Pillar of Fire (92 page)

By the time Lee White returned Wachtel's calls to ask whether it was too late to stop the announcement, Wachtel said that the Selma news was being cranked already into tomorrow's front-page headlines: “Dr. King to Seek New Voting Law/Freed Integrationist Will Fly to Capital Monday.” White responded with a tempered version of Johnson's furious response. “Where the hell does he get off inviting himself to the White House?” Johnson had shouted at White, who told Wachtel that they now faced a “lousy situation” caused by “grandstanding” on the part of King. Wachtel gamely defended the initiative as legitimate politics, and plunged into grueling negotiations that went on all weekend. White said Johnson expected to be tied up all day Monday in the National Security Council, which Wachtel resisted as an excuse until he heard the news bulletins about Vietnam. He told Clarence Jones over an FBI wiretap that while he hated to see such a crisis, at least it meant that Lee White might not be lying.

At his press briefing on Saturday, February 6, Press Secretary George Reedy made front-page news by disclosing the administration's intent to offer a “strong recommendation” for voting rights legislation before the end of 1965. He straddled questions about whether President Johnson would accommodate or refuse King on Monday, when alarms reached the White House in mid-afternoon (before dawn Sunday, Vietnam time) of a disaster near the mountain village of Pleiku. Guerrillas had overrun Camp Hollowell, a fortified barracks of U.S. Army Special Forces, killing eight, wounding more than a hundred, and destroying ten aircraft on the ground. The shock of a strike on Americans galvanized official Washington, and President Johnson convened the 545th meeting of the National Security Council at 7:45
P.M.
that evening. From Saigon, over secure phone lines, Taylor and Bundy were recommending retaliatory bombing raids. McNamara distributed contingency orders for 120 planes to hit four installations in North Vietnam. When polled by President Johnson in the Cabinet Room, all grimly concurred except for Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, who said that the local population in South Vietnam “is not behind us, else the Viet Cong could not have carried out their surprise attack.” The President overrode Mansfield behind a consensus that the United States could not sit still for such treatment.

Journalists compiled an hourly “chronology of the crisis” on Sunday—not only in Washington, where President Johnson ordered the evacuation of all two thousand U.S. dependents from Saigon, and McNamara delivered a crisp briefing on the airstrikes with a map and pointer, but also in South Vietnam, where Bundy, described by the
New York Times
correspondent as “hatless, tense and pale,” flew by helicopter to visit the devastation at Pleiku and to a field hospital that lacked enough beds for the incoming wounded, including a gravely injured West Point major who told Bundy, “That's the breaks.”

Aboard
Air Force One
, heading home from his fatefully timed mission, Bundy solidified the resolve of the “fork-in-the-road” memo ten days earlier. He wrote a memorandum recommending an air and naval campaign of “
sustained reprisal
against the North,” not limited to specific incidents such as Tonkin Gulf. “We emphasize that our primary target in advocating a reprisal policy is the improvement of the situation in
South
Vietnam,” he wrote, explaining: attacks on the North would depress morale of Vietcong guerrillas in the South (“This is the strong opinion of CIA Saigon”), and raise morale of South Vietnamese allies behind U.S. initiative. “We have the whip hand in reprisals as we do not in other fields,” Bundy argued. Still, he confessed doubt as to whether sustained reprisal could prevent Communist victory. “What we can say,” he concluded, “is that even if it fails, the policy will be worth it.” His flight reached Washington in time for Bundy to give President Johnson the report before he went to bed Sunday night.

 

M
ARTIN
L
UTHER
K
ING
was in Atlanta. He had rushed to catch up with his lost week in Alabama—first speaking in Marion to encourage the new movement there, which was battered, then meeting late into the night with leaders of the movement in Selma, which was tired. He had dispatched Andrew Young and James Bevel to see if they could open a supporting front in nearby Lowndes County, made hasty arrangements to throw together a registration march in Montgomery, and then gone home to preach at Ebenezer. All the while, Harry Wachtel was reporting that the Pleiku crisis had stirred the Johnson White House into a “hornet's nest” over his public quest for an appointment. The most Wachtel could wheedle from Lee White was an offer that if King would settle for Vice President Humphrey on Tuesday, the President might “spontaneously” invite him by for a chat—provided that King kept the plan strictly secret. White insisted that Johnson would renege upon the first hint of advance publicity. King first held out for Monday, pleading commitments in Montgomery on Tuesday, but backed down when aides streamlined his schedule with charter flights. Wachtel and Clarence Jones negotiated a press release on the Humphrey appointment, which King released late Sunday from Atlanta. Unbeknownst to them, White was recommending that Johnson not see King at all.

On Monday, in Selma, James Bevel led fifty volunteers into the courthouse to confront a symbol of the new procedures established under the Thomas court order: an “appearance book” on a hallway table outside the registration office. Victor Atkins, chairman of the Board of Registrars, informed him that while the office was closed that week, aspiring voters could guarantee a future place in line by signing the appearance book at any time. After Bevel objected that the Thomas order was a sham reform, marchers filed by the appearance book without signing, and followed Bevel outside to form a line of silent vigil. There were three visiting whites among them, two Unitarian ministers from Boston and a Catholic theologian from New York. Some marchers held signs calling for more registration days. Sheriff Clark came outside “shaking with anger,” observed the
New York Times
correspondent, that these people would spurn the county's concession. “You're making a mockery of justice!” Clark shouted at Bevel, jabbing him backward down the courthouse steps with his billy club. A deputy attacked Ivanhoe Donaldson at the rear of the line. When the marchers refused to disperse, Clark hauled all fifty upstairs so that Judge Hare could impose five-day contempt sentences for disturbing his courtroom. The local
Times-Journal
, in its first notice of violence against demonstrators, reported that “Bevel was roughed up somewhat” and that others on the way to the county jail “were jabbed by deputies carrying electric cattle prods.”

At a Monday night rally in Montgomery, King urged citizens to join him “by the thousands” for a mass voter registration Tuesday morning, but fewer than two hundred showed up to march out of his former church home on Dexter Avenue. The meager turnout was embarrassing, although King knew that infighting had long since withered the local spirit of the bus boycott. Hosea Williams tried to convince reporters that his own poor staff work was to blame. At a press conference, running late for his midday charter flight, King conceded the existence of voter apathy among Negroes, then rushed off with Bernard Lee, Andrew Young, and James Forman of SNCC. In Washington, they gathered late Tuesday afternoon with Harry Wachtel and a swelling entourage in Vice President Humphrey's office, where Attorney General Katzenbach and his staff lawyers joined the discussion on what kind of legislation might break down political barriers to Negro registration in the South. Former MFDP counsel Joseph Rauh submitted a rough draft of a bill. Lee White arrived from the White House next door, having informed President Johnson that King had kept silent as promised. As time passed, White parried anxious looks from Wachtel about whether Johnson would honor his reciprocal pledge.

The President was in a crisis briefing, the first of a series that would bring members of Congress in groups of thirty or so almost daily. Undersecretary of State George Ball, substituting for Dean Rusk, who was ill, described the Vietnam conflict against the sweep of Chinese history. “We can't forget that during the first thousand years of the Christian era, Southeast Asia consisted of vassal states of China,” he said, adding that in the present century the dominant geopolitical force in Asia combined a Communist revolution at its “raw, primitive, expansionist state” with the “imperial drive of a proud, arrogant, gifted people.” Unless the drive could be “checked in South Vietnam,” Ball warned, “sooner or later there will be an overrunning of the whole of Southeast Asia by Red China,” with a corresponding withdrawal of American power that would shake confidence from New Delhi and Tokyo to Berlin. “And in the long run,” Ball concluded, “the stakes here are very simply the question of the expansion of Communist power both from Peiping and from Moscow. And I think that our options are very limited.”

President Johnson followed by introducing McGeorge Bundy as a witness fresh from his transpacific return. Bundy conceded a strong adverse tide while insisting that “the situation is by no means finished business.” To the positive headlines from his public comments the previous day (“Bundy Gives an Optimistic Report on Vietnam”), he added a report from the battle zone. “I met no American and no Vietnamese who did not think that the will and power and determination of the United States itself were perhaps the most important variable of all in this effort,” he said. Bundy emphasized that McNamara and he had made their crucial Vietnam recommendations before Pleiku. President Johnson resisted congressional entreaties to arouse the public against the Vietnamese adversaries, for fear of a war stampede.

In Humphrey's office, secretaries at last interrupted with word that the President was calling. Humphrey took the telephone briefly and then excused himself to answer a summons to the White House, triggering panic in those who were aware of the scripted plan. Lee White chased after Humphrey, who had simply forgotten, and the Vice President returned to invite the entire group along to see the historic rooms outside the Oval Office. President Johnson emerged for handshakes, then whisked King and Lee White away to discuss politics. Ten minutes later, King did not give waiting reporters the statement drafted for him by the White House (“We all appreciate the heavy demands on the President's time…”), but neither did he disclose Johnson's comments. Choosing a middle course, he spoke about his own suggestions for a voting rights bill, and shaped front-page news by referring to the President's commitment to take action.

 

T
HAT
T
UESDAY
, February 9, French security officials detained Malcolm X on arrival at Orly International Airport and expelled him two hours later as an “undesirable.” They announced that his scheduled lecture at the Salle de la Mutualité in Paris might “trouble the public order.” Malcolm arrived seething in London, protesting that French authorities “would not even let me contact the American embassy.” He expressed shock to be branded an outcast abroad, where he had enjoyed refuge from close dangers at home.

The next day, Malcolm delivered a furious lecture to a packed hall at the London School of Economics. He attacked as “absolutely unnoticed” the clandestine warfare waged by Western powers in Africa for colonial and neocolonial regimes—“American planes with American bombs being piloted by American-trained pilots, dropping American bombs on black people….” He said the United States was paying salaries to puppet presidents and employing mercenaries from apartheid South Africa. “Which means,” he added with sarcasm, “that I come from a country that is busily sending the Peace Corps to Nigeria while sending hired killers to the Congo.” The student crowd laughed. They applauded when he said that an independent Congo might topple Portuguese colonies in Angola and Mozambique, and bring pressure even against the white bastion of South Africa. They cheered when he predicted the demise of Ian Smith's unpopular white supremacist government, which was defying Britain's grant of independence to the colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). “And you can't win in the Congo,” said Malcolm. “If you can't win in South Vietnam, you can't win in the Congo.”

He paused to scattered snickers. “You think you can win in South Vietnam?” he asked. “…The French were deeply entrenched in Vietnam for a hundred years or so. They had the best weapons of warfare, a highly mechanized army, everything that you would need. And the guerrillas came out of the rice paddies with nothing but sneakers on and a rifle and a bowl of rice—nothing but gym shoes, tennis shoes…. They ran the French out of there. And if the French were deeply entrenched and couldn't stay there, how do you think someone else is going to stay there who is not even there yet?” Guffaws over the shoe image competed with catcalls (“Shut up!”) and derisive comments about the flat presumption that English-speaking superpowers would fare no better than the French.

Malcolm turned his lecture inside out on the consuming subject of hatred. A conqueror's image of Africa had infected 100 million people of African descent in the West, he said, “and in hating that image, we ended up hating ourselves without even realizing it.” He teased Britain for producing the common Jamaican immigrant “running around here trying to outdo the Englishman with his Englishness.” He scoffed at affected innocence. “Some whites have the audacity to refer to me as a hate teacher…,” he said. “In America, they have taught us to hate ourselves. To hate our skin, hate our hair, hate our features, hate our blood, hate what we are. Why, Uncle Sam is a master hate teacher, so much so that he makes somebody think he's teaching love when he's teaching hate. When you make a man hate himself, why, you've
really
got it going.” The audience erupted in laughter.