An American Requiem

by James Carroll

  What Hans Küng had showed me about my Church, Martin Luther King showed me about my country. Finally, in seeing King as a revolutionary figure, my father and I agreed about him. About the desirability of King's "revolution," as about the desirability of Küng's "reform," we disagreed.

  By the spring of 1968, I was a local SCLC organizer in Washington of preparations for the Poor People's Campaign. The plan to bring massive numbers of poor people of all races to Washington represented King's shift from the quest for racial equality to the demand for economic justice. The government and the media had been cooperating in the portrayal of the coming of antipoverty demonstrators as, in David J. Garrow's phrase, "a reenactment of the Vandals' occupation of Rome." King's broadening of the civil rights agenda to include issues of class, income, and employment, especially paired with his by now strident condemnation of the war in Vietnam, frightened even many of his supporters. There was an edge about King, an open anger and an off-putting impatience, but by now I myself had learned to trust him.

  And I trusted the movement too. My own dear Paulist confreres were part of it, even in Memphis, where lately King had been using the Paulist parish, St. Patrick's, as an organizing center for the sanitation workers' strike. My boss in the campaign in Washington was a rotund Italian-American curate named Gino Baroni, a gruff street priest around whom I'd constructed a new idea of what I hoped to become. More than once he tapped me, with others, to help a young SCLC preacher who'd come ahead of King to see to final preparations. His name was Andrew Young.

  My main job, again, was to organize teams of seminarians—Protestant, Catholic, Jew—to go out to suburban congregations to soothe fears and drum up support. We collected donated supplies—bedding, tents, camping equipment, cooking utensils—that the tens of thousands of demonstrators would need in Resurrection City, the tent settlement that was going to sprout alongside the reflecting pool. It would not be a one-day affair, or even a week's. The citizens of Resurrection City, a people's lobby inspired by the Bonus Army of the Depression, were going to stay until the government showed signs of hearing them.

  The coming Poor People's Campaign was the occasion of my one glimpse of Dr. King in the flesh, when he spoke from the pulpit of a packed National Cathedral. I was standing in the far rear of the elegant structure I'd grown up thinking of as a Protestant rival, but which I now cherished for its Gothic—high Catholic—purity. Even at that distance, the light reflected off King's glistening forehead. His cadences rolled down the nave, filling even the alcoves of the buttress chapels. His appearance there on the last Sunday in March may have been for the scheduled service, but I remember it as a robust gathering of supporters who'd been working so hard to prepare Washington for the campaign. We held each other and rocked the place, singing "We Shall Overcome." I have no specific memory of King's remarks, although I recall catching a distant sense of his gravity, a hint of which had impressed itself on me five years before, when I'd craned toward his televised image in the novices' common room in the New Jersey hills.

  Now I know what a period of despondency this was for King. Though my work for him was exhilarating, I recognize that the movement itself, like the country, had developed an air of desperation. Garrow identifies a peroration that King often attached to his remarks during this period: "[The Lord] promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone, no never alone, no never alone. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone."

  The feeling I had that day was that I would not leave him. King was the first public figure, more than either Kennedy, to whom I felt personally devoted. He was the first to whom I was attached as if he were mine—again unlike the Kennedys, who belonged, after all, to my parents. He represented so many elements of a world I was choosing for myself, in contrast to the world into which I was born. Thus, despite King's mood, and despite my bare glimpse of him in the cathedral, I felt a vivid happiness at last to be in his presence. Like Elvis's, in an odd way. And Pope John's. And Hans Küng's.

  My father did not know I was there. However much he knew about the world's secrets, Dr. King's, or those of Morris Chilofsky, I'd made sure he knew very little of mine. Coward that I still was, I had not openly proclaimed, to the only one I had to, the content of this new loyalty of mine, this new love.

  Five days later—I always think it was Good Friday, but it was the Thursday evening before Palm Sunday—I was patiently explaining to a worried congregation at a Catholic parish in Bethesda, Maryland, that Dr. King's followers were all committed to satyagraha, the truth force of nonviolence. Therefore, I assured them, nothing bad would happen at Resurrection City. A nun interrupted us with the news that Dr. King had been shot in Memphis, was reported dead. On the radio they were saying that parts of Washington were already on fire, that fires had been set near the White House.

  Later that night, I watched from the roof of the St. Paul's College castle tower as flames lit the night sky only a mile or two away. Smoke obscured the spotlit Washington Monument. Drifting cinders stung my eyes. I heard sirens near and far, and bursts of what I took for gunshots. When I was unable to stand it anymore, I went inside. Despite myself, in grief, I called home, wanting the consolation of a word with my mother. In her way, she was as devastated as I was. Washington was her Jerusalem. The city aflame was an end of the world to her. She described with a shaking voice the air policemen, in battle gear with fixed bayonets, who were posted along Generals' Row. Jeeps were patrolling the base, machine guns mounted on their hoods. Helicopters were landing and unloading more troops. My mother told me to be careful, and she said she loved me, which was what I'd called to hear.

  When my father came to the phone, I sensed that he too was staggered. But all he could bring himself to say to me was "See?"

  8. HOLY WAR

  "IT WAS LIKE paradise at night," my mother said. As she described the scene, I could almost see the flashbulbs amid the sea of candles held aloft by the tens of thousands, as if reflecting the unseen stars above in the balmy autumn night. Ninety thousand people sang and swayed together, a wonder of the faith to this savvy South Side Irish Catholic, a display that marked our true arrival, she said, not just in this country but, after the events of that day, in the eyes of all the nations of the world.

  My mother was Cardinal Spellman's personal guest at the Mass at Yankee Stadium on the night of October 4, 1965. The Mass was celebrated by Pope Paul VI, at the end of his historic day-long visit to the United States, the first ever by a sitting pontiff. If, in our audience with Pope John XXIII in the Vatican in 1960, Mom had never felt more proudly Catholic, now, commissioned by Spellman as one of the welcomers of His Holiness, she never felt more proudly American. Present for the pope's warm salutation at St. Patrick's Cathedral that morning, and among the select to receive the Communion bread consecrated by His Holiness that night, my mother was herself the object of true arrival—a woman whose dream, unlike Spellman's, was not in the least defiled by what the pope had said that day.

  The purpose of the pope's trip was to address the General Assembly of the United Nations as it celebrated its twentieth year. His speech had stunned the president of the United States, Cardinal Spellman—and also me, watching, as always, on the common room television in Washington. Later I would learn that my father, too busy to make the trip to New York, also watched on TV, in his Pentagon office. My mother would tell me that the pope's words hit Dad like a truck, but when I would ask him about it, he would brush the speech off as if I had given it.

  "Peace!" Paul VI said, such a striking figure in white at the green marble rostrum in the hall of the General Assembly. "It is peace which must guide the destinies of peoples and all mankind."

  Everyone present knew that he had just come from a private meeting with Lyndon Johnson at the Waldorf-Astoria, and everyone was attuned to the new meaning the word "peace" had acquired in that season. Here was the world leader of Catholicism announcing that he had come to speak in the name not of God or of the Church but "of the young who legiti
mately dream of a better human race ... and of the poor, the disinherited, the suffering; of those who hunger and thirst for justice." "Justice" too had acquired new meaning. The pope was not sounding like a pope. Where was his emphasis on order? on tradition? on proper respect for authority? Why was he speaking for the young and the poor? And what about Communism?

  His visit took place seven months after the launching of Operation Rolling Thunder and less than three months after the first massive infusion of GIs into South Vietnam. By now Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara, relying on intelligence provided by Richard Helms at CIA and by my father at DIA, had dispatched nearly 200,000 troops, with another 100,000 soon to follow. I was quite aware of the fact that my father had traveled to Vietnam only months before, in July, to form his own impressions of the conflict. He had refused to share them with me.

  Others were less reticent about making their views known. A "Declaration of Conscience" opposing the bombing had appeared, signed by hundreds of people including Martin Luther King, Benjamin Spock, and Linus Pauling. Only two recognizably Catholic names appeared on the list: the Reverends Daniel and Philip Berrigan, one a Jesuit, the other a Josephite. The "Declaration" was followed by an event that amounted to the birth of the antiwar movement. On a spring day in 1965, twenty-five thousand people gathered at the Washington Monument. The day's climax came when a throng marched eighty abreast down the Mall to present a "Petition to Congress." "We call upon you," it read, "to end, not extend, the war in Vietnam." It was a respectful act of democratic appeal, although the political establishment mostly agreed with Senator John Stennis, who denounced the demonstration as "shameful and deplorable."

  Cardinal Spellman denounced the Berrigans for participating in the public protests, and he led the chorus of support for the military escalation, declaring, "Less than victory is inconceivable." But the peace movement grew. Within days of the pope's appearance in New York, more than 100,000 Americans would demonstrate against the juiced-up war in nearly a thousand cities. Already people crying "Peace!" were being labeled traitors. Even the liberal Hubert Humphrey said that the "international Communist movement" was behind the antiwar campaign, and establishment voices like James Reston of the New York Times charged that second-guessing U.S. military initiatives was "not promoting peace, but postponing it."

  It was into this maelstrom that Paul VI stepped when, to his host's horror, he deliberately chose to make a single unambiguous point before the General Assembly. He felt, he said, "like a messenger who, after a long journey, finally succeeded in delivering the letter that had been entrusted to him." He raised his fist above his head. He was speaking in French. As I recall it, the droning low voice of the interpreter hesitated, as if to let these words leap unmediated from the pontiff's mouth. Even I could understand: "Jamais plus la guerre! Jamais plus la guerre!"

  "War no more," the interpreter put in then. "War never again."

  I thought of my mother in the pope's presence. That night at Yankee Stadium, as if to be sure he was understood, he said, "First of all, you must love peace. Second, you must serve the cause of peace." My mother, with her heart wide open, already afraid for her sons, three of whom were home still, heading for the draft—how could she not hear such words with gratitude? If the pope was calling for peace, then how could peace not follow?

  I thought of my father, and immediately imagined him deflecting the pope's words by pointing out that they were not spoken ex cathedra. "If you wish to be brothers," His Holiness said, "let the arms fall from your hands. You cannot love while holding offensive weapons." Within weeks, I would quote these words to my father, not in any spirit of defiance—I was yet miles from defiance—but in a state of genuine confusion. In that first year of the war, I worked to bend my mind into the shape required to support it, not just for my father's sake but for Lyndon Johnson's. He was our hero of the Great Society and "We shall overcome." I worked to support the war for my own sake too. The Air Force was my dream city. "Off we go into the wild blue yonder" was still music to me.

  But I had sensed, with the onset of Rolling Thunder, that the order of my moral universe was at stake, and I wanted to protect it. So contrary words from the pope's mouth, unlike anything from, say, Senator Fulbright's or Rabbi Heschel's or even Martin Luther King's, shook me to the core. Who was the pope if not the avatar of the order I had, at my father's invitation, put at the center of my life? Not the center, actually, for the operative symbol was a pyramid, but the top.

  That is why, not long after the pope's appearance at the United Nations, I found an excuse to get permission to visit my parents out at Boiling. My brother Joe was away at graduate school, and Brian was at college in Massachusetts. Dennis, a dayhop at a local Catholic high school, was already yanking our parents' chain with the length of his hair. At dinner, it was apparent that a new and unpleasant mood had settled over the family, and what seemed remarkable was that not even the pope's visit could be casually discussed. After dinner, Dennis and Kevin disappeared, then so did Mom. Though I was due back at the seminary, I went with Dad into the living room. To my surprise, the orderly, without being asked, followed with a glass of Scotch on a silver tray. My father hadn't made a habit of drinking after dinner, but things were changing. The orderly offered me a drink. As required, I declined. When Dad and I were alone, I asked him, finally, what he'd made of the pope's speech. He answered smoothly, "His Holiness wants what we want. We are all working for peace. His Holiness said, 'Drop your weapons.' But in the real world, our weapons keep the peace. That's what deterrence is all about."

  "But Vietnam—"

  "His Holiness does his job by holding up the ideal. We do ours by seeing how it applies in a specific situation, which assumes information and expertise His Holiness doesn't have."

  I was incapable at that moment of hearing it, but my father's dispassionate response included the seeds of dissent from papal teaching that would infuriate him a few years later when the issue had shifted to birth control.

  My father's authority overrode the beginning of my doubt, which was what I'd hoped would happen when I came home. But then he cast his head in the direction of our neighbor's house, where Curtis LeMay had lived when he was vice chief of staff. "'Peace Is Our Profession,'" Dad said, citing LeMay's SAC motto. But the reference to LeMay stopped me. "I never asked you," I said. "What did you think when he said we should just drop the H-bomb on Hanoi?"

  My father stared at me. His blue uniform shirt was open at the collar, his blue tie loosened, his steel-gray hair not a strand out of place. Smoke wafted up from the cigarette between his fingers. I focused on his shiny Rolex watch. He looked at me in silence for a long time. I had to stifle the urge to bring up something else—the White Sox, Jack Nicklaus, whatever. I had no idea what he would say, but I knew from the rare intimacies of a few years before—Berlin, Cuba, not Vietnam—that he was no more able than I to contemplate that manmade sun, its mushroom cloud, vaporized cities, radioactive dust swirling around the globe, the incineration all at once of millions, including, as he'd put it to me that night driving home from the Pentagon, "Mom and the boys." Fear of the Bomb, when he'd let me see his, had made us friends, friends forever. He was like me in this, not like Curtis LeMay, of that I was certain.

  Finally he answered: "You never tell your enemy what you're going to do or what you're not going to do. If they think we might use the Bomb against them, good."

  "But—"

  "Jimmy, you know these are things I can't talk to you about."

  "But you have talked to me about it." I wanted to add, And you made me afraid—I'm still afraid.

  I think my father knew what was in my mind. Sadness clouded his eyes, and he said, "Well, I shouldn't have."

  To which I wanted urgently to reply, But Dad, I loved you when you spoke to me of these things, and I felt your love for me.

  I said no such thing, of course. And if once I had caught a germ of fear from him, what I caught now was that sadness. Neither he nor I would ever sha
ke it.

  After returning from the papal spectacle in New York, my mother told me all about it. Cardinal Spellman, she said, had asked about me—Jimmy Carroll. "He's still counting on ordaining you." And I was still capable of being thrilled at the prospect. Alas, she reported that he was looking awfully frail. The pope had even taken him by the elbow as they mounted the sanctuary stairs at St. Patrick's. His Holiness had called the aged Spellman "our beloved son." From gossip in the seminary, I had picked up the undercurrent of something entirely other flowing between the pope and the archbishop of New York. And there was the LBJ-insulting content of the pope's speech. My usually alert mother was focused on her own particular agenda, Spellman's ordaining me. She had chosen to ignore the humiliation the cardinal surely felt.

  Within weeks the pope would embarrass Spellman again by rejecting his advice to ignore Martin Luther King. I knew nothing of those machinations, but certainly, given my father's access to Bureau information, his assessment of papal naivete could only have been reinforced when Paul VI granted an audience to King. J. Edgar Hoover would say, "I can't believe the pope would meet with that degenerate." My mother, like many other Catholics wary of civil rights, would take the pope's meeting with King as an endorsement she could not ignore.

  The pope was taking his people by surprise again and again, but there were no surprises between him and Spellman. They had known each other for thirty years. As Montini, and now as Paul VI, the pope knew very well things that others did not know. The full drama of papal defiance on Spellman's own turf cannot be appreciated except in the context of a larger story. It was untold at the time, although the pope surely knew it and so, probably, did the New York priests named Berrigan. It was the story of how, before it was Lyndon Johnson's war, or even Robert McNamara's, the war in Vietnam belonged to my mother's friend, my father's ally, my brother's "enema," and my own designated godfather in the priesthood. The Vietnam War began as Spellman's.