Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, who had flown back from Vietnam to meet with President Kennedy, met instead with Johnson and his top foreign policy leaders three hours after church. He began by flatly denying that the United States had been involved in the coup three weeks earlier against President Diem, but his evident satisfaction indicated otherwise. Pointing to photographs of joyful crowds in Saigon, Lodge described the coup as a success that promised a favorable settlement with North Vietnam. He said his mission was pushing on all fronts—military, diplomatic, even religious—with Lodge now bound for Rome to reassure Pope Paul VI that the United States understood the political risk of losing the Catholic president Diem in Buddhist Vietnam, and was fully alive to “dangers of an anti-Christian move.” In recounting the coup, Lodge offered a veiled reference to the phone call in which Diem first asked urgently about the U.S. knowledge of and response to the military revolt, and reported his crisp reply that Diem should leave his country in prompt surrender. “Lodge said that we were in no way responsible for the death of Diem and [his brother] Nhu,” CIA Director John McCone recorded in his minutes, “that had they followed his advice, they would be alive today.”

  While Defense Secretary McNamara, among others, objected that Lodge was overly optimistic about Vietnam, Johnson was merely formal and cool toward Lodge. The ambassador’s boastful report did nothing to relieve his misgivings about the murder of Diem—a man he had praised in 1961 as “the Churchill of Asia,” whose portrait hung on a wall of the Johnson home. To confidants, Johnson soon confessed a vague fear that the Kennedy assassination was retribution for American plotting against Diem. “We had a hand in killing him,” he remarked to Senator Hubert Humphrey. “Now it’s happening here.” Nor did Lodge improve the phantom chill that swirled through Johnson’s early spy reports on Oswald, the Russians, and Cuba. Although Lodge did not work for the CIA, Johnson associated him with an unfavorable image of CIA officials as mediocre dissemblers from overbred patrician families. (“Whenever those rich people have a son they can’t trust with the family brokerage,” Johnson once grumbled, “they ship him down to the CIA.”) Still, at his first foreign policy meeting, Johnson only hinted at his suspicions. A lot of people were upset about the overthrow of Diem, he told the assembled advisers, but nothing could be done about it now. He instructed Lodge to eliminate the meddlesome backbiting and hidden agendas within the American mission. With that, photographers were admitted and a bland press statement was distributed to the effect that Johnson was adopting the Kennedy course in Vietnam.

  Within an hour of President Kennedy’s burial on Monday, as television networks returned to afternoon soap operas after three days and nights of stupefying news, Johnson called Kennedy’s chief congressional lobbyist, Larry O’Brien, and said, “I need you a lot more than he did.” It was an awkward moment for O’Brien, who replied that another time might be better because he was grieving with Kennedy’s chief of staff, Kenneth O’Donnell, an Irish politician who had been close to the slain president and remained undone. Johnson disregarded the plea for privacy and said he needed O’Donnell, too, and that he admired the whole staff. “I don’t expect you to love me as much as you did him,” he told O’Brien, “but I expect you will after we’ve been around awhile.” When O’Brien responded, “Right, Mr. President,” Johnson pressed forward with questions about upcoming votes in the Senate.

  By the end of a long working day, Johnson had rearranged billions in the upcoming budget and reversed Kennedy’s intention to push the civil rights bill to a vote before the tax bill. His late evening phone calls included one of thanks to Martin Luther King for public statements urging calm. King managed to squeeze in a few encouraging words that the new law would be “one of the greatest tributes” to Kennedy’s memory, and the two virtual strangers spoke with a glancing intimacy common to the crisis. (King: “Regards to the family.” Johnson: “Thank you so much, Martin.”) Still later that night, Johnson complained to Kennedy’s chief speechwriter, Theodore Sorensen, about the crush of ceremonial duty—“all these ambassadors…I bet I saw twenty of them this afternoon…I mean heads of state, [French President Charles] de Gaulle and [Canadian Prime Minister Lester] Pearson and all this crowd…then they’re running fifteen more on me tomorrow….” Johnson tried to tell Sorensen gently that he planned to use other drafts than Sorensen’s for his first major speech. “Well, anyway, you liked Galbraith,” Sorensen said glumly, referring to a draft that Johnson had solicited from Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. All the next day and night, Johnson snatched time to sift phrases from contributors ranging from U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson to his former Senate aide from Texas, Horace “Buzz” Busby, author of his Gettysburg speech.

  On Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, Johnson delivered to a joint session of Congress an address that won acclaim as a nearly perfect first step to lead the nation out of its stupor. A New York Times critic noted the reassuring thread of Kennedy themes and even some trademark rhetorical devices such as the parallel inversion of phrases, as in Johnson’s “We will demonstrate anew that the strong can be just and the just can be strong.” Still, the emotional core of the speech would have been too earnestly moral for Kennedy’s taste. Johnson urged the country “not to turn about and linger over this evil moment.” He expressly joined the unknowable motive for the murder with the knowable hatreds of race, and drew from them jointly the healing, historical purpose of passing the civil rights bill. “We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights,” he said. “We have talked for a hundred years or more.” An audience conditioned for shock by the nightmare weekend embraced his colloquial, earthy style—his slow Texas twang and Southernisms (“…as I did in 19 and 57 and again in 19 and 60…”), his unabashed recital of “America the Beautiful,” and sentimental gestures such as placing Zephyr Wright, the Johnson family cook, prominently in the House gallery. (“Heavens to Betsy,” she told reporters, “I don’t give my age out.”) Many tearful members of Congress interrupted him with applause—thirty-four times, by Johnson’s count—most heartily when he denounced “hate and evil and violence” and, near the end, when he echoed Lincoln at Gettysburg: “So let us here highly resolve that John Fitzgerald Kennedy did not live—or die—in vain.”

  “AS SOON AS Lyndon Johnson finished his speech before Congress, twenty million of us unpacked,” quipped comedian Dick Gregory, who, after submitting to the breakthrough year’s jail campaigns in Greenwood, Birmingham, Chicago, and Selma, expressed relief that Negroes did not see Lyndon Johnson emerge in the White House as a cowhide segregationist. From North Carolina, Professor Al Lowenstein scribbled one of several thousand viewer responses. “Like everyone else I was shattered by the bullet,” he wrote Johnson. “Your speech to Congress today started the long pull back together, for me and countless others….” As was his habit, Lowenstein wrote on whatever scrap was at hand—in this case on stationery from the Castellana Hilton in Madrid, Spain, a souvenir of his quixotic campaign against the Franco dictatorship.

  In Washington, movement workers arrived by bus and caravan at Howard University for a Thanksgiving SNCC conference. Two U.S. representatives of Lowenstein’s acquaintance had agreed to sponsor a public forum on the political meaning of the Mississippi mock election earlier that month, but the assassination wiped out the planned agenda. To a crowd of onlookers and movement veterans, a nervous volunteer delivered his assigned press analysis of the current Life series, saying it painted SNCC students as putschists and troublemakers worse than Communists. A proposal to march to the fresh Kennedy grave site for a vigil of respect was voted down as hypocritical given the movement’s estrangement from the federal government.

  Bob Moses quietly told the conference that the white people of the country had not yet grasped or decided the deeper questions of freedom, that beneath the national swoon of remorse over Kennedy and violence there remained a hard shell of disbelief about the blanket repression of voting rights in the Deep South and what it portended fo
r racial politics elsewhere. The hotly debated summer project was designed as a tactic to force that awareness upon the country. Meanwhile, he said, movement volunteers remained shock troops struggling every day in every town with “the problem of overcoming fear.” Small delegations of volunteers fanned out to labor unions and government offices in the capital, seeking ears for their message, while those at Howard aroused movement spirit through marathon freedom songs. Fannie Lou Hamer, the lifelong sharecropper who had discovered an immense voice since her jail beating in Winona, took the lead in “Go, Tell It on the Mountain.” Over rhythmic hand-clapping, Willie Peacock of Greenwood alternated between storytelling exhortation and improvised verses for the slave spiritual “Wade in the Water”: “Well, if you don’t believe that I’ve been to hell/just follow me down to the county jail/Wade in the water….”

  Toward the end of the conference, the Rev. Robert Stone of New York approached Moses to ask whether the organized clergy might help combat the fear in Mississippi. Stone, a Union Seminary graduate and Freedom Rider, had joined the new Presbyterian Commission on Religion and Race in October—his most vivid memory since was crawling on hands and knees in search of stray shards of stained glass outside Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Moses told Stone that never in history had Mississippi authorities tolerated a voting rights picket line, and perhaps the prestige of the Northern clergy might help break that barrier. Seeing no chance yet in the Delta, Moses sent Stone to the new SNCC project manager in Hattiesburg, Lawrence Guyot.

  From the other side of the vast political chasm, White House officials looked also to the church as a catalyst on civil rights. Over the Thanksgiving weekend, Lawrence O’Brien wrote President Johnson that the civil rights bill would never even reach the House floor for a vote unless they could break the months-long stranglehold of the House Rules Committee. To do that, Republican votes must be marshaled for one of two rare parliamentary maneuvers—a discharge petition signed by a majority of the entire House, or a politically sensitive committee revolt against the segregationist Rules Committee chairman, Rep. Howard Smith of Virginia. To succeed either way required an effective channel to reach opposition Republicans, many of whom represented nearly all-white districts in the Midwest and Plains states, where the problems of segregation were unfamiliar. “The Negro groups as such don’t have the broad spread strength to get this done,” O’Brien wrote Johnson as he prepared for a meeting with the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, “but Wilkins should be urged to press the religious leaders….”

  President Johnson was practicing his own parallel lobbying strategy on selected callers. “Say to the Republicans, ‘You’re either for civil rights or your not, you’re either the party of Lincoln or you ain’t,’” he exhorted. He hoped to dislodge the bill from committee with public arguments that Republicans of conscience must vote at least for consideration by the full House. “I believe that we can dramatize it enough that we can wreck them,” he told Rep. Richard Bolling. “God almighty,” he said of the obstructionists, “I don’t see how California and Chicago can stand up against civil rights.”

  While laying the groundwork, Johnson maneuvered to contain the seepage of public trust since Dallas. With J. Edgar Hoover, he pretended to be against calls for a national commission of inquiry, which he said “would be very bad and put [the controversy] right in the White House.” Such a commission would be a “regular circus,” Hoover agreed,* but Johnson carefully told congressional leaders that Hoover’s true goal was to head off any independent review of the FBI investigation. Among dozens of orchestrated calls on the Friday after Thanksgiving, Johnson warned Senator Richard Russell of Georgia about the likelihood of multiple, runaway investigations. He hinted to Russell that assassination hearings in the House would be disorderly, unproductive, and careless with legitimate national secrets, and that the state murder investigations in Texas would only exacerbate sectional mistrust, especially since Oswald had been killed while in Texas custody. As he approached his purpose, Johnson ladled compliments over his former mentor in the Senate, going so far as to say that “the country would be in a hell of a lot better shape” if Russell were president instead. Russell scoffed, “I’ll be dead in another two or three years,” and Johnson, in sounding out names for the proposed relief of a single national commission, passed breezily over the various Justices of the Supreme Court as unlikely to serve. He asked Russell what judge might be appropriate “if I didn’t get the Chief.”

  Five hours later, Johnson called Russell again with a statement naming the members of the assassination commission, reading them swiftly. The old senator fairly howled when he heard his own name just after that of Chief Justice Earl Warren. “I couldn’t serve on it with Chief Justice Warren,” he gasped. “I don’t like that man. I don’t have any confidence in him.” Johnson roared right back, dismissing the courtly Southerner’s contempt for the architect of the Brown decision. Racial feelings were trivial compared with assassination rumors that involved Castro and Khrushchev and might spill into what Johnson called “a war that could kill forty million Americans in an hour.” “You’re my man on that commission, and you’re going to do it, and don’t tell me what you can do and what you can’t,” he shouted. “Because I can’t arrest you, and I’m not going to put the FBI on you, but you’re goddammed sure going to serve, I’ll tell you that, and [mutual friend Judge] A. W. Moursund is here and he wants to tell you how much all of us love you.”

  Johnson soon took the phone again to swear that he had cleared these names with Russell in the earlier call. “You did not,” Russell complained. “…Mr. President, please now.” Johnson told him it was too late anyway: “I gave the announcement. It is already in the papers….” For the next half hour, he dragged Russell along a swerving roller coaster of tweaks (“I’m not afraid to put your intelligence up against Warren’s”), blandishments (“Well, of course you don’t like Warren, but you will before this is over with”), bluster (“Well, you’re damned sure going to be at my command!”), and endearments so nakedly primal (“Nobody ever has been more to me than you have, Dick, except my mother…. I haven’t got any daddy, and you’re going to be it…”) that even the fuming Russell laughed helplessly.

  Having employed a similar bombardment, in person, to bowl over Chief Justice Warren’s initial refusal to serve, Johnson mollified FBI Director Hoover with a steady application of flattery. His deferential questions stimulated Hoover’s clipped, authoritative updates on the investigations, which invariably led to diversions of personal animus. Hoover insistently referred to the shady nightclub owner who killed Oswald, Jack Ruby, as “Rubenstein,” for instance, and denounced Ruby’s defense counsel, Melvin Belli, as “a West Coast lawyer somewhat like the Edward Bennett Williams * type and almost as much of a shyster.” In discussing security improvements, Johnson asked if it were true that Hoover had a bulletproof limousine, and Hoover proudly replied that he had four of them, including one stored in California for his horseracing vacations. He recommended that President Johnson acquire half that many armored cars himself—one for the White House and one for his Texas ranch.

  Hoover did not challenge the President’s assertion that an independent inquiry was the only way to prevent wildcat investigations, but he took it as a personal affront that the FBI’s conclusions would not suffice. He described the Warren Commission to his staff as “the proposed group they are trying to get to study my report,” and as insurance against the unwelcome scrutiny he ordered headquarters to stockpile all information—no matter how far-fetched—that might deflect blame back into the White House. “In Florida and on Cape Cod, Mr. Kennedy often jumped behind the wheel of an automobile and drove off,” an assistant director reported in a list of security defects. “He has been characterized by the Secret Service as a notoriously poor driver who drove through red lights and took many unnecessary chances.”

  IN ATLANTA, Martin Luther King preached on Thanksgiving morning to his own congregation at Ebenezer Baptist. To Paul Good, an ABC televis
ion reporter who stopped by out of curiosity to witness his first Negro church service, the opening of the sermon was formal, even pedantic, and King’s passing reference to the cataclysm of the assassination seemed devoid of warmth or comfort. Making no effort to address the grief that saturated nearly all conversation, King astonished Good by preaching instead on slavery.

  King had identified with Kennedy as a leader—studied his skills in public speaking, assumed the code name “JFK” in Birmingham, and consistently tried to understand the political pressures pushing Kennedy away from the movement. Moreover, King long since had braced himself for the martyr’s fate that had come so unexpectedly to Kennedy, and friends still weighed his risks by direct comparison. “If they hated him, you know they love you less,” warned his mentor, Benjamin Mays, president of Morehouse College. King associated with Kennedy so strongly, in fact, that he was wounded when the Kennedy family had not invited him to the funeral mass. On his own initiative, King had stood unattended and unnoticed among the sidewalk crowds that watched the cortege pass by.

  Adding to his sense of invisible companionship, King was suffering through a bad phase of his contentious relationship with Robert Kennedy. In a particularly galling outgrowth of the 1962 campaign in Albany, Georgia, federal prosecutors who had ignored pleas to punish or prevent flagrant violence against local movement leaders managed instead to indict nine of those leaders on federal conspiracy charges. Recently, King had gone to the extreme of personally asking the Justice Department to review the indictments, only to have Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach turn him down, and a post-assassination letter from the Attorney General defended as racially impartial the prosecution of people King considered heroes. “I trust that the within information will satisfy your concern,” Robert Kennedy advised.