American Experiment (357 page)

Such an ideology called for political separatism as well. This was the strategy of Black Power. Born in the anger of the Meredith march through
Mississippi, this potent idea was carried North by Stokely Carmichael and other militants and debated at a National Conference on Black Power attended by a thousand delegates in Newark in midsummer 1967. In the spirit of Malcolm X’s black nationalist program, the aim now was to organize a separate black “third force,” which was either to gain control of one or both major parties or to strike out on its own. The most extreme expression of political separatism was the Black Panther party, founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby George Seale a year and a half after Malcolm’s death. His party, Panther chairman Seale said, “realizes that the white power structure’s real power is its military force.” So blacks had to organize themselves “and put a shotgun in every black man’s home.”

The force of black desperation and anger was now both vitalizing and fragmenting the black leadership. The once liberal-left NAACP now stood on the right of an array of black groups. King’s SCLC was shifting a bit to the left, and SNCC even more so, as it dropped much of its white membership. Also on the left stood CORE, but it still sought to work through the machinery of the two big parties. On the far left, separated from the rest -by their cult of violence, stood the Panthers. “The thrust of Black Power into national politics sounded the death knell of civil-rights alliances,” according to historian Thomas L. Blair. “It brought the black masses into what Frederick Douglass called the ‘awful roar of struggle.’ It revealed basic differences over ideology, methods, tactics, and strategy” among black groups as well as conflicts over power and status within the Democratic-liberal-labor-left civil rights coalition.

Yet at the heart of the new black politics was a powerful political consciousness rooted in an old and expanding black culture. More blacks were turning, for reasons ideological and spiritual, to their origins in Africa, to their way stations in the Caribbean. They looked up to their own heroes and celebrities, to their own artists, writers, musicians, dancers, their own actors on and off Broadway and in the ghetto, their own black history and myths. They read such journals as
Black Theatre, Black Scholar, Black Poetry, Black Enterprise. Negro Digest
changed its name to
Black World,
as blacks drove the very word “Negro,” and all it connoted, out of their vocabulary and their conscious lives. There was black dress, food, slang, jazz, hairstyles, and black jive and rapping, and above all black soul, which encompassed all of these things and more. Black religion embraced Christianity, Islam, and varieties thereof, including fundamentalism, evangelicalism, Catholicism, belief in the Kawaida value system or in a Christian black nationalism that proclaimed Jesus as the Black Messiah. Many of these beliefs were in flux; black Roman Catholics, for example, tripled in number over the three postwar decades.

Thus Black Power had its own rich culture, history, literature, religion, style, values. But it lacked a coherent political strategy, and the issue of strategy more and more arrayed black against black. Even while he led the Meredith march through the Mississippi heat, King could hear young blacks behind him bitterly criticizing nonviolence. “If one of these damn white Mississippi crackers touches me,” he heard a young voice say, “I’m gonna knock the hell out of him.” They should sing, someone said, “We Shall Overrun,” not “Overcome.”

The issue of strategy came to a head in a new and bitter battlefield: Chicago. After his successes in the South, King decided to make the “City of the Big Shoulders” his first major northern target, not only to force Mayor Richard Daley to end racism in hiring and housing but to prove that nonviolence could work in northern ghettos. To show his commitment he settled in a shabby, urine-stenched tenement in one of Chicago’s worst slums. During the long planning and mobilizing process Black Power militants booed King on the streets. Though hurt and angry, he reflected that he and the other leaders had preached freedom and promised freedom but had been “unable to deliver on our promises.” Few could question King’s militance in Chicago. After affixing a set of demands to the metal door of City Hall, in Martin Luther style except for the adhesive tape, King readied his forces for nonviolent sit-ins, camp-ins, boycotts.

It was too late. The street people moved first. In the 100-degree heat youths turned on water hydrants and reveled in the cold jets, but when they were accosted by the police, violence erupted, turning that night and the next day into open war between hundreds of police and thousands of blacks. In vain King and his associates toured the war-swept area preaching nonviolence. By the time several thousand National Guardsmen started patrolling the area, two persons had been killed, 56 injured, almost 300 jailed. King grimly proceeded with his demonstrations. Day after day blacks marched through white areas of Chicago. They were met with epithets, Confederate flags, rocks, bottles, bricks.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” King said. In all the demonstrations down South he had “never seen—even in Mississippi and Alabama—mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I’ve seen in Chicago.” Somewhat intimidated, and under heavy pressure from Chicago’s Catholic hierarchy, Daley met with King and other black leaders to patch together an agreement on housing, mainly consisting of promises. Some blacks praised King for forcing the mayor to the bargaining table. Others called it a sellout.

So the black leaders continued to divide and argue over political ways
and means. In all the diversity of attitudes and style, however, there could be discerned a remarkable agreement over the highest values and ultimate ends. Just as blacks from left to right apotheosized liberty and equality, so did both black nationalists and Muslims. Elijah Muhammad’s 1962 manifesto proclaimed at the very start, “We want freedom,” as did the Black Panther party program six years later. Blacks invariably backed egalitarian ideas as well. Inevitably interpretations of such values differed. Thus the Muslims declared they wanted “full and complete freedom” and spelled this out, while the Panthers defined their freedom as “power to determine the destiny of our black community.” Whether this kind of agreement on overarching values, camouflaging disagreement over specific policies and tactics, could serve as a basis of political unity remained as dubious in the black community as it always had in the white.

A storm was rising in the mid-sixties, however, that would bring blacks into stronger harmony. As LBJ’s escalation in Indochina proceeded apace, blacks were drawn more and more into the Vietnam resistance, out of motives ranging from compassion for people of color in Indochina to distaste for “whitey’s war” fought so disproportionately by black men. As King became increasingly outspoken against the war, the White House distanced itself from him and the black movement. This hurt, because time and again King still needed Administration help. But he could not resist this higher call. “We must combine the
fervor
of the civil rights movement with the peace movement,” he said in February 1967, in his first talk entirely devoted to Vietnam. “We must demonstrate, teach and preach, until
the very foundations of our nation are shaken.
”

He had known from the start, Lyndon Johnson told Doris Kearns the year after he left the White House, that he would be crucified either way he moved.

“If I left the woman I really loved—the Great Society—in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home. All my programs. All my hopes to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless. All my dreams to provide education and medical care to the browns and the blacks and the lame and the poor. But if I left that war and let the Communists take over South Vietnam, then I would be seen as a coward and my nation would be seen as an appeaser and we would both find it impossible to accomplish anything for anybody anywhere on the entire globe.”

LBJ elaborated. “Oh, I could see it coming all right. History provided
too many cases where the sound of the bugle put an immediate end to the hopes and dreams of the best reformers.” The Spanish-American War had drowned the populist spirit—World War I, Wilson’s New Freedom—World War II, the New Deal. It could happen again. The conservatives always loved a war. “Oh, they’d use it to say they were against my programs, not because they were against the poor—why, they were as generous and charitable as the best of Americans—but because the war had to come first. First, we had to beat those Godless Communists and then we could worry about the homeless Americans. And the generals. Oh, they’d love the war, too.” That was why he had been so suspicious of the military.

“Yet everything I knew about history told me that if I got out of Vietnam and let Ho Chi Minh run through the streets of Saigon, then I’d be doing exactly what Chamberlain did in World War II. I’d be giving a big fat reward for aggression. And I knew that if we let Communist aggression succeed in taking over South Vietnam, there would follow in this country an endless national debate—a mean and destructive debate—that would shatter my Presidency, kill my administration, and damage our democracy.” Truman and Acheson had lost their effectiveness when the communists took over in China. The “loss” of China helped cause the rise of McCarthy. But compared to what might have happened in Vietnam, all that was “chickenshit.”

The former President had lost none of his bombast, sarcasm, Texas high coloring, his capacity to oversimplify history. But wholly authentic in this discourse was the self-portrait of a leader who had been deeply divided about his choices as he had perceived them. As usual, he had dealt with his options by personalizing them. He remembered just what he had felt and whom he had feared in those years: Bobby Kennedy would be out front telling everyone that Lyndon Johnson had betrayed John Kennedy’s commitment to South Vietnam. LBJ would be called a coward, an unmanly man, a man without a spine. He had nightmares, he said, about people running toward him shouting “Coward! Traitor! Weakling!” But he feared World War III even more.

Always the image of Roosevelt loomed before him as exemplar and guide—FDR, who had led the nation so skillfully against Hitlerism despite the doubters and the defeatists. World War II had shown that the defense of little nations like Czechoslovakia was necessary to the security of big nations; that the democracies must unite in the face of aggression; that nations must live up to their promises and commitments. LBJ knew of Hans Morgenthau’s warning against treating Vietnam in European terms—but had not Roosevelt’s and Truman’s way of standing up to aggression worked against Japan? Against North Korea?

So Johnson had reasoned. It seemed historically fitting, in retrospect, that he had dealt with his first Vietnam “crisis” much as Roosevelt had exploited Nazi “aggression” in the North Atlantic. Just as FDR had converted provocative acts on both sides into a simple act of Nazi hostility, just as he had grossly oversimplified murky actions in the misty waters south of Greenland, so Johnson seized on equally minor, two-sided, and confused encounters between an American destroyer and North Vietnamese patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964 to step up the war. After ordering reprisal air strikes against North Vietnam, LBJ asked congressional approval for a resolution—drafted in the White House several months before the Tonkin Gulf incident—that would empower the President as Commander-in-Chief to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against forces of the United States. After brief hearings at which the Administration failed to provide Congress with vital information about the Gulf of Tonkin encounters, disingenuously suggesting that the attack on the destroyer had been unprovoked, the House gave Johnson his mandate by a vote of 414-0, the Senate by 88-2. Only the outspoken former Republican Wayne Morse of Oregon and Democrat Ernest Gruening of Alaska voted against the White House.

The escalation continued. National Liberation Front forces attacked a U.S. base at Pleiku in February 1965, killing eight Americans. Johnson ordered air strikes and sent in the first official American troops—no longer “advisers.” The sequence became tedious: land battles, more troops mobilized on both sides, lulls in the struggle marked by calls for negotiation, more battles.

Later, when Johnson talked to Kearns and others about his nightmares, about awaking and prowling the White House and visiting the situation room to scrutinize the latest battle reports, some said that the President had become unhinged. But if this was the case, the whole White House had been a little mad, for the President had acted not alone but on the advice of such presumably sober and experienced advisers as Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, and many others who were largely holdovers from the JFK White House. Some said that LBJ had become a fanatical anticommunist in the face of Hanoi’s resistance. But the President was no fanatic. He often spoke loudly while wielding a relatively small stick, limiting attacks in both intensity and duration, holding back the military all-outers, spending hours selecting bombing targets that would not provoke Chinese or Soviet retaliation. He constantly pleaded that he was seeking not to crush communism in Russia or China or North Vietnam—merely to preserve South Vietnam as a bastion of present, or future, freedom. Indeed he staked his most
eager hopes on his numerous economic aid and social reform programs in Vietnam—a kind of Indochinese Great Society. He would bring to the Vietnamese democracy American style, honest elections, Bill of Rights liberties. Like his predecessor, he failed to see that the Vietnamese wanted freedom as
they
defined it—and the first freedom was liberation from imperial or neocolonial control.

His motivation was far less psychological or ideological than political and conceptual. The Gulf of Tonkin brush occurred hardly two weeks after the nomination of Barry Goldwater, and the Republicans were already making clear that they would campaign against the party that had lost Poland and China and was now about to lose Indochina. Even after his November triumph, Johnson feared that other rivals lay in wait for him, not only in the GOP but in both the hawk and dove wings of the Democratic party. Yet the conceptual factor was perhaps more influential, certainly more insidious. Every small escalation seemed so sensible, so practical, so moderate. Each little step was based on careful analysis, ample intelligence, elaborate quantification. Like good pragmatists, like eminently reasonable men, the leaders experimented with a variety of strategies and tactics. When none worked—and none ever did—they tried something else.