Pillar of Fire (70 page)

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, President Johnson stirred his own whirlwinds behind two historic bills that converged in Congress that same Friday, August 7. Working the telephone mercilessly toward the critical votes, he spurred a harried operator to find targeted legislators: “I want to talk to him, honey, wherever he is…whether he's on the floor, if he's got a red tie on, or if he's barefoot. And I also want Senator Smathers—get him even if he's in a beer house.”

To “resist further aggression,” and to assist South Vietnam “in defense of its freedom,” the Tonkin Gulf Resolution authorized the President to use “all necessary measures,” including military force. For Johnson, the nearly unanimous vote—416-0 in the House, 88-2 in the Senate—fixed a national claim for the United States as the aggrieved party in Southeast Asia, and also neutralized Vietnam as a presidential campaign issue by depriving Senator Goldwater of political ground to press for bolder attack. Johnson congratulated Rusk and McNamara for harnessing an instant wave of public enthusiasm, but he told them secretly that he “did not wish to escalate just because the public liked what happened….” Instead, he wanted to use the reprieve to seek methods of “maximum results and minimum danger” before weakness in South Vietnam presented another crisis. Already, while grandly inspecting the war “front” in a jeep under camouflage of ferns, General Nguyen Khanh had seized upon the American airstrikes as a pretext for imposing a state of siege to stifle his political opposition. He enjoyed little support among Vietnamese in or out of his army, warned Ambassador Taylor, who predicted that “Khanh has a 50/50 chance of lasting out the year.”

In the second pivotal vote, final House passage of Johnson's War on Poverty hinged on the fate of a political hostage. More than a score of powerful Southern Democrats were demanding the ouster of Adam Yarmolinsky, Sargent Shriver's deputy director on the poverty task force. While they complained formally of Yarmolinsky's “suspect” background among Russian-speaking New York intellectuals—his father had translated Tolstoy and Dostoevsky for the Modern Library—their real grievance traced to his service at the Pentagon, where, as special counsel to Secretary McNamara, Yarmolinsky had spearheaded orders putting segregated rental quarters off limits to military personnel. This made him a bellwether symbol of controversy, especially for politicians sensitive to partisan upheaval in the South. With Goldwater sentiment running high among traditional Democrats, stalwart House segregationists treated the poverty proposal as another civil rights bill—picturing integrated job training programs, newfangled Head Start classes, perhaps even federal grants to the NAACP, with “nothing to stop them,” cried the theatrical Representative Howard Smith of Virginia, “from establishing a nudist colony in your community.” Against almost unanimous Republican opposition in the House, Johnson had begged poverty votes from a losing position for two weeks, one by one, saying, “This is my blood. This is it.” He focused mostly on Southern Democrats. “We've bled 'em to death and we've wrung their arms,” he told union leader Walter Reuther, “and twisted 'em and bought 'em and everything else.” Needing 218 votes to win, he had reached late Wednesday night the “magic 200” level of promised votes, and was teetering near the brink on Friday when two unwelcome controversies intervened from the South. In the afternoon, working with Attorney General Kennedy, the President delivered a scripted phone message to Louisiana Governor John McKeithen—urging state forces to protect Monday's first court-ordered integration in St. Helena Parish, saying “it is my duty to enforce those orders if they don't.” Shortly after this ordeal, Johnson reacted sharply to news coverage of the previous day's MFDP convention. “Joe Rauh was on television just raising hell…on the Freedom Party,” he complained to Bill Moyers. “Now that's gonna ruin us if you do that…because you run all the border states out.” More immediately, Johnson knew that such issues only emboldened moderate Democrats—those looking for a safe way to support the poverty bill so dear to their President—to demand the head of Yarmolinsky as proof to their constituents that they could curtail interference in racial customs.

Shriver squirmed through a showdown meeting in Speaker McCormack's office, protesting that only President Johnson could hire and fire executive employees. “That isn't going to satisfy those people,” McCormack replied. From a phone in the hallway, Shriver pleaded with Bill Moyers and President Johnson to spare him the awful choice, only to be told that he must take care of the matter himself. Shriver hedged miserably. He told the holdout Democrats that he would not positively recommend Yarmolinsky for a job, which they accepted as a guaranteed purge. Their swing votes established the War on Poverty on the night of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, and Shriver returned from Capitol Hill to face Yarmolinsky. “Well, we've just thrown you to the wolves,” he said, “and this is the worst day in my life.”

Johnson endured final torments when Minority Leader Halleck refused to dispense with the archaic requirement that the House vote on an “embossed” copy of the poverty bill, which meant a night's delay. The President exploded with rage on learning that several Texas representatives “really had the gall” to say they would stay over in Washington for the Saturday vote only if the administration supplied government planes to fly them home afterward. Early the next morning, Secretary McNamara called with threats from a different quarter. Because CIA Director McCone had disclosed too much to congressional leaders about the secret commando raids on North Vietnam, he warned, Johnson might face questions at his Saturday press conference on whether the United States had provoked the Gulf of Tonkin incident. “This is a very delicate subject,” McNamara told the President. He said he and McGeorge Bundy had prepared careful contingent replies, because, while Johnson could not admit that the raids took place, “neither should you get in a position of denying it.” The North Vietnamese already had requested international inspection of the island targets, said McNamara, “and it would be very unfortunate if they developed proof that you in effect have misstated the case.”

The President survived the day on both fronts. His poverty bill survived, 226-184, and he laughed when Walter Jenkins reported that Halleck's formality allowed some straddling members to record a vote each way. Johnson sailed through the press conference at the LBJ Ranch without challenge on the Gulf of Tonkin, but there were questions about the reported sacrifice of Yarmolinsky from the poverty task force. Johnson cut them off by tersely denying that Yarmolinsky had ever left the Pentagon: “No, your thoughts are wrong…. He never left.”

A worried Joseph Califano, who in fact had replaced Yarmolinsky months earlier at the Department of Defense, privately asked Secretary McNamara how Johnson could hope to lie so brazenly in public. McNamara replied that Califano was missing the larger point that power is not for the squeamish, and that the greater good as defined by the President superseded all personal concerns. “None of us is important,” he told Califano. “Everyone's expendable.”

 

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, the nine clergy celebrated their release with an integrated breakfast Friday morning at the airport cafe where they had been arrested as Freedom Riders. (“Service—3 Years Later,” a newsphoto caption noted wryly.) Groggy and light-headed from fasting since Monday while lawyers scrambled to free them on bond, the former prisoners were immensely relieved to learn that jail rumors of outright war in Asia were exaggerated. They absorbed the headlines radiating from their lost week—Tonkin Gulf, Mississippi, War on Poverty—and shared what details they could glean on their own. Rev. Robert Stone learned that a judge in Hattiesburg was just then setting free with suspended sentences the two admitted pipe-beaters of Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld of Cleveland—one of the religious pickets Stone had been recruiting weekly since the original Hattiesburg Freedom Day in January—and that Lelyveld would deliver the principal eulogy for Andrew Goodman on Sunday in New York. Israel Dresner of New Jersey—one of the rabbis who had answered Martin Luther King's jail summons to St. Augustine in June—missed word that King had returned there, just across Florida, because King had drawn less notice than the jailing of the Tallahassee prisoners themselves.

King floundered in backwater behind two breaking waves. He praised Judge Bryan Simpson for ordering seventeen segregated or resegregated public businesses to comply with the civil rights law, saying, “Now the citizens of St. Augustine have an opportunity to live together in peace and harmony.” Hours later, however, the St. Johns County grand jury undercut Simpson by releasing a new presentment that rebuked King and the federal government alike as outsiders. In a reluctant concession to the St. Augustine movement, the grand jury established a biracial commission that never met because its white members promptly resigned. King reverted to critical lament, telling another audience that the presentment was “out of line with the mood of the age,” but he saw no timely role for his protest methods now that rival government powers were in conflict over racial standards. Judge Simpson already was displacing him as a focus of resentment and death threats. (St. Augustine mayor Joseph Shelley, who publicly accused Simpson of being “bought and paid for by Lyndon Johnson,” joined civic leaders from Trinity Episcopal church in a protracted but fruitless campaign to have the judge impeached as a federal tyrant.) Along with Jackie Robinson and Yale Chaplain William Sloane Coffin, King offered encouragements to the local movement, which in turn supported Judge Simpson through the painful aftermath of the summer's clashes at the Slave Market. Robert Hayling, who lost his dental business to the point of bankruptcy, struggled with bouts of depression and letdown, feeling abandoned by King. “On the surface, conditions have quieted down considerably,” he wrote in a newsletter with Henry Twine, “but a closer look reveals the same old trouble and discord seething underneath.”

Swamped also by larger news, King made phone calls from St. Augustine about Johnson and the primeval drama in Mississippi. Both these tides—one becoming a colossal popular force in the White House, the other awakening millions of Americans to the meaning of the civil rights movement—were heading toward the Democratic convention in Atlantic City. Bayard Rustin reminded King that he foresaw a “terrific squabble” there between friendly forces, with Johnson and Mississippi's Freedom Democrats each expecting King to control the other. King told Rustin he was thinking of an extreme middle course: a public fast through the convention, honoring his commitment to the Mississippi movement without undue public disruption.

From St. Augustine, King called his lawyer Clarence Jones about drafting an article for him to temper a strain of “thinking now prevalent” in the movement: that by ratcheting up militancy in nonviolent protest, “you can somehow capture political power.” He returned to Atlanta long enough to ransack home and office for a lost passport, growing desperate enough to ask Harold DeWolf to search for it through the truckload of personal papers just shipped in boxes to Boston University. He asked for a meeting with President Johnson by telegram, tended church business on the side—arranging a guest pulpit appearance for Ralph Abernathy—then rushed to New York in time for newsmaking services on Sunday, August 9. To overflow crowds that backed up into the streets outside the separate funerals of Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner, loudspeakers carried the voices of David Dennis, James Farmer, Arthur Lelyveld, and John Lewis.

From his pulpit at Abyssinian Baptist, Adam Clayton Powell scolded King by name as an interloper during the recent riots—“…no leader outside of Harlem should come into this town and tell us what to do…”—while King himself reprised one of his standard sermons, “A Knock at Midnight,” a few blocks away at Riverside Church: “The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state.” At the “midnight” of personal or national crisis, King preached, the prophetic voice must raise hope of a just morning, as slaves once sang, “I'm so glad that trouble don't last always.”

After a speech on Monday at Amherst College in Massachusetts, King returned for long strategy meetings with his New York Research Committee. The imposing site—usually the library of Wachtel's Madison Avenue law firm—suggested that King's public business had outgrown the old days when the now-banished Stanley Levison had supplied most of King's worldly advice from his head. Members debated far-ranging choices before King as a nonviolent leader of religious credentials—approving with reservations a proposed
Playboy
interview with King,
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to be published among photographs of nude models, while painfully reprimanding one of their own number, Clarence Jones, for telling a reporter that King might cooperate one day with Malcolm X. In an atmosphere of shifting internal politics for King's favor, the latter subject opened blistering contentions about loyalty and free expression, but the overriding issue of the time was the political crisis ahead in Atlantic City. King told the Research Committee on Tuesday of his request for a personal audience with President Johnson.

Bayard Rustin undertook to run political interference at the White House. Getting through to a secretary in the office of Johnson aide Jack Valenti, he vouched for himself with details behind the telegram. “Mr. Rustin told me very confidentially that Dr. King's family needs him,” the secretary recorded, “and they want to know what he is going to be doing.” Her memo circulated that night to Walter Jenkins among other top assistants, and Lee White called Rustin the next day to scout King's purpose. When King himself later called White from the New York World's Fair, where he was keeping a promise to spend a rare day with Coretta and their children, White told him that secrecy would be essential to any White House talks on the sensitive subject of the Mississippi Freedom Democrats. King agreed, but White recommended that Johnson duck him anyway. “If it looks like a secret meeting and is discovered, there are all sorts of implications that might be drawn,” he warned the President. “If he comes through the front door, it is simply an unnecessary affront to a large number of people at this particular time.”