Pillar of Fire (47 page)

T
IME AND AMBITION
dimmed President Johnson's image as the healing caretaker of the Kennedy legacy. When Kennedy's press secretary tried to resign in March to run for the Senate in California, Johnson refused to accept the news from Pierre Salinger himself or any of his aides until one secretary told him that Salinger was leaving that very day. Johnson then called the hospital where George Reedy was confined to lose the excess of his 285 pounds, and yanked him back to the White House within the hour as Salinger's emergency replacement. Reedy, a scholarly man whose hospital reading included works by theologian Paul Tillich and a historical tome on the Irish famine (the better to appreciate his diet, he joked), noticed that the President was absorbed in a book,
The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations
, by the British economist Barbara Ward. For the first time in Reedy's long acquaintance, Johnson avidly reread and quoted a work of nonfiction. The book's resolutely positive outlook on prosperity
*
and its moral call to global statesmanship gripped Johnson as an approach that unified his idea of foreign policy with his intended crusade against domestic poverty. He struck up ongoing conversations with Ward, to the point of having Air Force jets transport her from Europe to Washington.

Reedy tried to introduce public themes for an emerging presidency just as White House reporters began to discover Johnson as an independent personality. Early in April,
Time
portrayed the President as a madcap cowboy who drove terrified correspondents over the bare hills of his Texas ranch at speeds above eighty miles per hour, dodging his livestock and bellowing nonstop yarns while sloshing Pearl beer from a paper cup. Johnson protested the account as a stinging departure from the respectful coverage through the transition since Dallas. Journalists were remarking already on his sensitivity to criticism, speculating that he was paranoid because of his lack of Kennedy charm.

In private, Johnson exhibited his mercurial temperament. He put Sargent Shriver into uncontrollable titters with a sunny, spontaneous description of Bill Moyers at the LBJ Ranch, “going around with a prayer in his eyes and a doleful look, and wishing that you were here, and got a glass of sweet milk in each hand.” Johnson also excoriated Moyers and Reedy in front of others and told secretaries their outfits or hairdos were ugly. He berated the legendary Secret Service agent Rufus Youngblood, hero of Dallas, with threats to fire “the whole damned Secret Service” and to puncture the tires of escort limousines. “Your damn Secret Service stays right up behind me every trip,” he growled at chief James Rowley. “…When I'm driving and I stop in a hurry, they're liable to hit my bumper and break my neck.”

Only with fellow politicians did Johnson maintain an even keel of professional understanding. When he told freshman senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia that Byrd's stand against civil rights would ruin his presidency, and the wounded Byrd protested, Johnson teased that he didn't expect Byrd's vote but hoped he would not fight cloture too hard. “I might make you stay at home and nurse me, and give me a thermometer,” said Johnson. “I'm gonna be so sick, and I'm gonna have to have somebody put cold packs on my head.” On the other hand, Johnson knew not to banter when Senator Fulbright expressed anguish about opposing the same bill. “It is a kind of embarrassing thing for me, as you know,” said Fulbright. “Goddamn it, I'm never very enthusiastic….”

“I know,” said the President. “I know. I know it.”

“Jesus Christ, I'm really over a barrel on this thing,” said Fulbright. “I wish to hell I could vote with you. You know that.”

“I know that,” said Johnson. “I know it.”

The President abhorred the press but consumed as many as fifteen newspapers each day, raged against the authors of the smallest unfavorable reference and yet looked hungrily to the same reporters for ways to present himself more favorably. He absorbed James Reston's private recommendation that he try “something new in Presidential TV” by taking the press with him to visit the country's problems rather than receiving them passively in the White House. An approving aide observed that Reston's proposal would “permit your genuine personality to have its full impact on the public….” When Eric Sevareid of CBS suggested that Johnson needed to develop his own slogan, like FDR's New Deal or Kennedy's New Frontier, the President seized upon the ideas.

On April 22, towing an expectant press corps behind
Air Force One
, Johnson flew off to open the New York World's Fair against the threat of massive civil rights protests. Met by five thousand police and Pinkerton guards who reinforced his Secret Service security detail, Johnson reacted far more charitably to what few pickets actually turned up near his speaker's platform (“I felt sorry for them”) than did national news outlets, one of which denounced the “wild-eyed, hare-brained, crackpot scheme” of “about 25 seedy, sleazy Congress of Racial Equality demonstrators, some of them appearing to be white beatniks.” Calling them rude and fanatic—“bearded and untidy, the seats of their pants muddied from sitting on the soggy ground”—the
New York Times
rebuked hecklers for insulting the President and for spoiling the $1 billion fair, which the
Times
promoted unabashedly in news columns as a “glittering mirror of national opulence.” Mayor Robert Wagner issued a statement of shame over the protests. The fanfare of wounded civic pride overlooked gaping faults within the fair itself, which, boycotted for gaudy, gouging commercialism by nearly all the nations that normally sponsored pavilions at international expositions, was destined to close the next year in debt and neglect, abandoned as a rusting hulk.

President Johnson predicted much better. Just as the most fantastic forecasts of the 1939 World's Fair had fallen short of feats since the Depression—satellite communications, eradicated diseases, atomic power, pushbutton kitchens—so the next generation would surpass his expectation of a society without bigotry, destitution, or war. “I prophesy peace,” he declared, and beyond that a promised land within the next generation. Scarcely pausing, Johnson flew back to Washington, invited the presidents of nine railroads up to his family room that afternoon, settled a debilitating strike that dated back to the Eisenhower administration, and ordered a spontaneous motorcade to announce the good news from a nearby television station. On the way home, exhausted reporters learned that Johnson had just decided to take them on an unscheduled tour of Appalachian poverty. After a formal press conference and a journey to Chicago the next day, the full presidential retinue was up before dawn to gallop by nightfall through the coal mining regions of five states.

Announced as a surprise speaker, Johnson waded through the tumult of 250,000 people who materialized along the streets of Pittsburgh, grasping their hands long after his own fingers started bleeding. Hours later, in the stillness of the hills near Inez, Kentucky, the entourage of dignitaries and reporters watched Johnson “hunker down” on the porch of a tarpaper hovel with Tom Fletcher, an out-of-work miner who talked softly of raising his eight children on a $400 annual income and why his teenagers had not finished fourth grade. Helicoptering on through Kentucky into West Virginia, Johnson strayed from his improvised itinerary into poverty so authentic that some in his party gagged from the acrid smell of open sewage and permanently unwashed bodies. He once veered off unwittingly into the parlor of a functioning backwoods bordello; panicky aides extricated him in time to preserve what became Johnson's uproarious tales about his presidential sense of direction.

Always, Johnson talked of poverty as the nation's enemy. He said he kept a photograph of his birth shack over his bed in the White House, and seemed to draw inspiration from the staggering contrasts of his own experience. Mentioning his favorite author Barbara Ward, Johnson tried out the phrase “great society” to evoke a nation of humane grandeur, in which “no child will ever have to say in any territory where that flag flies, ‘This is not my day to eat.'” Back in Washington before midnight, reporters expressed awe over his “breathtaking, nerve-shaking, totally implausible” pace.
Time
more than made up for the embarrassment of the Pearl beer incident by publishing a cover story on Johnson as a Texas whirlwind with “no ceiling on his energy, no limit to his endurance, no issue or individual to whom he would not offer a hayseed's aphorism or a statesman's advice…. No man in the White House has ever moved faster.”

 

M
ARTIN
L
UTHER
K
ING
whirled simultaneously in his own orbit from Washington to Atlanta to New York, back to Atlanta and on to a tour of California, raising money and preaching against segregation. Against pressure from his fellow heads of civil rights groups, he declined to sign their joint manifesto against the World's Fair “stall-in.” Instead, on April 21, King explained himself in a conflicted letter of self-examination. He agreed that unruly demonstrations such as the “stall-in” were unwise, King wrote in a joint letter to Roy Wilkins and the others, and he certainly shared their alarm about political backlash against the movement. (The
New York Times
, stunned since Governor George Wallace won a third of the primary vote in Wisconsin,
*
had just published a special page with a chart of the nationwide spread of protest, warning of “hostile white reaction.”) Still, King advised that he was “just as hesitant” about joining the manifesto's “outright condemnation.” “Which is worse,” he asked, “a ‘Stall-In' at the World's Fair or a ‘Stall-In' in the United States Senate? The former merely ties up the traffic of a single city. But the latter seeks to tie up the traffic of history, and endanger the psychological lives of twenty million people.” While acknowledging the criticial need for political allies, King refused to discard nonviolence at the first sign of opposition in the North. “I hear a lot of talk these days about our direct action program alienating former friends,” he wrote. “I would rather feel that they are bringing to the surface many latent prejudices which were always there.”

King still wanted to hire Bayard Rustin to replace Wyatt Walker as SCLC's executive director, but incompatibilities between Rustin and King's staff had compounded delays on both sides. Some warned King that Rustin's prestige as organizer of the March on Washington could not erase the political vulnerability of his private life as a homosexual former Communist—especially now, during the Senate filibuster, with opponents of the civil rights bill looking for ammunition. Beyond that, some of Rustin's own advocates raised a new issue from the murkiest recesses of left-wing politics. King's New York advisers worried that Rustin was becoming too close to the sectarian Shachtmanites, a tiny band of socialists who followed the exotic, sixty-year-old theorist Max Shachtman.

A Communist prodigy of Polish birth, transplanted to the Bronx, Shachtman still brandished the romantic authority of one who had known world revolutionaries back to Zinoviev in 1925. Leon Trotsky himself, while being hunted down by agents of Josef Stalin, had included Shachtman among the trusted few who shared his exile in Turkey, then in Mexico—Shachtman with a German pistol strapped to his leg. Shachtman had served after Trotsky's 1940 assassination as an executor of the Trotsky literary estate, even though he rejected the Trotskyite “line” that the Soviet Union was a defective workers' state, corrupted by Stalin. Declaring the Soviet empire a totalitarian perversion beyond repair, and therefore his mortal enemy, Shachtman fiercely opposed the Soviets and their American Communist “lackeys” throughout the 1940s and 1950s. While his socialist disciples never numbered more than several hundred, Shachtman's dialectical workshops at times included influential writers such as Michael Harrington and Irving Howe, plus Albert Shanker of the United Federation of Teachers among many labor officials. Intellectually, what linked their obsessive polemics with Karl Marx and the nineteenth-century utopians was Shachtman's unswerving belief that a “correct” diagnosis of history could cure the world's ills. By the early 1960s, the long arc of Shachtmanite heroes inched all the way over to the gruff AFL-CIO boss George Meany—perceived as a patriotic, militantly anti-Communist “purification” of Lenin. Radiating from Manhattan, this arcane line of thought took hold within the neoconservative movement that became popular a decade later.

Early complaints reached Martin Luther King that Rustin was behaving strangely—pushing hard for the SCLC job, then disappearing mysteriously for days. Rustin himself said he was thinking fondly of a steady income after three decades as a vagabond radical, but King's three New York lawyers reported that Rustin was making his transition in step with the Shachtmanites, who were rumored to be searching out positions close to organized labor. Harry Wachtel, the corporate lawyer who had worked with Clarence Jones on the
Sullivan
case, picked up the political gossip, and Stanley Levison told Jones that Rustin was letting personal favorites among the Shachtmanites put ideas into his head. Wachtel, who admired Rustin, initially quibbled with Levison; in fact his first thought was that Levison might be “operating” with American Communists again, which would explain his hostility to Shachtmanite adversaries. Levison insisted from years of friendship that Rustin was surrendering his trademark independence to the Shachtmanite caucus, which he said moved in concert like a swarm of bees. Ironically, Levison was obliged to send his analysis indirectly through Jones, because Levison had submitted to the painful banishment demanded by the Kennedy administration and J. Edgar Hoover. Filtered warnings reached King by phone during his travels. Coming on top of the vexing personal feuds that clouded the Rustin matter already—not to mention the aversion to homosexuality from preachers on the SCLC board—these obscure intrigues exasperated King as a sign that enemy-thinking was infecting his own camp. “You're doing the same thing to Bayard that Hoover did to us about Stanley!” he complained to Clarence Jones.