At Canaan's Edge (108 page)

King climbed into the high white pulpit of Washington's National Cathedral during the eleven o'clock service on Sunday, March 31. Three thousand people filled the sanctuary, and another thousand listened over loudspeakers outside or by remote feed to the adjacent parish church of St. Alban's. Having apologized privately that he lacked time to prepare a special address, King began with an awkward mis-citation of the biblical text (“Behold, I make all things new”) for one of his standard sermons: “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” He recited an allegory derived from Washington Irving's early American tale of Rip van Winkle, who awoke from a twenty-year sleep into a world filled with strange customs and clothes, new vocabulary, and a mystifying preoccupation with the commoner George Washington instead of King George III. Just as Rip van Winkle had missed the American Revolution, King argued, people remained deaf to the day's ongoing cries for freedom.

He spoke grandly of new technology and interdependence on a shrinking globe. Not until halfway through the sermon did King veer off personally into the underlying cause. “I have literally found myself crying,” he said. “I was in Marks, Mississippi the other day, which is in Quitman County, the poorest county in the United States.” He described malnourished children of illiterate parents, adding stories from his visits to tenements in Harlem and Newark. He sketched again Luke's parable of Dives and the beggar Lazarus, saying that while there was nothing wrong with wealth or new about poverty, there was hellish shame in subjugation blind to common humanity or citizenship. “We are coming to Washington in a ‘poor people's campaign,'” he said. They would not settle for a “histrionic gesture,” nor seek “to tear up Washington,” but they would “engage in traumatic nonviolent action.” King grounded his purpose in nonviolence despite Levison's quibbles, because it unified the method with the necessary twin goal, to end the Vietnam War. He said those who still believed in war to solve the social and political problems of mankind were sleeping through the revolution, too.

“In summary,” King declared, “nothing will be done 'til people of good will put their hearts and souls in motion.” He told the congregation that the odds were stacked heavily against the Washington campaign, but they should reject despair. “I say to you that our goal is freedom,” he cried. “And I believe we're going to get there, because however much she strays from it, the goal of America is freedom.” Press outlets filtered King's sermon into news stories built around confrontation. “Oh, we're always willing to negotiate,” he replied at a press conference, which generated the headline: “Dr. King Hints He'd Cancel March if Aid Is Offered.” Another story focused on speculation about where the poverty encampment might pursue legislators if Congress adjourned for the election season: “King Threatens Demonstration at Conventions.” For those interested but not present at Sunday's cathedral service, the gist of King's message lay dormant in a composition already sent to the printer. “I'm committed to non-violence absolutely,” he wrote. “I'm just not going to kill anybody, whether it's in Vietnam or here.” His article, published as “Showdown for Non-Violence,” would emerge a posthumous testament in the April 16 issue of
Look
magazine. “The American people are infected with racism—that is the peril,” King concluded. “Paradoxically, they are also infected with democratic ideals—that is the hope.”

P
RESIDENT
J
OHNSON
also set his course in storms of colliding emotion. Early Sunday morning, March 31, he and Lady Bird trundled outside in pajamas to greet their daughter Lynda on the White House South Grounds after her sleepless return flight from California. Pale and haggard, she vented angrily at the President about sending her newlywed Marine Captain Chuck Robb off to war duty in Vietnam. “Daddy, I want to ask you a question,” she said. “Why do we have to fight over there when so many people are opposed to the war?” Lady Bird pulled her away, and Lynda Robb confessed upstairs that her steely composure was dissolving. Yesterday's farewell moments at Norton Air Force Base had turned into a chaotic media scrum, after which she sobbed uncontrollably through actor Dustin Hoffman's hit film about youth rebellion,
The Graduate.
Many Marine families from Robb's company had done their best to leave progeny in case the husbands did not come home, but she did not yet know she was pregnant. Her mother ordered a sedative to make her sleep.

The President met secretly after breakfast with a trusted former speechwriter, Horace Busby, who waited in turmoil with the advance draft for Johnson's address on Vietnam. Busby was elated to read of the bombing halt and invitation for peace talks, but utterly nonplussed to learn that they were a blind leap. “No, we have heard nothing from Hanoi,” the President said brusquely. “Not a whisper, not a wink.” Johnson waved all that aside to ask for Busby's judgment about a more personal matter. If he closed that night's speech with a second bombshell announcement, that he would not seek reelection, would he lose authority for the remaining ten months of his term? “Point Two,” said the President. “Will this hurt or help in getting peace? Will Hanoi or Moscow or Peking—or Saigon, for that matter—think we are collapsing over here?” Would American soldiers think Johnson reneged on his duty to protect them? Did he have a better chance to pass the tax increase as a candidate or noncandidate? To a host of related questions, Busby hazarded a consistent reply that the dramatic surrender of power would enhance Johnson's stature. Otherwise, for instance, he thought the peace initiatives would be discounted as election year subterfuge. These answers earned him the commission to refine an alternative “peroration,” and the President secluded Busby with a writing pad in the second-floor Treaty Room of the White House residence. “Don't let a soul know you're over here,” he instructed.

Shortly before King began his sermon at the Episcopal Cathedral, Johnson went to Catholic mass with his daughter Luci, then detoured his motorcade for a surprise visit to the home of Hubert Humphrey. He told the thunderstruck Vice President not to inform even his wife, Muriel, that there was a one-in-four chance he would withdraw. Back in the White House, Johnson met the four top managers of his reelection effort, including Lawrence O'Brien, who coupled bad news of the latest bottom in his Gallup approval rating (36 percent) with confident predictions that he already had enough delegates to win the Democratic nomination. The President said nothing to them of his withdrawal from the race, knowing any hint would deflate his campaign, but the electric tension later in the small dining room made clear that the option had let slip among the family and houseguests. Plates went untouched. After lunch, while Johnson practiced the body of the speech in the Oval Office, his tearful daughter Luci woke her sister to tell her the news. “Chuck will hear this on his way to Vietnam,” Lynda Robb cried, and Busby cringed in the Treaty Room away from their wailing fits of disbelief.

The President warned selected friends late Sunday. When he told the principal speech author there might be a special ending tacked on, Harry McPherson said he was pretty sure what it was. “I'm very sorry, Mr. President,” he sadly observed. McPherson's shorthand perception relieved Johnson from any need to explain his political logic that no President could survive ambivalence in war.

Johnson was equally spare. “Well, I think it's best,” he said. “So long, podner.”

Less than an hour before the nine o'clock address, Johnson sent Busby's final peroration ahead to the TelePrompTer unit being set up with television cameras in the Oval Office. Glum aides and technicians transmitted the words. When Defense Secretary Clifford and his wife, Marny, arrived at 8:25, bringing confirmation that formal orders already had stopped all bombing north of 20 degrees latitude, the President showed him the speech coda as he dressed for television. “Nothing in my career ever surprised me so much,” Clifford recorded. A distraught family friend emerged to tell the others that Johnson wanted no more emergency appeals for reconsideration or delay: “He said that the decision has been made.” Newcomers to the small audience of dignitaries stared in puzzlement at anguished faces.

Thirty-five minutes into the historic address, which went so far as to designate Averell Harriman the U.S. representative for nonexistent peace talks, Johnson abruptly turned personal: “Finally, my fellow Americans, let me say this. Of those to whom much is given, much is asked.” He professed a philosophy he said sustained him since the “tragedy and trauma” of the Kennedy assassination “fifty-two months and ten days ago…binding up our wounds, healing our history, moving forward in new unity to clear the American agenda and to keep the American commitment for all of our people.” Now, faced with crippling divisions at home and abroad, Johnson declared his resolve not to “devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes” in the election year. “Accordingly,” he announced, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”

Lady Bird Johnson waded into the aftershock. “Nobly done, darling,” she said, but the staggering finality of the speech left a mood of resignation around her. “Can I go to England now?” asked Lynda Robb with a mordant smile. Mayor Daley of Chicago led an avalanche of callers suspended between protest and congratulations. The President alone, relishing the bewildered commentary on the television networks, claimed ebullient release that it was over. “I never felt so right about any decision in my life,” he kept saying.

President Johnson's twin jolt lifted the whole country into euphoria. Commentators praised his statesmanship in the cause of peace, and his poll ratings reversed symmetrically from stark disapproval to approval. Cheering crowds instead of pickets mobbed him on a speech trip to Chicago on Monday, when securities on the New York Stock Exchange gained more percentage value than in any previous session. The markets also broke a long-standing record for most shares traded, which had stood nearly four decades since the “Black Tuesday” crash of 1929, but this new mark lasted only two days. Early on Wednesday, April 3, when news flashed of North Vietnam's agreement to enter talks with the United States, peace buyers so overwhelmed the Big Board that its ticker lagged nearly an hour behind trades.

Hopes for early peace proved false. Johnson changed only one political fact about Vietnam with his magnanimous abdication: he turned the country away from military escalation as a viable option to resolve the conflict. Major candidates from both parties henceforth would run on troop reductions and slogans of peace with honor, but Johnson escaped rather than solved the dilemma that broke him. He offered no convincing narrative to reconcile the concrete experience of Vietnam with American character and purpose. Even freed from the cares of reelection, he recommended no such story to compete with the North Vietnamese claim on history. Fifteen of sixteen paragraphs in Hanoi's response insisted that Johnson's speech was merely a stopgap toward inevitable failure. “This is a defeat,” said Radio Hanoi, “and at the same time a perfidious trick of the U.S. Government to appease public opinion.” One grudging paragraph accepted talks only to ratify Hanoi's constant prescription: “The United States must bring its aggressive war in Vietnam to an end, withdraw all U.S. and satellite troops from South Vietnam and let the Vietnamese people settle the internal affairs of Vietnam themselves.”

No American leaders wanted to dignify North Vietnam's terms, and public esteem toward Johnson spiked high on the wish that the political sacrifice by the war's sponsoring embodiment might open some more palatable way to peace. “Your speech was magnificent,” Robert Kennedy told Johnson Wednesday morning. The President had just walked into the Cabinet Room to share with Kennedy the Hanoi dispatch received only twelve minutes earlier. Kennedy said he appreciated the heavy burdens on Johnson, and regretted letting their differences leave him out of touch. A lot of it, Kennedy said tactfully of the feud, “was my fault.” The President said the press had exaggerated their differences, and, turning to Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy's counselor and family friend, opined that the rift might never have developed if Sorensen had stayed on in the White House. Sorensen said they must not let the press divide them. He embraced consultation on common issues, and observed as a former speechwriter that Johnson's Vietnam address had the ring of a man searching for peace. Johnson said he felt no belligerence toward any of his critics: “I want everybody to get together to find a way to stop the killing.”

They achieved an intimate but guarded understanding on the new political landscape. Kennedy had requested the private talk when, after a weekend spent investigating extraordinary poverty among the White Mountain Apaches of Arizona, he landed Sunday night in a New York media blitz. “You're kidding,” he reacted to the first couriers who pushed through the passengers into his plane. Suddenly, Kennedy no longer was running to unseat his late brother's former Vice President. “Can I ask about the political situation?” he asked Johnson. “Where do I stand in the campaign?” Would the President marshal forces against him?

He intended to honor his neutrality pledge, Johnson replied, but he also did not wish to mislead Kennedy. He said he felt much closer to Vice President Humphrey, who might run, and was about to hold the same meeting with him. “If he asks my advice,” Johnson told Kennedy, “I won't give it.” (Humphrey, in fact, would be wounded to receive no mandate from Johnson.) While reserving his options, the President said he would try to stay out of the race not because he was so pure but because he was scared. “If I thought I could get into the campaign and hold the country together,” he declared, “I would have run myself.”