At Canaan's Edge (62 page)

Senator Robert Kennedy stepped briefly into the politics, alarmed by the gulf between architects and critics of the war whom he had observed intermittently from the back of Fulbright's hearing room. At the last of the televised sessions, Secretary Rusk insisted that Vietnam was a proxy contest to ward off global conquest by the major Communist powers—“If we don't make clear where we stand, then the prospect for peace disappears”—and Kennedy called a press conference for the next morning, February 19. To stimulate meaning for the vaguely defined alternative of “negotiations,” he suggested that neither side could expect surrender and that the United States should entertain talks with South Vietnamese Communists toward granting them “a share of power and responsibility.” Kennedy went skiing that afternoon, reportedly expecting little reaction to such a tentative idea, but lightning struck. “The uproar was general,” wrote Arthur Schlesinger.
Newsweek
said he “jolted the Administration like a Claymore mine.” Kennedy's friends George Ball and McGeorge Bundy went on national television to denounce his idea as naive, quoting Kennedy's late brother the President against him on the folly of trusting Communists. The
New York Daily News
and the
Chicago Tribune
called him “Ho Chi Kennedy.” Vice President Humphrey spouted quotable metaphors to ridicule a coalition with the Vietcong variously as arsenic in the medicine chest, an arsonist in the fire department, and, most famously, “letting the fox into the chicken coop.” Kennedy swiftly qualified his statement by declaring firm opposition to Communist takeover in South Vietnam.

On February 23, he and President Johnson maintained the awkward truce of professionals. They flew together in the presidential cabin to New York and shared a limousine with Chief Justice Earl Warren to the Waldorf-Astoria, where some five thousand antiwar pickets protested Johnson's receipt of the Freedom House Award. On the hotel sidewalk, pacifist A. J. Muste presented a “people's” freedom award in absentia to Julian Bond of Georgia, who was rerunning that day for his vacated House seat. In the Grand Ballroom, Freedom Rider James Peck leapt to his feet among the black-tie guests just as Johnson began his acceptance speech, shouting, “Peace in Vietnam! Peace in Vietnam!” only twice before a hand clapped over his mouth and agents dragged him off to serve sixty days.

Kennedy's friends rallied comfort in a siege. “The reason it is going to cause you such public pain,” Burke Marshall wrote of the Vietcong statement, “is that it has substance in it.” A political strategist advised him to keep future comments about Vietnam “on a high, solid level…with a little more patriotic rhetoric,” thereby to regain an independent stance between the nagging impotence of the Fulbright camp and the “emotional and psychological box” of Kennedy's friend McNamara, who had been urging him to visit the troops. The senator avoided provocative Vietnam statements for the next year, brooding, and sought out instead the most daunting leadership issues outside the military arena. He gave a series of speeches on poverty. He arranged to visit South Africa, having consulted Robert Spike, leader of the church council on civil rights, about the delicate liaison with banned democratic activists inside the bastion of apartheid. He accepted invitations from two states where he said people “hate my guts,” which touched off death threats and a parallel flurry of secret memos inside the Justice Department over Hoover's adamant refusal to provide FBI protection or even observers.

On March 18, while King navigated irregular routes to and from the White House, Kennedy spoke first to public controversy about his day-trip across Alabama and Mississippi. “Somebody down here suggested it was like putting a fox in the chicken house,” he quipped at the new Ole Miss Rebel Dome. “And some of my friends said it was like putting a chicken in a fox house.” His self-deprecating humor disarmed the crowd of 8,500 for a straightforward speech about patriotic renewal he called barely begun. The Ole Miss student body counted thirteen Negroes in the fourth year since the lurching mess of stagecraft to enroll James Meredith. “We must create a society in which Negroes will be as free as other Americans,” said Kennedy. “Free to vote and to earn their way, and to share in the decisions which affect their lives.” He quoted Emerson that every citizen must choose either truth or repose. The students gave him three standing ovations, partly for pluck alone.

K
ENTUCKY DEFEATED
Duke that night in the Final Four of the NCAA college basketball tournament, 83–79. The March 19 championship game was all but conceded to powerhouse Kentucky before the shocking cultural upset by a little-known team from El Paso. Coach Don Haskins received forty thousand hostile letters afterward. His own university president had implored him all season to observe common etiquette and play no more than three black players at a time. Years later, basketball historian Frank Fitzpatrick reviewed films of the timepiece black-and-white broadcast, which preserved an awed hush when Haskins actually sent out five black starters to contest the five white Kentucky Wildcats, with scattered Confederate flags and few discernible dark faces at the new Cole Field House in Maryland. The workmanlike 72–65 victory by Texas Western turned pitiful mismatch into churning reappraisal. Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp privately complained of incessant calls from his university president. “That son of a bitch wants me to get some niggers in here,” he said. “What am I gonna do?”

Rupp, the legendary “Baron of the Bluegrass,” was strong enough to resist. The Kentucky legislature had flown the capitol flag at half mast to mourn his loss to integrated City College of New York in 1950, when even the professional NBA was still segregated, and his last team would be all white when he retired in 1972 with the most career wins of any college coach. However, Vanderbilt offered Perry Wallace a scholarship two months after “the game that changed American sports,” breaking the Southeastern Conference color line. By 1968, when Auburn made Henry Harris a second breakthrough for basketball, black students held a paltry eleven of 2,236 SEC scholarships in all sports combined. Every pioneer suffered ostracism and stress. (Harris jumped to his death from a building.) Only inexorable transformation over decades led to a more comfortable era when Kentucky would win the 1998 national basketball championship with a black coach, let alone black players. Intervening tragedy and embarrassment were dampened in public memory. Ole Miss simply abolished its track team for the 1970s rather than surrender or defend segregation in a nakedly quantifiable sport. The NCAA rules committee banished the flamboyant, intimidating “dunk” shot from all college basketball games (including warm-up drills) for eight years between 1968 and 1976, which somehow cushioned the influx of black players.

P
RESIDENT
J
OHNSON'S
frustration seeped into a national mood made irascible by Vietnam. Questioning his lifelong gift as a judge of character, he sent Bill Moyers to verify by soul-searching conversation that Senator Fulbright remained both privately and publicly against military withdrawal. “He admitted to no solutions and accepted the thesis that we cannot pull out,” reported Moyers, who concluded that Fulbright was “basically defeatist in nature toward any Western White involvement in Asia…rretrievably committed to doubts which put him beyond the pale of reasoning.” Fulbright's dissent rubbed a blister in Johnson. How could the senator conceal his fundamental agreement that the “loss” of South Vietnam must be avoided? Like every elected national leader, Fulbright skirted the risk by implying vaguely that Vietnam negotiations could avoid disaster—knowing better, in Johnson's view—and aimed all his skeptical realism at the war policy instead. The Senate inquiry amounted to a public flogging, the President seethed, because Fulbright knew that administration witnesses could not acknowledge ambivalence once troops were committed.

The dissenters unhinged Johnson. To him, they undermined the tenuous hopes for military success without offering an honest alternative, which made them disloyal, impractical, and unprincipled all at once. The President railed against conduct so alien to his code of politics that he explored like a palm reader for eccentric motivations. On Fulbright alone, he ordered a compilation of every personal contact during his presidency—which ran four full pages, broken down into luncheons, meetings, receptions, and so on—to study whether some overlooked social slight might have provoked a peevish tantrum on Vietnam. He accused Senator Mansfield of poisoning Fulbright “because of your goddam trip,” recalling that Mansfield once pulled rank on Fulbright's plans to borrow a coveted presidential jet for a flight to Europe. On March 2, the day Fulbright voted with only four senators to repeal the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, losing 92–5, Johnson said he heard from one mutual friend that Fulbright was “going through a menopause” and from another that he was “off his rocker because of Mrs. Fulbright being sick.” That night, Vice President Humphrey whispered to Johnson that Fulbright had accosted him “with this look in his eyes that was most unusual” and demanded that Humphrey find a way out of Vietnam, saying, “That's what we pay you for…I'm not joking…. This is the goddamdest war. Just get busy and settle it.”

“I just looked at him,” Humphrey reported. “I said, ‘Bill, you—what's
wrong
with you?' He really was quite angry! I just sort of think…he talks about it and thinks about it so much that he's lost his sense of judgment, Mr. President.”

In April, Fulbright began to warn in lectures that the United States “was succumbing to the arrogance of power.” He said the U.S. military presence was turning Saigon into “an American brothel.” President Johnson retorted publicly that power in Vietnam brought “not arrogance but agony.”

In May, he would decry “nervous Nellies” who quaked from the fight, and mock Fulbright in person before a dinner audience of fellow Democrats. White House aide Harry McPherson dared to scold his boss in a memo the next morning for unbecoming sarcasm “trying to beat down Fulbright's ears.” Buried in the senator's “sophomoric bitching,” he added, were questions that “cannot be shouted out of existence.” The President tolerated the rare staff rebuke and punished McPherson merely with weeks of sulking disregard.

He obsessed into knots over Robert Kennedy, egged on by a press theme of Shakespearean enmity between rival usurpers for the White House. “Bobby is behind this revolt up there on Vietnam,” Johnson complained to Katzenbach, coaching him to intercede for a truce. The President recited his own record of loyalty to Kennedy from disasters like the Bay of Pigs—“I didn't run or shimmy or bellyache or cry”—down through a list of presidential appointments and pardons and favors for the whole family—“I've done every damn thing they asked”—and perceived a gratuitous plague of “Kennedy infiltration” as his sour, Job-like reward. To Deke DeLoach, Johnson listed senators who attended Russian cocktail parties, plus Joe Alsop and other Kennedy friends, among dissenters he fearfully pressed the FBI to sift for subversive “sons-of-bitches boring from within.” To Dean Rusk, he whispered runaway suspicions that Kennedy's influence was driving the strongest holdovers within the administration into pessimism at the verge of heresy—most critically, Robert McNamara. “When he [McNamara] said the other day that we only have one chance out of three of winning, it just shocked me,” Johnson lamented, “and furthermore it shocked everybody at the table.”

B
ATTLEFIELD NEWS
hardened politics. An April edition of the
New York Times
reported 1,361 American soldiers killed over the first ninety-nine days of 1966, matching the cumulative toll over the five previous years. Six died in a three-minute ambush on the second or third mission to retake the Bong Son area, during which 1st AirCav medic Hank Thomas discovered his own arm shaking because a bullet had splintered open the hand bones. “Oh shit, I'm going home,” he said, and soon returned for six months of surgical reconstruction at Army hospitals, observing a nation bizarrely changed. Concentrated hostility he had endured as a Freedom Rider seemed to spill from civil rights into the broader culture. In a Mississippi cemetery, standing red-faced with a posse of flashlights over the exhumed remains of a humble farmer, Sheriff Earl Fisher of Washington County blamed itinerant Klansmen for the rampant false belief that Negroes had stockpiled a fiendish arsenal in their coffins. On a sidewalk in Bogalusa, Lousiana, enraged by the look of another presumed civil rights outsider, three white women pummeled an Italian violinist touring with the San Pietro Chamber Orchestra of Naples. Nationally, “The Ballad of the Green Berets” by Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler overtook Simon & Garfunkel's “The Sounds of Silence” as the number one song played on the airwaves, and Sadler's album of death-defying war choruses displaced the Beatles'
Rubber Soul
atop sales charts for thirteen weeks. (The latter recording suffered sporadic radio boycotts and bonfire incineration over comments by John Lennon that his band was more popular “right now” than the namesake of Christianity. “Jesus was all right,” Lennon remarked in a London newspaper interview published on March 4, “but his disciples were thick and ordinary.”)

Rancorous trends surfaced elsewhere in the arts.
The Sound of Music
maintained box office supremacy for an astonishing seven months through the end of 1965—Martin Luther King's favorite film, reported his traveling aide Bernard Lee, the one he ducked away to see again on harried speech trips. By April 18, 1966, when the film won Best Picture at the first Academy Awards ceremony ever broadcast in color, Best Director Robert Wise noted a strong undercurrent against his theme of romantic escape from ugly war, and wryly invited critics to “see my new film,
The Sand Pebbles,
where people get sliced to pieces with bayonets.” By 1967, signature characters in cinema shifted from the Trapp family singers to the Depression-era gangsters Bonnie and Clyde, as boldly promoted in studio ads: “They're young, they're in love, and they kill people.”
Newsweek
's movie reviewer Joseph Morgenstern soon retracted his scruples about the spellbinding gore of its slow-motion shoot-out scenes.