January 1966
PRESIDENT Johnson prepared for his State of the Union address that week. “I feel a good deal of the ice cracking under me,” he confided to General Maxwell Taylor, “and slipping on the domestic scene.” Johnson had extended a one-day Christmas bombing pause over North Vietnam to advertise frenzied overtures for settlement talks with “more than a hundred governments,” and he continued the pause past January 9 with a simultaneous U.S. infantry assault launched in strict secrecy from the South Vietnamese government, for the first time, to forestall betrayal by allies only nominally in charge of their cause. With millions of Americans stirring to peace prospects even as others still awakened to serious war in a small country, Johnson elbowed frantically for room on all sides. He told General Taylor that Vietnam costs figured to drive up the next military budget by 40 percent, but he included only a fraction of the realistic $20 billion increase in the January message. “I want a minimum in that defense budget to get by,” he instructed McGeorge Bundy. “You’re absolutely right,” McNamara separately agreed. “You’d just absolutely destroy your Great Society program.” Johnson planned to return to Congress for supplemental Vietnam funds only after securing domestic appropriations, and he used the specter of war in turn to stall his fledgling War on Poverty below its second-year peak of $1.7 billion.
Early in January, the President had locked away his top aides to write what became known as the “guns and butter” speech. Charged with an alchemist’s task—to amass both without promising new money or favoring one over the other—they cast a wide net for ideas among Johnson’s most trusted friends beyond the administration. From the Supreme Court, Abe Fortas boldly proposed to cede the entire Vietnam conflict to the United Nations with a pledge to withdraw American forces in less than three years. By contrast, novelist John Steinbeck recommended massive, erratic bomb strikes based on his experience in the World War II London blitz: “People can get used to anything except what they don’t expect.” Steinbeck’s literary empathy with the Dust Bowl poor still made him a security risk in FBI files, but he forwarded a bellicose mix of strategic advice and amateur designs for unconventional weapons: crop bombs of bright methyl dye, on the theory that Vietnamese would not eat blue rice, plus a “napalm grenade” and spray shotguns for close jungle warfare. “I never knew anyone to hit anything with a .45,” he wrote the White House on January 7, “unless he shoves it in his opponent’s mouth.”
Johnson rejected the final draft at four o’clock on the morning of January 12. Speechwriter Richard Goodwin, recalled again for ad hoc emergency duty, slumped over his typewriter and did not revive until a White House doctor gave him an injection to start over at dawn. Still banished from Johnson’s actual presence for suspect loyalty since quitting the staff, Goodwin fell to the margins in a day-long Oval Office flurry of reshuffled sections and shouted orders to ad hoc phrasemakers, including Justice Fortas and Clark Clifford. The State of the Union, as set forth that night before a joint session of Congress, blended raw passions for justice, war, and peace. Johnson pressed the breakthrough in civil rights with proposals that made separate front-page headlines: for new laws to “prohibit racial discrimination in the sale or rental of housing,” to integrate juries, and to make it a federal crime to murder or cause malicious injury to civil rights workers. In like spirit, he asked Congress to “prosecute with vigor and determination our war on poverty,” to rebuild crumbling cities “on a scale never before attempted,” and to begin a historic cleansing of the environment. “Of all the reckless devastation of our natural heritage,” said the President, “none is really more shameful than the continued poisoning of our rivers and our air.”
He promised to pursue these goals and also stand fast for freedom abroad: “I believe we can continue the Great Society while we fight in Vietnam.” Five separate times he raised the “brutal and bitter conflict” where “tonight the cup of peril is full,” until Vietnam consumed half the hour-long speech. Johnson called a universal hunger for independence not only “the strongest force in today’s world” but freedom’s long-range ally to help dissolve Communism, and praised nationalism for “eroding the unity of what was once a Stalinist empire.” Military urgency overrode ambivalence on this core issue, however, along with financial realism. Johnson announced that Vietnam costs would increase by only an estimated $5.8 billion in fiscal 1967. Furthermore, he said vigilant pruning would reduce the year’s overall deficit on the federal budget of $113 billion to $1.8 billion—“one of the lowest in many years”—while wiping out the small international trade deficit. “Time may require further sacrifices,” he told the national audience. “And if it does, we will make them.” Above qualification and deceit, he smothered doubt with a bared yearning to make his figures come true. “Let us choose peace,” he said, “and with it the wondrous works of peace.”
A recurring passion in the speech mediated between energized national dreams and his wrenching imperative to let slip the stilled bombers. Johnson pronounced war “a crime against mankind.” It is “young men dying in the fullness of their promise,” he said. “It is trying to kill a man that you do not even know well enough to hate. Therefore, to know war is to know that there is still madness in this world.” The President gained fifty-nine ovations in the House, often with Goodwin’s language harking back to the crossroads of Selma. “Finally, I must be the one to order our guns to fire against the—, against all the most inward pulls of my desire,” Johnson said with a slight catch. “For we have children to teach, as we have sick to be cured and we have men to be freed. There are poor to be lifted up and there are cities to be built and there’s a world to be helped. Yet, we do what we must.”
The President stayed up late to savor reviews of a triumphant speech said to have “exhilarated the capital,” but he called Press Secretary Bill Moyers long after midnight about an advance news item that Moyers might be longing for his old job at the Peace Corps. “Well, are you happy, or are you unhappy?” Johnson asked in a grave, wounded tone, airing his impression that Moyers “got angry this morning and kind of sulked” through the day, “puffed up like a pouter pigeon.” The chief aide declared wholehearted support for the speech, but the President probed for discontent until Moyers raised a comment among the customary tirades in which Johnson had chided him for currying favor with reporters by encouraging their suspicions of duplicity in the White House. “Well, that hit me like a ton of bricks,” said Moyers. In awkward, glancing protest, he professed a loyalty so resolute that he said it undermined his own reputation and effectiveness as press secretary.
Johnson kept circling the edge of direct accusation. “I don’t give a damn a whole lot about the Washington Post,” he said softly, “just as long as I understand where I am with you.” He pushed the sleep-starved Moyers for more than half an hour to elaborate a grievance or desire. “Do you want to change jobs?” he asked. “Would you prefer to? Are you, did you make a bad deal when you agreed to stay? Would you rather do something else?”
“Uh, no, sir,” Moyers answered with repeated sighs. “There’s not another job that I believe I should do right now.”
“It’s coming from within,” Johnson warned of destructive news. “There’s nothing about it from the outside. The Republicans are not hurtin’ us.”
MARTIN LUTHER King sent Johnson a telegram of praise for his commitment to seek peace and his “reassuring” determination not to let Vietnam spoil the hard-won domestic initiatives. “In all of these endeavors,” he wrote, “you have both my prayers and my support.” King also wired congratulations to Deke DeLoach for a promotion that lifted him among the few FBI executives whispered to be a potential successor to J. Edgar Hoover. Following the considered advice of Negro elders that flattery was the only known solvent for the Bureau’s imperious hostility, King slathered on a personal touch: “It makes me doubly proud to know that a fellow Georgian has been elevated to such a key position in the federal government.” He reminded DeLoach of discovering a common birth state during their one face-to-face encounter, but of course did not specify that occasion as the scalded truce summit after Hoover had publicly called King “the most notorious liar in the country.”
Tremors from the war already swallowed up King’s gestures in public anxiety promoted ardently from FBI headquarters. Director Hoover charged that the minuscule American Communist Party played “an ever-increasing role in generating opposition to the United States position in Vietnam,” and DeLoach, in a publicized Chicago speech, lumped civil rights clergy and war protesters together with “racketeers, Communists, narcotics peddlers, filth merchants, and others of their ilk” who spread the “malignant disease” of false freedom. “I refer to the arrogant non-conformists, including some educators,” he added, “who have mounted the platform at public gatherings to urge ‘civil disobedience’ and defiance of authority.”
On January 14, while King marched for Julian Bond in Atlanta, FBI agents gave Gary Thomas Rowe $10,000 with a carefully scripted message that the payment was a token of gratitude from Director Hoover himself, and should be added to whatever “ultimate settlement” Rowe might receive from the Justice Department for his service as a Klan informant and witness. Rowe “became very emotional,” the lead agent reported to Hoover. “[T]ears came to his eyes, and he asked me to personally thank you for your consideration.” Rowe signed a release for the FBI and wrote Hoover a devoted farewell the same day, expressing nostalgia over “my last official association with the Bureau.” Soon thereafter, his first collect phone call to John Doar’s home triggered an inkling of woe for the Justice Department. Based on the Attorney General’s written promise before the December Liuzzo trial, Rowe demanded attention to debts, quarrelsome relatives, and real or imagined security threats from vengeful Klansmen, Doar advised Katzenbach, and FBI officials dropped a solid curtain of amnesia to rebuff the Justice Department’s plaintive requests for help. “We have no views,” Hoover wrote tersely on a memo from DeLoach. “We settled our obligations to Rowe.”
Thus the FBI fobbed off Rowe’s future as well as his past. Government lawyers inherited a decade of headache over his ensuing performance as a deputy U.S. marshal working under a protective identity in California, where he slugged and threatened to shoot a black doorman, for instance, rather than sign a building register. “Rowe apparently has a super detective complex,” concluded one evaluation, “and is prone to display his identification, badge, and weapon to almost anyone who will listen when he is under the influence of alcohol.” Years later, during the post-Watergate investigation of intelligence scandals, Rowe’s name surfaced in allegations that FBI handlers had received advance notice of Klan violence long before the Liuzzo murder. This news shocked even Katzenbach, who retained an impression that Rowe had turned informant only after he “got scared” during the lethal ambush. In 1979, Attorney General Griffin Bell appointed a task force solely to investigate the FBI’s complicity through Rowe in a host of Alabama Klan crimes between 1960 and 1965, both infamous and unknown. Despite stale records and obstruction, task force attorneys concluded that Rowe had warned the FBI days ahead of the Klan-police agreement to beat the 1961 Freedom Riders in Birmingham, for instance, and that Bureau officials had condoned the attack to the point of watching Rowe himself become “one of a handful most intensely involved in the violence.” Even so, Justice Department attorneys stoutly defended the FBI against lawsuits for negligent damage. They lost a modest award of $25,000 to Freedom Rider James Peck, whose wounds had required fifty-seven stitches to close, and of $35,000 to the elderly Quaker Walter Bergman, who was confined permanently to a wheelchair since being knocked unconscious in the Birmingham bus station. They won dismissal of a $2 million case when U.S. District Judge Charles Joiner ruled in 1983 that advance approval for Rowe to join the Klan ride that killed Viola Liuzzo “cannot place liability on the government,” and it took a shower of adverse publicity to quell as unseemly the Justice Department’s subsequent counterclaim to recover all its court costs from the Liuzzo family. Renewed security worries placed Rowe back in Witness Protection until he died obscurely in 1998 under the pseudonym Thomas Moore.
These troubles lay submerged when DeLoach advised Hoover in 1966 that Katzenbach’s unguarded letter “gave the FBI an excellent opportunity to divest us of our responsibilities” for the radioactive informant. Among moves to forestall a parallel congressional inquiry into violations of privacy, Hoover sent DeLoach secretly to argue that Senator Edward Long of Missouri should leave the FBI out of contemplated hearings on bugging policy, despite the scandal in Las Vegas. “It seems a little ludicrous to consider the civil rights of such hoodlums have been violated by microphones being placed on them,” he advised, by his account, “when these same individuals are dealing in murder, racketeering, and complete sadism.” DeLoach returned to headquarters convinced that ulterior motives lay behind claims of congressional duty to learn the facts. “Senator Long thoroughly dislikes Senator [Robert] Kennedy,” he reported, “and will use such information against Senator Kennedy.” Hoover resisted the temptation to abet an attack on Kennedy, whom he despised, and moved first to neutralize the FBI’s vulnerability over its decades of freelance bugging. He sent DeLoach to lobby Katzenbach for three days, playing on his desire to avoid public recriminations, until the Attorney General approved a formal letter to Senator Long late on Thursday, January 20. An investigation not only threatened capabilities essential to national security, he agreed, but would be pointless because bugging practices rested securely on an “understanding” down through the years between the FBI and Attorneys General of both political parties.
An agitated Katzenbach informed DeLoach early Friday that he had lain awake with second thoughts and wanted to revise the letter. He said the understanding provision might infuriate Robert Kennedy, whose support he needed for bills in the Senate, but DeLoach cut short the misgivings. “I told the Attorney General that I was just as sorry as I could be,” he reported, “however, this letter had been mailed out last night and no doubt would be in the hands of Senator Long either this morning or early this afternoon.” DeLoach also reported, with merciless satisfaction, that Katzenbach instantly declined his offer for the FBI to retrieve the letter from Long with a candid account of his fears about Kennedy. By a combination of bureaucratic skills—patient cultivation of long-range advantage, sealed with masterful control of paperwork—FBI officials fastened Katzenbach to a bugging defense they had constructed from nothing.
Nevertheless, Hoover cautiously placed a moratorium on new bugs “irrespective of what Long does,” in order to minimize exposure in the unstable climate since President Johnson’s ban on intrusive surveillance. That same Friday, Hoover reacted sharply to notification of hasty installations on King. “Remove this surveillance at once,” he ordered. FBI technicians surreptitiously planted no fewer than sixteen bugs anyway, seeking to intercept significant mischief in various rooms occupied for the weekend by King’s party at the New York Americana Hotel. This frenzied, unsuccessful attempt remains a mysterious lapse of internal FBI discipline, traceable to mixed signals or perhaps anticipated regret that these would be the last microphone intercepts ever targeted at King. The government’s electronic ear would intrude upon the final two years of his life exclusively through the numerous telephone wiretaps authorized by Katzenbach and Robert Kennedy.
KING PREACHED at New York’s historic Riverside Church once again that Sunday, January 23, which marked the end of a battle truce for the Vietnamese Tet holiday. “The days that follow may well be decisive,” warned an advertisement spread across two pages of the morning New York Times, “in determining whether this brutal, bloody war will be ended or escalated.” King’s name appeared among hundreds of signers drawn from interfaith clergy worldwide, including theologian Karl Barth, rabbis Heschel and Gittelson, Father Daniel Berrigan, Martin Niemoeller of Germany, and bishops from Sweden to Tasmania. Their appeal—headed “they are our brothers whom we kill!”—rebuked both sides for alarming determination to prove sincerity by violence. Thich Nhat Hanh, the monk who had written King about Buddhist theory of nonviolent self-immolation, added the Vietnamese perspective throughout a text circulated by the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation: “Helpless villagers in Vietnam, unable either to escape or defend themselves, recoil from the bombing of one side and from the terror of the other.” The ad called upon the opposing governments to reinstate the 1954 Geneva Accords under a truce leading to a plebiscite on reunification. Thich Nhat Hanh signed as “A Vietnamese Buddhist…whose name is withheld for reasons of prudence.” In hiding—soon exiled for the remainder of the century by the diverse autocracies to govern Vietnam—he wrote that foreign military escalation would reinforce Ho Chi Minh’s reputation for patriotic resistance and conversely would undermine for Westerners the ultimate goal of forging political allegiance, so that by every boost of violence “the more surely they destroy the very thing they are trying to build.” He charged that a million South Vietnamese already lived in refugee camps on whatever portion of the four-cent daily allowance was not stolen in graft.
King flew home to address internal conflicts centered on Hosea Williams, who had been arrested for drunk driving late Saturday night in Birmingham. No sooner did Williams make bail than he scandalized a public meeting on registration goals, exclaiming “You can’t Jew us down!” to the few interracial stalwarts of the Alabama Human Relations Council, among them several Jews. SCLC aides labored to curb his outbursts and profligate ways, especially in light of the unresolved FBI car theft investigation. “I think that the root of this problem is that you don’t realize the strength of your own personality,” Andrew Young counseled privately. “I am sure that you don’t mean to abuse and humiliate people, but quite often you do.” Still, Williams berated his rival James Bevel for “stealing” King away to Chicago. Determined to recapture the movement spotlight for Alabama by spectacular enrollments of newly registered black Democrats, he excoriated SNCC project directors for what he called their “ignorant, black nationalistic” notion to organize independent parties for selected counties instead. He accused Stokely Carmichael of exploiting sharecroppers with newfangled schemes. “There ain’t no Negro in Alabama, including ourselves, that knows one iota about politics!” he shouted. Carmichael retorted that Williams was herding black voters into a party with “White Supremacy” as its official slogan. Francis Walter, who observed several of the tumultuous parleys, found the question of party loyalty “vexing” and Carmichael unpersuasive but game. “I don’t blame anyone for resisting Hosea’s dogmatic egomania,” he recorded in his diary.
Sunday afternoon, Walter drove alone into Alabama’s Wilcox County for a mass meeting to map strategy for first-time voters in the May primary. He came upon a visibly charged crowd of Negroes on Highway 41 just outside Camden, held back from an abandoned car by troopers with sawed-off shotguns. Movement supporter David Colson had been poised to turn into the parking lot of Antioch Church when a car behind thumped his bumper. He walked back to investigate, whereupon the driver shot him dead behind the right ear with a .32 caliber pistol and drove away past Mrs. Colson in the car with her small son and three cousins. The crowd calmed slightly when Sheriff P. C. “Lummie” Jenkins announced that J. T. Reaves, a local farmer, had surrendered. Witnesses murmured that Reaves seemed deranged, having bumped into other cars, with Colson the first Negro who dared to inquire like a motorist in an ordinary accident. Reporters arrived from distant cities. “With the pool of blood still fresh outside the windows, the meeting went on after a brief eulogy by [SCLC aide Rev. Daniel] Harrell & Rev. Frank Smith,” Walter wrote that night. “There was crying in the church and a great deal of fear. I was afraid.” Despite pleas not to let terror achieve its purpose, no one agreed to stand for office in the May primary.
A hundred miles north, King accepted staff advice to avoid contention with SNCC projects over the isolated Black Belt counties plagued with evictions, tent cities, and ingrained fear spiked by the fresh murder in Camden. He confined a hurried visit to Birmingham, where Hosea Williams catapulted Monday morning from the defendant’s table to a personal triumph that made national news. He won dismissal of the drunk driving charge in court just before federal officials arrived as a result of his battered month’s marches to dramatize the slow pace of Birmingham registration. Twenty-three new registrars—nine of them Negroes—took up stations under superseding authority from the Voting Rights Act. King led a small parade of welcome, and Williams invited white people to make use of the registrars, too. “The more people that register,” he grandly declared, “the better government we have.” With aides in bemused debate about whether Williams gained his miracle rescues by providence or lunatic boldness, King toured spontaneous voter rallies. He proclaimed a mission to “democratize the total political structure of the state,” reported the New York Times. The detachment of federal registrars worked well into Monday night to process more than a thousand people the first day. A certifying order from Attorney General Katzenbach made Birmingham the thirtyseventh local jurisdiction served—eleventh in Alabama, first in an urban area.
In Washington that week, also on the legal initiative of John Doar’s Civil Rights Division, Katzenbach quietly approved an effort to ban segregation in the 226 state and local jails that held federal prisoners under contract. He recommended that Constance Baker Motley become the first Negro woman to hold a federal judgeship, partly in recognition of her landmark cases to integrate Clemson and Ole Miss, and he joined President Johnson at the White House ceremony to swear in Robert Weaver as the first Negro Cabinet member, heading the new Department of Housing and Urban Development. The President chided Roy Wilkins about Weaver’s propensity to travel, which he called “the principal defect of Negroes in government.” (“The moment they take an oath, they get an airplane ticket,” he teased, and Wilkins agreed, “They do get around.”) More seriously, Wilkins, Clarence Mitchell, and Whitney Young complained that White House protocol granted no special reward for political loyalty on Vietnam. Vice President Humphrey took note of their quiet tenacity in a favorable memo, asking “why treat all of the civil rights leaders alike when the SNCC outfit engages in the most outrageous attacks on the President and the Administration.”
JOHNSON AND McNamara had slipped with their wives into the White House theater on Saturday night to watch the James Bond spy fantasy Thunderball, then returned to the crucible of inescapable choice over a bombing pause now extended past thirty days. On Monday, January 24, McNamara advised gloomily that he expected a “military stand-off at a much higher level” under troop deployments scheduled for the year, with American casualties to reach a thousand killed per month. He agreed with the CIA assessment that no amount of deliverable ordnance could reduce the flow of soldiers and supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail enough to threaten the enemy war effort, and favored renewed bombing because he had exhausted his hope for a diplomatic settlement. Privately, McNamara commended to Johnson a historical explanation for North Vietnam’s stunning indifference to peace feelers in the face of pending devastation: they believed they had all but won a terrible long war in 1954, only to negotiate away half their country at Geneva under conciliatory pressure from the world, including their Communist allies, and were steeled never to repeat such a mistake. Monday night in the White House Cabinet Room, McNamara pressed to restart Rolling Thunder by Friday. “I’d go sooner,” he said. “Political delay can be damaging.”
Johnson stalled. “I think we’ll spend a good deal of political capital in resuming,” he countered. War doubters would decry the lapse of restraint. War enthusiasts would claim proof that restraint was dangerous folly.
On Tuesday evening, Johnson gathered twenty congressional leaders from both parties to address the pause under strict pledge of secrecy. Senators Mansfield and Fulbright advocated essentially the New York Times peace ad—an international push for plebiscite under a revived Geneva Accord, from a military posture pulled back within “enclaves” to minimize casualties. Everyone else spurned the idea as a passive formula for eventual defeat. Republican leaders Everett Dirksen and Gerald Ford said bombing was the only choice to win. Senator Russell lamented that extra American soldiers inevitably would be killed—“casualties of our care for peace,” he called them—by enemy reinforcements moving freely during the pause. “This is the most frustrating experience of my life,” he said. “I didn’t want to get in there, but we are there.” He pleaded for Johnson to bomb with vengeance. “We killed civilians in World War II and nobody opposed,” he said. “I’d rather kill them than have American boys die.” The only woman among the leaders warned the President that his pause signaled cowardice. “Can’t we fight?” asked Frances Bolton of Ohio, the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “Don’t let them think we won’t fight.”
Johnson read out loud from Bruce Catton’s Civil War history Never Call Retreat, a copy of which he had just received from Senator Robert Kennedy with a handwritten note that “it might give you some comfort to look back at another President, Abraham Lincoln, and some of the identical problems and situations that he faced.” When he finished reading the passages Kennedy recommended, about the incomparable loneliness of a war President in the midst of clashing passions and divided counsel, Johnson told the senators he felt the force of Lincoln’s reference to himself as “that unhappy wretch called Abraham Lincoln.” He called Justice Fortas Wednesday morning to vent against the stubborn pretense that some neglected word or negotiating strategy would unlock a door to sensible compromise. “The problem is not communicating,” Johnson fumed. “We understand them, and they understand us.” He dashed off mournful descriptions of North Vietnam’s one “loud and clear” message, consistent to diplomats “running back and forth to Hanoi and Peking and every other place,” which he called the clearly stated purpose “to kill every American soldier in South Vietnam” even if it required “twenty or thirty years,” with firm advance notice that Americans “can either leave or get killed.”
Johnson’s monologue abruptly reversed direction to portray guns aimed also at his back. “‘You can either fight or run,’” he told Fortas, paraphrasing the message from congressional leaders from the night before. “‘And we’ll universally condemn you, and history will condemn you, and we’ll despise you, if you run.’” He said his generals accused him of tying their hands in order to feed the enemy. “And then you have Eisenhower callin’ me yesterday from California, sayin’ when are we going to fight?”
Fortas scarcely spoke as the fulmination circled back to the bombing pause in its thirty-third day. “And uh, uh, the, they’re going to try and convict and impeach me,” Johnson sputtered, “for committing to war two hundred thousand men—”
“Yes.”
“And then not supporting, doing this. That’s my big problem in the morning. I don’t know how much longer I can wait, number one. And number two, what in the hell am I waiting on?”
“Well, that’s right,” said Fortas.
“They’ve given me my answer loud and clear.”
“Yes.”
“What—, I don’t—, I just hesitate to mash the button that says to the world, ‘He’s off again.’”
President Johnson broke away from Fortas to deliver televised remarks for a major initiative long in gestation. “Nineteen sixty-six can be the year of rebirth for American cities,” he began. His Model Cities message to Congress proposed to test renovation blueprints for urban systems from parks and schools to sewers across sixty metropolitan areas. “If we become two people, the suburban affluent and urban poor, each filled with mistrust and fear for the other,” he warned, “if this is our desire and policy as a people, then we shall effectively cripple each generation to come.” News outlets generally praised the comprehensive experiment, because or in spite of its modest cost of $2.6 billion over six years. When the Washington Post computed that only $5 million was to be invested in the first budget year, 1967, White House aides would scramble with hopeful bromides to allay an “extremely unfair” but persistent guess that Vietnam already had pinched the bud from Johnson’s lofty plan.
KING BEGAN weekly slum residence that Wednesday afternoon. From the Chicago airport, he was whisked secretly to mediate the lingering frictions over his proposed location. A few leaders from Al Raby’s coalition considered it belittling to their hopes that a renowned international figure would advertise black Chicago’s most extreme degradation. Some argued that there were plenty of distinguished homes and hovels alike in historic South Side “Bronzeville.” Others objected that James Bevel had ignored neighborhood partners in an awkward search for the most symbolic site on the lowly West Side. Word surfaced that traveling aide Bernard Lee had pronounced eight vacancies “unlivable,” and landlords recoiled from King’s name on the lease, so Lee was obliged to conceal the intended occupant by signing himself. Newspapers discovered the ruse. Their emphasis on last-minute refurbishment by the panicked landlord—“King Picks ‘Typical’ Flat/8 Men Repair It,” reported the Chicago Tribune—projected an air of fiasco and false humility for the Chicago campaign.
King appraised the sniping as normal. “I can learn more about the situation by being here with those who live and suffer here,” he insisted, then proceeded by caravan into the West Side ghetto of North Lawndale, nicknamed “Slumdale” by residents. A crowd of several hundred waited numbly in the cold to observe the entourage enter a third-floor walk-up at 1550 South Hamlin Avenue. Coretta, looking ahead to the small comfort of promised improvements upstairs, stepped first into the shock of a lock-less ground-floor entry with a bare dirt floor. “The smell of urine was overpowering,” she recalled. “We were told that this was because the door was always open, and drunks came in off the street to use the hallway as a toilet.” Above, fresh coats of gray and yellow paint did cover the empty apartment of four narrow rooms and “a bath of sorts,” lined single-file from the street to overlook a back alley. “You had to go through the bedrooms to get to the kitchen,” Coretta noted. They broke away from unpacking for King to deliver an evening speech at Chicago Theological Seminary, where new SCLC staff member Jesse Jackson was a student, then returned to a steady stream of first-night neighbors, including children who darted in to gawk. Bob Black of the Chicago Defender photographed eight-year-old Roy Williams sitting shyly on King’s lap. Six curious members of the local Vice Lords gang stayed late in discussion with King about their turf battles and his concept of nonviolence.
As he first walked the streets to sample Lawndale and nearby East Garfield, trailing reporters noticed faces peering at the phenomenon from open windows even in zero-degree weather. One old man nearly collapsed when he recognized the famous preacher, and mumbled, “Great God a’mighty, I didn’t ever think this day would come.” Many in the path remained skeptical about change, however, saying the black people who had made it to Chicago were divided and reluctant to risk what little they had. “It’s bad enough to be at the top of nothing,” said one mother, “but to be at the bottom of nothing?” On Thursday, Al Raby guided King’s party from a bustling soul food lunch at Belinda’s Pit to a courtesy tour of police headquarters. Press interest fluttered to every hint of future conflict, as when King assured Chief Orlando Wilson that he would give ample notice before marches or civil disobedience. Wilson tried to be gracious by confirming his surprise discovery of some Irish ancestry in King (pretty far back, on Daddy King’s side), which he said never hurt in shamrock Chicago.
In another balancing foray to the South Side, King lectured on race and family life that night at the University of Chicago. “Family life not only educates in general,” he began, “but its quality ultimately determines the individual’s capacity to love.” He sketched conditions from the time of his slave great-grandfather on the plantation, when “the institution of legal marriage did not exist.” Some Negroes had murdered their own young to spare them, he said bluntly, and “after liberation countless mothers wandered over roadless states looking for the children who had been taken from them and sold.” He said city adjustment was often ruinous for ex-slaves, as for other migrant groups of peasant stock. Without mentioning Moynihan by name, he presented alarming statistics from “a recent study” that found 25 percent of Negro women in cities to be divorced. It was triple the rate for white women, said King, though the latter was rising more rapidly, and similar gaps prevailed for illegitimacy, unemployment, and welfare. He warned of the twin danger posed by “historical facts” of stubborn cruelty, seduction, and sorrow. America might mold a new pretext “to justify neglect and rationalize oppression,” he said, and Negroes could give in to rage or surrender. King lifted up a narrow alternative for common hope. “What man has torn down,” he asserted, “he can rebuild.” Negroes in American cities must seize every opportunity “to grow from within,” while others must cooperate “from the outside” to remove invisible barriers of jolting strength. “This is what we intend to fight for in Chicago,” he concluded. “A fair chance.” In haste, he scrawled an instruction to himself at the end of the surviving text: “Ad lib we shall overcome!”
After a second night on Hamlin Avenue, King left Friday for registration rallies in Birmingham and weekend commitments in New York. His advisers expressed mild optimism about Chicago. Bayard Rustin, who still opposed the Northern campaign, passed along rumors that the city was preparing significant concessions for the spring. Mayor Daley already had beamed back an interview from his Caribbean vacation, promising full repair for every residence classified dilapidated (40 percent of Negro dwellings citywide) within two years. “All of us, like Dr. King, are trying to eliminate slums,” Daley announced. As always, King’s inner circle salved movement hardship with running tales of mirth. They speculated about the finer appointments Daley might select for King’s tenement, and Abernathy, who demanded road perquisites to match his putative co-partner, magnified every palatial detail still lacking from his duplicate apartment one floor below, which retained all its rust and debris without new paint or heat. Blaming his wife’s sensitivity, he resolved to bequeath the space to the staff and duck out to a hotel.
King headed back to tenement rounds in a kind of throwback to his quixotic movement years after the bus boycott. He was isolated from a national government rumbling to war. For all the sinews of his experience in heartland Chicago—battling J. H. Jackson there in the stronghold of church culture, addressing its elite Sunday Evening radio forum, sharing Bronzeville galas with Mahalia Jackson and a lawyer with Muhammad Ali—King blew words at a galaxy of strangers. There were fifty square miles of black people concentrated apart from scattered white allies in a vast mosaic of neighborhoods. He began anew as one waif seeking others. Among papers stuffed in his flight bag was a Friday memo urging him to pay a call in Chicago on the parish priest Richard Morrisroe, who was still hospitalized and said to be neglected five months after being shotgunned near the Lowndes County Jail. Stokely Carmichael had been among his few movement visitors.
SECRETARY OF State Rusk testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Friday morning, January 27, in an atmosphere of palpable tension. Front-page headlines suggested irresistible war pressures—“A Lonely Johnson Weighs Bombing”—and fifteen senators had released a joint letter pleading with President Johnson to delay. When Rusk explained again the steps necessary to guarantee an independent South Vietnam against Communist aggression, Chairman Fulbright dropped the courtly veneer of Senate discourse to question every premise, especially Rusk’s assertion that Congress already had authorized a war of unlimited scale by its 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. “This was a fire fight, angry, bitter, and hostile,” wrote David Halberstam. “Fulbright lost his temper, and he made no attempt to conceal it.” He asked whether Rusk believed South Vietnam could be independent “with two hundred or four hundred thousand” American soldiers running its war. Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon brusquely refused to ask questions until the administration agreed to a full inquiry on Vietnam. The normally avuncular Republican George Aiken of Vermont demanded to know if Rusk seriously meant that Ho Chi Minh alone “will determine then whether we send four hundred thousand or two million men into Southeast Asia.” Cameras recorded so much sizzling footage that Walter Cronkite would use three full minutes on the half-hour CBS Evening News—an eternity by television standards—only to find out that NBC used five full minutes and wanted more. The public sensation touched off heated debate inside the three broadcast networks—consequential for the future of television news—about whether to preempt daytime shows for live coverage of the hearings on the war.
In Vietnam, four thousand U.S. Marines completed the largest amphibious landing since Inchon in the Korean War and pushed south from Quang Nai to trap North Vietnamese regiments against twenty thousand U.S. Army infantry headed north in Operation Masher. While the infantry pushed up the central coastline, repairing all seventy-two bridges destroyed by foes along the forty-five-mile path from An Khe, Lieutenant Colonel Harold Moore landed Friday morning with his 7th Cavalry Battalion in a forward helicopter assault on the target area of Bong Son, and charged first into a thatched hut filled with peasants wounded and terrified from advance artillery fire, including a bloodied six-year-old girl “the same age as my daughter Cecile, back home,” he recorded. “I summoned the medics, but I left there heartsick.”
In Atlanta, Julian Bond sat quietly that afternoon as three federal judges heard arguments on his lawsuit challenging the refusal to seat him by the Georgia House of Representatives. Lawyers for co-plaintiff King had submitted a brief of unusually petulant fervor, arguing that segregationists still were “cheered” when they defied federal policy, and that Bond might have been seated “had he recanted, begged, or crawled…. No free man should.” Against Bond, Judge Griffin Bell cast the swing vote in a 2–1 ruling “that the judgment of this court is not to be substituted for that of the House.” All three judges, citing the acceptance of other newly elected Negroes, agreed from the bench that the evidence excluded race as a motivating factor for the House, which mooted Bond’s contention that his civil rights were abridged. On the contrary, their ruling managed torturously to find that Bond himself had introduced improper racial considerations through comments aligned with critics of U.S. war policy “in the Dominican Republic, the Congo, South Africa, Rhodesia,” and other foreign nations. The SNCC action he endorsed was “a call to action based on race…alien to the pluralistic society which makes this nation,” declared the court, ruling that Bond had shifted the “balancing test” against his claim to free speech under the First Amendment.
In Washington, Dean Rusk left the explosive Fulbright hearing for a final war review that included civilians officially labeled “THE WISE MEN” on the confidential White House log. Only one hard-liner now recommended a defensive military posture to encourage the gradualist faction in Hanoi, based on his experience fighting the Chinese Communists. “If you just sit tight there, in six months or a year that will convince them,” the Pakistani dictator Ayub Khan predicted by secret cable. “Your enemies expect you to be impatient, to commit more and more forces, and finally to weaken your resolve in the face of unsatisfactory military results and your own democratic pressures.” For Americans in the Cabinet Room, however, the most divisive question was whether renewed bombing was a military or political necessity. The Joint Chiefs testily conceded McNamara’s evidence that no air campaign could interdict more than half the supplies moving down the Ho Chi Minh Trail—and the Vietnamese would “probably use human backs,” he said, if they needed to make up for lost trucks—but they insisted that heavy bombardment must gain some military advantage. To McNamara, bombs in mountainous jungle were largely noise but politically vital nonetheless, because he doubted “the American people will long support a government” that failed to throw every resource behind its soldiers.
Clark Clifford, one of the Wise Men, disputed McNamara’s emphasis on ground forces. “We must fight the war where we are strongest,” he said, “and we are strongest in the air.” Vice President Humphrey stressed the political dangers of further delay, warning that “Congress will run all over the lot.” Johnson closed with a simple three-part conclusion. He was “not happy with Vietnam.” But “we cannot run out.” Therefore, the bombing must resume.
THE ALABAMA movements wrestled with fear and political choice over the weekend. In Wilcox County, still traumatized from the Colson murder, Walter Calhoun hinted that he might run against Lummie Jenkins for sheriff—in the Democratic primary. This caused confusion, as many favored an independent county party instead, but Calhoun believed the simplest campaign would be hard enough for first-time voters and a pioneer candidate. (He would be ordered to vacate his grocery store as soon as he filed for office.) Mass meetings in Selma were split between independents who favored Negro candidates and pragmatists who believed their new votes could provide a victory margin for the “decent” segregationist Wilson Baker over Sheriff Jim Clark. Youth organizers in Macon County defied Tuskegee elders to leaflet for a February 6 caucus to begin a “black panther” organization in honor of Sammy Younge. The Greene County movement scraped together a tent city modeled on the one in Lowndes, where SNCC workers continued workshops on the strict legal requirements for a new local party.
In Mississippi, a weekend Poor People’s Conference at Mount Beulah emphasized survival more than politics. On Saturday, January 29, seven hundred participants sent a telegram to President Johnson pleading for jobs and emergency housing to relieve conditions of abject peonage worsened by terror. The portion of crops harvested by machine had nearly doubled to 80 percent since 1960. Two sharecroppers had frozen to death Thursday night, and the Klan had burned fifty crosses across the state to continue a January offensive marked by the Dahmer firebombing in Hattiesburg. On Sunday, delegates sifted ideas to dramatize their plight, from petitions and a march on Jackson to guerrilla warfare. (The latter notion was floated by fringe rebels called “boppers,” mostly young whites who had drifted into the holdover excitement of Freedom Summer with Marxist terminology and trophy guns.) The conference dispatched scouts to the Yazoo National Wildlife Refuge, which they found unsuited to become a squatters’ site, but proposals to “occupy” another federal property steadily gained favor.
Only a remnant of the seven hundred volunteered for a bold plan to caravan north one hundred miles through the night to the derelict Greenville Air Base. All admitted new fears about incurring the wrath of the U.S. Air Force. They included Art Thomas, a Methodist preacher and Duke economist who headed the two-year-old Delta Ministry project for the National Council of Churches, plus six members of his staff, a reporter from Copenhagen, and some forty sharecroppers. Many of the latter were recently evicted; some had never ventured beyond their county line. At dawn Monday, January 31, they drove past a startled guard and pried the rusty padlock from a ramshackle barracks, unused since 1960. Once inside with their few blankets and boxes, they elected a governing council led by Unita Blackwell of Issaquena. The council authorized a hand-lettered sign for the door: “This is our home. Please knock before entering.”
A sleepless President Johnson called the White House Situation Room at 3:20, and again at 6:06, hoping for reports on the first raids over North Vietnam to end the bombing pause. The front pages of his Monday newspapers featured a large AP photograph of 1st AirCav medic Thomas Cole kneeling half-blind near Bong Son, his own damaged eye wrapped in a bandana as he cradled one wounded soldier with another prostrate just behind. Johnson obtained crisp after-action figures from McNamara after breakfast: 225 sorties aborted by bad weather, seventy-five completed, three aircraft lost, 312 enemy and sixty-eight U.S. killed in Operation Masher. He said the pilots reported heavier antiaircraft fire. Johnson asked, “Did we get much results in your judgment?”
“No,” said McNamara. “My judgment is we accomplished practically nothing.”
The President talked briefly with Fortas, then announced the renewed bombing on national television from the White House theater at ten o’clock. Eleven hours ahead in Vietnam, dark closed on Monday’s battles around the hamlet of Anthai, which Colonel Moore described as “a rat’s nest of trenches and bunkers and spider holes” four miles north of Bong Son. One platoon quickly lost twenty-three of forty soldiers on a sand island surrounded by rice paddies, as described by a rare first-person dispatch to the New York Times. “I was a passenger on the first of these two choppers,” wrote correspondent R. W. Apple. The survivors endured a sudden, prolonged fusillade from the rear, which turned out to be an errant attack by South Vietnamese allies. “We could not move, we could not take cover for there was none,” wrote Apple. “We could not shoot back. We could not even tell who was shooting at us.”
The President took a call late Monday from his Attorney General. “Mr. President,” asked Katzenbach, “have you seen on the ticker about Greenville, Mississippi, this group of Negroes that moved on this abandoned, surplus air base there?”
“No, I haven’t,” replied Johnson. “No, I haven’t.”
Katzenbach explained. Fifty squatters refused to move until the Office of Economic Opportunity met demands for job training, relocation, and food assistance. Local officials refused to help.
“Did they do any damage?”
“Well, they’ve broken in, and the danger mainly is fire,” the Attorney General replied. “You see, there’s no plumbing in there, uh, it’s cold.” The occupants were lighting fires in little potbellied stoves, and Katzenbach worried also about the precedent: “My concern with this group is that if they stay on there, we’ll have more.”
When Johnson asked about getting a court order if negotiation failed, Katzenbach advised against it. “In fact, I’m not even sure we can get one,” he said. “I didn’t want to bring charges against them.” He said Cyrus Vance and the Pentagon were preparing to move them on military authority.
The President suggested that perhaps Roy Wilkins and Martin Luther King could help explain history’s proven snare whenever Negroes relied on the U.S. military to settle political questions in the South. “If you go to moving in,” he prompted, “we go back to Reconstruction days, and we have a lot of unshirted hell, and they better move off.”
A television crew landed in a Learjet to film the awkward standoff at Greenville Air Base. Federal negotiators offered freedom; occupants said they had no place to go. Negotiators said they should move for their own good, lacking heat and basic sanitation; occupants said they had never had any. “If that’s all you got to say,” Unita Blackwell told Major General R. W. Puryear, “I guess we’ll stay right here.” Puryear’s air police unit broke into the barracks with billy clubs Tuesday morning, February 1. About half Blackwell’s group consented to retreat under escort, while the others went limp and were dragged beyond the gates of federal property. Federal officials recommended a crash poverty program to alleviate suffering among “many thousands” of sharecroppers losing what little livelihood and shelter they had. “If we do not do this,” Katzenbach wrote Johnson, “there is a real possibility that Mississippi will be the Selma, Alabama of 1966.”
In Vietnam, an intensified U.S. air campaign more than made up for the long January pause. Bombing runs over North Vietnam in 1966 tripled the heavy numbers of the sustained 1965 campaign, to 79,000 sorties. Southward infiltration of Ho Chi Minh’s soldiers increased substantially anyway, as McNamara and the CIA expected. For all the concussion to fall on North Vietnam, American pilots dropped more than triple that ordnance in air support for ground troops south of the border—eventually some four million tons, according to historian Christian Appy—to make South Vietnam the most bombed country since the invention of war.
The President somberly anticipated the devastation if not the result. Joe Califano noticed that he gave up alcohol from the moment he unleashed the bombers again. Johnson also severely curtailed the use of his clandestine telephone recording system, as though he had preserved all the history he wanted to make.