At Canaan's Edge (77 page)

“A
POST-ELECTION
silence settled today on the LBJ ranch,” reported the
New York Times
on November 10. In seclusion, the President groaned, “I don't think I lost that election. I think the Negroes lost it.” He emerged for a press conference several days later to address the dismal 1966 tally of net loss to Republicans: forty-seven House members, three senators, eight governors, and 677 seats in state legislatures. Johnson first took ten questions about war matters, especially U.S. nuclear missile capabilities versus the China and Soviet Union, then put the best face he could on the results. He said Democrats still controlled both chambers of Congress—the House by 248–187, the Senate by 64–36—with roughly the same margin he enjoyed before the 1964 landslide. Asked directly about the influence of “white backlash,” the President dodged. “I just don't have the answer to it,” he replied. “I don't know.” He said the abnormally large shift could be traced to three popular Republican governors in big states: George Romney of Michigan, James Rhodes of Ohio, and Ronald Reagan of California. Privately, however, Johnson saw an adverse trend instead of a fluke. He predicted that most of the new Republicans in Congress would vote with the Southern Democrats while seeking colleagues to replace them. This was the backlash he feared. “It'll move beyond George Wallace and become respectable,” he told Bill Moyers.

Wallace, for his part, bristled at suggestions that Ronald Reagan surpassed him overnight in presidential stature. “He
used
to be a liberal,” Wallace warned reporters at a victory celebration. “Now he's a conservative, and he might change back again.” Wallace claimed to have orchestrated the nation's most impressive win against the Republican trend despite the handicap of a stand-in novice candidate, his wife, Lurleen, who won 63 percent of the Alabama vote but sat quietly through a press conference devoted mostly to his larger ambitions for 1968. The outgoing governor indignantly rejected any backlash label—“I never made a statement in my political career that reflects on a man's race”—and presented himself as a crusader for constitutional states' rights. Wallace said, “My only interest is the restoration of local government.”

In California, Governor-elect Reagan deflected instant clamor that he was destined for the White House, calling it “very flattering that anyone would even suggest such a thing.” His contest drew a record 79 percent of registered Californians to the polls, and he won by 993,739 votes out of 6.5 million, carrying all but three of fifty-eight counties. Reagan acknowledged a groundswell. “It seems to be all over the country,” he said. “The people seem to have shown that maybe we have moved too fast.” He discounted white backlash as a benefit to him or other Republicans, emphasizing his personal abhorrence of bigotry and contrasting the new Negro Republican senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts with segregationist Democrats Lester Maddox and George Wallace. “For me,” said Reagan, “the vote reflects the great concern of the people with the size and cost of government.” His dubious but genial disclaimer of racial politics in California was more attractive than the bitter view of his vanquished opponent, who grumbled that Reagan won a 57 percent landslide with only 5 percent of the black vote and a quarter of Hispanics. “Whether we like it or not,” said the two-term incumbent Pat Brown, “the people want separation of the races.”

Political analysts found backlash effects central to the success of Republican challenger Charles Percy over three-term Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, who maintained his “unequivocal stand in favor of open-occupancy legislation.” All the muscle of Democratic precinct captains barely carried the city of Chicago itself for Douglas, and Republican Sheriff Richard Ogilvie, who had been so visible against the fair housing marches into his suburbs, wrested from the Daley machine 18,000 patronage jobs under partisan control of the Cook County Board. This political feat established Ogilvie to become the next governor of Illinois, and Mayor Daley, according to biographers Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor, perceived a grave threat to his own reelection in April of 1967. He criticized Martin Luther King early in November as a troublemaker bent on creating backlash votes for Republicans. One day after the election, Daley had his chief negotiator deny any binding responsibility under the Open Housing Summit Agreement of August 26. “There were only certain suggestions put down and goals to be sought,” Thomas Keane told the Chicago City Council. An uproar ensued. “Any attempt to destroy that hope is an act of cruelty,” said King, but the mayor moved decisively to shore up the white ethnic wards, relegating integration to a charitable zone at the margin of politics. His press secretary later confided that Daley's “idea of affirmative action was nine Irishmen and a Swede.”

P
RESIDENT JOHNSON
underwent surgery after the election to remove a throat polyp and repair the scar from his gall bladder operation, while submitting also to political pain he could defer no longer. Announcements dribbled out that the ceiling for the ongoing Vietnam buildup would rise from 400,000 to 470,000 troops, and Defense Secretary McNamara, who had lopped 50,000 soldiers from the request by the Joint Chiefs, presented the figure as a “leveling off” in future military effort. Still, journalists anticipated a bloody future from combat deployments in 1967 that projected roughly twice the average for 1966, when 30,000 Americans were wounded and 5,000 of the 6,644 cumulative U.S. fatalities occurred. To pay unbudgeted war expenses being filched from other Pentagon accounts, McNamara soon asked Congress for a supplemental appropriation of $12.4 billion, which more than doubled the admitted Vietnam estimate and pushed annual costs toward 20 percent of the overall national budget. Such sums threatened to deform the tiny South Vietnamese economy, whose prices had jumped 125 percent to absorb the flood of American war dollars. (“Runaway inflation can undo what our military operations can accomplish,” McNamara secretly observed.) To curb inflationary pressures from the Vietnam deficit at home, the President unhappily asked for an income tax surcharge.

Johnson prepared to strike a tone of gallant realism in his 1967 State of the Union address. Vowing to “stand firm” in Vietnam, he quoted Thomas Jefferson's “melancholy law of human societies to be compelled sometimes to choose a great evil in order to ward off a greater.” He reintroduced the failed omnibus civil rights bill of 1966, and promised to “intensify our efforts” in the War on Poverty. Anticipating a political crossfire, Johnson ordered archivists to retrieve every word the late President Kennedy said about helping the poor, and his economists compiled impressive statistics showing that 8.4 million new jobs since 1960 had reduced the poverty rate from 22 to 17 percent of the population. Still, Johnson's own anti-poverty director denounced pressures to keep the third Office of Economic Opportunity budget stalled at roughly $1.5 billion, dwarfed by—and sacrificed to—the escalating price for Vietnam. “The poor will feel that democracy is only for the rich,” Sargent Shriver told reporters. Rustin's freedom budget, launched to headlines on October 26, fell dormant with its plan to rescue the remaining 34 million poor Americans, of whom three in four were white, and Martin Luther King discreetly complained to the White House staff of domestic “retreat.” At the same time, countervailing forces sought to eliminate the anti-poverty campaign entirely. “Our work was just beginning,” Johnson recalled balefully in his memoir, “but there were some who felt that even this beginning was too much.” Elements of reaction in both political parties worried Johnson more than his liberal critics. They pressed for all-out war in Vietnam and attacked the anti-poverty agency as a utopian dream tinged with black power subversion.

A political strategist admonished President Johnson that “the best minds are now in this game” against him, determined to exploit his association “with eliminating ghettos and generally pouring vast sums into the renovation of the poor and the Negro. The average American is tired of it.” A White House counselor advised less bluntly that government leaders were wearing down under conflict between Vietnam and the Great Society. “You have a tired cabinet,” wrote Harry McPherson. “They are good men, but they are beyond asking the hard questions now.” Johnson privately confronted Democratic governors who blamed the midterm losses on poor communication, especially his cornpone television persona and the vexing school desegregation guidelines. “I think it is unfair to take your leader and publicly say that it is his image that has caused all the problems,” he asserted in full pique, and the governors returned equally wounded complaints. “All of us want to help you,” insisted John Connally of Texas. “All of us want to look forward to 1968. We are all now on the defensive.” Seeping doubt plagued Johnson's efforts to protect his mandate from 1964. “Now is indeed ‘The Valley of the Black Pig,'” Lady Bird Johnson told her diary, recalling an apocalyptic poem by William Butler Yeats. “A miasma of trouble hangs over everything.”

F
IVE DAYS
after the election, King convened the far-flung SCLC staff of seventy-five for a stabilizing retreat on the coastal island of St. Helena, South Carolina, near the town of Frogmore, where the Penn Community Center inherited the rustic grounds of an old Quaker school for freed slaves. James Lawson and Ira Sandperl conducted joint seminars on the philosophy of nonviolence. Joan Baez performed solos between rousing group songfests that relieved strife brimming from the campaigns in Grenada and Chicago. Workshops vented fatigue, doubt, and abandonment. “The only time I have ever been hit is by a staff member,” said one overwrought worker. Rival factions loyal to Bevel and Hosea Williams blamed each other for division, sabotage, unnecessary suffering, and the disillusionment of vulnerable followers. Williams fiercely resisted suggestions that he shift his operations into black Chicago for a winter registration drive to offset Mayor Daley's push in the white wards, until a threat of open revolt silenced the commotion. “Dr. King, we love you,” Willie Bolden announced, “but I'm gonna be frank. Hosea Williams is our leader.”

Williams made choking gestures toward Bolden, knowing the loyal outburst would only feed rumors that he was plotting a “coup” against King. Williams nurtured reciprocal suspicions against Bevel and his mercurial new protégé, Jesse Jackson. The Williams camp presented themselves as workhorses in the Selma tradition against dilettante theorists who seldom went to jail and had lured King to grief in Chicago. The Bevel camp disparaged Williams as a domineering crew boss for reformed seaport gangsters, incapable of grasping a national movement or the self-sustaining potential of Operation Breadbasket, spearheaded by Jackson. King himself, when present, tolerated the clash of headstrong lieutenants as a necessary by-product of frontier hardship and conviction. He ignored the scathing duels over his leadership, and seldom restrained the combatants. (“Remember, we are a nonviolent organization,” he placidly interjected.) Only in the end, when Williams growled at his hint that temporary consolidation in Chicago might be best, did King exhibit his will. “All right, forget it,” he told Williams. “Just forget it.”

Williams stopped short to gauge the intensity of King's remark, then folded. “Doc, you know I'll go,” he said, and with the notable exception of Willie Bolden, most of his staff soon packed off sullenly into the Chicago winter. Privately, King rebuked Andrew Young for allowing Bevel and Jackson to combine so heavily against Williams, sapping resilience, and distress over the criticism snapped Young's exhausted nerves. Leaving the retreat early for another assignment, he fell unconscious in the Savannah airport. One of the doctors who helped revive him sent Young straight on to Tel Aviv, reasoning that negotiations abroad would amount to prescribed rest.

Battered emotions long had been a staple of the movement, testing King far past his trained experience at funerals. On Monday evening, November 14, he suspended the turmoil at Penn Center to explore thoughts out loud. “Whether I have anything to say or not,” he said, “I want you to try desperately to listen.” He honored the assembled SCLC workers and guests. “I found myself shedding a few tears this afternoon when I listened to Lester [Hankerson] talk about what he had gone through in Mississippi,” King confessed. “And many of our staff members go through experiences not quite as bad as Lester that we often know nothing about. And I want to thank you, because you have done this out of loyalty to a cause.” He acknowledged “a great deal of confusion in the air,” and professed no certainty or answers—“I am still searching myself”—to begin what he called “my informal statement” on the past, present, and future of the movement. In its surviving rough outline, biographer David Garrow later identified the skeletal structure of King's next and final book,
Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

Reviewing the movement decade, King concluded that change from its great mandates for equal citizenship was broad but neither swift nor deep. “While this period represented a frontal assault on the doctrine and practice of white supremacy,” he said, “it did not defeat the monster of racism…. And we must never forget that the roots of racism are very deep in America.” King defined the obstacle on a philosophical plane, distinguishing between the “empirical” statement that black people lagged behind and a stubborn “ontological” disposition to divide races for battle. He saw both. “And the fact is that the ultimate logic of racism is genocide,” he asserted. “If you say that I am not good enough to live next door to you…because of the color of my skin or my ethnic origins, then you are saying in substance that I do not deserve to exist. And this is what we see when we see that [form of] racism still hovering over our nation.”