 7 from 5 to 6 cents. Measured from its first official casualty, the American military effort in Vietnam became six years old, and within months would pass the Revolution of 1775–81 to become the nation’s longest war, but the murky status of earlier deaths in Asia left the starting point shrouded in dispute. Appropriately, Vietnam struck many Americans as a terrible undertow from the distant haze. Year-end reviews put the cumulative toll at 15,900 U.S. soldiers killed and 99,000 wounded. While few anticipated that 1968 alone would approach those totals, or would become the watershed of political assassination and upheaval at home, apprehensions pointed to a bloody year. General Westmoreland sent six thousand Marines to hold the isolated mountain fortress of Khe Sanh from forty thousand North Vietnamese, touching off jittery analogies with the decisive French surrender at nearby Dien Bien Phu.

  Domestic advisers inside the White House debated whether the President’s January message on civil rights should state forthrightly that “full non-discrimination may take as long as a generation to achieve.” Opponents feared such a slow timetable “gives ammunition to the Black Power types,” who considered the Great Society a fra
ud. Proponents favored realism over Pollyanna dreams, hoping to cultivate patience for long-haul progress despite setbacks and scars. In Mississippi, Robert G. Clark of Holmes County persevered that month to become the twentieth century’s first black member of the legislature. He skipped the inaugural banquets for lack of an invitation, borrowed a car to trail the official parade, stood alone beneath those seated for the platform ceremonies, and followed his elected peers inside to take the oath from an isolated desk—all without being addressed—then survived decades of adjustment to become speaker pro tempore in 1992.

  In New York, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission opened 1968 with hearings on a void of minority faces in television, newspaper, subway, and billboard advertisements. Media executives, pleading helplessness to affect images projected by their sponsors, stressed their internal commitments to diversify. “Immediately following World War II we determined to search actively for non-white employees,” testified CBS vice president William Fitts, but he conceded meager results above the mailroom, and CBS hired its first black on-camera correspondent, Hal Walker, nine days after the hearing. John Mortimer, personnel director for the New York Times, suffered withering questions about the contrast between his paper’s workforce and its crusading editorials. “I don’t believe so,” he replied, when asked if the Times ever had employed a Puerto Rican reporter. Clifford Alexander, the newly appointed EEOC chairman, confirmed reports that investment firms had just broken a color bar against sending black clerks or messengers onto the traders’ floor. “My understanding,” said a vice president of Bache & Company, “was that we were the first company to do so.” Witnesses established that sixty of ninety-one New York City employment agencies still accepted test job orders for a “white Gentile secretary,” and some prominent advertisers confined their goals well short of hiring any minority professionals. “We have no segregated facilities,” testified Frederick Moseley of the Morgan Guaranty Trust. Before 1970, when the New York Stock Exchange accredited its first black member,* leaders in Congress would secure Alexander’s early resignation from the EEOC for badgering employers beyond their pace of comfort.