The Kerner Commission enjoyed a record burst of popular interest—with 740,000 paperback copies sold in the first eleven days of March—then vanished without official notice. Potentates in Congress dismissed the idea of helping cities when they could not even pass a small surtax to pay for Vietnam, and one television network soon broadcast a prime-time news special, What Happened to the Riot Report? From the opening fanfare, what galled President Johnson most was the Kerner report’s signature sentence: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” History had reversed course! The report baldly stated that American race relations were growing more segregated and stratified, which to Johnson was catchy but insidious slander. If the civil rights era was counterproductive, then historic commitments since Brown v. Board of Education were empty and liberal democracy itself futile. Together with Tet, the report left in near ruins both his war and his peace paths to advance freedom. Johnson’s fury was so strong that he could not bring himself to sign routine thank-you letters for the eleven Kerner Commission members, including stalwart friends Roy Wilkins and I. W. Abel, president of the United Steelworkers. “I’d be a hypocrite,” said Johnson. He ordered his staff to hide or destroy the unsigned drafts.
JAMES LAWSON made King laugh with calculations that Roy Wilkins’s ego would not allow him to follow King into Memphis, because the inevitable fall-off in audience would reflect poorly on him, but Lawson thought he could persuade Wilkins to be the first national speaker. Memphis was an NAACP town, and the local NAACP leaders had endorsed the fundamental cause of the garbage strikers before the Mace attacks of February 23. For ten days since, more than a hundred local black preachers organized to join strikers in protest marches to City Hall every morning and afternoon, with nightly mass meetings in churches across the city. It was the broadest coalition ever in Memphis, Lawson reported by telephone, with the energy of movements they had experienced together from Nashville and Albany to Selma, but all he wanted now was permission to say he had invited King. This would help lure Wilkins.
King seized the reprieve, pleading exhaustion from his own labors. Only a handful of reporters turned out in Atlanta on Monday, March 4, to hear him postpone the starting date for SCLC’s “nonviolent poor people’s march on Washington.” Leaders would begin “a lobby-in against Congress” on April 22, King disclosed, when a simultaneous “mule train” of three thousand pilgrims would set out from Mississippi to reinforce them. Details remained vague, as there might be more than one mule train, and King promised only that the legislative agenda would resemble the new Kerner Commission proposals. “It may be,” he said, “that in one or two instances we are stronger than they are.” King seemed unfazed by reports that federal authorities were mobilizing a backup force of ten thousand MPs to contain him, but he escaped to Mexico on Tuesday for a rest. In Memphis, that afternoon’s march to City Hall ended with the first planned sit-in against the suspended negotiations. Fearing Mace, first-time demonstrators weakly chanted, “We want arrest,” and managed to sing “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.” Officers hauled off NAACP leader Maxine Smith, possessor of degrees from Spelman and Middlebury colleges, along with several preachers and more than a hundred sanitation workers. On the way to jail, Lawson told reporters he had invited King to Memphis.
King’s gloomy distraction pushed friends to the brink of alarm. He preached at Ebenezer on “Unfulfilled Dreams,” clinging to the Bible’s message of consolation when King David of Israel realized he would never live to see a temple built in Jerusalem: “You did well that it was in your heart.” King identified with crushed hopes. Bullets had ended Gandhi’s hope to witness independent India, he said, and “Paul never got to Spain.” People constantly fell short both on great dreams for the world and intimate promises to redeem their character. “You don’t need to go out this morning saying that Martin Luther King is a saint,” he cried. “Oh, no. I want you to know this morning that I am a sinner like all of God’s children.” He longed from the pulpit to hear the comfort of David: “It is well that it is within thine heart. It’s well that you are trying. You may not see it. The dream may not be fulfilled, but…thank God this morning that we do have hearts to put something meaningful in.”
The flight to Acapulco was so sudden that no hotel could be reserved, and King complained oddly and persistently that he did not get into the Las Brisas resort where Luci Johnson had spent her honeymoon. Ralph Abernathy soon wangled rooms there by invoking King’s Nobel celebrity, whereupon King refused to leave El Presidente because the staff workers had made such a fuss over him. Abernathy kept rooms in both hotels, but King slept little in either. He stared alone from a high balcony until nearly dawn and evaded Abernathy’s questions about what was wrong—pointing enigmatically to a rock in Acapulco harbor, then singing “Rock of Ages.” His conduct alarmed Abernathy enough to make discreet inquiries about whether the FBI may have threatened King directly again, but he found no such reports.
In Washington, Director Hoover clamped down when a single hint of FBI surveillance surfaced publicly. Late in February, five days after Hoover circulated another secret report within the government, Richard Harwood disclosed in the Washington Post that FBI officials had offered to reporters tape-recorded evidence of “moral turpitude” on King’s part. No other news outlet would touch the cryptic revelation, which Harwood buried among equally sensitive suggestions that Hoover had become a pampered tyrant with homosexual leanings. Over the next decade, a few journalists would regret their failure to expose firsthand evidence of Hoover’s penchant for spy vendettas above public service. (“I didn’t do my job,” recalled David Kraslow of the Los Angeles Times. “I should have blown the thing sky high, but I didn’t.”) At the other extreme, the editors of Parade magazine asked permission to print the following answer to a fake question about the extent of the FBI’s sex dossier: “Not a complete file, but it has a great deal of titillating information about his sexual activities.” When Bureau officials sternly refused, “because it clearly intimates that the FBI is furnishing information to the public concerning Martin Luther King,” the editors canceled the item. Publications avoided the controversy to preserve the prime FBI news source.
Internally, Hoover emphasized his supreme rule that operations must carry “no possibility of embarrassment to the Bureau.” While demanding an invisible hand, he expanded covert, extralegal assignments on March 4 by adding eighteen new FBI field offices to the twenty-three largest ones already tasked for the COINTELPRO campaign against black groups. Two days later, Hoover approved parallel instructions against the SCLC poverty campaign in Washington, declaring it “a grave threat to peace and order in this city.” The goals were to discredit black groups and “prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement.” Hoover targeted King, Stokely Carmichael, and Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad as potential messiahs, twisting the religious word into something alien and violent. “King would be a very real contender for his position,” he wrote, “should he abandon his supposed ‘obedience’ to ‘white liberal doctrines’ (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism.” There were grumbles in the field about the draconian schedule for submission of counterintelligence ideas “to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercise their potential for violence.” What did Hoover’s nobly dramatic words really mean? Most offices lacked a dark face to help infiltrate civil rights groups, as the integrated FBI still employed only forty black rookies among six thousand agents. Some veterans considered political chores inherently childish, or thought militants needed no help to discredit themselves.
The approved COINTELPRO actions ran heavily to propaganda and petty sabotage. Detroit was the first office to volunteer nonexistent transportation and lodging for SCLC’s anti-poverty volunteers. Miami recruited and paid the producer for a local NBC television special on young black leaders made to appear especially fearful, angry, and incoherent on screen. (Hoo
ver himself praised the skillful use of hard chairs, lights, and slow camera techniques showing “each movement as they squirmed about in their chairs, resembling rats trapped under scientific observation.”) Savannah said Hosea Williams lost two hundred poverty recruits because of planted news stories that he would strand them sick and penniless in Washington. Several offices sowed bitter discord with forged tips that black leaders were spies for the CIA or the Bureau itself—a tactic borrowed from the wars against the Communist Party. New York falsely warned May Charles Carmichael that the Black Panthers were on the way to shoot her son, which would cause him to leave for Africa the next day. (“Mrs. Carmichael appeared shocked upon hearing the news,” reported the FBI supervisor, “and stated she would tell Stokely when he came home.”) The Jackson, Mississippi, office pioneered leaflets to peddle rumors that King wanted the poverty campaign for money and aggrandizement. Headquarters updated a secret, twenty-page monograph on King, which appended to the usual sinister interpretation of his career a partial list of recent SCLC contributors: New York governor Nelson Rockefeller ($25,000), Harry Belafonte ($10,000), Anne Farnsworth ($150,000), the Ford Foundation ($230,000), Merrill Lynch ($15,000), and the U.S. Department of Labor ($61,000 for job training). The last figure caused President Johnson to scribble a note: “Show this to [Labor Secretary] Bill Wirtz.”
A grim omen transformed official Washington. On Saturday night of the Gridiron Club’s satirical revue, shock passed visibly through the ballroom behind whispers and advance copies of a headline in the March 10 New York Times: “Westmoreland Requests 206,000 More Men, Stirring Debate in Administration.” Reporters ambushed White House press secretary George Christian at his table, and speechless senators excused themselves. The next day, President Johnson issued a furious but technical denial, which served to confirm the hotly debated secret while eroding his credibility. On Monday, television entertainer Jack Paar endorsed Eugene McCarthy in a network interview that broke his career pattern of lampooning all politicians and the vote itself; Paar told viewers he had been converted by his college daughter in “this children’s crusade” for McCarthy. On Tuesday, McCarthy confounded political observers by winning 42 percent of the vote against an incumbent President in New Hampshire’s first primary test, despite a late blitz of LBJ ads calling McCarthy the champion of draft dodgers and surrender. On Wednesday, ABC News anchor Howard K. Smith broadcast a passionate editorial for war mobilization “on an overwhelming scale,” far beyond the pending troop request. On Thursday, Pentagon officials said the week’s 509 combat deaths pushed the running total to 139,801 American casualties (19,670 killed and 120,131 wounded), which surpassed Korea to make Vietnam the fourth bloodiest war in American history. That afternoon, with President Johnson listening on a telephone extension, intermediaries deadlocked over Robert Kennedy’s tormented new offer to stay out of the presidential race in exchange for public steps to change Vietnam policy. By Saturday, March 16, when Kennedy formally challenged both Johnson and McCarthy for the Democratic nomination, political warriors from the White House scrambled to lock down “blood oath” commitments.
The President took soundings among bellwether politicians such as Senator Russell and Mayor Daley of Chicago, who knew how to shift ground skillfully. Russell already was touting more bombs instead of soldiers, though doubting victory through airpower. “I can’t afford to lose Russell,” Johnson confided. “Now if I lose him, we’ve got nothing.” Johnson feared that approving the latest troop escalation would isolate him as the candidate of all-out war. “We can’t take it and hold,” he warned Defense Secretary Clifford, “because people like Daley and them are not going to hold.”
“They won’t hold,” Clifford repeated. Following the President’s lead, he suggested a slogan that would stall disengagement politics for seven more years: “We are not out to win the war—we are out to win the peace.”
“That is right,” Johnson replied. Through Clifford, he embraced an offer from McGeorge Bundy to reconvene the bipartisan advisers called the Wise Men, who had approved the course of the war as recently as November of 1967. Now the President hoped to regain political and military initiative short of Westmoreland’s escalation. “We’re not going to get these doves,” he told Clifford, “but we can neutralize the country to where it won’t follow them, if we can come up with something.”
THE GLARE of Vietnam overshadowed contemporary landmarks. Even as their rivalry boiled into open warfare for the presidency, Johnson and Robert Kennedy collaborated to gain a Senate vote at last on the civil rights bill from 1966. The lynch-murders of Freedom Summer had inspired its federal protections for the exercise of basic political rights, while Alabama’s travesty trials for the killers of Viola Liuzzo and Jonathan Daniels generated the provisions for integrated juries. Despite two intervening years of backlash and division, the civil rights coalition pushed tenaciously on fundamental points to invoke cloture for the eighth time in history. Republican leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois once again claimed credit for “pulling it out of the fire,” with timely compromise on the historic open housing provisions. Only three Republican senators joined the old segregationist core of seventeen Southern Democrats to oppose final passage, 71–20, nearly duplicating the tally on the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Celebrations were subdued because prospects remained uncertain in the House.
Empirical results from the freedom movement advanced quietly by inertia. On March 11, in Washington v. Lee, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the wholesale segregation of state prisons and local jails by race. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission resolved after two years to challenge industry rules requiring flight attendants to be single young women, but it would take another five months to ban the separate “Girl Friday” want-ad sections. In Memphis, where the sanitation strike entered its second month, more than a thousand black students now integrated Memphis State University, but school officials, still worried that Tiger fans would not accept any change in their Saturday spectacle, pressured the athletic department to defend the all-white football team on competitive grounds. “We would like to recruit Negro players in Memphis, if they can play,” the head coach announced before spring practice. Such contortion seemed antiquated already, which united all sides in belittlement of strained or outdated racial news. White students made front pages with a hippie “be-in” at New York’s Grand Central Station in March, but it was a tiny squib that the South African government introduced three measures to “complete” the apartheid system, including abolition of the four seats in the National Assembly for which mixed-race Coloreds had been allowed to elect white representatives. Only a small movement journal recorded the brazen clash at Tuskegee Institute when student followers of Stokely Carmichael pelted four State Department visitors with eggs, calling themselves a simulated “Vietcong air force” to show the panel of experts what it felt like to be bombed in their own country. The same journal headlined the plea from a rural rally outside Tuskegee, where no utility service reached farmhouses or the Negro school: “‘A Phone Before I Die.’”
On March 15, a dozen white men returned a guilty verdict for the 1966 firebomb attack on Vernon Dahmer. “It was the first time a state jury in the South has convicted anyone for murder in a civil rights case,” reported the Los Angeles Times. Judge Stanton Hall, who whittled on the bench with a confiscated razor, sentenced Klansman Cecil Sessum to life. District Attorney James Finch, always proclaiming that he never voted for LBJ but considered the Negro victim one of the hardest-working farmers in Hattiesburg, prosecuted and convicted three more Klansmen with an emotional summary: “You twelve men represent Forrest County to the world when it comes to justice.” Star witness Billy Roy Pitts testified each time that he had dropped his gun in the Klan posse’s wild flight after their bullets pinned Dahmer in the firebombed home to suffer mortal burns, and had confessed since “because I done what I done and the Lord wouldn’t let me go on livin’ that kind of life.” The four trials exhausted the pioneer courage in the local cou
rts, leaving eleven indictments unresolved, and the story lapsed nearly thirty years before reporter Jerry Mitchell noticed that Mississippi had neglected to have Billy Roy Pitts serve even a day of his life sentence. This invisible dereliction—a wonder in the annals of jurisprudence—made news until Pitts surrendered from Louisiana. His testimony then buttressed one of the atonement prosecutions revived by a new generation of elected Southerners, aimed at surviving figures long admired, forgotten, or excused. On August 21, 1998, Mississippi peers convicted Sam Bowers of ordering the Dahmer murder, among others, and sent the former Imperial Wizard to prison at seventy-three.
BLIND VIOLENCE alone could seal a more dogmatic estrangement than race. Earlier in March, toward the end of the Tet offensive, one wounded medic from the 101st Airborne Division whispered a prayer from the evacuation helicopter: “God help you guys for what you did.” His elite Tiger Force platoon had been detached into central Vietnam with orders to drive the inhabitants of selected villages into refugee camps, thereby depriving enemy soldiers of food and shelter. Isolated, victimized by snipers and booby traps on patrol, platoon leaders surrendered the unit to sporadic but indiscriminate revenge. Twenty-seven of its forty-five soldiers later told Army investigators that it was routine to wear shoelace necklaces of human ears. Private Sam Ybarra, who had joined the Army on the day of his release from an Arizona jail, pushed ahead in pathological displays. He scalped “gooks,” shot a boy for his shoes, and decapitated a Vietnamese infant to remove the “Buddha band” from its neck. At least one fellow soldier pondered killing Ybarra, but pulled back to “creepy” fatalism. “The way to live is to kill,” said Sergeant William Doyle, “because you don’t have to worry about anybody who’s dead.” Ybarra stood three courts-martial in Vietnam for drug abuse, and would drink himself to death from nightmares on his mother’s couch. So many soldiers filed complaints, and even confessions, that the Pentagon’s longest war crimes investigation waited years at the threshold of White House authority to prosecute, until the cases were dropped with quiet relief at the war’s end. Official aversion to the anticipated publicity proved stronger than distaste for the alleged crimes, and the Tiger Force history would not surface until a 2003 newspaper series in the Toledo, Ohio, Blade, full of haunted, cathartic recollections from aging veterans.
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