At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  Another fiscal trend percolated from the states. In congressional hearings, House Banking Committee chairman Wright Patman berated Governor Nelson Rockefeller for “claims that New York must have a lottery so that its children may go to school.” The New York legislature, by repealing an 1833 statute against “radically vicious” games of chance, had just legalized the twentieth century’s second state-sponsored lottery for public revenue. While far less swaddled by inhibition than the pioneer 1964 sweepstakes in New Hampshire—which allowed only two drawings per year, and required customers to fill out forms in triplicate—New York did steer ticket sales for its monthly lottery to the teller windows of duly licensed banks. This arrangement lent an air of respectability to transactions ordinarily associated with bookies, but it ran into Representative Patman’s jurisdiction over federally chartered and insured financial institutions. “It seems incomprehensible,” he declared, “that New York State—a fabulously rich area—could not finance education without resorting to gambling.”

  For Wright Patman, the collision with Rockefeller echoed a formative struggle when he entered Congress in 1929 from the poorest region of East Texas. Into the maw of the Depression, he had become chief sponsor of the bonus bill to relieve destitute fellow veterans of World War I, who issued him membership card number one for their “Bonus Expeditionary Force.” Patman’s cause won by losing. He failed in a daring bid to impeach Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, but publicity about the wealthy banker’s lavish art purchases amplified charges of contrasting disregard for the veterans. In 1932, President Herbert Hoover sent regular Army troops under General Douglas MacArthur to rout the unresisting veterans by force, burning their shantytown encampments, but revulsion against the violence built public sympathy for the marchers, who kept returning until the bonus bill passed over FDR’s veto in 1936. Now, decades later, Patman lost by winning. In February of 1968, when his anti-gambling bill outlawed lottery sales from banks, New York lawmakers blamed “hillbilly morals” for obliging them to throw open vendor licenses to convenience stores. Soon a Princeton-based consulting firm would recommend simple games modeled on the illicit numbers racket, plus an Italian fantasy contest called lotto. To spread beyond the Northeast, lotteries won exemption from federal laws that ban gambling notices on commercial airwaves, and the interval between drawings shrank from weeks to minutes. Early promises to restrain a dominant new voice of state governments dissolved slowly with promotional bonanzas like “The De Ville Made Me Do It” in New Hampshire. “The way to sell lottery tickets,” said New York’s director of advertising, “is by appealing to people’s greed.”

  In Vietnam, the first artillery of a full-scale siege struck Khe Sanh before dawn on Sunday, January 21. For the next eleven weeks, commanders made good on the military judgment that air support would keep the Marine outpost from succumbing like the French army at Dien Bien Phu. American bombers concentrated 1,300 tons of explosives daily on North Vietnamese units trying to charge or claw their way up the hilltop redoubts. The concussion of incoming shells left more nerve damage and grime than bloodshed, as the garrison, having stockpiled two tons of body bags, used only three on an average day to evacuate corpses along with a dozen wounded and constant military bulletins. A special medics’ bunker on the exposed Khe Sanh runway facilitated treatment for those injured during vulnerable takeoffs and landings. President Johnson tracked the siege on a topographical replica of Khe Sanh in the White House basement. First he grilled the National Security Council and secured assurances from the Joint Chiefs—in writing—that they lacked no provision for military success. Then he ordered confident public statements to reinforce a recent tide of “unusually good press from South Vietnam.” The Associated Press quoted General Westmoreland’s assessment that countrywide enemy forces “seem to have run temporarily out of steam.” The New York Times reported that a two-year drive by local allies had achieved a “dramatic decline” in Vietcong sabotage. On January 25, news dispatches carried an announcement from White House pacification chief Robert Komer that two-thirds of South Vietnam’s eighteen million people now lived in areas made secure from attack.

  THE ADMINISTRATIVE mission to rescue SCLC pitched Bill Rutherford into turmoil deeper than chaos and rebellion. Late in January, he fined three workers for chronic absence and fired a staff preacher, “effective immediately,” for billing prostitutes to the Chicago voter registration project. He managed younger people with personalities marked by varying mixes of combat fatigue, kamikaze idealism, dissipation, and premature nostalgia. A few already were lifelong casualties, but none would regret enlistment in the nonviolent wars for which Rutherford deeply admired them. His control of the budget and the schedule thrust him also into tensions within the King family. Coretta called frequently to track King’s prolonged absences, and the occasional flubbed alibi led to awkward silence. A search for King once sent Rutherford knocking at Coretta’s door when King had told each he was with the other. Like advisers before him, Rutherford learned quickly not to pass along even the most indirect suggestion that she join a road engagement, because King instinctively detected and rebuffed her desire to go along. King bristled against tampering with his marital arrangements. He stoutly upheld a mother’s duty to stay home with their four young children, and barred joint travel in order to guarantee a surviving parent. Coretta complained that his family concerns did not extend to an education fund for the children or a personal will in the face of the constant death threats. King made it a principle that theirs should be an unprivileged household, forswearing maids or a second car, but she felt the dogged austerity as a penalty from his consuming guilt. In his absence, she transferred her grievances in part to SCLC with daily hardship appeals, and Rutherford, squeezed between the couple and his own work standards, quietly diverted staff members willing to serve as temporary chauffeurs and home attendants. He hoped to make small amends for Coretta’s cruel isolation, but her lasting agitation over slights and displays earned her the office nickname, “Queen.”

  As a newcomer, Rutherford stood at the periphery of SCLC’s most private drama. He saw the swirling, teasing flirtations of its inner circle, and he discouraged prurient speculation about the link between Coretta’s regal suffering and King’s pursuits elsewhere. Rutherford could only guess about what he called “a double life,” marveling at burdens King must carry beyond the superhuman pressures and expectations of the movement. He was not privy to the raw candor among the preachers. James Bevel, for instance, had stunned them with a radical new stance that they must “confess all our stuff to our wives.” King first said he would rather die, that they did not even know a chaste colleague in the pulpit except perhaps James Lawson, who was a United Methodist, and that disclosure would do nothing except rupture families. Bevel persisted with typically elaborate theories drawn from two disparate books: The Kingdom of God Is Within You, by Leo Tolstoy, and The Function of the Orgasm, by the unorthodox psycho-biologist Wilhelm Reich. By opening his mind, Bevel said, they allowed him to realize that he had been closest to Diane Nash during the Freedom Rides, before their romance or marriage, and had experienced the purest creation when accessing the hearts of Birmingham’s teenagers for witness in jail. Bevel thought King could apply nonviolence to every stubborn harm between people, “just like you did for segregation,” but must build from truth instead of lies. When King asked why the confessional approach had not reconciled Nash to him after three years of tumultuous separation, Bevel somehow blamed Nash for abandoning his new “scientific partnership” to eradicate the causes of lust.

  Ordinarily, Ralph Abernathy would have counseled earthy skepticism toward such advice, especially since Bevel ingeniously spun his purity experiments themselves into enticements for guilt-free seduction, but Abernathy was gone for most of January on a pilgrimage to India and South Vietnam.* King’s formidable armor wore down in midlife, draining assurance from his glib mantra as a young scholar that many great men of religion had been obsessed with sex—St. Augustine
, St. Paul, Martin Luther, Kierkegaard, Tillich—and his self-reproach spilled over when Coretta underwent surgery for an abdominal tumor on January 24. He disclosed to her the one mistress who meant most to him since 1963—with intensity almost like a second family even though she lived in Los Angeles—a married alumna of Fisk, of dignified bearing like Coretta, but different. The result was painful disaster. Juanita Abernathy exploded with the fury of a trusted second that King picked Coretta’s most vulnerable moment, just as she recovered from her hysterectomy, to ambush her sanctuary of willful, silent discretion. If he was truly desperate to be honest, she said, King should purge himself privately to God or a psychiatrist. Abernathy, back from Asia, grew so alarmed that he canvassed the regular mistresses for hidden fits of jealousy or romantic blackmail strong enough to break down the careful habit of secret, nonpossessive affairs, but he found no conventional clues to explain the rash new fatalism in King.

  The attack of penitent melancholy coincided with a ferocious push for public sacrifice through the movement, as before with King in Birmingham and Selma. On January 29, he exhorted his New York advisers to design lobbying strategies for the campaign against poverty, but he faced a new spearhead of resistance. Bayard Rustin submitted a memo warning that Washington demonstrations “can only lead to further backlash and repression,” and he added sharply in person that King should forget any “mystical bullshit” about success. It was fatuous to hope for a shantytown occupation to help poor people more than the established power of trade unions, said Rustin. He predicted countermovements far stronger than black power or white backlash, saying King could not hold discipline in the unruly national mood. His critique was biting and witty. Afterward, Stanley Levison told Rutherford on his wiretapped line that Rustin “showed his true colors by opposing civil disobedience,” and Rustin would be sensitive for the rest of his life to implications that new union employers had compromised his lifelong distinction in pacifist witness. In 1995, when information from the secret wiretaps seeped into public view, he wrote the New York Times to rebut an impression “that in 1968 I rejected the philosophy of nonviolence as espoused by Dr. King.” Harry Wachtel, who had shared the doubts about a favorable outcome in Washington, insisted privately to Rustin that what wounded King was Rustin’s scorn for the effort itself. “He felt let down, because he held you up so high,” Wachtel recalled in an old man’s accounting. At the time, King had nodded, winced, and smiled through the steady barrage of negative advice in Wachtel’s law office, then appealed for help anyway. With disarming aplomb, he asked a recognized expert to craft a statement on the primary goal to dramatize the hidden faces of American poverty. “We didn’t know we were poor until we read your book,” King teased the author Michael Harrington, who could not resist the assignment even though he had just seconded most of Rustin’s dissent.

  IT RAINED early in Memphis on Tuesday, January 30. The river city was not on King’s recruiting list, and his campaign would visit there only by detour, but many faces of poverty assembled at its sewer and drains division to hear the arbitrary “cutting down” announcements. A foreman sent home twenty-one low-level black workers without pay an hour before sunshine suddenly reappeared, leaving white crews with good weather but few men to supervise. T. O. Jones, a former employee fired for trying to organize a labor union, reported the fluke hardship to the incoming director of public works, who agreed to meet Jones on Thursday about the plaintive hope of powerless sewer workers for a rainy day grievance procedure.

  Also on Tuesday morning, Robert Kennedy told reporters he had decided not to contest President Johnson for the Democratic nomination “under any conceivable circumstances.” Several disappointed aides resigned to work elsewhere against the Vietnam War. Allard Lowenstein reportedly accosted Kennedy within hours to exchange emotional tirades of regret. A last-second substitution in the official news release changed the word “conceivable” to “foreseeable,” which added grist for lampoons as well as anguish about Kennedy’s tilting indecision. “Besides the columnists and cartoonists, you have really been getting it the last several days from the mass TV shows like the Smothers Brothers, the new Martin and Rowan Laugh-In and others,” confided counselor Fred Dutton. To speed political recovery, Dutton prescribed an attractive family vacation at the Winter Olympics with a side visit to the Pope, which he thought would “demonstrate that you are relaxed and enjoying things (in contrast to most of the rest of the country).”

  The Kennedy announcement relieved political worries for President Johnson, who swamped the declared rival Eugene McCarthy in voter polls. Johnson met Tuesday with top national security officials. The siege at Khe Sanh, while suspended for the three-day Buddhist celebrations called Tet, had acquired the worldwide media drama of a tense duel. Military leaders considered the natural mountain fortress secure against anything except full-scale invasion from North Vietnam, a remote contingency that might require tactical nuclear weapons or chemical agents as “active candidates for employment.” Johnson reviewed battle statistics from Khe Sanh and updates from the galling January 23 capture by North Korea of the spy ship Pueblo with all her crew, which would remain a hostage crisis for the year. At 2:35 in the afternoon, Walt Rostow returned from an emergency call to announce that “we are being heavily mortared in Saigon.” He said the enemy had broken the holiday truce with daredevil attacks on the presidential palace and the U.S. embassy compound, plus scattered targets elsewhere.

  “This could be very bad,” Johnson groaned. He said it reminded him of the February 1965 barracks assault in Pleiku, which had prompted the first air strikes on North Vietnam. “What comes to mind in the way of retaliation?” he asked. Chairman Wheeler of the Joint Chiefs said the Vietcong infrastructure made guerrilla attacks difficult to repulse, and the only suggestions came from McNamara, whose successor was being confirmed that day in the Senate. They must counter the psychological effect by publicizing military success at Khe Sanh, he urged, and retain General Nguyen Ngoc Loan as national police chief despite the State Department’s efforts to remove him for brutal corruption. Rusk grumbled that Loan was “rather uncooperative.” McNamara called him indispensable in crisis, and CIA director Richard Helms concurred.

  Investigators later concluded that a part-time Vietnamese chauffeur nicknamed Satchmo had guided nineteen Vietcong sappers into the U.S. diplomatic compound in Saigon through an eight-foot hole blown in the wall. News film from the Tet offensive’s most symbolic pitched battle reached New York too late for some network broadcasts Tuesday night—CBS showed instead a rocket attack that shut down the Da Nang airbase—but Wednesday’s New York Times carried three stories of vivid description: “In one of the strangest scenes of the Vietnam War, helmeted American troops ran crouching across broad Thong Nhat Boulevard to assault the gate of their own embassy at dawn today.” A front-page photograph in the Washington Post showed a Vietcong corpse on the embassy lawn. Satchmo’s body lay next to a Soviet machine gun. His entire assault team was killed along with seven embassy guards.

  Seventy thousand guerrillas launched similar attacks of coordinated surprise in thirty-six of South Vietnam’s forty-four provincial capitals. In Saigon alone, assault teams used prearranged codes to pick up weapons that had been hidden in more than four hundred homes by the Vietcong political director, who lived next door to Deputy U.S. Ambassador William Porter. Top analysts in Washington instantly acknowledged the absence of warning as a calamitous intelligence failure, while their counterparts in Hanoi suffered dashed hopes to touch off a general uprising. “Saigon’s 4 million people had barricaded themselves inside their houses,” wrote war historian A. J. Langguth, “and refused to obey when the Vietcong banged on their doors and told them to come out.” Few Vietnamese civilians believed it was yet safe to flout either side.

  The plans left massive carnage. Battles from the offensive would stretch well past Tet—killing nearly four thousand American and six thousand South Vietnamese soldiers, plus an estimated 58,000 Communist soldiers an
d 14,000 civilians. General Westmoreland insisted that Ho Chi Minh counted on weak knees in the United States to offset a crushing military defeat, and war critics asked how the Communists so quickly replaced enormous losses. The American public first rallied angrily for retaliation, but one small event pushed above the contending claims of momentum, credibility, and might. A South Vietnamese patrol was marching through Saigon’s Cholon district when the national police chief stopped his passing motorcade and spontaneously took custody of its lone Vietcong prisoner. Without a word, General Loan marched him into a quiet square outside the An Quang temple, paused long enough for news cameras to focus on a slight man in a checkered shirt, squinting with his hands bound behind, then pulled out a pistol and shot him point-blank in the head. After photographs and film of the random street execution circled the world on Thursday, the third day of the Tet offensive, poll measurements recorded the most decisive single drop in American support for the Vietnam War. As King’s movement believed, lasting power rose against the tide of violence.

  CHAPTER 38

  Memphis