Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  Jordan’s confession, and another soon to follow, looked back through the eyes of astonished Klansmen into the heart of the Mississippi movement at the peak of its conviction, only four months earlier. From word that Neshoba County had locked up the White Knights target known as “Goatee”—Mickey Schwerner—with two civil rights friends who “needed their asses tore up,” there had been furtive recruitments at homes and parking lots, errands for sandwiches and protective gloves, plus logistical mix-ups in the rendezvous between Jordan’s Meridian Klansmen and the Philadelphia klavern of Billy Posey, whose 1955 Chevrolet broke down with carburetor trouble in the night caravan that overtook the newly released civil rights workers. Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price took them to the isolated Rock Cut Road in his cruiser, with Jordan riding shotgun.

  Of a thousand details to the hasty lynching, such as securing a spare key to the bulldozer, only Schwerner’s last words confounded the Klansmen themselves. Jordan and others preserved them verbatim for agents who passed them to Inspector Sullivan as indelible signs. The Klansmen heard nothing fearful or defiant, nor anything practical to escape the moment of terror, but they could not forget the spark of supremely disciplined faith that reached across the last human barrier. Alton Wayne Roberts exploded past more hesitant Klansmen to yank Schwerner from the cruiser next to a ditch. He jammed a pistol into his ribs and screamed from a face of animal hatred, “Are you that nigger lover?” Schwerner had an instant to reply, “Sir, I know just how you feel.”

  PART FOUR

  “Lord, Make Me Pure—but Not Yet”

  —St. Augustine,

  The Confessions

  37

  Landslide

  THE MIRACLE CARDINALS, who overtook the collapsed Philadelphia Phillies in the last twelve days of the season, represented the National League partly by adapting to integration and speed, with a team built around Bob Gibson’s fastball and two fleet outfielders, Lou Brock and Curt Flood. They were World Series underdogs to the New York Yankees of Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and Whitey Ford, whose corporate management stood on its astonishing record—thirteen pennants and nine championships since 1949—to resist Negro players beyond their pioneer Elston Howard, as an unnecessary risk to the patronage of white ballpark customers.* Neither adverse odds nor racial subtext mattered to St. Louis fans, who welcomed the surprise gift of fall pageantry on Wednesday, October 7, cheering Dixieland bands that marched in the Busch Stadium outfield. The crowd howled with delight when a goofy reserve player named Bob Uecker impulsively caught pregame fly balls in the throat of a borrowed tuba, then roared when the blithe and limber Cardinals unexpectedly thumped the Yankees in the first game, 9-5.

  That evening in Washington, Walter Jenkins stood in for President Johnson at an office-warming cocktail party given by the editors of Newsweek. He departed alone on foot to the nearby YMCA, where at 8:35 P.M. police officers accosted him in a basement pay toilet together with an elderly resident of the U.S. Soldiers Home. Jenkins quietly submitted to his second stakeout arrest from this rendezvous spot on the charge of “disorderly conduct (pervert),” giving his true name and occupation. Booked and fingerprinted, he obtained release on $50 forfeit bond and returned to work past midnight at the White House, very likely in catatonic denial.

  Unaware for days, President Johnson campaigned obsessively right into Barry Goldwater’s hometown of Phoenix, where more than once he abruptly halted the entire presidential motorcade, seized a bullhorn, and “verbally caressed” a handful of gawking pedestrians. On October 9, he rode Air Force One through stops at Louisville and Nashville, then in New Orleans walked half a mile down track number two to greet the incoming Lady Bird Special at Union Station. A predominantly Negro crowd cheered him to the obvious discomfort of straddling Democrats such as Louisiana governor John McKeithen, who tacitly supported Goldwater behind a stated posture of “nonparticipation, but just short of being neutral.” As toastmaster, Congressman Hale Boggs of Louisiana tried to smother the palpable tension among nearly two thousand influential donors that night by embracing the Johnsons as kindred Southerners. He praised Lady Bird as one who “knows the sound of the wind in the pines and the song of the mockingbird in the morning.” The President himself, with a nod to Senator Russell Long at the dais, reminisced beyond his text about hearing the controversial speeches of Long’s father, Huey, during the early Depression. “I thought he had a heart for the people,” said Johnson, playing on fond local memory of Huey the Kingfish as a champion of schoolbooks, roads, and other instruments of common opportunity. He played further to the regional sense of victimization by national economic powers since the Civil War. “And all these years they have kept their foot on our necks by appealing to our animosities, and dividing us,” he said.

  “Whatever your views are,” Johnson added with a significant pause, “we have a Constitution and a Bill of Rights, and we have the law of the land. And two-thirds of the Democrats in the Senate voted for it, and three-fourths of the Republicans. I signed it, and I am going to enforce it, and I am going to observe it….”

  Having hushed his audience in the coded language of Southern politics, without mentioning the new civil rights law by name, Johnson pushed on. “I am not going to let them build up the hate and try to buy my people by appealing to their prejudice,” he vowed, and leaned forward to tell “you folks” a tale of deathbed lamentation over a wasted political career. Johnson recalled how an old senator—“whose name I won’t call”—once beseeched Speaker Sam Rayburn for encouragement to make just one speech toward the common good of his despoiled state. “‘I feel like I have one in me!’” Johnson quoted the senator. “‘The poor old state, they haven’t heard a Democratic speech in thirty years. All they ever hear at election time is, Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!’”

  “The audience gasped,” recorded one historian. An eyewitness called the shock in the Jung Hotel banquet hall “a physical thing—surprise, awe—ears heard what they plainly could not hear.” A president of the United States had shouted the word three times, in a context that at once revealed and rejected a racial core of politics. The initial grudging and scattered applause grew into an ovation that lasted fully seven minutes, but the next day the reporters lacked the nerve to quote him exactly. From Jet magazine to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the President’s climactic phrase was rendered “Negro! Negro! Negro!” The New York Times dodged the word choice by omitting the passage altogether, and book accounts later modified it to “Nigra! Nigra! Nigra!” It was not until Johnson wrote his memoirs that the word “nigger” was put into the mouth of a president of the United States. The Vantage Point was famously selective about war and race—without a word, for instance, about the MFDP challenge at the Democratic convention—but Johnson claimed the raw truth of New Orleans as another Gettysburg moment.

  His boldness did gain sympathy in news outlets that shied away from the actual words. “Johnson Hits at Hatred as Southern Vote Bait,” proclaimed the Atlanta Journal, and White House aides privately reported a wave of “respect and admiration” within a previously skeptical traveling press corps. While many reporters remained “tired and negative” about quirks such as “your interest in the polls,” Horace Busby advised Johnson, “the New Orleans (Negro, Negro, Negro) speech captured them…. Thus, overnight, they are speaking of you—as once of FDR—as ‘the master,’ ‘the champ.’”

  Johnson’s campaign rose on extraordinary national tides, lifted by fear and remorse that converged from the Kennedy assassination, threats of nuclear war, and from incidents of bared racial hatred. William Stringfellow, who at the 1963 Chicago conference had advised religious leaders to “weep” over lost hope for racial justice, now collected signatures from seven hundred Episcopal bishops and priests protesting Goldwater’s “transparent exploitation of racism.” Republican newspapers rallied to Johnson, most notably New York’s Herald Tribune, which had been founded in 1840 expressly to oppose Democrats. “Travail and torment go into those simple words,” the Herald Tribune
editors wrote of their groundbreaking endorsement, which the New York Times quoted as front-page news, “…but we find ourself as Americans, even as Republicans, with no other acceptable choice.”

  In a series of confidential October reports, campaign manager Lawrence O’Brien predicted that Johnson would win a landslide “without too much difficulty,” and conceded only Alabama and Mississippi to Goldwater. Nevertheless, he identified the undivided Negro vote as a tricky new valve in political mechanics. “It is becoming more and more apparent to me that we need to make a special effort to get out the vote in Negro precincts,” O’Brien wrote Johnson, after campaign inspections revealed practically no working relations among Democratic politicians to turn out the vote across racial lines. Separate political structures were axiomatic in the South—“Dependence upon the Negro vote is a new experience…. Before this year they never had encouraged the Negro to vote—or particularly wanted him to vote”—but prevailed elsewhere, too. In New York, Adam Clayton Powell was still bargaining for his promise to deliver constituent votes, demanding intervention to fend off the Esther James judgment. Democrats, lacking a unified political apparatus, labored to invent “safe” public appeals for the Negro vote, and O’Brien’s state-by-state reports on resistance alarmed Johnson about party realignment in future elections.

  Democrats pursued vital Negro turnout with some care. “Obviously,” O’Brien advised Johnson, “we must see this is done by passing the word without fanfare to avoid further backlash.” Pressure fell upon Martin Luther King to mount specialized campaign tours designed to generate Negro votes for Johnson while minimizing spillover pressures on local white candidates. King held out for assurance that Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young would pull their share of the load, signaling Johnson that he could not look to King at the ballot box and still ascribe prime Negro leadership to more comfortable patronage figures. Besides, King told aides, campaigning alone would make it “look like Johnson has me in his pocket.”

  On his own grueling schedule to raise money for SCLC, King delivered four speeches in three East Coast cities over the weekend of Sunday, October 11, then two speeches on Monday in St. Louis before collapsing at home of viral fever and exhaustion. Dr. Asa Yancey, the first Negro staff physician licensed at St. Joseph Infirmary, managed to admit King on Tuesday for overdue bed rest. Yancey delivered a lecture on the medical need to abandon fried chicken and lose twenty pounds, then prescribed sleeping pills that left King groggy Wednesday morning when Coretta King called to say he had been chosen for the Nobel Peace Prize. Until security barriers were improvised, photographers overran the hospital on its first day of integration to shoot the next day’s front-page pictures of King propped up in bed.

  An early Jet reporter noticed as bedside reading The Prize, a celebrated novel about international intrigue behind the Nobel awards. The book confirmed King’s awareness that he was being considered, but its plot scarcely prepared him for domestic repercussions ahead. In a vain attempt to head off what he rightly feared would be contending claims among dear ones to shares of the bounty, King instructed his assistant Bernard Lee to issue an unequivocal statement that he would donate to the movement “every penny” of the $54,600 gift accompanying the Nobel Prize. Within hours, hints reached King that the prize had dissolved the political objections that had kept him off the board of Morehouse College. Roman Catholic Archbishop Paul Hallinan appeared in person to celebrate the news, kneeling with dramatic humility to ask King for a reciprocal blessing. King chuckled over reports of disgusted reactions from Bull Connor, who said the Nobel committee was “scraping the bottom of the barrel,” and from St. Augustine police chief Virgil Stuart, who called his selection “the biggest joke of the year.” Incoming wires of congratulation filled boxes. Duke Ellington, who had composed King Fit the Battle of Alabam’ in tribute to the Birmingham demonstrations of 1963, hailed the announcement as “a beautiful bright shining light of hope,” and Robert Kennedy called King’s “richly deserved” honor a global inspiration for “the greatest of American ideals.”

  Kennedy received the news while campaigning in New York with President Johnson, whose telegram warmly commending King would be delayed two days because of hysteria over Walter Jenkins. By late afternoon, press inquiries about Jenkins’s YMCA arrest the week before put him into George Washington Hospital under heavy sedation. Johnson’s legal advisers Abe Fortas and Clark Clifford pleaded privately with news editors to withhold the ruinous story until facts were tested. Jenkins in turn pleaded with the lawyers not to tell the President, sadly insisting that he could remember little of his arrests. With an early evening statement that “the White House is desperately trying to suppress a major news story affecting the national security,” Republican national chairman Dean Burch prodded the Jenkins scandal onto the UPI news wire at 8:09 P.M. A tearful George Reedy soon confirmed to reporters in New York that his friend Jenkins—upstanding Catholic, father of six, Johnson’s closest aide since 1939—had been hospitalized for “extreme fatigue,” and at 10:15 there was a follow-up announcement that Jenkins had resigned.

  From Washington, Lady Bird Johnson issued an independent statement of personal sympathy that night: “My heart is aching….” President Johnson doggedly continued his speeches in New York: “And if Lincoln abolished slavery, let us abolish poverty….” Privately, he insisted from then on that the Jenkins tragedy was a Goldwater plot to steal the election. He had the Pentagon retrieve Jenkins’s spotless personnel file from an Air Force Reserve unit commanded by Barry Goldwater, and he ordered his lawyers and the FBI’s Deke DeLoach to run down suspicions, including a wild hunch that the waiters for the October 7 Newsweek party had been Republican operatives trained to use mind-altering drugs.

  Inside FBI headquarters, confronting the coincidence of two men hospitalized on the same day—one dropped from the White House into scalding humiliation, the other raised from servile inheritance to a pedestal of global honor—J. Edgar Hoover mobilized his bureau. He sent Walter Jenkins a bouquet of get-well flowers with a card marked “J. Edgar Hoover & Associates,” and he denounced the new Nobel laureate to those same associates as “top alley cat,” pushing them to generate against King the kind of publicity that had struck Jenkins. Only a tiny portion of the crusade surfaced in public. When William Loeb, James Kilpatrick, and other prominent conservatives complained that the flower gesture betrayed Hoover’s own bedrock principles by coddling a homosexual security risk, the Director claimed to have sent the Jenkins bouquet before realizing the nature of his affliction. This fabrication helped insulate Hoover from suggestions of bias when the FBI “cleared” Jenkins—“No Evidence Is Uncovered That Ex-Presidential Aide Compromised Nation,” blared the Times headline—only a week later. To prove a national security negative so swiftly was a feat of convenient service to Johnson, especially since investigating agents secretly pursued a host of extraneous political angles, such as whether any of Barry Goldwater’s aides had homosexual tendencies.

  Johnson and Hoover vouched for each other in crisis. Johnson needed Hoover’s national authority to shield his campaign from charges of immorality mixed with spy danger; Hoover needed Johnson to overlook his failure to warn of Walter Jenkins’s arrest records on file for years at the FBI. With the help of a complacent press, Hoover also managed brazenly to criticize the local police and Secret Service for laxity about Jenkins, and to advertise the FBI’s sensitive distance from tawdry gossip—all while secretly bombarding officials from the White House, Justice Department, United Nations, and even embassies overseas with nasty interpretations of King’s sexual habits (which the cover note to Hubert Humphrey called “His Personal Conduct”). The contrasting forbearance toward Walter Jenkins was scarcely sentimental. To protect Johnson, FBI agents unsuccessfully pressured doctors to explain Jenkins’s YMCA conduct not as “voluntary” homosexuality but the result of a “mysterious disease which causes disintegration of the brain.” What guided the FBI through both cases was acute sensitivity to vanities of p
ower at Hoover’s level and above.

  KING EMERGED from St. Joseph Infirmary into a world engulfed by the news of Thursday, October 15: a coup led by Leonid Brezhnev that toppled Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, a change of British government, China’s first successful nuclear bomb test—with background stories featuring South Vietnam’s execution of a seventeen-year-old who had tried to assassinate Defense Secretary McNamara the previous May, plus the Game Seven victory of the St. Louis Cardinals in spite of Mickey Mantle’s eighteenth and final World Series home run. Against statements by leading journals such as the New York Times that the Jenkins scandal was “bound to be seriously detrimental to President Johnson’s campaign,” the embarrassment never registered among voters at large, but the threat erased King’s qualms about campaigning nonstop for Johnson.

  Louis Martin, a publisher of Negro newspapers and the Democratic National Committee’s expert on minority politics since 1944, designed for King a specialized tour that created what amounted to ticker tape parades visible and audible mostly to Negroes. Martin put King on the back of a flatbed truck that attracted tumultuous crowds to more than twenty neighborhood street corners in Chicago, beginning October 21, and he sent a roaring motorcade through churches and playgrounds of Negro Cleveland. By careful prearrangement, King preached the urgency of voting without saying Johnson’s name. “You know who to vote for!” cried King. “Don’t you?” His aides shouted “All the way,” omitting the last two words of Johnson’s slogan, “with LBJ.” The thin veneer of neutrality, which suited King’s desire to avoid long-term partisan commitment, helped Louis Martin and Lawrence O’Brien harvest targeted voters behind a bland message. The tour received only sporadic external notice, usually in small stories of crossover interest—as when Chicago’s Catholic Interracial Council presented King with its John F. Kennedy Award in race relations, or a convention of white evangelicals denounced him as a false Christian.