At Canaan's Edge (58 page)

An agitated Katzenbach informed DeLoach early Friday that he had lain awake with second thoughts and wanted to revise the letter. He said the understanding provision might infuriate Robert Kennedy, whose support he needed for bills in the Senate, but DeLoach cut short the misgivings. “I told the Attorney General that I was just as sorry as I could be,” he reported, “however, this letter had been mailed out last night and no doubt would be in the hands of Senator Long either this morning or early this afternoon.” DeLoach also reported, with merciless satisfaction, that Katzenbach instantly declined his offer for the FBI to retrieve the letter from Long with a candid account of his fears about Kennedy. By a combination of bureaucratic skills—patient cultivation of long-range advantage, sealed with masterful control of paperwork—FBI officials fastened Katzenbach to a bugging defense they had constructed from nothing.

Nevertheless, Hoover cautiously placed a moratorium on new bugs “irrespective of what Long does,” in order to minimize exposure in the unstable climate since President Johnson's ban on intrusive surveillance. That same Friday, Hoover reacted sharply to notification of hasty installations on King. “Remove this surveillance at once,” he ordered. FBI technicians surreptitiously planted no fewer than sixteen bugs anyway, seeking to intercept significant mischief in various rooms occupied for the weekend by King's party at the New York Americana Hotel. This frenzied, unsuccessful attempt remains a mysterious lapse of internal FBI discipline, traceable to mixed signals or perhaps anticipated regret that these would be the last microphone intercepts ever targeted at King. The government's electronic ear would intrude upon the final two years of his life exclusively through the numerous telephone wiretaps authorized by Katzenbach and Robert Kennedy.

K
ING PREACHED
at New York's historic Riverside Church once again that Sunday, January 23, which marked the end of a battle truce for the Vietnamese Tet holiday. “The days that follow may well be decisive,” warned an advertisement spread across two pages of the morning
New York Times,
“in determining whether this brutal, bloody war will be ended or escalated.” King's name appeared among hundreds of signers drawn from interfaith clergy worldwide, including theologian Karl Barth, rabbis Heschel and Gittelson, Father Daniel Berrigan, Martin Niemoeller of Germany, and bishops from Sweden to Tasmania. Their appeal—headed “they are our brothers whom we kill!”—rebuked both sides for alarming determination to prove sincerity by violence. Thich Nhat Hanh, the monk who had written King about Buddhist theory of nonviolent self-immolation, added the Vietnamese perspective throughout a text circulated by the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation: “Helpless villagers in Vietnam, unable either to escape or defend themselves, recoil from the bombing of one side and from the terror of the other.” The ad called upon the opposing governments to reinstate the 1954 Geneva Accords under a truce leading to a plebiscite on reunification. Thich Nhat Hanh signed as “A Vietnamese Buddhist…whose name is withheld for reasons of prudence.” In hiding—soon exiled for the remainder of the century by the diverse autocracies to govern Vietnam—he wrote that foreign military escalation would reinforce Ho Chi Minh's reputation for patriotic resistance and conversely would undermine for Westerners the ultimate goal of forging political allegiance, so that by every boost of violence “the more surely they destroy the very thing they are trying to build.” He charged that a million South Vietnamese already lived in refugee camps on whatever portion of the four-cent daily allowance was not stolen in graft.

King flew home to address internal conflicts centered on Hosea Williams, who had been arrested for drunk driving late Saturday night in Birmingham. No sooner did Williams make bail than he scandalized a public meeting on registration goals, exclaiming “You can't Jew us down!” to the few interracial stalwarts of the Alabama Human Relations Council, among them several Jews. SCLC aides labored to curb his outbursts and profligate ways, especially in light of the unresolved FBI car theft investigation. “I think that the root of this problem is that you don't realize the strength of your own personality,” Andrew Young counseled privately. “I am sure that you don't mean to abuse and humiliate people, but quite often you do.” Still, Williams berated his rival James Bevel for “stealing” King away to Chicago. Determined to recapture the movement spotlight for Alabama by spectacular enrollments of newly registered black Democrats, he excoriated SNCC project directors for what he called their “ignorant, black nationalistic” notion to organize independent parties for selected counties instead. He accused Stokely Carmichael of exploiting sharecroppers with newfangled schemes. “There ain't no Negro in Alabama, including ourselves, that knows one iota about politics!” he shouted. Carmichael retorted that Williams was herding black voters into a party with “White Supremacy” as its official slogan. Francis Walter, who observed several of the tumultuous parleys, found the question of party loyalty “vexing” and Carmichael unpersuasive but game. “I don't blame anyone for resisting Hosea's dogmatic egomania,” he recorded in his diary.

Sunday afternoon, Walter drove alone into Alabama's Wilcox County for a mass meeting to map strategy for first-time voters in the May primary. He came upon a visibly charged crowd of Negroes on Highway 41 just outside Camden, held back from an abandoned car by troopers with sawed-off shotguns. Movement supporter David Colson had been poised to turn into the parking lot of Antioch Church when a car behind thumped his bumper. He walked back to investigate, whereupon the driver shot him dead behind the right ear with a .32 caliber pistol and drove away past Mrs. Colson in the car with her small son and three cousins. The crowd calmed slightly when Sheriff P. C. “Lummie” Jenkins announced that J. T. Reaves, a local farmer, had surrendered. Witnesses murmured that Reaves seemed deranged, having bumped into other cars, with Colson the first Negro who dared to inquire like a motorist in an ordinary accident. Reporters arrived from distant cities. “With the pool of blood still fresh outside the windows, the meeting went on after a brief eulogy by [SCLC aide Rev. Daniel] Harrell & Rev. Frank Smith,” Walter wrote that night. “There was crying in the church and a great deal of fear. I was afraid.” Despite pleas not to let terror achieve its purpose, no one agreed to stand for office in the May primary.

A hundred miles north, King accepted staff advice to avoid contention with SNCC projects over the isolated Black Belt counties plagued with evictions, tent cities, and ingrained fear spiked by the fresh murder in Camden. He confined a hurried visit to Birmingham, where Hosea Williams catapulted Monday morning from the defendant's table to a personal triumph that made national news. He won dismissal of the drunk driving charge in court just before federal officials arrived as a result of his battered month's marches to dramatize the slow pace of Birmingham registration. Twenty-three new registrars—nine of them Negroes—took up stations under superseding authority from the Voting Rights Act. King led a small parade of welcome, and Williams invited white people to make use of the registrars, too. “The more people that register,” he grandly declared, “the better government we have.” With aides in bemused debate about whether Williams gained his miracle rescues by providence or lunatic boldness, King toured spontaneous voter rallies. He proclaimed a mission to “democratize the total political structure of the state,” reported the
New York Times.
The detachment of federal registrars worked well into Monday night to process more than a thousand people the first day. A certifying order from Attorney General Katzenbach made Birmingham the thirtyseventh local jurisdiction served—eleventh in Alabama, first in an urban area.

In Washington that week, also on the legal initiative of John Doar's Civil Rights Division, Katzenbach quietly approved an effort to ban segregation in the 226 state and local jails that held federal prisoners under contract. He recommended that Constance Baker Motley become the first Negro woman to hold a federal judgeship, partly in recognition of her landmark cases to integrate Clemson and Ole Miss, and he joined President Johnson at the White House ceremony to swear in Robert Weaver as the first Negro Cabinet member, heading the new Department of Housing and Urban Development. The President chided Roy Wilkins about Weaver's propensity to travel, which he called “the principal defect of Negroes in government.” (“The moment they take an oath, they get an airplane ticket,” he teased, and Wilkins agreed, “They do get around.”) More seriously, Wilkins, Clarence Mitchell, and Whitney Young complained that White House protocol granted no special reward for political loyalty on Vietnam. Vice President Humphrey took note of their quiet tenacity in a favorable memo, asking “why treat all of the civil rights leaders alike when the SNCC outfit engages in the most outrageous attacks on the President and the Administration.”

J
OHNSON AND
McNamara had slipped with their wives into the White House theater on Saturday night to watch the James Bond spy fantasy
Thunderball,
then returned to the crucible of inescapable choice over a bombing pause now extended past thirty days. On Monday, January 24, McNamara advised gloomily that he expected a “military stand-off at a much higher level” under troop deployments scheduled for the year, with American casualties to reach a thousand killed per month. He agreed with the CIA assessment that no amount of deliverable ordnance could reduce the flow of soldiers and supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail enough to threaten the enemy war effort, and favored renewed bombing because he had exhausted his hope for a diplomatic settlement. Privately, McNamara commended to Johnson a historical explanation for North Vietnam's stunning indifference to peace feelers in the face of pending devastation: they believed they had all but won a terrible long war in 1954, only to negotiate away half their country at Geneva under conciliatory pressure from the world, including their Communist allies, and were steeled never to repeat such a mistake. Monday night in the White House Cabinet Room, McNamara pressed to restart Rolling Thunder by Friday. “I'd go sooner,” he said. “Political delay can be damaging.”

Johnson stalled. “I think we'll spend a good deal of political capital in resuming,” he countered. War doubters would decry the lapse of restraint. War enthusiasts would claim proof that restraint was dangerous folly.

On Tuesday evening, Johnson gathered twenty congressional leaders from both parties to address the pause under strict pledge of secrecy. Senators Mansfield and Fulbright advocated essentially the
New York Times
peace ad—an international push for plebiscite under a revived Geneva Accord, from a military posture pulled back within “enclaves” to minimize casualties. Everyone else spurned the idea as a passive formula for eventual defeat. Republican leaders Everett Dirksen and Gerald Ford said bombing was the only choice to win. Senator Russell lamented that extra American soldiers inevitably would be killed—“casualties of our care for peace,” he called them—by enemy reinforcements moving freely during the pause. “This is the most frustrating experience of my life,” he said. “I didn't want to get in there, but we are there.” He pleaded for Johnson to bomb with vengeance. “We killed civilians in World War II and nobody opposed,” he said. “I'd rather kill them than have American boys die.” The only woman among the leaders warned the President that his pause signaled cowardice. “Can't we fight?” asked Frances Bolton of Ohio, the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “Don't let them think we won't fight.”

Johnson read out loud from Bruce Catton's Civil War history
Never Call Retreat,
a copy of which he had just received from Senator Robert Kennedy with a handwritten note that “it might give you some comfort to look back at another President, Abraham Lincoln, and some of the identical problems and situations that he faced.” When he finished reading the passages Kennedy recommended, about the incomparable loneliness of a war President in the midst of clashing passions and divided counsel, Johnson told the senators he felt the force of Lincoln's reference to himself as “that unhappy wretch called Abraham Lincoln.” He called Justice Fortas Wednesday morning to vent against the stubborn pretense that some neglected word or negotiating strategy would unlock a door to sensible compromise. “The problem is not communicating,” Johnson fumed. “We understand them, and they understand us.” He dashed off mournful descriptions of North Vietnam's one “loud and clear” message, consistent to diplomats “running back and forth to Hanoi and Peking and every other place,” which he called the clearly stated purpose “to kill every American soldier in South Vietnam” even if it required “twenty or thirty years,” with firm advance notice that Americans “can either leave or get killed.”

Johnson's monologue abruptly reversed direction to portray guns aimed also at his back. “‘You can either fight or run,'” he told Fortas, paraphrasing the message from congressional leaders from the night before. “‘And we'll universally condemn you, and history will condemn you, and we'll despise you, if you run.'” He said his generals accused him of tying their hands in order to feed the enemy. “And then you have Eisenhower callin' me yesterday from California, sayin' when are we going to fight?”

Fortas scarcely spoke as the fulmination circled back to the bombing pause in its thirty-third day. “And uh, uh, the, they're going to try and convict and impeach me,” Johnson sputtered, “for committing to war two hundred thousand men—”