Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  In Washington, exactly twelve time zones behind Vietnam on the clock, aides rushed a crisis report into President Johnson’s bedroom before dawn, and the government’s top security officials debated their concerted response through most of Sunday. One surface fact stood clear: the United States must treat the incident as an unprovoked attack upon a flagship in international waters. U.S. leaders genuinely puzzled over what could have motivated the North Vietnamese to break from covert hostilities to open naval combat, where the American military advantage was most pronounced. The one-sided result—zero American casualties, no material damage to the Maddox—allowed President Johnson to act with restraint on his hunch that an isolated North Vietnamese commander may have attacked without authority. He ordered the Maddox to resume its mission with a second destroyer at escort, issued stern notes of warning against repeat violations, and, in his first use of the Kennedy “hot line” to Moscow, advised Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to instruct his North Vietnamese allies on the rules of engagement.

  In overnight cables from Saigon, Ambassador Maxwell Taylor objected to the policy as too weak, stating that the lack of robust military retaliation would deflate America’s worldwide prestige by signaling “that the U.S. flinches from direct confrontation with the North Vietnamese.” Independently, the President received warnings on the political side from his Texas friend Robert Anderson, Eisenhower’s former Treasury secretary, who called to report on his efforts to form a Citizens for Johnson campaign committee. Wary of Goldwater, Anderson urged the President to “make it look like a very firm stand” on the previous day’s gunboat battle. “You’re gonna be running against a man, who’s a wild man,” said Anderson, “and if he can show any lack of firmness…this fella’s gonna play all the angles.”

  Johnson replied that the American response had been superior, especially since he thought the North Vietnamese were trying to stop the secret commando attacks. “What happened was, we had been playin’ around up there,” he told Anderson, “and they came out, gave us a warning, and we knocked hell out of them.”

  “That’s the best thing in the world you can do,” said Anderson, but he recommended “a little emphasis” on the firmness, because Goldwater might say, “‘I would have knocked them off the moon.’”

  A few minutes later, Johnson discussed with Defense Secretary McNamara alarming rumors that Jacqueline Kennedy would return from Italy to make her first public appearance since the assassination at the Democratic convention, which might set off an emotional stampede to nominate Robert Kennedy. McNamara said he did not believe she wanted to, and hoped she would stay away, then turned to plans to brief congressional leaders on the Tonkin Gulf incidents. The President, citing Anderson, instructed him to “be firm as hell without saying something dangerous.”

  At McNamara’s suggestion, President Johnson clarified his course late Monday morning. Gathering the press corps into his office without notice, he explained that Navy commanders were to meet any renewed threat off the coast of North Vietnam “not only with the objective of driving off the attack force but of destroying them.” Five minutes later, having dismissed the reporters with the makings for dramatic headlines, the President resumed a deliberately tranquil White House schedule: a bill signing on land transfers in Minnesota, a statement of national hopes for the International Hydrological Decade, and a speech to the editors of America’s foreign language newspapers, who made him an honorary member of the Chinese Historical Society and gave him an autographed copy of the Hungarian weekly, Az Ember.

  IN FLORIDA, nine male clergy maintained their own tenuous calm as they answered an unexpected summons. One by one, rabbis and Protestant ministers converged from distant home states at the Tallahassee airport where their ecumenical bus journey, inspired by the original Freedom Rides, had ended with arrest in 1961. Some defendants had nursed hopes of being spared even after the U.S. Supreme Court sent their appeal back to the Florida courts for jurisdictional review. They doubted that Florida authorities wanted to jail religious leaders on a dusty conviction now outdated by law—for seeking an interracial meal at the airport cafe—but on Monday, August 3, Judge John Rudd sent them off to the doggedly segregated Leon County jail for sixty days.

  Stanford professor Robert McAfee Brown, an author and theologian of national reputation, trimmed the grass edge of Tallahassee roadways with a hoe, while AME Rev. John Collier of Newark stacked bricks on the Negro work crew. In the Negro cell block, drunks and thieves among the regular prisoners treated Collier and two fellow preachers shyly as celebrity heroes, whereas white inmates more often reviled the six strange clergy in their midst. One irate convict set fire to the mattress of Rabbi Martin Freedman. Outside, a defense lawyer tracked down the nearest federal judge, G. Harrold Carswell, who rebuffed a petition for writ of habeas corpus with an invitation to check back with him in a month. Inside, the Protestants used their allotted phone calls to talk with their wives; one of the rabbis notified a White House office of his intention to refuse all food behind bars.

  TOP OFFICIALS in Washington were preoccupied Tuesday morning with warnings of renewed battle near the South China Sea. It was night in Asia, and Secretary McNamara warned the President that “this ship could be attacked tonight.” When Johnson expressed a wish to have targets “already picked out” for retaliation if there were a second incident, McNamara said he and McGeorge Bundy were doing precisely that for the midday security meeting, so that the United States could “move against North Vietnam in the event this attack takes place in the next six to nine hours.” An hour later, McNamara notified the President of a message that Captain Herrick had sighted “two unidentified vessels and three unidentified prop aircraft.”

  Naval commanders, having rejected a proposal to ease back on new OPLAN 34A commando attacks on Monday, denied Herrick’s request to monitor them from safer waters, and ordered him instead to hold a tight legal course near the coast and to treat North Vietnamese vessels “as belligerents from first detection.” On radar and intelligence warnings of a trap, Herrick put the Maddox and C. Turner Joy into evasive maneuvers heading toward the Chinese island of Hainan. His radio alarms, which scrambled warplanes this time from the Constellation as well as Ticonderoga, chronicled a naval engagement until nearly noon on Tuesday, Washington time. At 1:27 P.M., shortly after President Johnson dispatched his top security officials to prepare retaliatory airstrikes against the North Vietnamese mainland, Herrick flashed a message of second thoughts: “…many reported contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful. Freak weather effects on radar and overeager sonar men may have accounted for many reports. No actual visual sightings by Maddox.” This caution, from a commander whose men had blasted on-screen blips from a moonless dark fog of ocean squalls and fifteen-foot swells, landed in the back channels of an American capital already surging toward the afternoon news deadlines on adrenaline and rumors of war. From the Pacific command in Hawaii, Admiral Ulysses Sharp reassured colleagues that the aggression was real and Herrick’s misgivings a mirage, not vice versa. Herrick concurred an hour later, before dawn in the gulf, in a strangely worded message that reverified the North Vietnamese attack with a tinge of endorsement: “Certain that original ambush was bona-fide.”

  IT WAS MID-AFTERNOON Tuesday in Neshoba County, Mississippi. The air temperature broiled at 106 degrees as sudden swarms of blowflies caused the Caterpillar dragline operator to cease excavations in the Olen Burrage dam. Teams of FBI agents dug the fourteen-foot-deep pit in short shifts, some puffing strong cigars to dilute the cloud of decay. With handheld garden tools, they carefully chipped impacted clay from what became two hours later the unearthed sculpture of a shirtless man pitched facedown behind outstretched arms, like a diver. The agents wrapped the hands in plastic bags, and one of them extracted from the left rear pocket a billfold containing Mickey Schwerner’s draft card. By cryptic code, prearranged to thwart eavesdropping Mississippi authorities, Inspector Sullivan soon notified FBI headquarters of the discovery. “We’ve
uncapped one oil well,” he said.

  During the hours of painstaking exhumation, which soon revealed a second form partially beneath the first, President Johnson reconvened his National Security Council. Robert McNamara detailed the military options for swift retaliation against North Vietnam, and addressed the unnerving contradictions in the morning battle reports. Under questioning from McNamara himself, distant theater commanders, including Admiral Sharp, had conceded a “slight possibility” that the American crews only imagined themselves under fire; pilots returning to Tonkin Gulf carriers reported no sight of vessels other than the two U.S. destroyers. Secure transpacific calls were routed through the Pentagon to McNamara at the White House for vigorous cross-examination on remedial facts. Within days, for bracing proof that at least the first reported attack had been real, McNamara would retrieve to his office the sole 50-caliber shell fragment recovered Sunday from the deck of the Maddox, and President Johnson would lament that on Tuesday “those dumb stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish.”*

  Innocent of doubt, while news outlets compiled dramatic secondhand accounts of the day’s battle,† sixteen congressional leaders gathered in the White House Cabinet Room to answer North Vietnam’s disregard for the warning Johnson laid down so publicly the day before. Flanked by McNamara, Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and CIA Director John McCone, the President greeted them at 6:45 P.M. with a stern reminder on the dangers of loose lips. Reporters were trailing every congressional movement or consultation, he noted ominously, and any disclosure of military developments put vulnerable soldiers more at risk. “Some of our boys are floating around in the water,” said Johnson.

  “I did not tell a damn person,” protested House Republican leader Charles Halleck. Maybe not, Johnson replied, but crisis information was “on both tickers anyway.” In response to briefings under pledge of secrecy, House Speaker John McCormack declared that the United States must meet the deliberate act of war by North Vietnam. Secretary McNamara rebutted one representative who quibbled that the ammunition on board the Maddox and C. Turner Joy had not been “powerful enough to do the job.” Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield worried out loud that North Vietnam, though a “third-rate state” of marginal interest to any of the great powers, was so determined that it might cost “a lot of lives to mow them down.” Otherwise, leaders from both political parties rallied when Johnson—saying, “I think I know what the reaction would be if we tucked our tails”—proposed limited airstrikes against North Vietnam. Three senators thought the word “limited” sounded too mild.

  Final authorization for airstrikes flashed from Washington to carriers in the Tonkin Gulf at 7:22 P.M., and at 8:01 Walter Jenkins interrupted the congressional war council with word from Deke DeLoach that Sullivan’s FBI team had just located all three disappeared bodies in Mississippi. To hear advance word from the President on the twin crises, frenzied relays of telephone and radio locators fetched two men ashore from vacation fishing trips: Mississippi Governor Paul Johnson to a dock at Ocean Springs on the Gulf of Mexico, and Republican nominee Barry Goldwater to the Balboa Bay Club in Newport Beach, California. That done, the President preempted the three television networks at 11:34 P.M. He stressed forbearance—“We still seek no wider war”—and the solemn responsibility of ordering “even limited military action by forces whose strength is as vast and as awesome as those of the United States.” CBS correspondent Dan Rather concluded that Johnson’s address on his first foreign policy crisis climaxed “a day of tension here at the White House.”

  NAVY PILOT Everett Alvarez, shot down at tree altitude during one of sixty-four authorized bombing sorties over North Vietnam, survived a fractured back to become the first POW and first officially acknowledged casualty of the looming American war. In Meridian, Mississippi, folksinger Pete Seeger used movement songs to calm panic over the grim discovery at the Burrage dam, urging the nightly mass meeting to let mortal awareness lift up the inner force of the words. By contrast, angry vindication whipped through the mass meeting in Greenwood, which bristled against assorted foes and Uncle Toms who had doubted the movement. “From now on,” shouted Stokely Carmichael, “we’re gonna check on niggers who ain’t doin’ right.” Informed by COFO staff that local Negroes were agitating for armed self-defense, Carmichael gravely replied, “We can only control them by joining them.” He went off to notify Bob Moses by telephone of a policy change on nonviolence, only to return somewhat subdued with word that the staff should stick with the summer project. In Neshoba County, definitive evidence of murder obliged Sullivan’s FBI agents to share criminal jurisdiction with prime suspects such as Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price. At 1:14 A.M. Washington time, after lending a hand with the body bags under close scrutiny, Price escorted a hearse caravan from the Burrage farm to Jackson for autopsies.

  Stokely Carmichael went to jail on Wednesday as a compromise between rebellion and the summer project’s enveloping restraint. He joined Silas McGhee and others bent on claiming rights to eat lunch in a Greenwood cafe, but the cathartic demonstration displaced the movement’s quieter political work and aroused hostility. Mobs guarded defiantly segregated facilities including the former town swimming pool—now operated by the local Kiwanis Club to dodge the civil rights law—and authorities cut electric power to the city grid that supplied COFO headquarters. Staff members holed up behind nonviolent sentries. “We had to call Washington to have our lights turned on,” wrote volunteer Sally Belfrage.

  At the first of several memorial services for the three murder victims, Bob Moses held aloft a Mississippi newspaper with a large headline from President Johnson’s toughening clarification on Monday—“Lyndon Gives Navy Shoot-to-Kill Order.” He asked how a country that declined to protect civil rights workers from clear and evil designs could galvanize so readily to do violence in Asia. It seemed to him partly a matter of vision. The country was largely blind to the movement’s reality until it perceived Mississippi through the eyes of summer volunteers. Through whose eyes did it see Vietnam? Moses circled with questions: was the freedom their three friends died for in Mississippi the same freedom the United States was fighting for in Vietnam?

  ON THURSDAY, AUGUST 6—a week after the delivery of the FBI birthday cake—James Lackey, manager of a gasoline station in Athens, Georgia, conceded that he had fudged some details of his whereabouts on the night of the Lemuel Penn murder. He and Cecil Myers indeed had intended to be home from Klan patrol by midnight, as they promised when dropping Cecil’s wife, Ruth, and her three sons off at the Lackey home after supper, but in fact they did not return until dawn. “I raised the roof,” Lackey’s wife, Loretta, told FBI agents in a separate statement, “asking where they had been all night…& why they hadn’t called.” The only answer she got was a cocked pistol in her face from a testy Cecil Myers—“I’ve killed one. Two won’t make no difference,” she quoted him—and his refusal to apologize had festered between the families ever since.

  Shortly after James Lackey admitted driving for Myers and Howard Sims—“Sims and Myers kept insisting that I follow the car from Washington…I had no idea that they would really shoot the Negro”—Herbert Guest claimed a more passive role, saying he had been present when the Klan trio had departed from the Guest Garage after unknown quarry and had questioned them following their return about whether they had used his shotgun. Thursday night, on the arrest of Myers, Sims, Lackey, and Guest as conspirators, Georgia Governor Carl Sanders issued a telling statement of balanced regret: “Further, if they are held responsible, I want to extend my sympathy to their families, the same as I did to that of the murdered man, because it will be those families who will have to bear the burden of this nonsensible act.”

  At FBI headquarters, Deke DeLoach and his supervisors shared satisfaction that “for the second successive evening a Bureau accomplishment highlighted all newscasts.” The Penn case attracted a tiny fraction of the news attention to Mississippi’s triple murder, but public relations machinery made
sure to arrange “exclusive credit to the FBI” and “prominent mention” of Director J. Edgar Hoover himself. Supervisors compiled imposing statistics to describe the feats of the Penn task force: 50,611 investigative miles driven by Bureau vehicles, 4,307 clerical hours worked, of which 1,372 were overtime. Meanwhile, other FBI officials searched diligently for ways to circumvent the Supreme Court’s crippling Screws precedent,* which all but blocked federal jurisdiction in civil rights cases by requiring proof of “a specific intent to deprive a person of a federal right.” Review of the Penn case confessions yielded ordinary gutter sentiments—“I am going to kill me a nigger”—far beneath the Screws standard of an expressly anti-constitutional motive. The prospect of a halfhearted or aborted state prosecution was so vexing that President Johnson himself made futile suggestions about how to construe the Penn murder as a federal crime. “I think a soldier in uniform ought to have something to do with it,” he said. “Doesn’t it?”