Parting the Waters (44 page)

This news visibly alarmed Rogers. “Excuse me, Mr. President,” he said quickly. “I think it would be a terrible mistake to tell Lyndon Johnson what we're going to do. He'll steal our bill and make it sound like the whole idea was his. I think he's setting you up.”

Eisenhower frowned. “Do you really think Lyndon is doing that?” he asked. He sent a message asking Johnson to come immediately to the White House. The Republican leaders drifted away, leaving Rogers and the President gossiping alone until the Majority Leader arrived. “Bill, if Lyndon tries to get around my desk, block him off,” Eisenhower said. “I can't stand it when he grabs me by the lapel.” Sure enough, not long after bursting into the President's office, Johnson jumped to his feet and began to circle the desk, and Rogers quickly interposed himself, absorbing the shoulder-thumping and finger-jabbing with which Johnson characteristically supplemented his conversation. By meeting's end, Eisenhower was satisfied that Johnson would take only as much credit for the civil rights bill as was necessary to get it through the Senate. Such assurances became moot when the bill languished all year in committee.

The civil rights issue intruded widely upon Eisenhower's political dealings, including his uneasy alliance with Vice President Nixon. In disastrous campaign performances the previous fall, Nixon had tried an unusual rhetorical mix. Prevented by Eisenhower from advocating defense increases in the wake of Sputnik, he had courted the hardshell vote with diatribes calling the Democratic Party a “haven for socialists” and worse. At the same time, prevented by Eisenhower from being too specific about civil rights, he had sought liberal and Negro votes with vague promises in race relations. Each of his pitches was faulted for excessive partisanship, and they clashed so sharply in tone as to renew doubts about Nixon's sincerity. The 1958 elections had forced him into a career reappraisal.

At a political meeting that winter, Nixon suggested that the Administration push strongly to enact tax credits for tuition paid to private schools. The idea, he explained, was to reach out to the growing number of families that would like to send their children to private schools but were pained by the cost. He wanted the Republicans to run on what he called “the erosion of the middle class,” by appealing to resentment against social leveling and a perceived loss of privilege. Nixon's presentation moved Eisenhower to contradict him in the presence of the other Republican leaders. The middle class was
not
disappearing, said the President. It was more prosperous and far larger than ever in history. What was disappearing were the laboring classes, who were sending their children to college in staggering numbers. Eisenhower emphasized the astonishing breadth of progress during his own lifetime, but Nixon held his ground through an increasingly personal debate. New professionals and others rising to the middle class felt threatened, he insisted. Middle-class people believed they were “sinking.” Politically, Nixon was beginning to depend less on theory and more on the status desires of people like himself. He was becoming less of a civil rights man, more grasping, more of a demographer. Comparatively speaking, Eisenhower was an idealist.

 

Early that February in New York, King met his traveling companions for the India trip: Coretta and L. D. Reddick.
Crusader Without Violence
, Reddick's biography of King, was just coming off the press, which added to the excitement of departure. At a final rendezvous, Rustin provided a new stack of materials about India that included an essay on Gandhi's
shanti sena
, or “nonviolent army,” which Rustin called “the latest thinking on the latest concept in the Gandhi movement.” King wanted time to absorb Gandhism as a discipline that might help him escape a drift toward stagnation as a glorified after-dinner speaker. Personally, he wanted to study Gandhi's lifelong struggle to harmonize his own life with his philosophy. King found much to tease himself and Coretta about on these accounts. Embarking on a trip to study Gandhi, a man who had renounced wealth, sex, and all clothing except his loincloth, the Kings carried trunks stuffed with suits and dresses to wear at the most elegant of the hotels built during the British Raj. Their first act on the trip was to pay a large tariff for excess baggage.

This was the sort of thing that annoyed Reddick, who was devoted to King but prickly by nature and highly independent of mind. Reddick thought King was too passive. Ironically, Reddick himself proposed a distraction that nearly wrecked the trip at the outset. He persuaded the Kings to abort their stay in London to spend a few days in Paris with Reddick's old friend Richard Wright, author of
Native Son
, then catch their scheduled London—New Delhi flight during a stopover in Zurich. All went well until the King party learned that their plane from London had been ordered to bypass Zurich's dense fog and head straight toward Delhi. Geography, weather, and foreign languages combined against them, with the result that they found themselves on a train through the Swiss Alps when the plane that was supposed to be carrying them was passing over Iran. In Delhi, a crowd of some five hundred people gathered at the airport, many bearing garlands. By the time investigators established that King never boarded his ticketed flight in London, the airport crowd had dissolved in confusion.

King tried desperately to reach Delhi by the second night of his India tour, but he failed. At the hour when he was supposed to be entering Prime Minister Nehru's sandstone palace for dinner, he had given up for the night in Bombay. Alone on the airport bus, like ordinary tourists, he and his companions recoiled from the sight of emaciated people densely packed on the sidewalks and in doorways along Bombay's narrow streets—an immense human carpet of homelessness. Sudden exposure to India's starkest extremes did little to console them for the disaster of missing Nehru.

A small replica of Sunday's crowd convened two days late to greet the embarrassed King party at Delhi's Palam Airport. Each of the two organizations sponsoring the visit had assigned a guide for the duration of the trip—James Bristol for the American Friends Service Committee and Swami Vishwananda for the Gandhi Memorial Trust. The two guides gave King a piece of extraordinary good news: Nehru had agreed to reschedule the King dinner for that very night. Government experts considered this nothing less than a miracle, given the ramifications likely to befall Nehru for being willing to shift his schedule to benefit a man without diplomatic rank.

The Prime Minister greeted the King party wearing the white jacket that had made him famous in world fashion, with a rose pinned to the breast. Nehru's daughter, Indira Gandhi, served as hostess. The other guests were Nehru's confidante Lady Mountbatten and Pamela Mountbatten, the wife and daughter of Lord Mountbatten, the last British Viceroy of India, with whom Gandhi and Nehru had negotiated the details of Indian independence a dozen years earlier. At dinner, Nehru impressed King with knowledgeable remarks about the Montgomery bus boycott and King's subsequent career. He strongly defended India's foreign policy of “nonalignment,” arguing that it was not passivity in the face of the ideological struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, but rather an aggressive strategy to induce the superpowers to see each other through eyes less blinded by hatred and pride. King spoke so often about his desire to learn more of Gandhi's nonviolence that Nehru felt obliged to remind him that it was impossible to say how the surprisingly pragmatic Mahatma might have dealt with the concrete problems of modern India, let alone the problems King faced in the United States. His replies disappointed King slightly, but the two men discussed race, colonialism, Gandhi, communism, and nonviolence largely without interruption for nearly four hours. The other guests listened politely but somewhat restlessly; Coretta retained vivid memories of the splendor and the parlor courtesies.

Two days later, after a continuous blur of speeches and teas, the pilgrims rose early enough to make a six o'clock flight to Patna, where they joined Jayaprakash Narain, a famous disciple of Gandhi. On the way to Narain's remote ashram, or spiritual village, the seer explained his conviction that Indian industry and all other centralized organizations should be abolished because of their pernicious effects on religion and country life. Narain opposed Nehru, who believed that India must become a modern industrial state. King listened politely, charmed by the odes to purity, but he remarked that Narain depended upon factory-made jeeps to get to his ashram. As the travelers made their way to Calcutta and on down the east coast of India, they noticed that it was not so easy to correlate shades of color with grades of social prestige. The wretched Untouchables did not have the darkest skin, for instance, and street beggars came in all hues. It was clear to the Kings that the Indians were celebrating them partly for their color, as fellow dark people struggling against white domination, but the meaning of color internally among the Indians was much harder to determine. One of the few indications they noticed was that newspaper advertisements for brides commonly specified a preference for light skin.

They pushed on to the All-India Cattle Auction as well as to a meeting of angry labor leaders. King talked with Gandhians of various types and eccentricities—Muslims, mystics, rich industrialists, Communist governors, and cynical bureaucrats. He discussed economic development with the chief minister of Bangalore and debated with a conclave of African students who believed unanimously that the nonviolent way of Nkrumah never could remove colonialism from the Congo or apartheid from South Africa. The party worked back up the west coast to Bombay, where the Kings had made their unscheduled entrance to the country. King stayed instead at Mani Bhavan, the home Gandhi himself had used whenever in Bombay. There was no heat, hot water, or shower, and only two Indian-style toilets, which were basically holes in the floor. Nor was there furniture to speak of. Nevertheless, the Kings did not complain. Their host, S. K. De, who gave them use of his room at Mani Bhavan, found that King complained only of Bombay's emaciated, homeless beggars. His reaction reminded De of a previous guest, Arthur Koestler, who had featured haunted descriptions of Bombay in one of his novels.

On March 1, the King party reached Ahmedabad, site of the ashram from which Gandhi had commenced the Salt March. Then, in the remote northern village of Kishangarh, King kept a rendezvous with Vinoba Bhave, India's “walking saint” and most revered Gandhian. Gentle, bearded, and otherworldly, Vinoba had no home, no real organization, and no regard for discipline beyond the appeal of his own morality. For years he had been walking back and forth across India, stopping to ask rich landowners to contribute one-fifth of their holdings to his Bhoodan movement, which aimed to redistribute the acreage to landless peasants. King encountered the Vinoba phenomenon in the countryside—a cloud of dusty meditation at the center of a moving gaggle of pilgrims and celebrity-seekers. Breaking through, King was dismayed to find Vinoba impossibly vague. Like a Western caricature of an Eastern guru, Vinoba spoke in riddles, answered questions with questions, and escaped randomly through the corners of sentences. To King, whose mind was always transposing his Indian experience to the United States, Vinoba summoned up the word “kook,” which activated some of the deepest fears of middle-class American Negroes. Who remembered the educated, eccentric man committed to a mental asylum only last year for the simple act of applying to the University of Mississippi? Even among civil rights activists, Clennon King was slipping away—a kook not worth fighting for.

King's anxieties did not help his upset stomach, and neither condition made him look forward to the next morning's scheduled “walk with Vinoba,” a rite that had come to be almost obligatory for Gandhian pilgrims. Vinoba, he learned, always commenced his daily walk at three thirty in the morning, so that he could cover a nine-mile stretch in time to begin prayers and meetings by seven or eight. The prospect of a long moonlight trudge with the inscrutable mystic moved King to ask for an “Americanized” walk. The next morning, he and Reddick overtook Vinoba in a car.

To make the best of the strolling audience, King put to Vinoba questions that had been tugging at him as he listened to the tangled theories of various Gandhians: should not India, as the first nation to come to life on nonviolent principles, set an example for the world in foreign affairs by disarming itself? What were the risks? Would any modern country dare to exterminate the world's first nonviolent nation? On this subject, King felt he made contact. Suddenly the great man became quite enthralling, at least in flashes, and King ran up against the unsettling dilemma of any observer who decides that a madman is a genius. Where was the line that stood between the two qualities, and was King or Vinoba drawing it? Although unilateral disarmament was no less visionary a proposal than anarchy or anti-industrial communalism, its possibilities took hold of King as home spindles, ashrams, and other forms of economic primitivism could never do. It was the inspiration he had been seeking—how to extend the spirit of the Montgomery bus boycott as far as religion and politics would allow. He could advocate international nonviolence as a Negro and as a human being, as a Gandhian and as an American, as a minister and as a student of war.

At his farewell press conference on March 9, King was careful to say that he was presenting “a suggestion that came to me during the course of our conversations with Vinoba.” He explained that his suggestion was a consequence of the failure by the United States and the Soviet Union to have the “faith and moral courage” to stop the arms race. The reporters nodded vigorously in assent, as denunciations of the superpowers for militarism were a rhetorical staple in India. “It may be,” King continued, “that just as India had to take the lead and show the world that national independence could be achieved non-violently, so India may have to take the lead and call for universal disarmament, and if no other nation will join her immediately, India should declare itself for disarmament
unilaterally
.”