Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  Nearby in giant Convention Hall, the Mississippi section remained empty. Convention officials provided the contending delegations with spectator tickets for the balcony, pending settlement of the credentials dispute, but most of the regulars stayed in their hotel. (In his hotel lobby, informed by veteran political reporter Bill Minor that E. W. Steptoe sent regards from the MFDP delegation, an Amite County regular replied with a jovial edge that Steptoe was alive only because “he owes me $400 and I wouldn’t let anybody kill him.”) Outside Convention Hall, MFDP delegates walked the singing picket line while Joseph Rauh and allied delegates frantically shored up support for a credentials floor vote, beating back one panic that Rauh had lost control of his own District of Columbia delegation.

  MONDAY EVENING, the President betrayed little of his depressed mood when James Reston pressed him for an off-the-record hint about his vice presidential choice. Reston argued that the Times needed a head start to prepare stories on the right man “so that it looks right in the libraries twenty years from now.” Johnson denied that he had chosen Humphrey or anyone else, and pretended to be out of touch: “How is the convention going?…The platform, is it out yet?…I haven’t seen it.” Offhandedly, he asked whether it made any difference “what happens on the Mississippi thing,” and Reston replied that it was of minor interest next to the vice presidency. “I don’t really have the impression that it’s all that important,” he said. “Nobody’s got a temperature about it around here except a few people like Rauh, who, you know, he’s always got a sweat about this question.”

  Johnson, huddled with Clark Clifford and Abe Fortas, privately mourned his inability to prevent a party-splitting roll call on Mississippi. “They are just distressed beyond words,” he said candidly when UAW president Walter Reuther called from Michigan a few minutes after Reston. Johnson raged against those who would expose his powerlessness. “I think the Negro is going back to Reconstruction,” he told Reuther. “…They’re gonna set themselves back a hundred years….” Reuther agreed. Alarmed, he said he had a charter plane standing by, and promised to break away from his own emergency—negotiations on strike deadline for 550,000 automobile workers—and fly into Atlantic City before dawn.

  Retiring to their White House bedroom, Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson watched the Monday night ceremonies while eating dinner off trays with houseguests John and Elaine Steinbeck.* They saw nothing but praise for Johnson. Senator John Pastore of Rhode Island lifted Convention Hall repeatedly to standing cheers with a keynote speech of partisan passion (Life called it “Full Fiery Throttle”), which raised speculation about Pastore himself as a new long shot for vice president. Still, Johnson remained lost in his own worries. Groping for a defensible public stance on the imminent Mississippi roll call, he asked his companions how he could justify resistance to the Freedom Democrats. “I am not going to bend to emotionalism,” his wife coached him to say. “I don’t want this convention to do so either. The election is not worth that.” Jack Valenti drafted similar language: “It isn’t a matter of what our emotions want, it is a matter of what the law demands.”

  The President ignored Tuesday morning’s headlines from the convention (“Unbroken Harmony,” reported the Times front page). When party chairman John Bailey tried to congratulate him for the “good start” in Atlantic City, Johnson glumly predicted that the Mississippi roll call must come that night and that “every one of those big states will have to go with the Negroes.” Bailey confirmed that his native New England delegations would likely vote three to one for the MFDP minority report (“they don’t like Mississippi”). Johnson said the victorious Negro coalition was digging its own grave. “I think they’re bigger than the President this morning,” he told Bailey, “and I think it’s just water on Goldwater’s paddle.”

  He disclosed a new plan that morning to his Texas rancher friend, Judge A. W. Moursund. When George Reedy called for instructions before the midday press briefing, Johnson read to him from a statement in progress—the first one drafted by his own hand in twenty years—announcing his intention not to run.* He told Reedy the convention could nominate “a new and fresh fellow.” His voice trailed off.

  Reedy let the silence hang. “This would throw the nation in quite an uproar, sir,” he said quietly.

  The President called Walter Jenkins in Atlantic City. “If anybody’s entitled to know, you are,” he said. He repeated his suspicion that the MFDP was “born in the Justice Department” as a creature of Robert Kennedy. “I don’t believe there’ll be many attacks on the orders I issued on Tonkin Gulf if I’m not a candidate,” said Johnson. He tearfully described fears of a breakdown. “I don’t want to be in this place like Wilson,” he said, “and I do not believe I can physically and mentally carry the responsibilities of the bomb and the world and the nigras and the South and so forth.”† When Jenkins gently doubted he would go through with it, the President insisted that he would—sometime after his foreign policy lunch with McNamara and Rusk.

  Lady Bird Johnson endured all through Tuesday the depressed side of her husband’s distemper—wide-eyed silence under the covers for naps, shades drawn from the daylight. “I do not remember hours I ever found harder,” she would write in her memoirs, and at the time she wrote out for him her anguished appeal: “Beloved—You are as brave a man as Harry Truman—or FDR—or Lincoln. You can go on to find some peace, some achievement amidst all the pain…. To step out now would be wrong for your country, and I see nothing but a lonely wasteland for your future. Your friends would be frozen in embarrassed silence and your enemies jeering…. I know it’s only your choice…. I love you always, Bird.”

  EVERYONE ELSE prepared blindly for the decisive crunch in Atlantic City. DeLoach delivered Tuesday morning intelligence on Martin Luther King’s last-minute lobbying schedule. The FBI wiretaps picked up frantic consultations with MFDP workers who wanted King to call the governors of New Hampshire, Alaska, and Hawaii, among others, plus Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, and who arranged for King to address the full New York and California caucuses. DeLoach also reported signs that White House counterpressure against the MFDP was effective: wiretaps overheard a delegate from Washington state apologize to King, saying “people who were previously friendly are getting harder to find.”

  At a midday mass meeting, exhausted MFDP partisans rallied for a last push before the evening session. Above snappish arguments rose general agreement to hold out for their fallback position of shared seats with the regulars. Joseph Rauh, charged to bargain for nothing less, was intercepted outside the Credentials Committee with a peremptory message to call Walter Reuther. “The convention has decided,” Reuther told him sharply. He disclosed two new concessions: Aaron Henry and Edwin King of the MFDP would be seated as voting delegates at large, and the party would establish a special commission to enforce nondiscrimination standards for the 1968 convention. Reuther emphasized that Johnson was holding out for a basic party loyalty oath for Mississippi as well as Alabama; no delegate could vote without signing one. “This is a tremendous victory,” he said. “I want you to go in there and accept it.” If he refused, Reuther promised to terminate Rauh’s employment as Washington counsel for the United Auto Workers.

  To reporters who clamored around his Convention Hall pay phone, Rauh lied that the caller had been “a pretty girl.” He entered the committee room, verified that Reuther’s new compromise was on the table, then began to agitate for a recess so that he could consult his MFDP clients. Their leaders were tucked away in the bedroom of Hubert Humphrey’s suite at the Pageant Motel, where Reuther concentrated his argument on Martin Luther King. “Your funding is on the line,” he said sharply. “The kind of money you got from us in Birmingham is there again for Mississippi, but you’ve got to help us and we’ve got to help Johnson.”

  King deferred to Moses, Aaron Henry, and Edwin King, who huddled across the bed from Humphrey and Bayard Rustin. Their skeptical questions about the overall fairness of the compromise raised resentments on
its fine points. The two proposed at-large delegates, for instance, would raise the official number of convention seats from 2,316 to 2,318. Humphrey defended this as an extraordinary concession to the Freedom Democrats, on par with expanding the size of Congress, but it also guaranteed that MFDP delegates would sit outside the Mississippi section and, technically, represent no one in Mississippi. Moses bridled when Reuther complained that Negroes who got the vote often misused it to elect irresponsible people.

  Edwin King suggested that if there must be only two at-large delegates, he would withdraw in favor of one of the many farmworkers and nonprofessionals. Bayard Rustin guessed that the administration would accept substitutions, but Senator Humphrey cut short an exploration of ways to rotate or subdivide the two votes by ruling out Fannie Lou Hamer. “The President will not allow that illiterate woman to speak from the floor of the convention,” he said. Moses objected to her exclusion as racist and autocratic, whereupon Humphrey jumped in to mollify him, saying the standard was not his but Johnson’s, and he was sure the President only meant that Hamer spoke too emotionally to help the party.

  While the Humphrey negotiations dragged on at the motel, Rauh filibustered inside the closed meeting of the Credentials Committee. His supporters stammered under insistent questioning about whether the proposed compromise wiped out the need for a minority report. Rauh himself hedged, praising the concessions while pleading for a fair chance to ask his MFDP clients whether they would accept. He finally persuaded subcommittee chairman Walter Mondale to arrange a brief recess, but aides near the chair vetoed the delay. A chant of “Vote! Vote!” gathered speed like a downhill train until Governor Lawrence moved the LBJ compromise to approval by the Credentials Committee. Thunderous acclamation drowned out requests for a tally along with scattered shouts of “no” from MFDP holdouts. Celebrations bolted to the corridors on adjournment.

  Across Boardwalk at the Pageant Motel, frantic knocks and cries of “It’s over!” pulled the negotiators from the Humphrey bedroom to behold the commotion around the suite’s television set, on which Mondale was presenting the Mississippi compromise to reporters as a finished deal. “You cheated!” shrieked Moses, whirling to accuse Humphrey and Reuther of sham talks as a diversionary trick. The MFDP leaders stalked out with King to their meeting place in the basement of Union Temple Baptist, and the remnant that converged there from the Credentials Committee walked into pandemonium. Questions flew about a “fix,” whose most treacherous and paralyzing effect seemed to be a cascading rumor that the MFDP had accepted the compromise already. There was talk of setups, especially against negotiating brokers such as Rauh, who recalled that Moses flinched from the trapdoor settlement as from “a white man hitting him with a whip.”

  Rauh protested that he and the core delegates had not agreed to surrender and the vote was not unanimous—even Governor Lawrence admitted hearing “no” votes he declined to count—but he conceded that Johnson may have annihilated their prospects for a better deal. Rauh’s anguish moved several MFDP members to say they should give in to the compromise, whereupon Moses, according to one surprised summer volunteer, “actually raised his voice and interrupted their speeches.” He said they should snap out of defeatist postmortem talk. At his urging, the MFDP delegates voted to reject the committee’s offer while they still had an hour or two to scrounge up votes for a minority report to the full convention.

  Rauh reluctantly agreed to fight on. Eight of the required eleven Credentials Committee delegates were present in the church and still willing to hold against the pressure. They included Rauh’s stalwart Washington colleague Gladys Duncan, wife of baritone Todd Duncan (Gershwin’s original Porgy on Broadway). Still, signatures had vanished from the large states of New York, California, and Michigan, and MFDP leverage vaporized from a power base reduced to delegates from Guam and the Panama Canal Zone.

  THE UNEXPECTED BREAKTHROUGH revived President Johnson until he heard from the two leading moderates who had been rallying Southerners for him at the convention. Together, governors Carl Sanders of Georgia and John Connally of Texas called Tuesday afternoon to warn of “a wholesale walkout from the South.” Sanders himself threatened to leave, and take the Georgia delegation with him. Johnson, having despaired for a month that Humphrey and Reuther could prevent a roll call for the MFDP, recoiled from sudden ambush on the other flank. Exasperated, he demanded to know how the MFDP’s two “symbolic” at-large delegates could hurt anybody when they did not reduce the vote of the all-white delegation. “Mississippi’s got every vote they ever had,” said the President. “Georgia’s got every vote they ever had. And we’re not gonna have any votes to begin with!”

  “I’m telling you because you want me to tell you the truth,” Sanders declared. “It looks like we’re turning the Democratic party over to the nigras….” Martin Luther King was deciding who could be a delegate, he said. “It’s gonna cut our throats from ear to ear.”

  Johnson argued that the MFDP really deserved representation in Mississippi itself. “Pistols kept ’em out,” he said heatedly. “These people went in and begged to go into the conventions. They’ve got half the population, and they won’t let ’em. They lock ’em out.”

  “They’re not registered,” Sanders insisted.

  Johnson’s temper fell into quiet pronouncement. “You and I just can’t survive our political modern life,” he said, “with these goddamn fellas down there that are eatin’ ’em for breakfast every morning. They have got to quit that. And they got to let ’em vote, and let ’em shave, and let ’em eat, and things like that. And they don’t do it.”

  Connally took up for Sanders with less passion, given the President’s agitation. Johnson pleaded with him not to let the South walk out—not to say, “I’m gonna be a dog in the manger.” He said that meant to have everything—all their votes—and then also “bark if somebody across the hall gets a couple.”

  The President urged Walter Jenkins in Atlantic City to resist the “dog in the manger attitude,” which became his rallying cry. By early evening, convention aides told him the South was now the threat. Mississippi’s state chairman praised his regular delegates for walking out on the compromise, and Governor Paul Johnson went on television to proclaim liberation from the bond that had kept his state purely Democratic since Lincoln and Reconstruction: “Mississippi’s debt to the national party is now paid in full.”

  On the convention podium, Governor Lawrence and Senator Pastore banged the credentials report to adoption, and finality released energy from all sides of the conflict. Joe Rauh shed tears as he marched dutifully to the podium to return unused the at-large delegate credentials issued for Aaron Henry and Edwin King. As much as he wished his clients would accept them as a victory, he longed more for the lost trust of Bob Moses. Most MFDP supporters recaptured the fervor of Freedom Summer from a rejection all too reminiscent of Mississippi. Their Boardwalk vigil escalated swiftly to a protest more like the Hattiesburg picket line, and lobbying gave way to daring demonstrations.

  Prominent Democrats such as Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon and ex-governor Mennen Williams of Michigan boasted of helping to smuggle MFDP members onto the convention floor to claim Mississippi seats as rightfully theirs. “I made about four or five trips in and out—it was really exciting,” observed one summer volunteer who relayed entry badges illicitly with a fake press pass and a Young Citizens for Johnson disguise. “I felt like Mata Hari and the French Resistance and the Underground Railroad all rolled into one.” Nearly two dozen MFDP delegates made it past security into the Mississippi section, which prompted the precious few oath-signing regulars there to flee.

  There were only three of them, trying to incubate a loyal presence with the encouragement of President Johnson,* and their evacuation sorely distressed Johnson’s floor commanders. Walter Jenkins called the President to report that delegates could not get into Convention Hall because of riots and demonstrations outside. White House aide Marvin Watson angrily ordered the MFDP sit-ins d
ragged from the Mississippi section; Jenkins countermanded him for fear that a televised eviction would be worse than the sit-in. Demonstrators, asked why they were making such a scene, asked in reply why network interviewers made no corresponding uproar over banned whites who had crashed the Alabama section again. Moses waved off the suggestion that he spurned a fair compromise. “We are here for the people and the people want to represent themselves,” he told NBC’s John Chancellor. “They don’t want symbolic token votes.”

  Press Secretary George Reedy hesitantly answered a summons to the presidential quarters when the convention broadcasts signed off about midnight Tuesday. From considerable experience, he hoped the morning’s resignation vow was forgotten, but he found Johnson in renewed despair over the threat of demonstrations and Southern walkouts. “By God, I’m gonna go up there and quit,” said Johnson. “Fuck ’em all.”

  Reedy slathered on reassurances, lumbering after Johnson on one of his hyperkinetic walks around the White House South Lawn. He said the President did not need to go to Atlantic City until Thursday, once he was nominated and the convention safely in his pocket. He pleaded with Johnson not to hand the country to Goldwater. Johnson merely said that he was having trouble with his withdrawal statement and ordered Reedy to draft it. When Reedy refused, the President flayed him as an incompetent, disloyal tormentor. Reedy ended the ordeal only by promising to write something, but the predawn resignation he typed out was his own.