Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  Anticipating this result, Moses drove out of the Allen gate on Sunday, February 2, past one reporter who recognized him as “the mainspring in the McComb racial turmoil of 1961.” Back in Hattiesburg, Moses threw his influence behind the summer project. For him, shell-shocked reality overrode lingering scruples about importing masses of white volunteers. It prevailed over staff resentment that whites would intimidate movement Negroes, and over moral reservations about using young whites as sensational guinea pigs to force federal intervention. It also overrode in Moses a philosophic unwillingness to cut off debate by fiat or personal authority. “We can’t protect our own people,” he gravely announced. From then on, the summer project became merely a question of details.

  A few days later, the distinguished Yale poet and author Robert Penn Warren sought out Moses in Mississippi for an interview. Across more than thirty years—since writing his equivocal essay on segregation, “The Briar Patch,” in a manifesto of Southern literary figures who defended agrarian values against Northern materialism—Warren had remained preoccupied with race. He found a reflective companion in Moses, who said he had been rereading Albert Camus in the Hattiesburg jail. Moses was drawn to the French existentialist’s challenge of refusing to be a victim without becoming an executioner. “It’s the importance to struggle…” he told Warren, “and at the same time if it’s possible, you try to eke out some corner of love or some glimpse of happiness within. And that’s what I think more than anything else conquers the bitterness.” When Warren asked him whether the movement could hope to attain such a standard, Moses confessed that it was hard for Negroes who had absorbed hatred all their lives “not to let all of that out on the white staff.” Without disclosing to Warren his decision to go forward with Freedom Summer, Moses described a recent staff meeting at which a Mississippi colleague erupted with “a whole series of really racial statements of hatred…. And we sort of all just sat there. The white students were, in this case, now made the victims.”

  After three weeks on the Hattiesburg picket lines, the Presbyterian organizer Robert Stone decided to return home temporarily in order to keep up the recruitment of clergy. Vernon Dahmer invited him to dinner before he left for New York, and Stone took the chance to get acquainted with the largely invisible presence always described to him as the buttress, refuge, and final court of disputes for the Hattiesburg movement. Stone hazarded a guess that evening about the delicate mystery of Dahmer’s own voting status. Although local whites pointed to him as the sort of upstanding Negro who had voted for years, the most informed movement people could remember only his escorting other Negroes to the courthouse. No one knew for certain that Dahmer registered or voted himself.

  Dahmer replied evasively, discouraging further inquiry. “They’d let me vote,” he told Stone. “They’d let half a dozen Negroes vote here in this county. But I don’t want to do it when they let me. So I don’t do it.”

  16

  Ambush

  IN WASHINGTON on January 31, as the House solemnly opened final debate on the civil rights bill, Sargent Shriver kept an appointment to brief President Johnson about his month-long trip around the world. Focusing on the moment in Jerusalem when Pope Paul VI had blessed his wooden cross from the Kennedy casket, Shriver said he still had to keep pinching himself to comprehend that an American born on a Maryland farm could stand there with the Pontiff on the soil of reborn Israel, in the presence of the Eastern Patriarch.

  “Well, Sarge, that’s really wonderful,” Johnson interrupted. He spared Shriver his satirical views on Vatican ceremony,* but abruptly shifted ground. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said, leading outside through the Rose Garden to the driveway of the White House South Lawn. The President announced on the way that he wanted Shriver to launch his new war on poverty.

  Shriver replied nervously that he remembered reading in Pakistan or somewhere that Johnson had mentioned poverty in a speech, but he was sure the President could find someone better qualified. Besides, he was more than occupied as Director of the Peace Corps. Johnson said Shriver could run the Peace Corps and poverty at the same time, and Shriver escaped with a promise to consider the flattering proposal. Not knowing Johnson, he assumed the next move was his.

  The next day, Saturday, February 1, a White House operator startled Shriver at home, and Johnson’s voice came on the line: “I’m gonna announce your appointment at the press conference.”

  “What press conference?” asked Shriver.

  “This afternoon,” said Johnson.

  “Oh God,” whispered Shriver, who began sputtering that he knew nothing about poverty. Johnson brushed him off. “You can’t let me down,” he said, “so the quicker we get it behind us the better.” Shriver in full panic waved silently for his family to prompt him with excuses. “Could you just say that you’ve asked me to study this?” he suggested to Johnson, who said, “No, hell no.” When Shriver begged politely for time—“I must say that I would prefer it if I had forty-eight hours”—he got back a resounding preview of the morning headlines: “You’re Mister Poverty.”

  “You got the responsibility,” Johnson told him. “You’ve got the authority. You got the power. You got the money. Now, you may not have the glands.”

  “The glands?” asked Shriver.

  “Yeah,” said the President.

  “I’ve got plenty of glands,” said Shriver.

  Johnson mischievously observed that Shriver’s Peace Corps was over-managed anyway, with 1,100 administrators for ten thousand volunteers overseas. “There’s not a Kennedy compound that’s got a babysitter per ten,” he said, “and you’ve got it in the Peace Corps.” This comment reduced Shriver to temporary silence, whereupon Johnson signed off: “Good luck to you. And happy landing.” The President fended off a last frantic call for reprieve, which Shriver insisted be put through in the midst of a Cabinet Room briefing on test performances of the Redeye and Wall-eye missiles, then announced the appointment from the White House movie theater. Hours later, he explained to Shriver that haste was necessary to quell violent opposition within government departments to the choice of an untested outsider.

  The poverty program scrambled forward by improvisation from the next day, when miscellaneous experts overran Shriver’s home at his invitation. Frank Mankiewicz, who called his boss for reassurance about the newspaper stories and was summoned instead to the first meeting, wound up working six months on poverty before returning to his Peace Corps assignment in Peru. Adam Yarmolinsky, an assistant to Defense Secretary McNamara who had been present when Shriver interrupted the missile briefing, took just as long to get back to the Pentagon. They were among those jammed into Shriver’s living room to hear a presentation by Walter Heller and budget director Kermit Gordon.

  “It will never fly,” Shriver bluntly commented during a break. He conceded some advantages to the “community action” model, as modified since the Christmas skull sessions at the LBJ Ranch. To break through to pockets of “hard-core” poverty, community action advocates wanted the poor themselves to present blueprints for improvement to a lean new poverty agency that would behave more like a research foundation than a traditional government department. Small and experimental, this bottom-up approach carried the flair of innovation, like Shriver’s own Peace Corps.

  Still, Shriver thought the community action idea fell short of his marching orders to conquer poverty itself. As critics in the room quickly pointed out, the community action proposal lacked even a clear definition of poverty and its causes. By contrast, the jockeying government departments brought statistics and hard experience to bureaucratic politics, with public works agencies eager to fight poverty through public works, housing agencies through housing. To Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel P. Moynihan, the root of poverty was lack of opportunity, and his department stood ready to run massive jobs programs. To Wilbur Cohen, Assistant Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, poverty was disability, and his department pushed programs for training, literacy, and basic nutri
tion. Shriver, always mindful of what he could sell to Congress, searched for ways to turn bureaucratic conflict to his advantage—perhaps in a war fought “on many fronts.” He called in scholars, old schoolmates, bureaucrats, campaign veterans, anyone he thought might be smart enough to “get a handle on poverty.” Ideas ran from space program tie-ins back to flat taxes. With his workday stretched at both ends, Shriver scheduled breakfasts, pre-breakfasts, even walking interviews on the way to buy his newspaper. When Hyman Bookbinder called from the Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial Foundation in New York to ask if he could help, Shriver replied, “How soon can you be here?” Bookbinder found himself working with Mankiewicz and Yarmolinsky off corners of desks in temporary offices at an abandoned court building, carrying files under their arms and queueing up for scarce telephones.

  POLITICAL SUSPICION complicated the poverty debate. Many saw Johnson as either rescuing or usurping a Kennedy idea, and Shriver as a loyal Kennedy in-law or sellout to Johnson. When Shriver first tilted against community action, Kennedy partisans mistakenly assumed him to be acting on orders from President Johnson, who was considered too much of a hack politician to favor a novel approach. Community action had an avant-garde quality stressed by intellectuals in new, euphemistically named poverty fields—“juvenile delinquency,” and “gray areas” of urban decay. Some of them looked to Attorney General Robert Kennedy for rearguard action to champion community action.

  Kennedy scarcely noticed. Since Christmas, he no longer gave way to the mordant despair of earlier remarks—“Been to any good funerals lately?”—but he remained wounded and withdrawn, staring over his desk in solitary trances that no one dared interrupt with business. Kennedy read tragic poetry and wrote notes to himself: “The innocent suffer—how can that be possible and God be just.” Privately, he referred to President Johnson as “the new fellow,” and lost most feeling for politics except for occasional torments over lost power.

  Late in January, shortly after returning from a diplomatic trip to Indonesia, Kennedy was ambushed by House members angry that the United States Information Agency was distributing a film on civil rights featuring King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. They said J. Edgar Hoover had disclosed to them in off-the-record testimony that King was a Communist philanderer, and worse, that Kennedy had prevented the FBI from distributing warnings about King. This set off a tense, three-week spitting match between Kennedy’s office and Hoover’s, with each side accusing the other of leaks, bad faith, or carelessness about subversion.

  Like litigants, principals from both sides dictated memoranda on meetings and phone calls. “I pointed out that anything the AG had said had been cleared with the FBI,” recorded Kennedy’s press secretary. “I told Deke [DeLoach] that our record in this matter could withstand any scrutiny.” The FBI took a more aggressive stance, pressing its advantage now that Kennedy no longer had family in the White House. “[Burke] Marshall is a liar,” wrote Hoover, who circulated this exact charge by memo twice more before the end of February. To Kennedy himself, Hoover rambled on February 5 through veiled warnings about coddling King, then switched abruptly to feigned worries about the general spread of sleazy rumors, all couched as friendly advice: “I stated just like that woman we had in here last week who retracted all the statements she had made about sexual relations with the former President, with him the Attorney General, and everybody else, that there were only two Senators she stuck to, but we had gotten her under oath and she had retracted her statements. I stated some private detective had recorded her statements and was selling it for $500 a copy…. I said people who listen to the recording, which is a vile recording, get a salacious pleasure out of it and then repeat it until it builds up. I stated it rolls like a snowball. I said it is an outrage to the people involved, but Washington is filled with gossip. The Attorney General stated he thought if we all just work closely together that is the best thing, and I agreed.” Kennedy talked of leaving office soon, absorbed himself in memorials for the slain president, and resisted the advice of friends who tried to revive his zest for politics. “The hurt that others feel can be only a shadow of your own feelings,” wrote Assistant Secretary of State Fred Dutton, who gently coaxed Kennedy toward a long-range idea of “giving much fuller expression to your concern for younger people…fuller harnessing of your potential impact with the rising generation (over half of the people on this globe are under 26)….”

  INTERNATIONAL YOUTH landed in New York on Friday, February 7, at John F. Kennedy Airport, newly renamed for Kennedy’s brother. Astonished reporters watched a throng of teenage girls dive into the street to fight over a cigarette butt that Paul McCartney had flicked from his limousine, the winner emerging bloody but enthralled with her trophy. Two nights later, 75 million television viewers witnessed the sustained scream that all but drowned out the Beatles’ American debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. Few of these could assimilate the flat pronouncement by the London Sunday Times music critic that John Lennon and Paul McCartney were “the greatest composers since Beethoven,” but the blast of youth hysteria itself seized national attention.

  The Beatles rode a tidal wave of numbers. A million more Americans would celebrate their seventeenth birthday in 1964 than in 1963, and behind them the postwar baby boom stacked more than a million “extra” children in each year’s age cohort down to the cradle. The number of teenagers, which actually had declined all through the 1940s and stagnated in the 1950s, was about to double to twenty million by 1970. Anticipating what he called “the buyingest age group in history,” Ford general manager Lee Iacocca was rolling off the assembly lines for April introduction the first expressly designed youth mobile, the Mustang—affordable but sporty and full of energy, seat belts still optional. Marketing followed suit in industries ranging from cosmetics and soft drinks to politics.

  Within their own idiom, the Beatles were a compounded crossover of race traveling back and forth over the Atlantic Ocean. Rock music, one of many jazz offspring, had adapted the distinctive, evangelical abandon of Negro gospel—essentially by lightening its message from religion to romance and pointing its fervor toward youth. Ever since 1952, when Clyde McPhatter and the Dominoes had recorded “Have Mercy, Baby,” substituting the word “baby” for the “Lord” of their own gospel standard—and certainly since 1955, when blind pianist Ray Charles changed the gospel lyrics of “I Got a Saviour” to “I Got a Woman”—the formula had registered with certified hits across the racial divide.

  The Beatles brought crossover music back to America* with a wallop of clean energy, free of assassination gloom, and white teenagers swooned like Pentecostals at a great awakening. “Beatlemania” swept from February’s news the contemporary campaign to ban the song “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen. (The lyrics were indecipherable, said Indiana Governor Matthew Welsh, but he knew the song was pornographic because his “ears tingled.”) Harvard sociologist David Riesman told U.S. News & World Report that the four Beatles, “although unkempt in one way, are very ‘kempt’ in another…it’s very safe for a young girl to admire these Englishmen.”

  On the spearhead of what would become a “British invasion,” the Beatles put the careers of American originators into prolonged decline. They bowled over even Sam Cooke, son of a prominent “holy roller” preacher in Chicago, precocious star of gospel’s premier group, the Soul Stirrers, until he crossed over into white rock with his 1957 hit, “You Send Me.” Cooke had bridged audiences from backwoods church revivals to New York’s posh Copacabana Club, with compositions ranging from party pop (“Twistin’ the Night Away”) to sugar-coated segregation (“Chain Gang”). In 1962, his childhood friend Lou Rawls, formerly of gospel’s Pilgrim Travelers, sang background vocals on his soulful hit “Bring It on Home to Me,” and by the end of 1963, amazed that “a white boy” like Bob Dylan could have written “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Cooke wrote a song inspired by road life amid freedom marches and church bombings. With simple lyrics about trees bending beside river currents, he invited his huge cross
racial audience into a song of prophecy.

  Future critics would uphold “A Change Is Gonna Come” as the outpouring of Sam Cooke’s accumulated artistry, but he had the misfortune to perform his new release on national television the same Friday the Beatles arrived at the Plaza Hotel with “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Not yet fully aware how completely their acclaim swamped him and his song, Cooke flew south to visit the Miami training camp of his friend Cassius Clay, who still boastfully ignored ten-to-one odds that the heavyweight champion would crush him. Uncannily, the Beatles followed Cooke to Miami, too, and climbed into the ring with Clay to promote each other in front of the chortling press. “You guys ain’t as dumb as you look!” Clay shouted to the Beatles. “No, but you are,” replied John Lennon in his deadpan put-on, and Clay pantomimed as mighty Tarzan standing over four pretended knockout victims.

  IN MISSISSIPPI, Byron de la Beckwith stood trial for shooting Medgar Evers in the back. The defendant regularly entered the Jackson courtroom with a swagger and a smile in spite of the evidence against him: his fingerprint on the murder rifle, his ownership of the telescopic sight. He acknowledged making the statements offered to establish motive, such as his courthouse speech (“I believe in segregation like I believe in God”) and his letter to the National Rifle Association (“For the next fifteen years we in Mississippi will have to do a lot of shooting to protect our wives and children from bad niggers and sorry white folk.”) Beckwith took his flamboyant gamesmanship so far as to refuse an alibi and to toy with taking credit for the deed. From jail, he submitted to an outdoor magazine a droll allegory under the heading, “Shooting at Night in Summertime for Varmints.”