Pillar of Fire (67 page)

Kennedy's political energy had markedly revived in recent weeks with his brother Edward's steady recovery from plane-crash injuries and his own triumphant tour of Poland and Germany. In Berlin, the Attorney General had drawn a Caesar's crowds, reprised his late brother's “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, and publicly confronted the undertow since Dallas—vowing to rise from the stubborn grip of resignation “that with him there died idealism and hope and what was clean and best in all of us.” National polls consistently showed Kennedy as the most popular choice for Johnson's running mate. On the fallback option of a Senate race, he took soundings among New York leaders on the depth of voter resistance to him as a transplanted Bostonian. His private polls showed that he stood a better chance to defeat the incumbent Republican Senator Kenneth Keating than either of the aspiring Democrats, U.N. ambassador Adlai Stevenson and New York mayor Robert Wagner.

Mayor Wagner, having cut short his vacation on the Spanish island of Majorca, spent more than six hours on Tuesday in stalemated negotiations with King over the aftermath of the Harlem riots. Wagner looked for King to control what his assistant called “the undermuck of Harlem,” but he wanted an advance commitment that King would not criticize New York's handling of the crisis. Some of Harlem's established leaders, such as Harlem Unity Council president Livingston Wingate, invited King to help boost their leverage in City Hall, then diverted attention from their own weakness by branding King an interloping Uncle Tom. “Wingate of course double-crossed Martin,” complained Bayard Rustin, who shuttled between the parties. Rustin told the Harlem leaders that King was unsophisticated and averse to conflict, while telling King that the leaders were “crackpots.” He said the Harlem street radicals were “dangerous dogs who will lash out at anything,” but he also said any settlement must meet their legitimate demands.

By Wednesday, July 29, Mayor Wagner agreed to petition President Johnson for funds to create jobs and “eradicate slums” in New York, on the theory that the contagion of violence had spread partly on economic desperation. His talks with King deadlocked permanently, however, on the volatile question of the original shooting on East 76th Street. King supported the demand of the Harlem leaders that the police lieutenant be suspended, or at least placed on administrative leave, but city leaders refused on the ground that such actions would convey doubt about the officer's conduct, which implied the need for an investigation and inevitably would build pressure toward something beyond the police department's internal review. After four fruitless rounds of talks, King issued a public statement of unusually sharp personal tone, drafted by Bayard Rustin, in which he attacked New York police commissioner Michael Murphy as “utterly unresponsive to either the demands or the aspirations of the Negro people.” Murphy, charged King, had “obstructed establishment of a Public Review Board to investigate charges of police brutality.”

King's comments eventually added a nettle to his trail of pending legal actions, in the form of a slander suit filed against him and other prominent Negroes by Roy M. Cohn, the tenacious former counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy. He faced more immediate problems on July 29 as the swing vote at a summit meeting of civil rights leaders called by Roy Wilkins. The NAACP executive, after strategy talks with President Johnson, had gathered his peers to New York with a telegram that mixed the direst apprehensions with his customary parlor-game metaphors, warning of “violent and futile disorder…if we do not play our hand coolly and intelligently.”

With Whitney Young of the Urban League, Wilkins proposed that the leaders declare a nationwide moratorium on marches and demonstrations until the fall election. The idea touched off rancorous debate. John Lewis of SNCC objected that because the NAACP and the Urban League seldom engaged in protest anyway, the proposed talk of “a major change of tactics” falsely claimed joint credit for past sacrifice while choking off the signature discipline of activist groups such as CORE and SNCC. More substantively, Lewis and James Farmer of CORE argued that a publicly announced moratorium would lump nonviolent witness together with riots under a vague heading of “Negro trouble,” which implicitly accepted the segregationist charge. Against this argument, Wilkins stressed the overriding importance of dampening racial disturbances—which wags called “Goldwater rallies”—to secure Johnson's election and with it a kind of national ratification for the new civil rights law. Rustin and A. Philip Randolph generally agreed with Wilkins, while King found merit on both sides. He helped modify the posture on demonstrations from a ban to a “broad curtailment, if not total moratorium,” but Wilkins announced the leadership pact with strong emphasis on his original language. When Lewis and Farmer issued correcting statements, the
Times
proclaimed “Negro Leaders Split” and quoted the stinging judgment of Malcolm X from Cairo, Egypt, that the summit leaders “have sold themselves out and become campaign managers to the Negro community for Lyndon Johnson.”

 

A
T THE HOUR
of the Wilkins summit in New York, Robert Kennedy found himself listening in the Oval Office as President Johnson read a careful memorandum on reasons “it would be unwise for our party in this election to select you as the vice presidential nominee.” Facing Goldwater, Johnson explained, the campaign would be vulnerable in the border states and Midwest, where the Attorney General would only weaken the Democratic ticket. Kennedy gracefully acquiesced, saying, “I think I could have been of help to you.” Johnson digressed from the formal reading to praise Kennedy as a likely president and to offer a choice of jobs to broaden his political experience. Kennedy, as he had signaled through Bundy, asked whom Johnson would choose in his place, and Johnson, as he had planned with Clark Clifford and other counselors, responded that he had made no selection.
*
Kennedy recommended Nicholas Katzenbach to succeed him as Attorney General, then asked how Johnson planned to reveal the decision to eliminate him from the ticket. Johnson replied that he would leave the manner of public announcement to the Attorney General. Kennedy asked time to think about it.

There was a flicker of private relief on both sides. Clark Clifford privately congratulated Johnson for “courage and forthrightness,” saying, “This is the kind of president that I want.” McGeorge Bundy reported that Kennedy came from the Oval Office into his without rancor, in a relatively cheerful mood. “This is quite hopeful, really quite hopeful,” Bundy told Johnson. “I think you must have handled it grade A, because I wasn't so sure.” By late afternoon, however, Bundy said Kennedy sounded “edgier.” That evening, Kennedy declined suggestions from both Bundy and Robert McNamara that he simply announce, or ask Johnson to announce, that he wished to remove his name from consideration. It was not true, Kennedy told them, and it would make him seem fickle to those with whom he had discussed seeking national office.

By the next afternoon, keeping public silence through intense speculation in the capital, the President pressed Kenneth O'Donnell of his White House staff about what the Attorney General wanted said for the record. “Any preferences or choices?” asked Johnson.

“No, no,” said O'Donnell.

“Well, does he prefer that I announce it instead of him?” asked Johnson.

“I think he does, Mr. President,” said O'Donnell. “He just sort of feels that it's rather arrogant of him to announce that he's decided not to allow himself to be a candidate.” O'Donnell endorsed a cosmetic proposal to eliminate all Cabinet-rank officials from consideration, so as “not to cause a furor by singling him out,” and the news statement followed later that afternoon of July 30. The transparently concocted rationale served Johnson's more lasting desire to conceal a personal obsession with Robert Kennedy.

Resentments crackled over contending versions of the hidden power struggle. Johnson was said to entertain reporters with theatrical imitations of Kennedy's disappointment in the showdown, recalling “his Adam's Apple going up and down like a yo-yo.” The Attorney General was said to consider McGeorge Bundy a traitor to the Kennedy legacy, and to relish Johnson's anguish over how to jettison him without offending millions of voters devoted to him as its namesake. Oracles of Washington perceived a Shakespearean breach between the rival camps. Kennedy loyalists saw Johnson as a transparent manipulator; Johnsonians considered Kennedy an unelected prince not yet forty, whose partisans treasured his mordant jokes about riding off to form their own country.

When Mayor Wagner arrived from New York a few days later, the capital fairly hummed with the gossip of jilted sovereigns and mutually exaggerated slights. Wagner's Senate ambitions gained no advantage, however, because the President insisted that both Wagner and Adlai Stevenson withdraw from the Democratic race in favor of Kennedy. Johnson's paranoid side believed that the LBJ national ticket would be safer if Kennedy were focused upon a Senate race. His sentimental side believed that Kennedy would benefit from seeking and holding elective office. His practical side knew that Kennedy had the best chance to win the New York seat for the Democrats.

Sitting with the Johnsons on the Truman balcony at the White House, Wagner reviewed his effort to bridge deeper chasms in his own city. He said he had imported Martin Luther King because of his “emotional hold” over New York Negroes, but that even King was no match for seething hostility to police. When Lady Bird Johnson remarked that to her as an outsider, the proposed civilian review board seemed to offer a workable bridge between police and community standards, Wagner politely dismissed the idea. The first step toward civilian review, he said, would make the morale of New York police “drop to zero overnight.”

I
N
G
EORGIA
, a task force of eighty-three FBI agents eventually pressed the investigation into the July 11 murder of Lemuel Penn by means of an unorthodox ploy: a birthday gift to the Klan. As Director J. Edgar Hoover reported to President Johnson, agents had discovered a locally notorious pattern of everyday brutality inside the Athens Klan Klavern 244, escalating from the purchase on March 6 of three double-barreled shotguns and a Smith & Wesson pistol at a local pawnshop. The next night, about twenty robed members tested vigilante resolve on the nearest Negro at hand, James Potts, a forty-nine-year-old laborer at an automobile garage that served the klavern as an after-hours headquarters. On the outskirts of Athens, they whipped Potts for his unsatisfactory “general attitude,” including guarded indications that he might welcome the pending civil rights bill. A few days later, after Potts tried bravely but unsuccessfully to press charges, Klansman Howard Sims led assailants more boldly against an anti-segregation sit-in at the Varsity Drive-In, a famous precursor of fast-food restaurants, where Sims bludgeoned the head of one demonstrator with the Smith & Wesson. He was arrested and the four shotguns confiscated from his seconds, but the police chief released Sims and two days later returned the shotguns to Herbert Guest, owner of the Klan's garage hangout on Hancock Street.

In July, on reviewing these and more recent attacks, FBI agents working the Penn case learned from Clarke County officials that prosecutions had been declined because the evidence seemed “sketchy,” and Solicitor D. M. Pollock frankly allowed that community standards precluded conviction anyway, especially after Klansman Sims cleverly adopted a standard alibi that he attacked Negroes only because he “thought” they were about to attack white police officers. Through spring, armed Klan patrols had grown rowdier on weekend nights, roaming from the Guest Garage in cars boldly marked “KKK” as an unofficial but avowedly enthusiastic police auxiliary against Negroes deemed troublesome or out of place. By June the Klan patrols were firing their weapons for effect, not only on lonely country roads but in Athens near the campus of the University of Georgia. On Saturday night, June 20, shots were fired over the heads of downtown Negro pedestrians at 11:30
P.M.
and again at 12:20
A.M.
At 12:50
A.M.
, a random blast through the rear window of an apartment building embedded shotgun pellets in the faces of two teenagers, after which Police Chief Edward Hardy hauled scared witnesses directly to the Guest Garage to identify the two KKK patrol cars and four well-known shooters on their expected return.

Herbert Guest paid a hundred-dollar fine for disorderly conduct, and more serious penalties loomed during the few days when one hospitalized victim lost his eyesight, but charges lapsed in time for vigorous marauding over the Independence Day weekend. At a racecar speedway outside Atlanta, attending a giant 4th of July rally that featured the Grand Dragon of the Georgia Klan and presidential candidate George Wallace, several members of Klavern 244 were detained briefly for pummeling civil rights pickets with metal chairs, but they returned to Athens in time for the Saturday night exercise of harassing Negro motorists who passed Guest's garage. One carload of Negroes, chased by a KKK patrol car with brandished weapons, jumped out to seek refuge in Bob Walker's Drive-In Restaurant, where the waitress, hearing that a Klan posse was right behind, inquired, “Well, what did you run in
here
for?” Assistant Police Chief James Hansen later confirmed to FBI agents that he rescued the refugees by sending Howard Sims and the KKK patrol after another carload of Negroes on a tip that the license tag looked suspicious. Later that same night, the Klan patrol pulled up behind a police officer giving highway directions to out-of-state Negroes. The officer, cowed but resentful of swaggering civilians, confided to FBI agents that Klansmen Howard Sims and Cecil Myers had superseded him with a conspicuous display of their pistols, ordering the Negroes back to New Jersey.

Night riding expanded from weekends to work nights. The FBI task force confirmed reports that on Monday night, July 6—not far from the spot outside Athens where Lemuel Penn would be ambushed four nights later—a Negro named Benny Johnson had been run over by a passing freight train and swiftly buried without so much as a death certificate, nor attention to the train engineer's statement that Johnson lay motionless on the tracks, nor investigation of reports by local Negroes that Johnson had been shot to death earlier that night. No sooner did the FBI arrange to have Johnson's body exhumed than reports surfaced of another body similarly discarded two years earlier. The two railroad cases appeared to have in common visits to a powerfully protected mistress, however, and the investigators set them aside from the Penn killing, especially after one Klansman disclosed that the KKK patrol had been engaged elsewhere that night of July 6. Outside Winder, Georgia, near Athens, night riders from Klavern 244 had chased down, harassed, and beaten a lone Negro pedestrian with sticks before Howard Sims went beyond the established routine by pulling out his shotgun to fire at the victim as he fled into a field. By the time FBI agents identified the anonymous pedestrian as Melvin Reed, and confirmed the Klan informant's tale, agents from the Charlotte, North Carolina, FBI office were examining more than fifty small dents in an automobile belonging to a salesman from the Afro-American Life Insurance Company. On the night before the Lemuel Penn murder, the salesman had reported, highwaymen pulled alongside just after he passed through Athens with his wife and two children on their way home from a family vacation, blasting away without warning until he escaped at high speed.

FBI technicians matched the car dents with Number 4 shotgun pellets, and Georgia search teams recovered the inner wadding of shotgun cartridges from the highway. When agents verified the salesman's reports that he knew no one in Athens, had not stopped there, and had never taken part in any civil rights activity, FBI investigators interpreted the Penn murder within a pattern of random attacks upon isolated Negroes, and settled upon the patrol from Klavern 244 as conspicuous chief suspects. As they blanketed Clarke County with offers of reward money, they pestered the Klansmen almost hourly for interviews, though with little success. Many members of the klavern were functionally illiterate—garage owner Herbert Guest had finished only the first grade—but they were clever enough to keep silent, spurning the FBI agents so as not to entrap each other in conflicting alibis.

At the end of July, without hard evidence to show for nearly thirteen thousand man-hours of intense work, agents from the huge FBI detail searched for ways to exploit signs of mistrust within the Klan families. Several of the wives, resenting the Klan patrol for long nights of abandonment, were reported to suspect that the hush about important absences camouflaged wild binges or assorted infidelities. One wife took to bed sick with worry. Suddenly, on Friday night, July 31, two FBI agents knocked at the door of the Guest Garage not with the usual gruff questions but a frosted white cake and well wishes on the occasion of Herbert Guest's thirty-seventh birthday. Their swift departure left the recipients stunned. Herbert's wife, Blanche, refused to let anyone eat of it for fear of being poisoned. She froze the cake in wax paper, and Klan families frequently removed the curious totem from the refrigerator to debate the meaning of significant details: several pink candles, one red one. Meanwhile, FBI agents encouraged rumors that they knew everything through well-paid informants.

 

T
HAT WEEKEND
into August, Inspector Joseph Sullivan's agents loosed a whirlwind of gossip in the small town of Philadelphia, Mississippi. A banker let it be known that FBI agents said they were planning to arrest Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, but a courthouse secretary shared contrary reports that two agents were offering Price a reward of $1 million for information about the three missing civil rights workers. Some people heard that FBI agents visited Constable Clayton Livingston with the promise of “enough money to last him the rest of his life.” Others passed word that agents were threatening to ruin reputable citizens for involvement in the lucrative moonshine trade, still others that FBI payments in the range of $30,000 were being dangled before Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, several civilian Klansmen, and at least one judge.

In marked contrast with the Herbert Guest birthday cake, Sullivan's Mississippi rumor blitz was designed not to stimulate the flow of information but to conceal the identity of one informant who had talked already. For $30,000, contingent upon positive identification, Sullivan had just bought precise information that the three bodies lay beneath a fresh earthen dam on the Olen Burrage farm, about five miles southwest of Philadelphia. In Washington, President Johnson confided to a caller on August 1 that “they think they know where…the boys in Mississippi are buried,” and high officials at FBI headquarters were fretting in advance about how to conceal “our modus operandi,” fearing that the cash purchase of evidence would be embarrassing “in a case such as this involving the Bureau's prestige.” In Mississippi, Sullivan focused on securing practical results. By scouting the remote forest property, he mapped the location and access routes to the sizable dam—547 feet long, twelve to twenty feet high, with a maximum base width of twenty feet. On Sunday, August 2, he arranged to secure a search warrant, and, through SAC Roy Moore in Jackson, hired out-of-town earthmoving equipment to meet him Tuesday morning at a blind rendezvous spot.

 

H
ALF THE GLOBE AWAY
, after a voyage from Japan, Navy Captain John Herrick initiated the first spy cruise off the coast of North Vietnam. Aboard the specially equipped destroyer
Maddox
, patrolling unfamiliar waters dotted with islands, Herrick and shipmates were acutely aware of their exposure at the far edge of American war policy. Officially, they knew nothing of nearby commando raids inside North Vietnam, but in reality they monitored the raids by advance coordination so that the on-board electronics for the new intelligence mission, code-named DESOTO, could track the location and response of North Vietnam's shoreline defense communications. The raids themselves were doubly secret. If discovered at all, the acts of covert warfare were to be passed off as independent actions by South Vietnamese allies, although the entire OPLAN 34A commando program was named, funded, and controlled from Washington, then supervised in action by undercover Americans called “hired personnel.”

Through nine months of disorder since the death of President Ngo Dinh Diem in November, U.S. officials had stretched many layers of secrecy to reconcile the ongoing claim of noncombatant support status with the impulse to assert direct command. Secretary of State Rusk speculated in a recent classified cable that “a pervasive infusion of Americans” might be the only way to seize South Vietnamese leaders “by the scruff of the neck and insist that they put aside all bickering and lesser differences.” At the insistence of General Maxwell Taylor, the new ambassador in Saigon, the South Vietnamese government was being remodeled after the U.S. National Security Council, and coup leader General Nguyen Khanh already was protesting, as summarized by Pentagon analysts in their idiom, that “the Vietnamese had some difficulty in adjusting their ministerial organization to the requirements of meshing with the U.S. mission subdivisions.”

For Captain Herrick, plotting a zigzag course along the remote north coast in the Gulf of Tonkin, there was instinctive alarm when the first light of Sunday, August 2, presented the strange spectacle of several hundred North Vietnamese junks massed at sea. Herrick steered clear on the assumption that the fishing boats might associate the
Maddox
with the OPLAN 34A raiders and be armed for retaliation. That afternoon, three North Vietnamese PT boats emerged from behind Hon Me island, which commandos had bombarded with cannon fire over the weekend. Faced with swarming attack vessels that seemed to care little for the fine points of maritime neutrality, Herrick retreated swiftly for open sea to protect the secrecy of the DESOTO mission. Much to his surprise, the high-speed PT boats doggedly pursued the
Maddox
some twenty-five miles offshore, where they opened fire with torpedoes that missed and machine guns that fared poorly against the U.S. destroyer's heavier 5-inch cannon. Herrick's distress signal scrambled pilots from the nearby carrier
Ticonderoga
—“This is no drill,” announced the startled intercom dispatcher. “I repeat. This is no drill.”—and four strafing Crusader warplanes repulsed the North Vietnamese attack within twenty minutes. They sank one PT boat and disabled the other two, which sputtered back to port near the Red River delta.

In Washington, exactly twelve time zones behind Vietnam on the clock, aides rushed a crisis report into President Johnson's bedroom before dawn, and the government's top security officials debated their concerted response through most of Sunday. One surface fact stood clear: the United States must treat the incident as an unprovoked attack upon a flagship in international waters. U.S. leaders genuinely puzzled over what could have motivated the North Vietnamese to break from covert hostilities to open naval combat, where the American military advantage was most pronounced. The one-sided result—zero American casualties, no material damage to the
Maddox
—allowed President Johnson to act with restraint on his hunch that an isolated North Vietnamese commander may have attacked without authority. He ordered the
Maddox
to resume its mission with a second destroyer at escort, issued stern notes of warning against repeat violations, and, in his first use of the Kennedy “hot line” to Moscow, advised Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to instruct his North Vietnamese allies on the rules of engagement.