At Canaan's Edge (86 page)

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12, at Paschal's Motor Hotel in Atlanta, some colleagues rolled their eyes when Stokely Carmichael told a crowded press conference he was “stepping down” from tedious administrative duty to resume his preferred post as a grassroots field organizer. In truth he enjoyed little support for reelection to head SNCC, even from those who valued his charisma and agreed with his black power stand. Many thought he had subverted their brotherhood collective with showmanship, popularizing the derisive term “honky” for white people and mocking the politic piety that good Negroes looked to them only for friendship: “The white woman's not queen of the world—she can be made like anything else.” SNCC women in particular thought Carmichael succumbed to shooting-star celebrity that mistook headlines and saucy clichés for a political program. Executive Secretary Ruby Doris Smith had upbraided him most directly, and was dearly missed at the gloomy Atlanta elections because she was dying swiftly at twenty-five of virulent lymphosarcoma. The new chairman, who emerged from the compromise between urban separatists and those who still pushed for electoral black power in the tattered rural projects, was introduced to the press as H. Rap Brown, having dampened the given name Hubert in favor of a movement nickname earned with rare talent to “rap” poetic in assorted dialects. (His spontaneous routines had supplied free entertainment for the Alabama wedding reception of Gloria Larry and Stuart House.) A first intelligence report on the new SNCC officers gleaned no prior FBI information about Brown. Reporters asked if the new chairman would generate publicity like Carmichael. “Hopefully not,” he replied.

Rap Brown presided over a review of personnel that consumed two more days. The central committee sifted the status of dissenters, casualties, and slackers (“It was difficult to get her out of bed”), along with faint hopes to harness Carmichael's world travel now that he dwarfed SNCC itself in the media. Late on May 14, when tension finally wore down avoidance, Bob Zellner was admitted to address the troublesome petition for him and his wife, Dorothy, to work in the white community under SNCC sponsorship. The question was whether a project of arm's-length cooperation would accommodate the white exclusion policy set at the Peg Leg Bates conference. “I think I have gotten over the emotional stage,” Zellner nervously told a dozen peers seated before him. “I am not completely tied up emotionally, but I do want some things to be settled.”

Disputes surfaced about whether the central committee possessed authority to revise what had been decided by the hazy votes in New York. Some questioned Zellner about the evolution of SNCC's purpose, and most who favored the project itself wobbled on his incorporated request to affirm SNCC membership. When Bill Hall of Tuskegee tried to separate the issues, wondering if white workers might be retained on the staff but excluded from policy meetings, Zellner asked to speak before being excused for the vote. “We don't have to go into the history of my relationship,” he said, boiling down a statement his wife had submitted for them, “but I feel and have always felt that SNCC was as much a part of me as anybody else, and that I was SNCC and will always be SNCC…. I will not accept any sort of restrictions or special categories because of race. We do not expect other people to do that in this country, and I will not accept it for myself.”

With Zellner waiting again outside, Rap Brown opened debate “in the light of our hope to become a revolutionary force and also in light of the fact that this may occur again and again.” Tortured clashes echoed segregationist dynamics. While defending the exclusion policy as necessary, one speaker criticized implementation thus far as “very sloppy and kind of barbaric.” Bill Hall, drawing analogies to the anti-colonial war in Algeria, said the question was not Zellner's race but whether he could subordinate his identity to be used “as a technician” in the event of armed black struggle. Fay Bellamy considered it “very unfair of Bob Zellner” to bring sentiment and personal history into a political question, saying he should recognize the public disadvantage of having even one white person on a committee devoted to black power. “Now it shouldn't make any difference,” she conceded, “but it does.” Ralph Featherstone, newly elected to replace Cleveland Sellers, agreed with Hall but cautioned that Zellner had more than nostalgia on his side. “In principle, Bob is right,” he said. “When we say that whites should not make policy about black communities, that is a two-way street.” Stanley Wise, newly elected to replace Ruby Doris Smith, quoted Frederick Douglass on gaining the upper hand—“it is absolutely crucial that we strike the first blow”—proposing to look past unfortunate regrets to build the capacity for all-black decisions, “but, as Fay said, understanding that there is no racism involved.”

James Forman, visibly agitated, said, “I think we are confusing some things. Bob is my best friend.” When a voice above the hubbub taunted, “You said the same thing about Fay the other day,” Forman's explosion silenced the room: “That is right, goddammit! I have
two
best friends!” He thundered that Zellner had every right to be emotional, evoking his long service since police in the primitive McComb of 1961 had beaten Zellner into jail with Bob Moses and SNCC chairman Charles McDew, but Forman calmed to recommend that the membership question be deferred until the next meeting of the full staff. Bill Ware moved instead to offer everything except a staff vote, but others denounced another “shucking and jiving proposal” they felt would expose SNCC to Zellner's rejection of second-class citizenship. Speakers wrestled with contradictions until they collapsed behind a countermotion to sever membership entirely. Before Zellner was resummoned, Forman browbeat his colleagues to clarify that the vote applied to all white people and not merely the one “who had the guts to come before this body.” Rap Brown prefaced a terse verdict by quoting to Zellner his own promise that SNCC bonds could not be broken, then added: “The only thing that is being cut is your privilege as a staff member.”

“I think it is a mistake, but that is among us,” Zellner replied. Promising silence to the press, he asked only for the recorded transcript of his words to assure his wife that he had stood firm through what she would call the worst experience of her life. SNCC's leaders veered from searing fatigue with their original principles toward uncertain new revolution, and soon would lose the remaining black members, too.

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egg splattered Dr. Benjamin Spock outside the White House on May 17. Police hauled away one counterdemonstrator who called him a traitor, and Spock kept vigil for three days among two hundred Mobilization supporters. James Bevel and Coretta King stood with him jammed against locked gates, trying to deliver an unanswered appeal for President Johnson to meet with the leadership of the April 15 protests. Coretta represented her husband, who was promoting the voter registration drive in Cleveland. Bevel had talked his way into Washington's St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Secret Service officials privately advised, where undercover agents observed that a rector favored for worship services by President Johnson “actively participated” in strategy sessions as “Bevel made numerous inflammatory remarks.” The Mobilization leaders scheduled a follow-up national protest for October 21, centered in Washington. On May 19, a polling analysis assured the President that 70 percent of Americans and nearly half of Negroes disagreed with King on Vietnam. The study issued a caveat, however, based on “sketchy data” about his brief antiwar push since April: “Dr. King may well have within his power a capability of influencing between a third to one half of all Negro voters behind a candidate he might endorse for President in 1968.”

President Johnson had summoned Senator Russell the previous week about a pending order to bomb the power station near Ho Chi Minh's headquarters, which McNamara advocated and Rusk opposed. Russell counseled that all such bomb targets were incidental now, as he believed only a full invasion of North Vietnam would be decisive. Harry McPherson, the sole aide present at the somber consultation, volunteered to inspect the southern war zone as a fresh if amateur set of eyes for his vexed President. He was making notes to himself about the immense scale of the military effort from a Huey helicopter on the way to Da Nang—“an air strike in progress…a division camp here, a battalion forward area there…great areas have been scraped off the hilltops…we have just about paved the road-side for a hundred miles”—when U.S. jets first raided within the city limits of Hanoi to bomb the power plant. North Vietnam scrambled thirty fighters to meet them on May 19, Ho Chi Minh's seventy-seventh birthday, and Luu Huy Chao would recall antiaircraft ground fire so thick that it downed several fellow MiG pilots along with five Americans.

That same day in Washington, Secretary McNamara showed the President his draft response to Westmoreland's request for 200,000 more soldiers. Its central conclusion marked a wrenching turn for McNamara and deeper crisis for Johnson: “The war in Vietnam is acquiring a momentum of its own that must be stopped.” Although McNamara amassed details behind one consoling achievement—“there is consensus that we are no longer in danger of losing this war militarily”—he could see no constructive end. The CIA supported him with maddening new conclusions that nearly total destruction (85 percent) of power plants and petroleum storage had failed to diminish the opposing flow of manpower—and worse, that both major alternatives, more bombs
and
fewer bombs, would only harden North Vietnam's popular will to persevere. “Twenty-seven months of U.S. bombing of North Vietnam have had remarkably little effect on Hanoi's strategy,” McNamara wrote. As for American troops in South Vietnam, he found that massive exertion and heroism generated greater than proportional opposition, while nominal allies from the South Vietnamese army grew “tired, passive, and accommodation-prone.” McNamara stressed that even Westmoreland's plan for 670,000 soldiers, which would require national mobilization of the Reserves, predicted no North Vietnamese willingness to negotiate until well after the 1968 U.S. elections. He recommended against the additional troops because he foresaw no gain to offset a bloodier stalemate, and warned of pitfalls instead. “There may be a limit beyond which many Americans and much of the world will not permit the United States to go,” McNamara wrote. “The picture of the world's greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.”

These haunted words might have made McNamara welcome in the Mobilization vigil outside the White House fence, which was dispersing from its final day. For President Johnson, who had backed into Vietnam with Cold War inertia bottomed on his naked political fear of being called a coward, apprehensions long shared with his advisers ran into a number more real than any of McNamara's famous calculations. “I've lost ten thousand boys out there,” Johnson kept saying. His war would become “increasingly hostage to the dead,” author Thomas Powers later observed.

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crisis struck before Johnson could devise a course between McNamara and Westmoreland. On Monday, May 22, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt closed the Strait of Tiran, which cut off Israel's shipping lifeline from the Red Sea into its sole southern port at Eilat. On Tuesday, Secretary-General U Thant complied with Nasser's legal notice evicting United Nations peacekeepers from the Sinai Peninsula, where the Egyptian army now marched. Arab forces instantly mobilized from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to Libya, and Iraqi units convoyed to support Jordan and Syria. In a single day, wrote historian Arthur Hertzberg, “the mood of the American Jewish community underwent an abrupt, radical, and possibly permanent change.” Outcries went up for U.S. intervention to save Israel. President Johnson, worried that Soviet reaction on the Arab side might draw the superpowers into a world war, appealed publicly for restraint on Wednesday while Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban pleaded to the United Nations. The forces encircling Israel were openly bent upon her annihilation, he said, with a twenty-five-to-one advantage in population plus a three-to-one superiority in war planes and tanks. On Thursday, urging Eban to hold tight for diplomacy, Defense Secretary McNamara offered his confidential military judgment that Israel could defeat the Arab nations on all fronts within a week, despite the numerical odds.

These war spasms caught Martin Luther King on his way to a peace conference in Switzerland. He was just leaving a retreat at the Frogmore Center in South Carolina, already swamped by fiscal and political demands. Some seventy staff members complained of abandonment by SCLC's senior executives. Jesse Jackson's office telephones in Chicago were about to be cut off for unpaid bills. Workers still assigned to beleaguered Grenada, Mississippi, confessed a worn-down commitment to nonviolence even among themselves. “We control ourselves in public,” said one, “and then come home and attack each other viciously or in petty ways.” King listened, then tried to rally spirits grown weary as the movement stretched to encompass Northern projects along with Southern holdovers and broader initiatives to stop war. He preached again on the connection between civil rights and Vietnam, adding for these colleagues a candid confession that he once succumbed to official blandishments about an imminent peace. “I backed up a little when I came out in 1965,” he said. “My name then wouldn't have been written in any book called
Profiles in Courage.
But now I have decided. I will not be intimidated.” From stops in Chicago and New York, King flew to Geneva for the
Pacem in Terris
convocation sponsored by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Soviet delegates suddenly canceled along with Ambassador Goldberg and most American government representatives. King drew large crowds, but James Reston told
Times
readers that the threat of Middle East war reduced the novel concept of hybrid peace exploration to a “prayer meeting.” Back in New York, FBI wiretappers picked up Stanley Levison's May 31 lament that Vietnam politics “is suffering badly because half the peace movement is Jewish, and the Jews have all become hawks.”