At Canaan's Edge (12 page)

By late Thursday afternoon in Washington, only two of twelve demonstrators had voluntarily departed from their sit-in positions along the primary entry corridor at the White House. President Johnson, running out of time before fifty-odd members of Congress were due for the tenth briefing reception on Vietnam, gave Agent Youngblood and several aides detailed instructions for removing the intruders with minimum public notice. While he diverted the press with a brief stop elsewhere by motorcade, Johnson directed, they were to assemble integrated teams of police officers—not federal agents—to haul away the occupiers in small groups out of different gates to different precinct stations in unmarked cars. That being precisely done, the arriving legislators passed no jarring sights of disorder on their way into the White House, but sounds from the continuous picket line outside the gates did penetrate the walls of the East Room, where Johnson made prefacing remarks on the parallel crisis in Selma. “The ghost of Lincoln,” he said, “is moving up and down the corridors rather regularly these days.”

The President introduced the Attorney General to explain the judgment he had just rendered at a press conference initiated and scripted by Johnson—that state and local officials had used “totally unreasonable force” on Sunday. “I have no question that federal law was violated,” Katzenbach declared in the administration's first substantive response to Pettus Bridge. “We are going to bring charges against those whom we can identify as violators.” This message drew a stinging cross-examination from several legislators, including Representative John Bell Williams of Mississippi, who blasted Katzenbach for siding with Communist agitators to trample on the rights of the South. McNamara and Rusk were having an easier time explaining the administration's war moves in Vietnam when an aide handed President Johnson a note that James Reeb had been pronounced dead at 6:55
P.M.
, Alabama time. “Lyndon and I excused ourselves for a helpless, painful talk with Mrs. Reeb,” recorded Lady Bird Johnson. The President insisted that a presidential C-140 airplane take the widow and Reeb's father back home when they were ready, and he consoled them for fifteen long minutes about their personal loss for a just cause. “But what is there to say?” Mrs. Johnson added in her diary. “When we went upstairs we could hear the Congressional guests and the music still playing below; and out in the front the chanting of the Civil Rights marchers. What a house. What a life.”

W
ILSON
B
AKER,
unshaven and haggard from lack of sleep, announced Reeb's death Thursday night to several hundred Selma Negroes and visiting clergy still standing vigil at the “Berlin Wall” clothesline on Sylvan Street. Behind them, dripping from a second day of steady cold rain, a banner still hung above the Brown Chapel doorway from Jimmie Lee Jackson's funeral on March 3: “Racism Killed Our Brother.” Prayers and song verses recognized Reeb as the second martyr of the Selma campaign until interrupted by another object hurled from the distance, which struck a demonstrator from Wisconsin in the forehead. Baker helped send him off to Good Samaritan for treatment, maintaining a rapport of gruff civility across his barrier even though he had prevented the demonstrators from building tent shelters—city code, he said—which left them and their patchwork bed of air mattresses soaked in the mud beneath umbrellas, blankets, and flattened cardboard boxes on sticks. (“I'm a segregationist,” Baker told one reporter, “but if I was a nigger I'd be doing just what they're doing.”) He pledged solemnly to the crowd—as he had promised the Justice Department already—that he would file first-degree murder charges within an hour of Reeb's death against the four Selma men he had identified as the assailants, one of whom had seventeen prior arrests. When he returned, the bandaged Wisconsin man was already back among demonstrators, who sang between their diversions of fatigue, such as street dances, grandiose debates about fasts to the death, and naps in the dry Brown Chapel pews.

Governor Collins rushed back to Selma that evening to buffer emotional eruptions from Reeb's death—only to become disturbed himself by an encounter with Lola Bell Tate, a teenage girl he found on the floor of the Brown Chapel parsonage. Dr. Dinkins explained as he worked to stop the bleeding that a .22 caliber bullet had pierced her lip and knocked out a tooth, but luckily had been too spent to cause more damage. Tate was the third victim so far of potshots fired into the street vigil. Collins made his way back outside past the clothesline and Baker's police officers to the commander of the state troopers, asking why he deployed his armed men to face inward with weapons trained on the demonstrators rather than upon the marauders who fired and hurled projectiles from the darkness behind. Receiving no satisfactory answer, Collins recovered his official neutrality and went off to seek a negotiated truce that would relax the vigil in return for a one-time memorial service for Reeb at the courthouse. He and his assistants discovered that tear gas grenades had been set off beneath their government sedan. “They attempted to drive it,” reported the
New York Times,
“but were forced to get out after half a block, their eyes watering.”

At FBI headquarters, officials maneuvered to minimize the bureau's public exposure. When both the White House and Justice Department requested an FBI escort for Marie Reeb in Birmingham, Assistant Director DeLoach fended off the courtesy duty with an exaggerated claim that all Alabama agents were “working around the clock in the Selma area.” This earned him a personal commendation from J. Edgar Hoover, who mandated instead a security review of the Justice Department aide suspected to have originated the escort idea. Simultaneously, to forestall any “numbers game” about FBI performance, DeLoach dodged a request to disclose how many agents were assigned to Selma. There were enough to get results, he told White House press secretary George Reedy, but Katzenbach's press conference late Thursday pitched the Bureau's internal machinery into reverse alarm. Well into the night, headquarters grilled employees about how the Attorney General could promise federal prosecutions before the FBI provided “any information whatsoever…indicating that any of the police officers involved in the brutal beating of the marchers on Sunday March 7, 1965 had been identified.” Panicky agents “emphatically stated that they had no knowledge,” and parroted the accepted line that matching troopers or deputies with thousands of photographs “has been difficult due to the fact a large majority were wearing gas masks.” When supervisors wrung from the head of the Mobile office an admission that he had shared interim results with John Doar, and thus taken initiative for which “he has no written record of authorization,” the FBI's disciplinary apparatus isolated and removed him by morning.

T
HE SEVERAL
crises converged toward showdown on Friday, March 12. In Selma, where rain fell so hard that only eighty at a time maintained the vigil outdoors, the last of the Chicago theology students left for home—Jesse Jackson with a mild case of pneumonia—but newcomers replaced them several times over. Seventy Catholics arrived that day from Chicago alone, and the annual meeting of the Unitarian-Universalist Association adjourned en masse to Selma from Boston, where the symphony honored Reeb with the same piece it had played after the Kennedy assassination, Gluck's “Dance of the Blessed Spirits.”

Wilson Baker could not keep his agreement with Governor Collins to secure permission for a memorial service at the Selma courthouse, because his boss, Mayor Smitherman, moved steadily against him into a political alliance with Sheriff Clark, bending to local voters angered by the “appeasement” of Tuesday's march. On his own, Baker did cut down the “Berlin Wall” with his pocketknife that afternoon. Although he emphasized that there still would be no marches, demonstrators eagerly cut up pieces of the clothesline as souvenirs of a symbol removed. They raised freedom chants along with prayers of conviction that nonviolence would overcome the barriers to Montgomery. The rain finally stopped. Young people invented new verses for their song: “The invisible wall is a Berlin Wall…. The troopers' cars are a Berlin Wall…”

In Montgomery, a large truck pulled up outside temporary SNCC headquarters with a surprise delivery of tents, helmets, cooking utensils, and assorted survival equipment. Silas Norman berated Forman for spending many thousands of scarce SNCC dollars unilaterally toward a “grandstand” campaign that the organization had rejected a week earlier. SNCC leader Cleveland Sellers was stunned to learn that Forman had put out a “nationwide call” to Montgomery, mimicking King. Forman, in turn, was dismayed to learn that Stokely Carmichael and seventy Tuskegee recruits abandoned the occupation of Dexter Avenue Baptist as a foothold for demonstrations, under pressure from Bevel and church trustees who cut off the electricity and water. Meanwhile, at federal court in Montgomery, Assistant Attorney General John Doar was “plainly astonished,” according to the
New York Times,
to hear his own FBI witness blurt out—against the grain of his testimony, and without being asked—that Alabama troopers were “justified in using tear gas” on Bloody Sunday. Unbeknownst to Doar or spectators, rookie agent James M. Barko had misinterpreted the Bureau's overnight dragnet about helping Doar, and soon felt corrective discipline straight from Hoover's office for putting the FBI on any side of public controversy about race. Doar, arguing in support of King's petition for a protected march, tried to recover by offering into evidence a three-minute news film of the violence on Pettus Bridge, and Judge Johnson, visibly affected by footage he had never seen, called a recess as soon as courtroom lights were restored. His demeanor confirmed instincts within Governor Wallace's inner circle that the judge and the whole country were tilting against them. “The niggers are like cats,” one legislator told a reporter. “They always land on their feet.” Late Friday, yearning to regain public initiative, Wallace wired President Johnson for an appointment to address “some of the greatest internal problems ever faced by this nation.”

Undercover agents scattered through the outdoor lines for the White House tour on Friday to prevent a recurrence of the previous day's sit-in. For better than four hours, through lunch, President Johnson sat in the Cabinet Room flanked by Katzenbach and Vice President Humphrey, listening to stories about voting rights from more than three dozen men—a few young activists
*
and a delegation of clergy from a mammoth ecumenical assembly convened by the Commission on Religion and Race. Many had been to Selma, including Rev. Joseph Ellwanger of the white Alabamian's march and Rev. Robert Spike from the “turnaround” march on Tuesday. The President took notes. His joke fell flat when he remarked that the picket lines outside were “violatin'
my
civil rights” by keeping his daughters from doing their homework, and the audience grew restless when Humphrey recited all the past achievements for which Johnson deserved credit. “Why has it taken so long for you to send a voting rights bill to Congress?” Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore asked bluntly. Stung, Johnson said it was not easy to fashion a constitutional bill that would pass a Congress dominated by hostile Southern committee chairmen, and also deliver the franchise effectively to five million Negroes where all previous measures had failed. When Spike and his delegation returned to the Lutheran Church of the Reformation on Capitol Hill, where the CORR's nationwide convocation of three thousand clergy itself made front-page news, their reports of impatience with Johnson drew cheers, but descriptions of an “anguished” President received skeptical comments about an LBJ “snow job.”

Back in the Oval Office, Johnson called for his dog Blanco but found him sick from a rabies shot. To stimulate interest in an upbeat topic, he took Laurence Rockefeller of the White House Conference on Natural Beauty down to the press room—only to find that nearly all the reporters had rushed outside to watch officers haul away two dozen demonstrators who had been rooted out of the tour line but now sat in Pennsylvania Avenue during rush hour, plus a handful of white women who had slipped through the northwest gate to lie facedown on the White House driveway. Johnson told the remaining journalists they could ask Rockefeller anything they wanted, but got few takers. When one of them mentioned that Governor Wallace reportedly was asking to see him, Johnson pounced. Even before the telegram from Alabama was received, his staff arranged and announced a summit conference for the next morning.

March 13–15, 1965

O
N
Saturday, March 13, President Johnson prepared for Wallace first by consulting his Secretary of Defense about the heavy pressure from the lobbying clergy to dispatch U.S. soldiers to Alabama. “They all say, ‘we want troops,'” Johnson told McNamara. But troops, he said, really meant sending “some young boy who's just been drafted or joined in,” and who lacked the ability to handle prosecutions or complex racial entanglements. “Troops don't do any of that, and we don't know that we've got enough troops but what he [Wallace] could match them if he just called in everybody that he could get.” Johnson added that Katzenbach had “thirty-three lawyers” working on the legal ramifications of using troops in Selma, “all of whom are in this field, and all of them recommend against it.”

McNamara concurred. “Beyond all the arguments you've given, Mr. President, Selma is just one point,” he said. “You have Mississippi, Louisiana, and the rest of Alabama to take care of. You got this bill coming up next week, and troops leave a bitter taste in the mouths of all the people that are in those three states, and in the mouths of all the senators.”

As applied to Vietnam as well as Selma, these were profound, treacherous distinctions of politics and war. Johnson also leaned against sending civilian U.S. marshals to Selma, which was the option that Martin Luther King strongly preferred. King saw the enforcement mission of marshals as corrective and constructive—treating violent segregationists as errant fellow citizens, with rights—whereas the military mission of soldiers tended to dehumanize opponents into enemies. For King, even armed marshals were easier to square with nonviolence than soldiers, but Johnson worked from practical experience rather than abstraction. Behind the myth of Wyatt Earp, he saw the typical U.S. marshal as a patronage hack with very little training. “He's just a fellow that carried some senator's suitcase,” the President told McNamara, “and there are just a hundred or so of 'em in the whole United States.”

Johnson wanted to rely on seasoned FBI agents as long as possible. DeLoach, his FBI liaison officer, had promised him that the Bureau would bring evidence to prosecute a hundred of the troopers who had run roughshod over the marchers on Sunday. “While this FBI man was getting his head beat in with a club, he was taking pictures…and he got them all on their horses,” the President told McNamara. “We can't identify 'em with gas masks on, but we've got their horses, and we're identifying the horses they rode.” McNamara expressed no reservations about such a fantastic stalling yarn, which the Bureau would discard when pressure eased, and if he detected a rare gullibility in Johnson he refrained from saying so. Instead, he assured the President that he had troop units on alert for rapid deployment, and endorsed Johnson's reluctance to use them in a political crisis. “If we did anything wrong in the past two or three years on this,” said McNamara of previous crises in Birmingham and at Ole Miss, “it was to introduce troops too early, and they escalate to a higher level of violence.”
*

With Governor Wallace waiting in the Cabinet Room, Johnson summoned Attorney General Katzenbach alone into his private bathroom while he sat on the toilet. This was Katzenbach's first exposure to a legendary Johnsonian practice, which power analysts interpreted as a submission drill for squeamish aides such as McGeorge Bundy. To Katzenbach, who may have been eligible for such treatment himself as an Ivy Leaguer, Johnson's manner seemed wholly one of raw urgency about Wallace, stripped of pretense. “What should I ask him to do?” Johnson demanded.

Katzenbach stammered. “I don't know,” he said. “What do you want him to do?”

“Write down six things for me,” Johnson commanded—make a list, put numbers on it. “I don't give a damn how outrageous they are,” he said.

Katzenbach found a pad in the Oval Office. The President glanced at the hastily composed list when he emerged minutes later, then pocketed it on the way to greet the Wallace entourage. There he remarked effusively on Lady Bird's Alabama roots and made a point of introducing the renowned Secret Service agent Rufus Youngblood as a native Georgian, which reminded him to send for an agent born in Alabama. He grandly announced that George Wallace had at least one thing in common with Martin Luther King, namely, that they were the only two people cheeky enough to ask him for an appointment and notify the press before the request reached the White House, which King had done on leaving the Selma jail in February. Bantering about Southern manners and a President's prerogatives, he waved off Wallace's apologies with assurances that he was glad to see him. The summoned Secret Service agent arrived, whereupon Johnson beamed, “Lem, I want to introduce you to your governor.”

The President soon invited Wallace and one aide to retire privately with him and Katzenbach. He guided the diminutive Wallace to sink low in one of the cushioned sofas in the Oval Office, then pulled his favorite rocking chair close enough to rub knees as he towered over his guest. “Well, governor,” said Johnson, “you wanted to see me?”

Wallace defined the problem as malcontent demonstrators trained in Moscow or New York. “You cannot deal with street revolutionaries,” he said. “You can never satisfy them. First it's a front seat on the bus. Next it's a takeover of parks. Then it's public schools. Then it's voting rights. Then it's jobs. Then it's distribution of wealth without work.” For fifteen minutes, he described the hardships created by subersive demonstrators for Alabama and Washington alike, then exhorted President Johnson to join with him in a dutiful alliance to restore public order. “Finally, Mr. President, I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to let me come here,” Wallace concluded, with comments about the White House and other national symbols that bordered on awe.

Johnson never took his eye off Wallace. His accent thickened as he expressed his own distaste for demonstrations, to the point that Wallace's aide later claimed he said “nigger” outright instead of the drawled Southern “nigra.” “Those goddam nigras have kept my daughters awake every night with their screaming and hollering,” said Johnson, then slowly shifted from the faults of the demonstrators to their grievances. “You can't stop a fever by putting an icepack on your head,” he told Wallace, and brutality was no good to “get at the cause” of the fever, of course. “I know you're like me, not approving of brutality,” said Johnson. He brushed off Wallace's quibbles about the word “brutality” by snapping his fingers for photographs of the violence on Pettus Bridge. Johnson secured a numb agreement that brutality injured the United States even if Wallace qualified the cause of it, then mused sadly about how the governor strayed so far from his progressive record in public service. “Why are you off on this black thing?” he asked. “You ought to be down there calling for help for Aunt Susie in the nursing home.”

The President soared off into New Deal memories of hooking up the first electricity in hardscrabble rural Texas so families at last could see at night and farmers could live past forty and farm women could iron clothes without first heating a metal slab in the fire. He rhapsodized on his plans to establish Medicare and attack hopelessness in Appalachia. He said Wallace could do a lot to educate the poor of both races in Alabama—“Your president will help you”—if he would stop harkening back to 1865 and look instead to his legacy for 2065. “What do you want left when you die?” Johnson intoned. “Do you want a great big marble monument that reads, ‘George Wallace—He Built,' or do you want a little piece of scrawny pine board that reads, ‘George Wallace—He Hated'?”

Seymore Trammell loyally intervened to say his boss had come there to discuss the growing menace of Communist demonstrations, but he failed to relieve Wallace from the grip of LBJ's treatment. The President slowly turned and “looked at me like I was some kind of dog mess,” Trammell recalled, then handed him a pencil from the coffee table. “Here, take notes,” Johnson ordered. Picking the most far-fetched item from Katzenbach's list, he offered Wallace a suggestion to “turn off those demonstrations in a minute” by announcing his commitment to desegregate all of Alabama's public schools: “You and I go out there right now in front of those television cameras.”

Wallace looked stricken. On the defensive about his tombstone, he parried the notion by saying that he lacked the power to do so under Alabama law.

Johnson sparred with Wallace through the items on Katzenbach's list: a pledge of obedience for federal court orders, a commitment to law enforcement without brutality, a declaration of support for the protected right of peaceful assembly, and a call for biracial meetings between Alabama whites and Negroes. “Are you getting this down?” he prodded Trammell, and finally suggested that Wallace simply affirm the principle of universal suffrage.

Wallace replied that everybody in Alabama could vote already if they were registered. In that case, Johnson pressed, say everybody including nigras could be registered. “I don't have that power, Mr. President,” said Wallace. “Under Alabama law it belongs to the county registrars.”

“Don't you shit me, George Wallace,” Johnson said sternly. Then he grinned slyly to register a sore point from the 1964 election: “You had the power to keep the President of the United States off the [Alabama] ballot. Surely you have the power to tell a few poor county registrars what to do.”

They emerged after three hours and fifteen minutes to tell a crush of reporters outside the West Wing lobby that they had enjoyed a frank exchange of views. Wallace called the President “a great gentleman, as always,” and then departed, confiding glumly to assistants on his homeward flight that “when the President works on you, there's not a lot you can do.” White House aides, by contrast, shelved contingency plans to contain an ugly scene if “the meeting has gone badly,” and later recorded that Johnson's performance left Wallace “sort of cowed and pliable—of course, it didn't last more than two days.” Johnson himself gobbled a bowl of soup before announcing outdoors at his thirty-eighth press conference that he would submit voting rights legislation next week. Asked what he had told Wallace, he revealed the last three suggestions from Katzenbach: “First, I urged that the Governor publicly declare his support for universal suffrage.” Asked why he had waited a week to respond publicly to Sunday's violence, Johnson asserted that he had received a suitable proposal only hours earlier. “I have plotted my course,” he said. From the Rose Garden, the freedom chants of a thousand pickets still could be heard beyond the Pennsylvania Avenue gates.

A
SMALL
airplane identified as the “Confederate Air Force” buzzed low over Selma's blockaded vigil on its fifth continuous day, dropping leaflets that advised white citizens to fire local Negroes—“an unemployed agitator ceases to agitate”—and to support a defense fund for the alleged murderers of James Reeb. Morale suffered on both sides of the line below. Bands of frustrated demonstrators slipped around Wilson Baker's front ranks toward the courthouse, only to need rescuing by Baker himself from more hostile whites lurking in the rear. Uniformed officers occasionally weakened under the prolonged barrage of nonviolent freedom songs that were personalized for them at close quarters—“I love badge number forty-seven…” Some answered questions about hobbies and trivia, or even expressed confusion about their duty, and a few commanders reportedly asked to have their men relieved by the Alabama National Guard. Sheriff Clark rallied his possemen and Lingo's troopers to block the first surge of a march to honor Reeb on March 14, but he relented under a truce with Baker to allow small parties through the lines for the limited purpose of attending Sunday worship downtown. Two fresh acquaintances from the vigil arranged to meet at the doorstep of First Presbyterian, where ushers turned them away because one was a Negro. At Central Baptist, much of the large congregation evacuated or avoided the sanctuary until the deacons safely refused several racially mixed groups.

At St. Paul's Episcopal, Rev. Frank Mathews missed his own service because of an ulcerous stomach that was aggravated by the expected arrival of twenty aspiring worshipers from the “Berlin Wall,” led by collared clergy. When Rev. John Morris and others had provided a courtesy notice of their intention, Mathews responded by asking whether they thought it would be Christian to bring guests with measles. In his absence, the awkward debate about an appropriate analogy for multiracial worship resumed in confrontation on the church steps. Seminarian Jonathan Daniels acknowledged the frayed nerves all around as signs of genuine spiritual conflict, but theological issues were so urgent to him that he frankly expressed worry about how the leaders of St. Paul's could hope to secure any standing within Episcopal canon law or any personal comfort from the deeper imperatives of faith.

For Judith Upham, the only other Boston seminarian who had remained all week in Selma, distress focused more on the tactical disadvantage of having within their group some local people in dirty blue jeans who displayed little respect for Episcopal tradition. She was embarrassed by her own wish that all the Negroes among them could be like the impeccably educated Ivanhoe Donaldson of SNCC, who had been raised Anglican in Jamaica. Finally, the phalanx of ushers and vestrymen from St. Paul's concocted a “nonracial” policy to admit all the clergy but none of the laymen, including Donaldson. Those blockaded on the church steps retreated to Brown Chapel rather than submit to the mandated division. Three regular members of St. Paul's walked out of the delayed service to protest the refusal of worship, opening battle within a congregation that included many of Selma's most prominent citizens.