Pillar of Fire (75 page)

“I'm telling you because you want me to tell you the truth,” Sanders declared. “It looks like we're turning the Democratic party over to the nigras….” Martin Luther King was deciding who could be a delegate, he said. “It's gonna cut our throats from ear to ear.”

Johnson argued that the MFDP really deserved representation in Mississippi itself. “Pistols kept 'em out,” he said heatedly. “These people went in and begged to go into the conventions. They've got half the population, and they won't let 'em. They lock 'em out.”

“They're not registered,” Sanders insisted.

Johnson's temper fell into quiet pronouncement. “You and I just can't survive our political modern life,” he said, “with these goddamn fellas down there that are eatin' 'em for breakfast every morning. They have got to quit that. And they got to let 'em vote, and let 'em shave, and let 'em eat, and things like that. And they don't do it.”

Connally took up for Sanders with less passion, given the President's agitation. Johnson pleaded with him not to let the South walk out—not to say, “I'm gonna be a dog in the manger.” He said that meant to have everything—all their votes—and then also “bark if somebody across the hall gets a couple.”

The President urged Walter Jenkins in Atlantic City to resist the “dog in the manger attitude,” which became his rallying cry. By early evening, convention aides told him the South was now the threat. Mississippi's state chairman praised his regular delegates for walking out on the compromise, and Governor Paul Johnson went on television to proclaim liberation from the bond that had kept his state purely Democratic since Lincoln and Reconstruction: “Mississippi's debt to the national party is now paid in full.”

On the convention podium, Governor Lawrence and Senator Pastore banged the credentials report to adoption, and finality released energy from all sides of the conflict. Joe Rauh shed tears as he marched dutifully to the podium to return unused the at-large delegate credentials issued for Aaron Henry and Edwin King. As much as he wished his clients would accept them as a victory, he longed more for the lost trust of Bob Moses. Most MFDP supporters recaptured the fervor of Freedom Summer from a rejection all too reminiscent of Mississippi. Their Boardwalk vigil escalated swiftly to a protest more like the Hattiesburg picket line, and lobbying gave way to daring demonstrations.

Prominent Democrats such as Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon and ex-governor Mennen Williams of Michigan boasted of helping to smuggle MFDP members onto the convention floor to claim Mississippi seats as rightfully theirs. “I made about four or five trips in and out—it was really exciting,” observed one summer volunteer who relayed entry badges illicitly with a fake press pass and a Young Citizens for Johnson disguise. “I felt like Mata Hari and the French Resistance and the Underground Railroad all rolled into one.” Nearly two dozen MFDP delegates made it past security into the Mississippi section, which prompted the precious few oath-signing regulars there to flee.

There were only three of them, trying to incubate a loyal presence with the encouragement of President Johnson,
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and their evacuation sorely distressed Johnson's floor commanders. Walter Jenkins called the President to report that delegates could not get into Convention Hall because of riots and demonstrations outside. White House aide Marvin Watson angrily ordered the MFDP sit-ins dragged from the Mississippi section; Jenkins countermanded him for fear that a televised eviction would be worse than the sit-in. Demonstrators, asked why they were making such a scene, asked in reply why network interviewers made no corresponding uproar over banned whites who had crashed the Alabama section again. Moses waved off the suggestion that he spurned a fair compromise. “We are here for the people and the people want to represent themselves,” he told NBC's John Chancellor. “They don't want symbolic token votes.”

Press Secretary George Reedy hesitantly answered a summons to the presidential quarters when the convention broadcasts signed off about midnight Tuesday. From considerable experience, he hoped the morning's resignation vow was forgotten, but he found Johnson in renewed despair over the threat of demonstrations and Southern walkouts. “By God, I'm gonna go up there and quit,” said Johnson. “Fuck 'em all.”

Reedy slathered on reassurances, lumbering after Johnson on one of his hyperkinetic walks around the White House South Lawn. He said the President did not need to go to Atlantic City until Thursday, once he was nominated and the convention safely in his pocket. He pleaded with Johnson not to hand the country to Goldwater. Johnson merely said that he was having trouble with his withdrawal statement and ordered Reedy to draft it. When Reedy refused, the President flayed him as an incompetent, disloyal tormentor. Reedy ended the ordeal only by promising to write something, but the predawn resignation he typed out was his own.

 

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EDNESDAY MORNING
, the MFDP delegation regathered amidst second thoughts about the compromise and rumors that the administration might relax some of the insulting details. Rauh told his friend Senator Humphrey that “the dumb bastards on your side—and I'm sure it wasn't you, Hubert—chose our two people instead of letting them choose their own two people.” Humphrey dragged himself back to work, saying he was so battered that “I honestly don't care too much anymore” about Johnson's test for vice president, and Rauh joined a phalanx of speakers at Union Temple Baptist. He urged the delegates to reconsider the compromise, as did Senator Morse and Aaron Henry. Bayard Rustin argued that they must broaden their outlook from moral protest to political alliance, during which Mendy Samstein of SNCC jumped up to shout, “You're a traitor, Bayard!” In an atmosphere charged with rebellion, James Forman eyed Al Lowenstein to make sure he did not dare speak for the pragmatism of experts. Church lawyer Jack Pratt did endorse the compromise, saying rejectionists were failing to disclose its many side promises—federal hearings, training programs, interventions long sought—but a cold reception made him wander off to get drunk in a bar.

Martin Luther King delivered a speech of formal neutrality. “I am not going to counsel you to accept or reject,” he said. “That is your decision.” He balanced a denunciation of Johnson's remote-control mistreatment against the leavening hope for political progress, airing his conflicted private advice: “So, being a Negro leader, I want you to take this, but if I were a Mississippi Negro, I would vote against it.” The delegates gave King generous applause on both sides. Some were still pinching themselves that all the big shots were worked up over their decision, and some shared the distaste of the student movement for King's straddling.

Bob Moses swayed nearly all of them against the compromise. “We're not here to bring politics to our morality,” he said, “but to bring morality to our politics.” One admirer said, “Moses could have been Socrates or Aristotle…. I mean he tore King up.” When the outsiders departed after the speeches, a few MFDP delegates ventured praise of the compromise as “getting somewhere,” but the larger voices—especially Victoria Gray, Annie Devine, and Fannie Lou Hamer—scorned it as a paltry temptation. Gray said people back home were counting on them to bring back gains deep enough and fair enough to hold against conditions in Mississippi. “When they got through talking and hoopin' and hollerin' and tellin' me what a shame it was for me to do that,” recalled an old man from Issaquena County, “I hushed right then.” The delegates voted again to reject the Democratic offer. “We didn't come all this way for no two seats,” said Hamer.

Meanwhile, Walter Reuther left for Washington to deliver a report in the West Hallway outside President Johnson's bedroom. No record survives of their eighty minutes alone, nor of Johnson's initial state of mind after serial crises, but Reuther's bracing news included an agreement by Martin Luther King to carry on a specialized LBJ campaign tour among Negroes. His morning reports accented the positive. There was no residual chance for a roll call on Mississippi. The
Washington Post
predicted that the “vast bulk” of Southern delegates would stay on, and praised Johnson as the invisible wizard who helped the Democratic party “finally rid itself of the divisive civil rights issue which has plagued every national convention beginning with 1948.”

The President buzzed for his press secretary after Reuther departed, but Reedy, cringing with his own undelivered resignation, ducked three calls before learning that Johnson was racing forward again. The President summoned Humphrey and Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut by private jet from Atlantic City, then took off for a spontaneous midday walk with his beagles, Him and Her, and sixty trailing reporters. He sent the exhausted dogs to their kennel after four breakneck laps around the White House driveway—about a mile—then herded the reporters through eleven more laps without dispensing a vice presidential announcement. Other reporters followed the two senators around the Washington Monument and other tourist sites in a Johnson-mandated holding pattern.

“One of them must now at last be chosen to stand within a heartbeat of the presidency,” campaign historian Theodore White recorded of the contenders' late afternoon arrival in a single limousine. Johnson privately consoled Dodd as his decoy, extracted pledges of loyalty from Humphrey, and called Humphrey's wife, Muriel, under bond of secrecy. “We're going to nominate your boy,” he said. His abrupt order scrambled the entire presidential entourage for Atlantic City a day ahead of schedule. Reedy, who had released White House reporters to evening cocktails, relieved that Johnson had abandoned his mad fits about quitting that night, recalled them to sudden departure. He replaced for safety reasons an inebriated member of the press pool who nearly walked into a helicopter blade.

Johnson announced Humphrey within hours, in person, to a pleasantly astonished convention that swept them jointly to nomination. The nominees returned to give acceptance speeches at the closing session Thursday night, when Robert Kennedy's speech in Convention Hall indeed broke the dam, as Johnson had feared. An unbroken wave of applause lasted fully twenty-two minutes when Kennedy introduced the film about his brother with Shakespeare's tribute to Romeo: “When he shall die/Take him and cut him out in little stars/And he will make the face of heaven so fine/That all the world will be in love with night/And pay no worship to the garish sun.” Johnson by then could welcome, even absorb, some of the outpouring as the secure successor to President Kennedy. “Party and nation both now gaze in wonder at the huge man,” wrote Theodore White for the CBS election special. “Yet no man but he knows all the measure of the huge distance he has come.”

Private dramas continued in the background. George Reedy endured embarrassing bureaucratic torment after a colleague retrieved the unused letter of resignation from his White House desk and leaked it to reporters. Reedy strongly suspected aides to his agile rival Bill Moyers, but he could only say he was “puzzled” by news stories painting him as an idiot who “quit because Mr. Johnson had ignored his advice not to go to Atlantic City.” Any hint of the truth would have scandalized voters over a manic, unstable President. “I don't want to louse things up,” he told Johnson morosely.

Deke DeLoach applied successfully for Director Hoover to bestow secret letters of commendation upon the agents of his Special Squad, highlighting their undercover work to “make major changes in controlling admissions into the Convention Hall and thereby preclude infiltration of the illegal Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) delegates in large numbers into the space reserved for the regular Mississippi delegates.” Agents posing as reporters had broadcast warnings to agents posing as security guards, who helped strip the chairs from the Mississippi section and block entrances to the empty rows.

Bob Moses and six others stood vigil in an aisle through the Kennedy tribute Thursday night, wearing black neck placards embossed with JFK's silhouette and his exhortation, “Ask not what your country….” Moses was among many who already felt Atlantic City a bitter turning point for the Mississippi movement, if not for all of American politics. Outside, Fannie Lou Hamer led farewell choruses of “We Shall Overcome,” and fireworks from President Johnson's gigantic fifty-sixth birthday celebration illuminated the whole Boardwalk, including portraits of Mississippi martyrs held aloft.

President Johnson left the convention giddy with energy, having conquered political and mortal anxieties on a birthday never reached by most Johnson men. Racing from a helicopter to
Air Force One
, with the Humphreys as guests, he veered across the airfield toward a crowded security fence to lift
Washington Post
publisher Katharine Graham happily off the ground. “We're going to Texas and we want you with us,” Johnson announced as he swept her aboard without regard for the luggage and corporate jet she left behind. All the trappings of government flew from Atlantic City to the LBJ Ranch, where on Friday the President whirled among the vistas, gadgets, and livestock of his domain. He dressed Senator Humphrey in an LBJ-sized ranch outfit—“I looked ridiculous and I felt ridiculous as I smiled wanly from under a cowboy hat,” Humphrey recalled—and abruptly commandeered six other guests, including Katharine Graham, to visit two venerable kinfolk in a ramshackle house down the road. “Cousin Oriole, wake up!” shouted Johnson, banging on the screened porch where he sank into a nap as soon as he got homecoming hugs. To his party, seated near the sleeping President, Aunt Jessie Hatcher recalled that even as a small boy young Lyndon sat in the front and held the reins on donkey rides. “He still does,” quipped Humphrey.