Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  Robert Kennedy personally scouted the territory ahead. In contrast to the more detached, cerebral President, he sought to engage primary experience at close quarters, like an explorer. In this crisis, he wanted to gauge the motivations of the Negro demonstrators still popping up in city after city throughout May—what drove them, did they understand politics, how fine was the line between political inspiration and insurrection? When a confidant suggested that the essayist James Baldwin might speak for the seething streets, Robert Kennedy characteristically introduced himself by telephone and on May 24 gathered a chorus of Baldwin’s choosing at the Kennedy family apartment in New York. It was a hurried encounter to fit a compressed moment. Harry Belafonte, eyeing guests who ranged from singer Lena Horne to Baldwin’s literary agent, wondered why Kennedy did not meet with the civil rights leaders themselves, and could only guess that this was intended to be a freer exchange.

  The room grew clammy with tension. Several guests jumped in on the side of racial despair against Kennedy, who answered with barbed questions about where the administration could find levelheaded support for the ordeal of governing. Through groans and clenched teeth, each side wound up laughing at things the other held dear. When a guest suggested that President Kennedy personally escort the next James Meredith into an all-white school, the Attorney General dismissed the idea as ridiculous—ineffective, losing politics, demeaning to the presidency. When Kennedy extolled the labors of FBI agents and Justice Department lawyers such as John Doar, several guests guffawed about them as complicit bystanders.

  Kennedy fumed even before a description of the fracas found its way into the New York Times, which, by suggesting that the Attorney General had lowered himself to an unseemly shouting match with assorted Negro celebrities, gave a small boost to Baldwin’s burgeoning fame at his expense. Kennedy especially resented King’s lawyer Clarence Jones for telling him at the end of the meeting, as a soothing gesture, that Jones and King appreciated the administration’s private lobbying on behalf of the historic Birmingham settlement. Fatefully, Kennedy marked Jones as a coward for failing to defend him during the heat of the open discussion, and within weeks would order FBI wiretaps on Jones to monitor his work for King. Tumbling between temper and remorse, Kennedy surprised an aide by reflecting that perhaps he would be as bitter as Jones if he had been raised a Negro, then reproached himself as a political albatross to his brother’s chances for reelection. Five days after the Baldwin drama, Kennedy hurled his conflicted energies into Vice President Johnson’s small corner of the federal bureaucracy—as though some dawdling government committee were concealing an escape route from the pressures of racial politics.

  ON MAY 29, Johnson convened a public meeting of the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, of which he served as President Kennedy’s designated chairman. He welcomed the members with an acknowledgment that the circumstances were “somewhat unusual” because demonstrations had erupted in “many of our cities” since the last gathering. Just the day before, sit-ins had reached even into Jackson, Mississippi, where white mobs had beaten integrated groups at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in full view of news cameras, and there, as elsewhere, observers feared an explosive escalation on both sides. Johnson told his members that he had just come from a meeting with President Kennedy and a number of governors on the urgent need to break down appalling barriers to Negro employment. The governor of New Jersey confessed that builders who agreed to meet integration goals had to import nonunion plasterers from a thousand miles away, because no labor union in New Jersey would admit or train Negro plasterers.

  Attorney General Kennedy walked in as Johnson’s staff director was reviewing the committee’s employment initiatives, including a voluntary corporate program for Negro hiring called Partners for Progress and a hearing process for complaints against government contractors. The President’s brother instantly commanded the room, and Kennedy soon interrupted with quiet intensity. “In these companies that you receive complaints about, what is the percentage rate of Negro employment in these companies?” he asked. “Do you have that rate broken down into communities, and also, what their level of jobs are that these people hold?” As the staff director nervously explained the latest report on racial employment by industry and region, Kennedy pressed repeatedly for different breakdowns—by plant, by company, by raw numbers and trends instead of percentages.

  Kennedy wanted precision to avoid repeating the calamity just suffered in Birmingham. Pointedly, he said that although the Vice President had “led the fight to insure greater employment for Negroes within government,” and had produced national statistics showing “great improvement,” the actual, mortifying numbers in Birmingham had proved the leading merchants to be correct that the federal government itself was essentially segregated. Kennedy quoted their words that turned the Justice Department’s pressure back on the government itself: “‘Why should we hire Negroes? You don’t hire Negroes.’” Outside of the post office and the veterans hospital, where menial work was plentiful, Negroes held fewer than twenty of the two thousand federal jobs in Birmingham—less than 1 percent in a city that was 37 percent Negro. The regional disbursing office of the Treasury Department and the Army ordnance plant, among many others, employed no Negroes at any level, and Kennedy conceded that his own Justice Department had done “virtually nothing.”

  The Attorney General’s cross-examination constantly reached beyond fresh statistics that had been compiled by nothing short of wartime bureaucratic mobilization since the crisis earlier in May. “Can I obtain from you immediately the number of employees of United States Steel in Birmingham, and how many Negroes?” he asked. Told yes, Kennedy asked for such data in Gary, Indiana, and from all major employers across the United States. He also asked for a list of all unions and union locals that barred Negroes. The staff director explained that companies were not required to supply information unless they were government contractors, or volunteers in Partners for Progress, and that even then questionnaires must be approved by the Bureau of the Budget, printed by the Government Printing Office, and so on. “How long will that take?” Kennedy asked. “…I ask you, how long will it take?”

  By brushing aside answers, speaking in the exaggerated softness of controlled anger, the Attorney General left no doubt that the committee had failed the administration’s supreme test of character: the proven ability to act in the world by skillful application of brains and courage, in this case to cut through the morass of segregation. Johnson once tried to deflect part of the blame into the segregated school system by interjecting that of two thousand Birmingham Negroes who had just taken the mandatory civil service examination by emergency roundup, only eighty had passed, and half of these few said they would wait for a federal job outside of Alabama. “It may be, Mr. Attorney General, that deliberate speed is not enough,” Johnson said, and suggested that the Justice Department file more school desegregation suits.

  For the most part, the Vice President endured the grilling in silence until Kennedy slipped out during one of the statistical elaborations. Then Johnson delivered a sulking monologue on his lack of authority. He read from President Kennedy’s order giving him nothing more than the duty to preside over committee meetings—“period and paragraph,” he said. “That is the way the Vice President is referred to, not only in the Executive Order but in the Constitution and other things,” he added balefully, drawing a laugh. Johnson recited a list of the committee’s weaknesses, including the absence of appropriations or permanent staff—everything was borrowed—and the very fact that the Vice President headed the committee. By the time he introduced his guest, Antonio Taylor of New Mexico, to talk about job discrimination against Mexicans and Native Americans in the Southwest, Johnson was openly morose. Part of his motiviation for inviting Taylor, brother of his wife, Lady Bird, was to show a family member how the racial emergency was relieving the enervated despondence of his two years in a powerless office. Instead, Taylor’s presence only magni
fied his humiliation in front of the distinguished public appointees and high representatives of nearly every government agency.

  The next morning, May 30, Johnson flew by helicopter to deliver the Memorial Day address at the Gettysburg battlefield. He berated his staff for setting him up to be lampooned in inevitable comparison with the most famous address in American history—certain to be criticized as a cornpone Southerner if he ducked the subject of racial demonstrations altogether, Johnson complained, or as a clumsy opportunist if he squeezed a racial reference into the patriotic veterans ceremony. After a customary series of conflicting tirades, while emptily demanding that the speech be canceled, Johnson had resolved around his backyard pool to gamble. He would hide from neither race nor Lincoln.

  At Gettysburg, Johnson took his leap after only a few paragraphs of traditional Memorial Day oratory. “One hundred years ago, the slave was freed,” he said. “One hundred years later, the Negro remains in bondage to the color of his skin. The Negro today asks justice. We do not answer him—we do not answer those who lie beneath this soil—when we reply to the Negro by asking, ‘Patience.’” In the next two sentences, Johnson endorsed a theme of Martin Luther King’s oratory on the neutrality of time. “It is empty to plead that the solution to the dilemmas of the present rests on the hands of the clock,” said Johnson. “The solution is in our hands.” Then the Vice President drew a line from Gettysburg to Birmingham, squarely recognizing the crisis thread of American history. “Our nation found its soul in honor on these fields of Gettysburg one hundred years ago,” he declared slowly. “We must not lose that soul in dishonor now on the fields of hate.”

  He continued only another few hundred words. While not as cogent or nearly as poetic as Lincoln, Johnson stuck single-mindedly to his theme that American democracy must rise above the divisions of race to survive. He knew before leaving the platform that his directness had touched a chord in a tough audience—nearly all whites, with the colors of high school bands scattered among martial units ranging from grizzled World War I veterans to the American Legion Drum and Bugle Corps. Johnson’s mood swung to euphoria. To the end of his life, his Gettysburg address remained a proud achievement—the speech he would mail as a prized sample of his oratory—but over that Memorial Day weekend, even the editorial praise of newspapers such as the Washington Post could not keep him from reverting mysteriously to depression at a rare Saturday work session in the Oval Office.

  The subject was civil rights, with Johnson a newcomer. Not once had he been consulted during the James Meredith crisis at Ole Miss the previous fall, even though the administration was desperate for accommodation with Southern politicians Johnson had known for decades, and up through the previous week Johnson had trotted into the large civil rights meetings on short notice, often reading the briefing notes over the shoulder of an aide because no one had bothered to make him a copy. Now, called for the first time into a summit with the Kennedy brothers and two of their closest aides, Ted Sorensen and Burke Marshall, the Vice President wilted. When the President asked what ought to be included in civil rights legislation, Johnson almost sleepily demurred. “I haven’t seen it,” he said.

  “I haven’t seen it either,” President Kennedy replied. They were exploring what elements, if any, should be included in a desegregation bill—lunch counters, hotels, restaurants, schools, university, private schools. When Johnson did not respond to prodding, Robert Kennedy emphasized that they were dealing with some thirty major demonstrations that week, with no end in sight. “You could make a pretty strong argument that we should end those, and get them off the front page of the paper,” he said. “It’s bad for the country and bad for the world.” With Republicans beginning to introduce their own bills, the Attorney General argued that the administration could not defend having none, but the various agencies of government were at loggerheads over coverage and enforcement, each one trying to deflect responsibility elsewhere. On “something as sensitive” as school integration, President Kennedy himself said it was “better to have the courts making the decisions as much as possible rather than the political branches.”

  Asked again for an opinion, Johnson replied that he was “not competent to counsel you” on the details. He fell from sheepish whisper to silence, but then started and stopped again like a balky engine until his energies revived on the subject of taking legislation to Congress with suitable resolve. “You’ve got to recognize first that it’s gonna be your people that are gonna be cussing you, the Democrats,” he told the President. “Every civil rights bill, nine out of ten people who talk will be Democrats…talking about states’ rights. And the papers will be reporting on it every day, and the public will be sitting back, kind of sitting on it. And if we do that, then we got to go through with it and pass it…gotta bear down…got to do that, or else yours will be just another gesture.”

  Johnson fell silent again, allowing speculation that he was wary, resentful, or confused about his sudden rehabilitation among Kennedy’s inner council. Overnight, however, he recovered his Gettysburg euphoria for a sustained campaign of private lobbying in the relentless Johnsonian style. What he had been unable to say to the group in the Oval Office, he said to each of them: they were going about civil rights backward. Johnson buttonholed even his personal nemesis, Robert Kennedy, with a capsule of his message, “absolutely poured out his heart” to a Kennedy assistant, and later that same day gained Sorensen’s ear. What could not wait, Johnson kept saying, was a defining message from the White House. “We got a little popgun, and I want to pull out the cannon,” he said. “The President is the cannon. You let him be on all the TV networks just speaking from his conscience.”

  Johnson wanted Kennedy to make a Gettysburg speech. He described an imaginary one in San Antonio and another in North Carolina, complete with quotes from Lincoln and a recitation of the Golden Rule. “If he’d make it in Jackson, Mississippi,” Johnson told Sorensen, “it would be worth a hell of a lot more than it would in Harlem.” He envisioned a patriotic setting with the President in a bank of flags next to an integrated military honor guard. “Then let him reach over and point,” Johnson said, working himself up again into rough rehearsal, “and say, ‘I have to order these boys into battle, into foxholes carrying that flag. I don’t ask them what their name is, whether it’s Gomez or Smith, or what color they got, what religion. If I can order them into battle, I’ve got to make it possible for them to eat and sleep in this country….’”

  Johnson said his purpose was to shift the psychology of racial politics. “I know the risks are great and it might cost us the South,” he told Sorensen, “but those sorts of states may be lost anyway.” As a Southern politician himself, he knew that a national policy of reasoned accommodation could and did encourage resistance. No matter how much private, inward fury the administration poured into administrative changes on behalf of Negroes, a hesitant public attitude signaled to segregationists that the administration feared showdown more than they did. Against segregation, therefore, the normal courtesies of politics could be fatally seductive. Ironically, Johnson argued, the current approach fostered doubts about the administration’s commitment among the Southern whites and Negroes alike. “The whites think we’re just playing politics to carry New York,” he said. “The Negroes feel and they’re suspicious that we’re just doing what we got to do. Until that’s laid to rest, I don’t think you’re going to have much of a solution.”

  Even worse, Johnson told Sorensen, the Republicans were “sitting back giggling.” While matching or exceeding Kennedy’s proposals aimed to please voters in the North, Republicans waited for a “civil war” of demonstrations to erode his Democratic base. “They cut off the South from him and [are going to] blow up the bridge,” said Johnson. “That’s what they want to do.” He argued that Kennedy had “played into the Republicans’ hands” by taking an indefinite position between Negroes and the South, and predicted disaster for halfhearted measures. “Every cruel and evil influence in this cou
ntry, plus all the uninformed, plus all the people that got a wounded air and a persecution complex, are going to be unified against the President. That oughtn’t be,” he said. Kennedy could “almost make a bigot out of nearly anybody that’s against him” by putting the presidency on high moral ground. “If I can do it,” said Johnson, “…the President can sure do it.”

  Johnson knew politicians were off balance, and that the Kennedy people must find it equally extraordinary to hear him, the oil-state dealmaker added to the ticket expressly to shore up the Democratic white South, urge the White House to take a position to satisfy James Baldwin. (“So the only big problem,” Johnson told Sorensen, “is saying to the Baldwins and to the Kings and to the rest of them, ‘We give you a moral commitment. The government is behind you.’”) He asked assurance that he would not read trial stories about how the Vice President was advocating a radical Gettysburg strategy or guaranteeing political success in the South. In return, he promised Robert Kennedy never to mousetrap the administration if the President “put it to them” in Georgia and Mississippi and Texas. “They’ll probably boo me off the platform,” he told Sorensen, “but I’ll be right there with him. I’ll be saying it myself if he wants me to.”