At Canaan's Edge (13 page)

At St. Mark's Episcopal in Washington, Rev. William Baxter preached about his own Selma journey to a congregation that included the Johnson and Humphrey families, as observances spilled widely to mark the week since Pettus Bridge. From San Jose, California, and Beloit, Wisconsin, marchers set off on fifty-mile treks to honor the impeded course from Selma to Montgomery. Twenty-seven ministers conducted a service of reconciliation at the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas, and a thousand people in New Orleans marched through hostile crowds to advocate voting rights. In Massachusetts, twenty thousand attended a “Rally for Freedom” on Boston Common, while opponents burned a ten-foot cross in the fabled revolutionary town of Lexington. A relay of eighteen freedom runners left from New York's George Washington Bridge bound for Washington, and nuns from the Sisters of Charity, in military formation and Puritan-style habits, joined a procession of 15,000 through Harlem to hear addresses by John Lewis, James Forman, and Bayard Rustin. From All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, where James Reeb had served as assistant pastor until 1964, the morning service emptied into a spontaneous march down Sixteenth Street that gathered another crowd of 15,000 into Lafayette Park for speakers, including Fannie Lou Hamer of Mississippi. “Her plump face shining in the sun,” reported the normally staid
New York Times,
“she shouted in her mighty voice: ‘It's time now to stop begging them for what should have been done one hundred years ago. We have stood up on our feet, and God knows we're on our way!'”

Noise from Lafayette Park filtered across the street into the Cabinet Room where President Johnson convened seven congressional leaders Sunday afternoon. “You made the White House fireproof but not soundproof,” he observed wryly in the midst of a sober prediction that more would die like Reeb until the government secured the right to register and vote for all citizens “except those in mental institutions.” Senate leaders Mike Mansfield and Everett Dirksen each pressed Johnson not to seem panicky in the face of demonstrations. “This is a deliberate government,” said Dirksen. “Don't let those people say, ‘we scared him into it.'” Perhaps by prearrangement, House leaders argued that a presidential address to the nation would instill relief rather than panic. “I think it would help,” said Majority Leader Carl Albert of Oklahoma, and Speaker John McCormack invited Johnson to address a joint session of Congress. They fixed Tuesday evening as the earliest practicable time for the President to put his proposals into speech form, but Attorney General Katzenbach allowed that the “unpredictable” King might try to resume the march from Selma earlier the same day. To preclude being upstaged, the leaders resolved to advance the date to Monday—the next evening. Bill Moyers called in emergency help from church leader Robert Spike as well as political strategist Louis Martin, the former publisher of Negro newspapers who worked for Democratic presidents since FDR. Johnson commandeered writers to work through Sunday night, including Horace Busby, author of Johnson's treasured 1963 civil rights speech at Gettysburg. Busby dismissed the Justice Department draft as “junk,” but the weekend rewrites fared so poorly that the President yanked in a startled new speechwriter, Richard Goodwin, to begin Monday morning from a blank page.

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15, as the third calendar Monday of the month, was a day specified in Alabama law for voter registration. At the Lowndes County seat in Hayneville, where surprised officials simply had told Negro aspirants to go away two weeks earlier, registrar Carl Golson consulted widely to prepare this time. He no longer required applicants to produce a testament of character from a current voter, because this custom, as applied selectively to Negroes, was deemed a legal albatross with the Justice Department and the newspapers now in an uproar over voting—especially for a county where no Negro had been registered for at least sixty years. Like the registrars of neighboring counties such as Wilcox, Golson balanced this concession with a special new arrangement for Negro applicants. When more than twenty did present themselves that morning a second time—all from the pioneer thirty-seven who had signed their names to the sheet on March 1—Golson redirected them to line up on a side street about two hundred yards from the courthouse, outside the old county jail.

None of the applicants had ever been inside the long-abandoned relic of local punishment. A scouting trip by John Hulett and Frank Miles turned up no booby traps or obvious signs of ambush, but did little to calm apprehensions. Just inside the front door, to the left, the old indoor gallows stood with a rope slung over the yardarm. Jesse “Note” Favors reported that a deputy sheriff mused to him, “I wonder if that old thing still works.” Mattie Lee Moorer noticed items other than the rope that seemed to be freshly placed props of crude but resonant intimidation: a shotgun leaned against the wall, a pint of unlabeled whiskey on a bare table in the cellblock. A news photographer later captured the registrar administering a test to a lone applicant at this table beneath the glare of three naked light bulbs. Sidney Logan, who had ventured alone on Tuesday to witness the “turnaround” march in Selma, stayed on outside as a reassuring presence for those obliged to wait under the gaze of passersby. Of the seventeen who completed the registration test by the end of the day, Logan would be rejected weeks later along with fourteen others, and two—John Hulett and the blind preacher, John C. Lawson—would become the first registered Negroes since the reign of England's Queen Victoria. These numbers were a pittance, and very likely a strategic move by county officials to remove the stigma of absolute racial exclusion. In Lowndes County, however, even the fifteen who persevered to failure vindicated Sidney Logan's scouting report from Selma that wonders must be afoot.

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from his public schedule that Monday, President Johnson convened the Joint Chiefs and his top national security officials to hear the report of a ten-day, “final” diagnostic mission to Vietnam. Army General Harold K. “Johnny” Johnson, a survivor of the Bataan Death March and three years in a Japanese POW camp, exceeded his own reputation for tough-minded realism by predicting that it would take 500,000 U.S. soldiers five years to “arrest the deterioration” in the military situation. As the President's chosen leader for the on-site review, he recommended a twenty-one-point program featuring large, immediate troop deployments to forestall what National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy now secretly called the Vietcong's “current expectation of early victory.” Assistant Defense Secretary John McNaughton, who had accompanied the delegation as McNamara's chief strategic thinker on Vietnam, was equally candid in his top secret apportionment of U.S. war motives: “70% to avoid a humiliating defeat…20% to keep SVN [South Vietnam] (and then adjacent territory) from Chinese hands, 10% to permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life.”

The report stunned the assembled commanders in the White House. Even McNamara, who had recommended the mission in order to solidify official support for gradual troop deployments, professed shock to hear the accepted difficulties projected into large, blunt numbers, and the President blanched at the implications of such a war. He warned thunderously against leaks of the sensitive material, then lashed out as though there must be a way to change the projections rather than fulfill them. “Kill more Vietcong,” he ordered the Joint Chiefs.

President Johnson dismissed the military conclave to keep a Monday afternoon appointment with columnist Walter Lippmann, who represented the opposite pole of his Vietnam predicament. Lippmann was warning in print that military escalation was leading to unnecessary, avoidable disaster: “The reappraisal of our present policy is necessary, I submit, because the policy is not working and will not work.” Over lunch with President and Mrs. Johnson in the White House residence, and then alone with Johnson in the Oval Office, the nation's foremost public intellectual pressed for national debate about Vietnam to prepare the public for a political compromise. “Your policy is all stick and no carrot, Mr. President,” said Lippmann. “You're bombing them without offering any incentive for them to stop fighting.” Johnson replied genuinely that he loathed the war and would do almost anything to escape it, but said the Vietnamese Communists were offering him no carrots either, short of a reciprocal invitation to leave.

The two men argued for competing versions of a middle course in Vietnam—contained war versus negotiated settlement—both of which rested on wishful thinking or fiction. Lippmann probably guessed this, and Johnson certainly knew so from the consistently grim assessments within his own government. Nevertheless, the President favored either course over his actual choice between major war and collapse of the American position. He was keenly aware that Lippman himself publicly ruled out American withdrawal from Vietnam,
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which only reinforced Johnson's political instinct that no President could risk “unmanly” surrender. Honesty about Vietnam would touch off a war stampede and upheaval over blame for weakness, Johnson figured, along with dissent against the notion that humiliation could justify war. He resolved instead to contain political division separately from the conflict itself, using secrecy as a first defense.

Privately, Johnson railed against Lippmann's call for open national debate (“He doesn't understand that I'm debatin' it every night,” Johnson told Moyers). In person, he presented himself to Lippmann as a reluctant warrior seeking to win in Vietnam by the minimal application of violence, and he entertained belief that Lippmann's suggested “peace initiative” might yield a surprise settlement. The President buzzed McGeorge Bundy: “Mac, I've got Walter Lippmann over here, and he says we're not doing the right thing. Maybe he's right.” Lippmann was elated by the positive reception, which relieved his anxiety about being ostracized after decades of access to Presidents.

President Johnson reverted briefly to his domestic crisis. Hours before the address to Congress, pages of a new draft were spilling one by one from the office where speechwriter Richard Goodwin had locked himself from the frantic attentions of presidential aides—chiefly Moyers, Katzenbach, and Jack Valenti, with supporting experts and ad hoc advisers. Somewhat to their chagrin, Johnson had insisted upon Goodwin as his last-minute substitute even though he was an urbane Kennedy holdover of the pedigree the President often disparaged as “a Harvard,” known for his dialectical encounter with Cuban revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara and starkly ill-suited to the Texas folkways that Johnson applied to politics. Still, after seeing Lippmann, the President lobbed a hand grenade into the speech stew by buzzing Goodwin ex cathedra with a story from his formative experience as a teacher of young Mexican-Americans in Cotulla, Texas. “I just wanted to remind you,” he signed off abruptly. Johnson saw in Goodwin an outsider with a gift for words, fit for the task of quick-mixing a bubble of presidential memory into the framework of Negro voting rights. “A liberal Jew,” he lectured Valenti, “has his hand on the pulse of America.”

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weekend speeches in Chicago, a conflicted Martin Luther King hesitated too long in Judge Frank Johnson's courtroom to address the James Reeb memorial service at two o'clock Monday afternoon. If he went to Selma, he could not make it back to Montgomery in time to catch a flight to Washington for the joint session of Congress that night. Since White House operators had tracked him down with President Johnson's personal invitation, some around King argued that his first obligation was to be visible in the House chamber as an emissary of the voting rights movement. To go to Washington, however, King must renege on commitments not only in Selma but also in Montgomery, where he remained a witness under subpoena. On this fourth day of hearings, Major Cloud defended the conduct of his troopers on March 7 (“I never saw any violence,” he testified), and one of Sheriff Clark's deputies disclosed in passing that two of those charged in the Reeb murder were the men who had tried the carburetor smokescreen three days earlier during the march of white Alabamians. Even this small surprise, linking a sinister event with antecedents that had seemed silly, was a reminder of what King called the “tiptoe stance” in the psychology of minorities. Uncertainty recommended that he take nothing for granted, including Judge Johnson's decision on the legal status of the suspended march from Selma. Finishing that quest was now the movement's test of its competence as well as its cause, and by this light King's first duty was to tend to the plaintiff's case through expected completion on Tuesday.

He lingered in Montgomery also to keep internal rifts from exploding in the press. So troubled was King that he solicited from Clarence Jones what arrived just then as a fourteen-page telegram defending him from charges “in some quarters” that he had “worked with the federal government to bottle up the militancy and indignation of Negroes.” Tuesday's mysterious “turnaround” march intensified King's vulnerability to the usual organizational frictions, in part because so many parties had reason to ascribe unflattering motives to him. Federal officials were straining to create for themselves a facade of sovereign control by suggesting that they had throttled King to broker peace. SNCC leaders encouraged the notion that King had connived his way into safe retreat, abandoning to them the trust of the long-suffering people, and reporters were drawn to saucy interpretations that put King under the condescension of his young allies for chessboard deal-making with Johnson and Wallace. Jones's defense was sophisticated but necessarily defensive, and King set it aside to tend higher priorities. Habitually late, he declined the President's invitation, secured an excused absence from Judge Johnson, and sent word to extend the Reeb memorial until he could get to Selma with a eulogy after all.