Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  ON MAY 2, anniversary of the first great children’s jail march in Birmingham the previous year, King joined Fred Shuttlesworth to preach the funeral of William Shortridge, the prickly but dependable former treasurer of the Birmingham movement. “There was no guile in his mouth,” Shuttlesworth told mourners in a bittersweet eulogy. “…Mr. Shortridge was a sick man ever since I knew him, but he did much more being sick than most men I know being well. I pray God that He would afflict many more men with a sickness like that.” King followed with a distracted, more somber tribute, quoting Shakespeare’s Horatio on the death of Hamlet, and then flew on short notice to Nashville. Students—supported by C. T. Vivian and numerous white religious leaders, including the renowned Vanderbilt Bible scholar Walter Harrelson—had picketed segregated restaurants through a week marked by a hundred arrests and numerous violent attacks, mostly by spectators. SNCC Chairman John Lewis, face bruised and lips split open from blows that morning, escorted King into a mass meeting at Fisk University.

  Back in the Ebenezer pulpit the next day, King preached in his deepest bass register at slow cadence, which often signaled a troubled mood. Modifying his standard sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan—“Who Is My Neighbor?”—he projected three distinct philosophies upon those who had encountered the waylaid traveler on the road to Jericho. “Everybody within the sound of my voice today lives by one of these three philosophies,” King told his congregation. Beginning with the robber—“whoever robbed that man had a philosophy”—he offered examples of predatory behavior ranging from ancient slavery and modern colonialism to street crime. Preachers were not immune, King said acidly, saying he had just heard a prominent fellow minister sell his members “a real blessing” of rebaptism for $10 apiece, offering each one a drop of the genuine holy water the preacher had brought back from the Sea of Galilee. “Out of that bottle of water, I can imagine that he got himself a good ten thousand dollars,” King declared with a fury that carried through a dozen repetitions of the robber’s philosophy: “What is thine is MINE! And if you don’t give it to me, I’ll take it from you.”

  He began more gently with a second outlook—“What is mine is mine, what is thine is thine”—saying that the priest and Levite in the story may have had good reason to bypass the waylaid man on the Jericho road. To indict their cautious self-preservation, King recited other Bible stories, including his favorite parable of the rich man Dives, who went to hell for no overt crime. Wealth itself did not condemn Dives, King told his congregation. “I can assure you,” he said, “if there is a hell there will be plenty of poor folks in it.” What undid Dives was failure to bridge the gulf that divided him from humanity, including the beggar Lazarus at his gate. Dives “never saw Lazarus even though he passed him every day,” said King, who went on to scold worshippers “here this morning” for withholding their talents from those in need.

  King proceeded to what he identified as the “third philosophy,” that of the Samaritan who stopped to help the victim. This merciful stranger “of another race” proved that “a man’s back is never straighter than when he bends it to lift fallen humanity,” he said. King summoned up an assortment of models, including Albert Schweitzer and Peace Corps volunteers, plus students, rabbis, preachers, and other movement volunteers “willing to go to jail, willing to be on picket lines, willing to be beaten and persecuted for righteousness’ sake. They know somehow, ‘what is mine is thine….’” Their philosophy “says in substance that all humanity is tied together,” King told the Ebenezer congregation, warning that neither predators nor bystanders could be healthy so long as misery, famine, plague, and hatred scavenged millions on the globe. “For you can catch these diseases, you know,” he said wryly, and some of the gloom lifted from his tone. “He who lives by this philosophy lives in the kingdom NOW!” King cried, and “not in some distant day.” This was “the kingdom within,” which rose from the sordid world “in a great act and a noble destiny.” It was the witness of Jesus, “who said in his own life, ‘what is mine is thine, I’ll give it to you, you don’t have to beg me for it.’ This is why the cross is more than some meaningless drama taking place on the stage of history. In a real sense, it is a telescope through which we look out into the long vista of eternity and see the love of God breaking forth in the night…. It is God saying, ‘I will reach out and bridge the gulf that separates me from you.’…And may this morning in some way we grasp this idea…. We open the doors of the church now….”

  Off for another week’s travel, King returned by way of Cincinnati after a speech on Friday, May 8. He just missed President Johnson, whose huge entourage had landed in Georgia on another whirlwind poverty tour from Ohio down through Tennessee. Atlanta’s Mayor Ivan Allen presented Johnson with a gift of two newborn tiger cubs, named Lyndon and Lady Bird. With the notable exception of Richard Russell, Georgia’s major politicians attended a Friday breakfast sponsored by the state legislature, where they applauded not only the President’s homespun recollections of “my Georgia ancestors,” including Sheriff Jesse Johnson of nearby Henry County, and his invitation to join the “quest for a great society,” but also his straightforward appeal to pass the civil rights bill. “Justice also means justice among the races,” said Johnson, who reminded his audience that Americans “are a very small minority living in a world of 3 billion people, where we are outnumbered 17 to 1, and no one of us is fully free until all of us are free.”

  Cheering crowds lined every block of the route to the Atlanta airport so thickly that they held Johnson’s motorcade to walking speed for fifteen miles. At a noon rally in the poultry center of Gainesville, Georgia, Rep.Phil Landrum hailed Johnson as “the finest President the United States of America has ever had,” and a beaming Johnson kept asking if anyone had ever seen anything like the enthusiasm of the forty thousand people—roughly equal to the entire town population—who turned out to see him in Franklin D. Roosevelt Park. The New York Times saluted the “public triumph” of Johnson’s bold speeches in the South.

  On returning to Washington late that Friday afternoon, Johnson called his political director Lawrence O’Brien still giddy from the crowds. “I need two new hands!” he moaned happily. “My right one’s chewed up.…I made sixteen speeches and we had a million people. That’s a minimum. I think it’s two million, but the goddamn mean Republicans gave us a million. Today we looked up there and just as far as you could see…. Old Herman Talmadge got up after I made two civil rights speeches that he was present at, and said, ‘I just want to say that I have never seen as many people anywhere.’…” Then Johnson summoned reporters to the White House Rose Garden for an announcement on J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure at the FBI. As expected, he used the occasion of Hoover’s fortieth anniversary at the FBI to heap praise upon the first and only Director as “a household word…a hero to millions of decent citizens and an anathema to evil men.” Confounding speculation that he might replace Hoover when he turned seventy on New Year’s Day, the President told Hoover he had “just now signed an Executive Order exempting you from compulsory retirement for an indefinite period of time.” The advance retention of Hoover—at Johnson’s pleasure—kept reporters off balance with a display of the poverty crusader as crafty power politician.

  MARTIN LUTHER KING trailed Johnson to Washington for an appearance on the Sunday television talk show Face the Nation. Before leaving Atlanta, he spent much of Saturday with a rare and welcome overnight visitor from Boston. The kindly, gnomish Harold DeWolf positively doted on King as a former graduate student who had become famous in the service of theology. Since supervising King’s doctoral studies at Boston University a decade earlier, DeWolf had fallen somewhat out of touch during two year-long sabbaticals to Africa, where his son had been a Methodist missionary, but he welcomed King’s occasional post-midnight phone calls and the greetings of the King children, who called him “Uncle Harold.” After catching up, DeWolf promised to contact King’s new SCLC representative in New England, Virgil Wood, and offere
d “to place my less than youthful and rugged body on the line” in Alabama that summer, if King needed him for the Bevel-Nash voting campaign.

  Significantly, DeWolf also offered Boston University as a depository for King’s burgeoning personal papers. Death threats and hate mail alone overflowed boxes in King’s basement and office, as did speaking invitations, and DeWolf urged King to place his accumulating correspondence in a special division of the Boston University library that housed historic collections. Flattered but undecided, King replied that he had always intended to leave his papers to Morehouse, his alma mater in Atlanta. He confessed doubt, however, that any Negro institution in the South could afford to maintain a permanent research library—based partly on years of baleful notices that Morehouse was on the verge of insolvency. King worried also about the political vulnerability of the college, as manifested in an awkward point of personal contention with his family mentor, Benjamin Mays.

  In spite of pleas from Daddy King, a thirty-year trustee, Morehouse President Mays had refused for several years to put the younger King’s name forward as a candidate for the Morehouse board. His pained explanation to both Kings was that some board members, both Negro and white, resisted King as a poor role model because he had gone to jail so often, or as a controversial figure who would hurt Morehouse fund-raising among large donors. Therefore, Mays said, he avoided the issue to spare the grave public embarrassment of having King elected by anything less than a unanimous vote. While King tried to be understanding—he admired Mays and appreciated the toll upon him of perpetual begging for college funds—his keen nose for rationalization made the board policy seem weak and insulting. King hesitated, sending Mays a thousand-dollar donation from a Life magazine article fee. (The unsolicited gift “amazes me,” Mays wrote King. “I wish your loyalty and devotion to Morehouse were contagious….”) As for DeWolf, King asked for time to evaluate Boston University’s offer. Rushing off to Washington after his daughter Yoki’s ballet recital on Saturday night, May 9, he left his old professor to preach for him the next morning at Ebenezer.

  Reporters on Face the Nation pressed King to admit that public opinion had turned against nonviolent demonstrations, but they also reminded him that he had promised to mount “massive” demonstrations in 1964, especially if a Senate filibuster endangered the civil rights bill. “Where is the direct action?” prodded Paul Niven of CBS. Why the delay? King responded that signs of a backlash confirmed race as “a national problem,” and he worried that the Republicans might turn into a new “white man’s party,” which he said would be “tragic for the Republican party as well as tragic for the nation.” He maintained that demonstrations still could “mobilize the forces of good will,” and cited polls showing heavy majority support for the civil rights bill, but he equivocated about a time or place. In fact, King seemed relieved to hear questions about the newspaper reports that he coddled Communists. “I am very happy that this question came up,” he replied, calling it “unfortunate that such a great man as Mr. Hoover allowed himself to aid and abet the racists….”

  The comments about Hoover worsened animosities already stewing deep within the government. On Friday, fortified by President Johnson’s affirmation of Hoover, Deke DeLoach had pushed for Justice Department clearance of a new public warning about Communism in the civil rights movement. He and the department’s press secretary, Edwin Guthman, dueled again over semantics, with DeLoach calling fact what Guthman defined as gratuitous speculation. When Guthman proposed to add a balancing statement that any Communist infiltration of the movement “should not distract us from the fact that discrimination does exist,” DeLoach refused on the ground that Director Hoover never stooped to “philosophize.” After King reprimanded Hoover on national television on Sunday, the clearance negotiations escalated to a catfight. DeLoach accused the Justice Department of trying to “suppress” Hoover’s national security warning. Guthman, after emergency consultations with Burke Marshall and Supreme Court Justice Byron White, among others, decided to fight back by imitating DeLoach’s tactic of constructing a bureaucratic “fact base” from his own memos on every significant conversation. Accordingly, Guthman quickly sent the FBI a “memcon” (memorandum of conversation) emphasizing his side of the clearance debate, which left DeLoach howling with indignation. “Obviously, Guthman is skeptical of the solidity of his position,” DeLoach wrote in his own memcon, “and consequently desires to make himself look as good as possible in the record….” Meanwhile, Robert Kennedy sent Hoover what amounted to a forlorn peace feeler on May 12: “In the past few months I have not had the pleasure of associating with you as closely as formerly.” Within a week, Guthman and DeLoach would agree to suspend further clearance talks as pointless.

  FOR PRESIDENT JOHNSON, the FBI squabble remained among background matters finessed or contained through May. In Congress, Johnson weathered the annual ritual of raising the authorized national debt ceiling—this time just above $312 billion, before a mandated rollback to $309 billion would have halted government payments. He also resisted Rep. Jamie Whitten’s nettlesome demand that the Pentagon compensate Mississippi, rather than vice versa, for military operations supporting James Meredith’s right to integrate the state university in 1962. (Whitten pressed claims for damaged runways and trampled grass, plus the cost of relocating a football game after the Army “usurped” latrines at Ole Miss.) More delicately, Johnson steered a course in the House between seniority rights and festering resentment against Adam Clayton Powell, who, shortly after his first criminal contempt citation for refusal to pay assessed libel damages to Esther James, agreed to let the popular white Southerner, Rep. Phil Landrum, sponsor the revised anti-poverty legislation. As compensation for his support in the upcoming election, Powell presented the Johnson campaign with what Lawrence O’Brien privately called “a laundry list a yard long.” “Christ,” O’Brien told Johnson, “all he wants is for the federal government to finance the [proposed] Hotel 2400 [in New York], to wipe out the $47,000 indebtedness to Internal Revenue, to get that judge to drop any threats of arrest, and a few other things.” O’Brien assured the President that he and Louis Martin, the Democratic Party’s expert on minority affairs, would bargain carefully with Powell, outside the White House.

  In foreign affairs, Johnson coped with whispers that he was not sophisticated enough to understand fundamental changes in the world order, such as the controversial evidence of enmity between Communist China and the Soviet Union. With Mao Tse-tung calling Soviet Premier Khrushchev a bourgeois traitor “even more stupid than the Americans,” and Khrushchev calling Mao a rotting Trotskyite—two world leaders opened doubts to the accepted theory that Communists were distinctive by nature, synchronized in ideological harness and immune to ordinary human divisions. Over lingering fears that the quarrel was a Communist ruse, Time recognized “The Communist Split” in a careful cover story advising that Americans, who “for many years underestimated the importance of the split, should not now overestimate it.” As president, Johnson offered guarded hope for dealing with Communists. When India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru died that month, he called upon world powers to negotiate for peace in the void left by the preeminent Cold War neutralist.

  At the end of his first half year in the White House, the New York Times declared that “Mr. Johnson has left an indelible imprint on American political lore.” In a glowing profile of a president who “stood high in all the popularity polls, dominated the national political outlook, and was heavily favored to win the election,” the Times questioned Johnson’s mastery only in regard to the lingering dangers of Vietnam and race relations: “the two major problems that disturbed the last year of Mr. Kennedy’s life.”

  News stories almost invariably referred to Vietnam as a nasty little war in a far-off place. Six American soldiers were killed there in April, raising the cumulative U.S. death toll since 1961 to 220. “Opposing forces are known as Viet Cong,” advised a war primer in U.S. News & World Report, which noted that
the Vietnamese Communists had defeated a French army of nearly half a million soldiers. “French generals, however, misunderstood the nature of the conflict,” said the article, emphasizing that Americans must learn to build political support among Vietnamese peasants in the midst of guerrilla combat. As a harbinger of ground-level difficulties for Americans in telling friend from foe, an April 1964 television special discovered a U.S. soldier who pinned to his hat a peculiar but handy Vietnam slogan, “Sorry About That.” The strategic imperative was clearer in the abstract, especially to U.S. officials who saw the southern part of Vietnam as a tripwire of global war. “Loss of this area would be a catastrophe,” proclaimed Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, “and would make a lot of Americans think that we’d better resign from the human race, so to speak, and fall back on a fortress America and gird ourselves for a fight with guided missiles.”

  Lodge spoke with the weight of an established Republican presidential candidate, having defeated Barry Goldwater in the New Hampshire primary despite his handicap as an undeclared write-in candidate. From his post in Saigon, Lodge had campaigned instead for the war partnership with South Vietnam—touring the provinces with Defense Secretary McNamara that March, jointly holding aloft the arm of the anointed General Nguyen Khanh, who had overthrown the generals who overthrew President Diem in the November coup. After Vietcong demolition teams nearly assassinated McNamara on his next visit in May, he and Lodge curtailed American-style gestures of public solidarity to conduct their field inspections under bulletproof cloaks. By then, the CIA had secretly reported a “tide of deterioration” against the South Vietnamese allies, and the wispy North Vietnamese president, Ho Chi Minh, likened the United States to a fox with its hind legs caught in a trap, who “by still trying to jump around is doing his best to get his front legs caught as well.”