Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  President Johnson was hosting thirty Democratic governors. Four strays—McKeithen of Louisiana, Orval Faubus of Arkansas, Johnson of Mississippi, and Wallace of Alabama—boycotted the sendoff to Atlantic City, and McKeithen, who had just resigned as head of the Louisiana delegation, was calling for a general walkout if the convention unseated regulars from sister states. On this issue, the nationally televised Mississippi hearing sounded a fire bell beneath the Washington conference, which Governor John Connally of Texas described to reporters as “a very enjoyable and very delightful meeting.” President Johnson mounted a diversion with the cooperation of news outlets massed on alert for revelation of his vice presidential choice. He stepped before White House correspondents, with several governors in tow, and stretched the moment with small news and a sympathetic reference to Connally—still suffering from rifle wounds inflicted in the Dallas motorcade—noting that “on this day nine months ago at very nearly this same hour in the afternoon, the duties of this office were thrust upon me by a terrible moment in our national history.” The President ducked questions and withdrew to the governors’ conclave in the East Room, leaving reporters with material for unrequited headlines: “Johnson Still Silent About Running Mate.”

  Knocked off camera, the Atlantic City hearing concluded with four more MFDP witnesses. After Rita Schwerner, for whom a section of spectators stood in silent tribute, Rauh called the national leaders James Farmer of CORE and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, then King for a summary exhortation. “I say to you that any party in the world should be proud to have a delegation such as this seated in their midst,” said King. “For it is in these saints in ordinary walks of life that the true spirit of democracy finds its most profound and abiding expression.” With a glance to the Mississippi regulars at the opposite table, he bemoaned a state party that since the last Democratic convention had forced the dispatch of twenty thousand troops before it yielded “a single Negro into a state university,” and was “already pledged to defy the candidate and platform of this great national body.” King testified that Mississippi was “no mean issue” in world affairs—not “for all the disfranchised millions of this earth, whether they be in Mississippi or Alabama, behind the Iron Curtain, floundering in the mire of South African apartheid, or freedom-seeking persons in Cuba who have now gone three years without election. Recognition of the Freedom Democratic Party would say to them that somewhere in this world there is a nation that cares about justice….”

  Then came the regular Mississippi Democrats for their hour, with mountains of evidence on standard election practice and their cries to be spared “a political cross.” If the convention seated ragtag “rump” challengers in place of the “lawful delegation,” declared State Senator E. K. Collins, “the party in Mississippi certainly will die.” Soon after, Chairman Lawrence finished all pending cases except Alabama and Mississippi, which he deferred because the politicking yielded no settlement strong enough to prevent an unseemly floor fight.

  AT 6:15 P.M., when Martin Luther King limped out of the hearing on a recently sprained ankle, surveillance agents radioed an SOS that yanked FBI technicians out of Room 1923 at the Claridge Hotel on Indiana Avenue, after they had wiretapped the two telephones but before they could install microphone bugs in the walls reserved for King. In the room directly below, SAC Leo Clark of the Bureau’s Atlantic City office had arranged a satellite branch of the hideaway command center in the old Post Office, where, with J. Edgar Hoover’s reluctant approval (“Lyndon is way out of line”), Assistant Director Deke DeLoach had thrown together a “special squad” of twenty-seven agents, a radio operator, two stenographers, and assorted informants. Secretly, apart from FBI security liaison with the Secret Service or local law enforcement, DeLoach pushed his squad on a mission to insure that nothing could occur in Atlantic City “to embarrass the President,” reporting personally to Walter Jenkins and Bill Moyers at the Pageant Motel.

  One agent with a mobile radio was permanently assigned to Jenkins. Several undercover agents posed as reporters on credentials supplied by NBC News, while others monitored wiretaps on the Atlantic Avenue storefront rented for the MFDP. Agents already knew that Bayard Rustin was telling King his sprained ankle was “the most fortunate thing to ever happen to you,” because it gave King an excuse to hobble out of town on crutches before President Johnson exerted his power. When he did, Rustin was predicting, many delegates professing support for the Mississippi challenge would “fall by the wayside.”

  Euphoria reigned for the moment among MFDP supporters. Jet reporter Larry Still described a tumultuous moving swarm around Fannie Lou Hamer, who “wiped the tears from her round, streaked face and sighed, ‘I felt just like I was telling it from the mountain. That’s why I like that song Go Tell It on the Mountain. I feel like I’m talking to the world.’” Indignant to learn that President Johnson had cut into her airtime, she was denouncing a plot when voices at the Gem Motel called out that television was showing film clips from the end of her testimony.

  After the first Negro had beat until he was exhausted, the State Highway Patrolman ordered the second Negro to take the blackjack. The second Negro began to beat and I began to work my feet, and the State Highway Patrolman ordered the first Negro who had beat to set on my feet to keep me from working my feet. I began to scream and one white man got up and began to beat me in my head and tell me to hush. One white man—my dress had worked up high, he walked over and pulled my dress down—and he pulled my dress back, back up.

  I was in jail when Medgar Evers was murdered.

  All of this is on account we want to register, to become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America….

  Evening news broadcasts delivered Hamer to larger audiences than Johnson had preempted in the afternoon. Atlantic City’s Western Union office reported 416 night telegrams supporting the MFDP, against only one for the regulars, and Rauh claimed that his “knockout” witnesses “won the Boardwalk.” Observing that President Johnson knew above all else how to count votes, he relished the bargaining ahead. “We won’t take any of those second-rate compromises,” Rauh told reporters Saturday night.

  Rauh did not disguise the compromise he preferred. Fully half the twenty-six major credentials contests cited in his written brief—dating back to 1836—had been settled by the simple formula of splitting the prize. His most treasured example was the Texas case of 1944, when New Deal loyalists, including young Congressman Lyndon Johnson, challenged the dominant Texas regulars over their refusal to endorse Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime reelection. Johnson had denounced the regular delegation as “Republicans who posed as Democrats” in an effort to “sabotage democracy,” and the convention had seated the rival Texans with half votes apiece.

  None of the precedent cases turned on racial imagery, however, which made the face of Fannie Lou Hamer doubly sensitive to Democrats on both sides. She gave the MFDP cause a moral urgency far above the esoteric record of warring local factions, but she also presented a daunting new symbol for the majority party of any state. “The thing is out of hand now!” Senator James Eastland squawked to President Johnson Saturday night. From his home in Mississippi, where he watched proceedings on television, Eastland despaired of selling the President’s offer to seat the all-white delegation in exchange for some veneer of party loyalty. (A mild statement of intention to support the Democratic nominees would do, said the President, even if they knew they would back Goldwater.) Eastland told Johnson that “to be perfectly frank,” the Mississippi party had nearly endorsed Goldwater already and that most delegates had not wanted to go to Atlantic City in the first place. The President objected that “poor ’ol Mississippi” was making it impossible for him to help his friends. “People oughtn’t to want to come and stay all night with you if they’re gonna bomb your house while they’re there,” he said, and joked with an edge about shutting off the cotton subsidy program. Even so, the best Eastland could secure was a vague promis
e from Governor Paul Johnson not to bring official “reprisals” against any Mississippi delegates who accepted the convention’s terms.

  On Sunday afternoon, Walter Jenkins notified the President that Chairman Lawrence of the Credentials Committee was about to entertain votes on a motion offensive to both sides: strong enough to make the South walk out, weak enough for Rauh to take a minority report to the convention floor. “I thought he was gonna procrastinate,” objected the President, after which Lawrence postponed the issue again. He appointed Minnesota attorney general Walter Mondale to head a five-delegate Mississippi subcommittee charged to resolve matters before Monday night’s opening gavel, and from seclusion, communicating with dozens of roving caucuses, Mondale’s group bickered to exhausted recess toward dawn.

  At midnight Sunday, a hundred supporters of the Mississippi movement set up a circular picket line outside Convention Hall, pledged to keep a perpetual vigil until the MFDP was seated. James Forman, Stokely Carmichael, and others huddled in the center with their walkie-talkies to orchestrate messages of song and silence among numbers that grew above three hundred the next day, when dignitaries began to drop by with speeches of encouragement. Among pickets still adjusting from the summer project to the neon lights of Atlantic City, many were further disoriented by Monday’s influx of 5,260 delegates and alternates who arrived for the main event festooned in political buttons and patriotic colors, often topped with LBJ souvenir cowboy hats. Bound for receptions, caucuses, lobster feasts around open beach fires, and parties given to eight hundred guests at a time in the Ventnor villa rented by hostess Perle Mesta, the delegates and observers swallowed up the Mississippi vigil among other spectacles along the jammed boardwalk pier, such as Dixie Blandy, the flagpole sitter, and a daredevil lady who plunged on horseback from a high tower into a vat of water.

  ON MONDAY MORNING, Democratic leaders had no better strategy than permanent delay—hoping the Mississippi question would “get lost in the business of the convention” behind a proposed statement from the Mondale subcommittee that the issues were “complex.” Walter Reuther praised the notion to Johnson as “your original idea,” but Johnson foresaw an impatient walkout spreading to eight or ten states. Into this White House quandary arrived a fresh telegram from Martin Luther King. “In the last few days,” King wired from Atlantic City, “the charged atmosphere of the convention has left the impression that only you are in a position to make clear the Democratic Party’s position…. Members of the Credentials Committee have made clear their wishes to follow you….”

  The President sought the advice of Richard Russell, who, like most prominent Southern Democrats, was staying home from the convention. Johnson complained that King had been pushing him to take a public position—“trying to get me in it every way he can”—and feared a plot. If King could force him to defend the white delegation, then the civil rights forces would have “an excuse to say I turned on the Negro,” and Robert Kennedy could swoop in to say Johnson was unfit for the Democratic nomination because he coddled Mississippi segregationists. “I think this is Bobby’s trap,” the President confided.

  Russell tried to calm his friend. He thought King at worst might “increase the backlash a little bit” and cut a million votes or so off Johnson’s victory margin. While he recommended that the President not dignify King’s wire with an answer, Russell said Johnson was not the first politician to be rattled by King’s political moves. “For example, in Atlanta, he can scare the hell out of [Mayor] Ivan Allen any time he wants to,” said Russell, “and rightly so…from a political standpoint.”

  No words could cure Johnson’s fears of racial emotion in combination with the Kennedy myth. He had already arranged to postpone until safely past the close of convention business two much anticipated events—a film tribute to the slain president, and Jacqueline Kennedy’s appearance at a marathon reception to shake the hand of each Democratic delegate. To guard against schemes to set loose floods of mourning that might sweep away normal arrangements, including his nomination, Johnson tasked Deke DeLoach and his undercover FBI squad to mount surveillance of Kennedy, their nominal boss, in tandem with King and the Negro challengers.

  On Monday, FBI agents circulated reports on a press interview in which Kennedy promised an unspecified statement on Tuesday, noting suspiciously that he “refused to elaborate” on its nature. Kennedy turned out merely to be teasing a Senate endorsement from Mayor Wagner of New York, but agents hinted that his Senate plans could disguise a presidential coup by spontaneous “draft” in Atlantic City. When Kennedy paid a courtesy visit to the delegation from West Virginia, a pivotal state for his brother’s nomination in 1960, observers sensed political electricity that made “applause hit like thunder.” Meanwhile, on Hoover’s orders, analysts dissected Sunday’s Washington Post story on Kennedy’s tenure as attorney general, which, because of a passage saying Kennedy had reformed some entrenched attitudes at the FBI, headquarters scornfully dismissed as “obviously another attempt by the Department to claim credit for FBI achievements in organized crime and civil rights, at the same time making a snide attack on Mr. Hoover and the Bureau—for political purposes.”

  The President’s worries were no secret to those who saw him regularly. On learning of Robert Kennedy’s discreet withdrawal that Monday as a Massachusetts delegate—the better to qualify as a candidate in New York—a secretary handed Johnson a note that borrowed Kennedy tactics for the Mississippi dilemma: suppose one or more of the loyal white regulars “got a virus,” and then chose Freedom Democrats as ad hoc substitutes (the way Kennedy had designated his sister-in-law Joan to substitute for him in the Massachusetts delegation)? By this scenario, Negro delegates would break the Mississippi color line by personal invitation rather than by the imposed dictum of the convention. President Johnson thought enough of the idea to make several calls to Atlantic City, but Walter Jenkins found no support in Southern delegations for Negro company. Besides, the few Mississippi regulars who might volunteer to withdraw were precisely the ones Johnson wanted to showcase for future conventions. He threw the crumpled note into his trash can.

  In Atlantic City, reporters noticed Martin Luther King and Senator Hubert Humphrey push separately through mid-Monday crowds into the Pageant Motel, known as the “convention White House.” Safely removed to a quiet suite with Bob Moses and some dozen MFDP negotiators, Humphrey passionately advocated the convention’s three-part settlement offer. First, as a condition of being seated, each Mississippi regular delegate must pledge support for the Democratic candidate and the party’s pro-civil rights platform, which most were expected to refuse. (The Credentials Committee had just voted to require a similar pledge from the Alabama delegation.) Second, the formal call to future conventions would give notice of disqualification for segregationist creed or practice, and third, the freedom delegation would be welcome in Atlantic City as nonvoting guests. To objections that MFDP delegates should have at least those seats vacated by disloyal regulars, Humphrey swerved uncomfortably from alleged deficiencies in the MFDP’s selection process to direct personal appeal. He said the President was testing them all in the battle against Goldwater. Without revealing his direct and indirect orders from the White House,* Humphrey said he was given to understand that his own chance to be nominated for vice president depended on his ability to prevent floor fights over Mississippi, which in turn demanded superhuman forbearance from the Freedom Democrats. He pleaded with them to stop pushing for seats.

  Fannie Lou Hamer confessed awe of Humphrey before shaming him like a disappointed mother. “Senator Humphrey, I been praying about you, and I been thinking about you, and you’re a good man,” she said. “The trouble is, you’re afraid to do what you know is right.” In tears, Humphrey protested that his commitment to civil rights was long-standing. Hamer cried, too, saying she was going to pray further over him. Rauh and others, including Allard Lowenstein among the MFDP legal advisers, made peacemaking suggestions until Humphrey objected to the presence
of Rep. Edith Green of Oregon, who was fighting White House direction on the Credentials Committee. She took offense, which allowed the stalemate to break up on procedural jealousies.

  Humphrey sneaked away with Walter Jenkins to report his frustration. “I walked into the lion’s den,” he told the President. “I listened patiently. I argued fervently. I used up all the heartstrings that I had.” Johnson put Clark Clifford on an extension phone to listen. Walter Jenkins said Edith Green claimed a surplus of ten votes to force a floor fight on her plan to split the Mississippi votes. He said some members of the committee were growing restive because of hair appointments and other pressing needs. Johnson wondered if they realized that they might have to hold up the entire convention to avoid a roll call.

  Down the elevator and through the lobby, the negotiators pushed into a throng of reporters that merged with an incoming crowd around Credentials Committee chairman David Lawrence. Thrown together in the center, Lawrence and Joseph Rauh parried each other’s questions about that night’s opening session (“What do you want to do?” “Well, what do you want to do?”), until snickering from the cameramen prompted Rauh to pat his briefcase and say that if Lawrence went before the whole convention with the current offer to Mississippi, he had the votes to bring the MFDP alternative to the floor. If so, Lawrence replied, the Credentials Committee would put off its decision yet another day. Rather than call attention to the Mississippi delinquency, he would open the convention without certifying any delegates at all.

  Lawrence broke away to deal with troubles over Alabama. Only thirteen of fifty-one Alabama delegates and alternates appeared before him to sign pledges of personal support for the Democratic ticket. These tokens of unity—required to console the national party for George Wallace’s blatant apostasy—so offended the unsigned delegates that they shoved their way through credentials checkpoints for the opening session Monday night, past guards specially alerted to prevent their entry. None other than Bull Connor of Birmingham led the crashers into the Convention Hall seats reserved for Alabama, where fratricidal resentments broke out. Some of the signers tried to evict the nonsigners, while others wanted to retract their own loyalty pledges. “This is as embarrassing as all hell,” mourned one Alabaman; another shouted, “I hope the whole damn state goes Republican!”