December 1966–February 1967
POLITICAL passions tested democracy’s institutional core. In Bond v. Floyd, the Supreme Court weighed the argument by Georgia that criticisms of the Vietnam War, rather than Julian Bond’s color per se, left the state representative-elect short on the sincere character required to take his oath of office. “We are not persuaded,” Chief Justice Warren wrote tartly, “by the state’s attempt to distinguish between an exclusion alleged to be on racial grounds and one alleged to violate the First Amendment.” A unanimous ruling on December 5 ordered Georgia’s House to admit Bond, the twenty-six-year-old former SNCC publicist who had been elected three times but not yet seated. “We’re all disappointed,” said one state official, “that the Georgia legislature will apparently not be allowed to make its own decisions.” Such grumbling marked what might have seemed a remedial lesson for the South, but just then a movement erupted in Washington to expel Representative Adam Clayton Powell. “Fight in Congress to Bar Powell Planned by California Democrat,” announced the New York Times. “Powell’s Just Too Blatant,” a Washington Post headline proclaimed. The powerful chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, while duly elected twelve times from Harlem, had infuriated colleagues with flamboyant displays of “the freeloading available to all and practiced more quietly by many,” reported the Post. “Powell’s creed has been that he can do anything a white man can do.”
By uncanny coincidence, the prolonged feud over FBI surveillance emerged garishly that same week. Thurgood Marshall, Solicitor General of the United States, asked the Supreme Court to vacate the freshly upheld conviction of Joe Schipani of Brooklyn, noting with apology that prosecutors had failed to inform either defense lawyers or judges of evidence obtained from devices installed “by means of trespass,” namely microphone bugs. Because this was the third such case recently discovered, Marshall further advised, the Justice Department would examine past and present federal prosecutions for the taint of undisclosed eavesdropping. “U.S. Reviews Cases in Bugging Quest,” declared the lead front-page story in the Times.
Publicity ruptured the fragile truce covering eighteen months of subterranean maneuver. When outsiders had unearthed FBI bugs, disputes within the government over responsibility had drawn the unusually blunt presidential order to forbid all surreptitious microphones, and compliance became what Katzenbach called “an issue of great emotion” between the FBI and Justice Department: “There was very nearly a threat on the part of the FBI to stop organized crime investigations if they couldn’t have this technique.” FBI Director Hoover claimed broad but vague legal authority. Senator Robert Kennedy reacted viscerally, being vulnerable already because his signature lurked on hundreds of formal requests for less intrusive wiretap surveillances on telephone lines, which did not require break-ins to install. Kennedy insisted that he had not even known of FBI bugs when he was Attorney General, let alone approved them, and warring charges of secret misconduct culminated in a cryptic appeal to his successor and former deputy. “As you know, this is a damn important matter for me,” Kennedy wrote Katzenbach by hand-delivered courier. “I just don’t want to receive a shaft—it’s not deserved—and anyway I don’t like them deserved or not…. I can’t write you as many memos as J. Edgar Hoover. And there is no sense in our talking about it by phone. I feel strongly about it—and I write you (just that as there’s) not much else to say.”
By July of 1966, Katzenbach had managed to trace and shut down not only shadowy bugs but also many wiretaps. The President demanded more restrictions than Katzenbach himself thought justified, and in particular prodded him to confirm the removal of the sensitive installations on Martin Luther King. (“You got that little situation prohibited?” Johnson asked carefully by telephone. “It’s gone,” the Attorney General replied. “It better be,” said the President.) Katzenbach, having employed cajolery, including legal predictions that the King wiretap would surface ruinously if the government indicted Hosea Williams for car theft, had transferred to the State Department in part because his relations with Hoover were frayed beyond civil respect.
The FBI Director reduced his bureaucratic risk, and, over the pained objection of intelligence deputy William Sullivan, suspended parallel operations to gather data by investigative burglary. “We do not obtain authorization for ‘black bag’ jobs outside the Bureau,” Sullivan acknowledged in a plea for reconsideration. “Such a technique involves trespass and is clearly illegal; therefore, it would be impossible to obtain any legal sanction for it.” Nevertheless, Sullivan defended the FBI position that burglary had proved “an invaluable technique” of “wide-range effectiveness,” gleaning information otherwise off-limits, and Hoover would be obliged to repeat his protective ban when Thurgood Marshall ignited the public controversy over bugs. “I note that requests are still being made by Bureau officials for the use of ‘black bag’ techniques,” Hoover informed his top executives. “This practice, which includes also surreptitious entrance upon premises of any kind, will not meet with my approval in the future.”
After more than four decades in office, Hoover much preferred the authoritarian cloak of political spy work to accountable duty in law enforcement, but he channeled the FBI’s clandestine activity away from the forbidden zone of trespass. When FBI sources learned that Martin Luther King, desperately low on SCLC funds, planned to ask Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa for a donation like the $25,000 bestowed long ago at the Liuzzo funeral, Hoover authorized Deke DeLoach to launch preemptive sabotage. Agents discreetly monitored results over the consolation wiretaps on Stanley Levison, which Katzenbach had left in place, and preserved Levison’s shocked recounting to Clarence Jones of a planted New York Daily News story that Hoffa hoped to buy friends like King because he faced thirty-five years of federal jail sentences under appeal. (“Yike, does it really say that?” exclaimed Jones, prompting Levison’s miserable retort: “What, do you think I made it up?”) Informants soon told FBI agents that an embarrassed Hoffa was calling King “a faker.” With the rendezvous aborted, and the FBI role safely concealed, Hoover scrawled “Excellent” on a report that “our counterintelligence aim to thwart King in receiving money from the Teamsters has been quite successful to date.”
The Levison wiretap alerted Hoover also to a budding association between King and former White House adviser McGeorge Bundy, who, as president of America’s largest private philanthropy, had announced on consecutive days two Ford Foundation initiatives tinged with penance. First Bundy proposed to harness satellite communications technology toward what would become the first public broadcast network, in a project developed purposefully with television executive Fred Friendly. Across deep lines of dissent, Bundy the Vietnam architect shared an overriding conviction with war critic Friendly, who had been forced out of CBS over the Fulbright hearings, that commitments of national will demanded unfettered debate and straightforward constitutional decisions. Bundy next catapulted race relations high onto the Ford Foundation agenda, proclaiming that “full equality for all American Negroes is now the most urgent domestic concern in this country.” FBI agents already knew of the intended shift, being privy to surprise among King’s advisers when Bundy quietly hired two of their contacts to make up for his admitted lack of prior interest in civil rights. Eavesdroppers overheard doubt that staid foundations really meant to fund SCLC citizenship programs, no matter how much they professed to admire nonviolent workshops with Chicago youth gangs, but grant negotiations progressed into meetings between Bundy and King. After the 1966 elections, Bundy allowed his two new race specialists virtually to join the SCLC staff, preparing King’s forty-four-page testimony for a U.S. Senate hearing on the challenge of poverty. Levison, the skeptical idealist, vacillated between worry and giddy hope to rescue the movement’s financial base. “I don’t want five million dollars,” he told Andrew Young. “I want less. Five million dollars could destroy us.”
DeLoach recruited an intermediary to poison the foundation against King, but John Bugas, vice president of the parent Ford Motor Company, ran into Bundy’s steely refusal to hear derogatory secrets from an anonymous source. When Bugas, a former FBI agent, said the source preferred not to be divulged, Bundy guessed FBI and offered to listen if its officials would speak openly for themselves, which set off boiling evasion at headquarters. “I personally feel that Bundy is of the pseudo-intellectual, Ivy League group that has little respect for the FBI,” DeLoach concluded. He despaired of the direct approach, and Hoover concurred: “We would get nowhere with Bundy.”
HOOVER COULD and did mount fierce political attacks against a rare public challenge, such as the Supreme Court’s reproach for cases corrupted with bugs. To circumvent his own secrecy restrictions, he sent a scripted letter of inquiry to himself on a confidential mission with DeLoach, who induced Iowa Republican Representative H. R. Gross to sign, and Gross compliantly released Hoover’s ad hominem reply for the front pages of Sunday, December 11. “Hoover Asserts Robert Kennedy Aided Buggings,” declared the Times. Kennedy offered a statement of rebuttal—“Apparently, Mr. Hoover has been misinformed”—together with a letter from his former FBI liaison stating that Kennedy had processed many wiretap applications but never a bug. From headquarters, the FBI sprang an overwhelming counterattack at precisely 2:25 P.M. the same Sunday, built on a declaration from Hoover that Kennedy’s position was “absolutely inconceivable.” DeLoach’s aides sent copies, buttressed with sample documents from “the official records of the FBI,” to every satellite office “for the use and assistance of reliable news contacts.” They assured superiors that while they obeyed fine points of the FBI image code—declining news requests to read material on camera, for instance, lest film footage preserve self-declarations on unsavory topics—Hoover’s blistering words led most Sunday evening newscasts, followed by Kennedy’s besieged reaction that he had been unaware of bugs nonetheless.
Issues of democratic norms and constitutional balance gave way to sensational headlines across the country: “RFK and JEH” (Little Rock), “Bugs and Justice” (New York), “Which Do You Believe?” (Chattanooga), “Bugging Furor Bad Business” (Sacramento). The Christian Science Monitor called the personality clash a “donnybrook” suited to Washington, “a town which relishes a good fight between public officials almost better than anything else.” Stories from the capital—“President Aloof in Bugging Feud”—suggested accurately that President Johnson was bombarded with FBI allegations against Kennedy. (Hoover went so far as to have DeLoach brief Justice Fortas on indiscretions he said “could destroy Kennedy,” and Ramsey Clark, Katzenbach’s successor at Justice, advised Johnson that Hoover had lined up affidavits from witnesses, “forty or fifty of them,” to say Kennedy was complicit in bugs.) On December 14, James Reston of the New York Times reported that suspicions of officials were so widespread that “nobody in Washington could be sure his telephones were private.” His column surfaced the rumor that “the Government, beginning with the Kennedy Administration, listened in on the telephone conversations of Martin Luther King, the Negro leader, during the racial disorders…. Who authorized the taps? We do not know.”
Billowing paranoia overshadowed the next day’s Senate hearings on poverty, in which King cited a multibillion-dollar adjustment in the war budget to indict misguided national priorities. “The error alone is more than five times the amount committed to antipoverty programs,” he said. “The bombs in Vietnam explode at home—they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America.” Using the black quarter of the poverty population as a barometer, he charged that “the attainment of security and equality for Negroes has not yet become a serious and irrevocable national purpose.” Robert Kennedy, one of only two senators present, engaged King in a forlornly inquisitive dialogue about why nonviolence seemed to have yielded hope so far only in the South.
Afterward, reporters who pressed King about the Reston story obtained a dampening reaction: “Dr. King ‘Assumes’ Phone Is Tapped / But Says He Doesn’t Know Why / Embassies Calm.” FBI officials refused comment, but their New York wiretap units, in a compounded irony, monitored the chilled discussions among King’s lawyers about the wiretap news. Stanley Levison said President Kennedy himself had warned King about FBI surveillance in 1963. Harry Wachtel thought King should display less forbearance and more outrage. “When you have a guy doing an illegal act,” he told Levison, “you should not be so sweet about it.”
HOOVER ESCAPED in melodramas over lost American innocence, including what NBC News anchor David Brinkley drolly branded “the biggest publishing story since the New Testament.” Jacqueline Kennedy, the widowed First Lady, sued on December 16 to block a forthcoming book on the Kennedy assassination because it reopened too many raw wounds. William Manchester, her chosen author, agreed to remove his opening chapter about Kennedy’s earlier trip to Texas, cast as an allegory on frontier manhood, in which Lyndon Johnson inveigled an elegantly squeamish President-elect to kill a deer on his ranch. Otherwise Manchester defended his manuscript and confessed to the widow an abject failure “to suppress my bias against a certain eminent statesman [LBJ] who always reminded me of somebody in a Grade D movie on the late show.” Gossip oozed into the press about whether, why, and how hard Robert Kennedy pressed for revisions. By Christmas, President Johnson fulminated to Fortas and other confidants that leaks from the book mocked him all through the bloodstained transfer of power. “I don’t think I called Mrs. Kennedy ‘honey,’” he told Bill Moyers. “I think that’s their idea of ‘you all’ and ‘comin”—C-O-M-I-N—and this stuff they write about Texas.” Moyers warned of press rumors that Johnson had compiled notes from his White House phone calls to rebut Manchester. “Well, that’s wrong,” Moyers briskly assured the President, “because there are no verbatim transcripts.”
“Well, no, there are,” Johnson countered. “There are a good many.”
Moyers stopped short. “I thought—”
“They don’t think so, but there are a good many,” the President whispered.
Moyers backtracked. “I thought that Juanita [presidential secretary Juanita Roberts] had said that we didn’t have the equipment in those days,” he said.
“Well, there are a good many,” Johnson insisted.
“But he’s talking here about, about,” Moyers stammered, “between you and other people.”
“Well, there are,” the President solemnly admonished. “There are a good many.” Hidden telephone recorders captured Johnson’s cautionary signal that not even his closest aide knew all his defenses.
Moyers had just resigned from the White House. The President chided him for cooperating with Manchester’s slanted account, and he fretted privately that Vietnam would push Moyers closer to Robert Kennedy as war debate surged Christmas Day in reaction to the first American news dispatch out of North Vietnam. For the next three weeks, Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times surveyed bomb damage to civilian areas of Hanoi, toured school ruins, and described residential sections of Nam Dinh where the Pentagon alleged no military targets: “The cathedral tower looks out on block after block of utter desolation.” Secretary McNamara’s spokesman spasmodically denounced the reports and then conceded a small error rate quantified at 1.5 civilian deaths per sortie. The Time’s military correspondent defended the bombing as accurate, while the rival Washington Post impugned Salisbury’s integrity: “Ho Tries New Propaganda Weapon…Harrison Salisbury of The New York Times is Ho’s chosen instrument.”
Streams of vitriol and patriotic zeal sloshed together in January. Published excerpts from the Manchester book relived the national trauma of Dallas just as Jack Ruby, owner of the Carousel strip club, died of cancer while awaiting retrial for the murder of presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. In a void of dignified or satisfying answers, maverick prosecutor Jim Garrison of New Orleans prepared the first conspiracy indictment of shadow devils to feed cynicism for decades. Beginning January 8 in Binh Duong Province, a systematic assault of B-52s, sixty-ton bulldozers, defoliants, and thirty thousand soldiers burned four villages and flattened forty square miles north of Saigon. Operation Cedar Falls, which defied Senator Russell’s maxim on the political folly of detaching the Vietnamese from their land, aimed to move all ten thousand inhabitants to relocation camps in a bold tactical reversal of the search-and-destroy sequence. American casualties set a weekly record at 1,194, including a death toll near the peak of 240 from the 1965 Ia Drang battles. Salisbury’s twentieth dispatch, “North Vietnam Spirit Found High,” reported that popular street songs in Hanoi paid tribute to the obscure war protester Norman Morrison, who had immolated himself outside the Pentagon late in 1965.
FBI Director Hoover slipped up to Capitol Hill when the 90th Congress convened on January 10. On the House side, away from ceremonial pomp, war frictions, and the tumult of California Democrat Lionel Van Deerlin’s successful drive to bar Adam Clayton Powell from taking the oath, Hoover briefed loyal supporters about the Kennedy dispute. He “pointed out we had many other documents proving Bobby was lying,” according to his aide’s notes, and rejected the idea of court-approved surveillance because “there are many untrustworthy Federal judges, including some in the District of Columbia, whom we would not want to have knowledge of particular installations.” Before a closed Senate committee, Hoover testified formally on the eavesdropping leaks. “None of this misinformation has emanated from the FBI,” he lied. He reviewed eavesdropping since Prohibition, illustrating the meticulous wiretap process with a pregnant reminder that Robert Kennedy had signed the secret order on Martin Luther King, stating falsely that the initiative had been Kennedy’s. He conflated wiretaps with bugs to disguise the fact that he alone had controlled the latter without a speck of due process. He argued at length that Kennedy had seen material he knew came from bugs, or so should have inferred, and on this presumption Hoover spun an invisible tradition of authority stretching back to the early Eisenhower administration. Quoting only a small portion of his private lodestar, a May 20, 1954, memo from Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Hoover concealed the memo’s dissenting purpose and never let on that it plainly skirted adverse law. (“It is quite clear that in the Irvine case the Justices of the Supreme Court were outraged by what they regarded as the indecency of installing a microphone in a bedroom,” Brownell wrote. “It may appear, however, that important intelligence…can only be obtained…in such a location…. It is my opinion that under such circumstances the installation is…not prohibited by the Supreme Court’s decision.”)
This tortured rationale for an era of bugs would embarrass free government in future years, with Hoover safely dead, but the living Director silenced Congress and the press alike. His towering image as chief protector from domestic fears was at once too formidable and too fragile for public discussion. William Manchester scarcely mentioned FBI performance in his account of the Kennedy assassination, except to note Hoover’s fury that the Warren Commission dared criticize his Bureau at all. Behind assertions of spotless rectitude, buttressed by the intimidating secret files, Hoover’s fits of eccentric hysteria were so jarring that outsiders kept their rare glimpses to themselves. When Manchester, for instance, asked in a book interview about Oswald’s brief expatriation to Moscow, Hoover launched an oddly defensive tirade against Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. “The Director told Manchester that he had always felt it better to kick individuals like Khrushchev in the shins once in a while rather than to boot-lick them,” recorded DeLoach. “The Director explained that Khrushchev was basically an oriental and that individuals opposing orientals usually lost face in the oriental’s opinion when fear or trepidation was shown.”
FOR ROBERT Kennedy, fortunes fluctuated amid talk of a 1968 bid to unseat President Johnson. The bugging scandal and Manchester book turned January straw polls from a 53–47 percent Kennedy lead into a 39–61 percent deficit, but the uproar over Salisbury’s bombing series renewed pressure for him to oppose the carnage. Columnist Walter Lippmann asked whether Kennedy could live with a failure to provide a moral alternative. When the senator tried to downplay talk of political insurrection, by referring to Johnson as “a man of compassion,” rival partisans debated which champion better served the poor. In England, where he retreated from the crossfire, Oxford University students who pressed Kennedy to denounce Vietnam extracted no more than an expression of “grave reservations” about the bombing within an overall endorsement for Johnson’s war goal to preserve South Vietnam, but stories emphasized his frank rapport with antiwar students. In Paris, President Charles de Gaulle warned anew that the United States could not prevail against the tide of Vietnamese politics, but he coldly advised Kennedy not to ruin a bright future by contesting a disaster in progress. Columnist Joe Alsop, writing as an “affectionate, admiring, and deeply concerned uncle,” offered identical advice from the opposite pole, and begged Kennedy to avoid involvement in protests that could turn military victory into stalemate. “Anyone who is in any degree implicated in the latter result will never be forgiven,” he warned. Back home, Kennedy confronted a tempest over reports that he brought a North Vietnamese “peace feeler” from Paris. Nonplussed, summoned to the Oval Office on February 6, he guessed that Johnson’s State Department must have leaked a grossly inflated detail from his routine debriefing, about a minor French official who thought an American bombing halt would induce North Vietnam to negotiate. “It’s not my State Department, goddam it!” the President erupted. “It’s your State Department!” The two men called each other names.
Undersecretary of State Katzenbach witnessed the personal duel, which he later called “a perfectly ridiculous episode.” His frantic search had failed to locate the Kennedy debriefing in State Department records of highly classified peace initiatives, including a current overture from President Johnson to Ho Chi Minh himself, because it had been widely dispersed with other ordinary messages. The President saw conspirators within his government magnifying an illusion that Kennedy could settle Vietnam on nearly painless terms, evading the brutal choice between defeat and war. Kennedy saw an unstable warmonger scheming to make him a scapegoat, and Katzenbach resumed his role from the triangular bugging feud as a battered second for each contender. (“I succeeded in getting both Hoover and Kennedy mad at me,” he recalled.) Hard questions of substance all but vanished once again—first the constitutional standards for surveillance, now the uncertain capacity of American arms to establish political allegiance among the Vietnamese. Director Hoover, having incited the personality diversion, disappeared in a Kennedy-Johnson rift that lasted far beyond their lives. Projections of animus between the two icons became a political language in itself, subsuming relatively small differences on issues. It would symbolize their era’s demise, and substitute for lessons that fell between them.
The play MacBird!, which opened a hit Off-Broadway that February, previewed an extreme polarization of public debate. Long spurned by publishers, with one reading for investors marred by scuffles and cries of treason, the script presented Johnson as mastermind not only of the Kennedy assassination but also of misfortunes like Adlai Stevenson’s fatal heart attack and Edward Kennedy’s 1964 plane crash. In a burlesque of Shakespeare, the usurper MacBird cavorted on stage with jangling spurs, a feathered scepter, and ludicrous armor borrowed from a baseball catcher’s gear, while the Robert Kennedy character vowed cold-blooded restoration like ancient MacDuff: “At each male birth, my father in his wisdom/Prepared his sons for their envisaged greatness…/Our pulpy human hearts were cut away/And in their place precision apparatus/Of steel and plastic tubing was inserted.” Playwright Barbara Garson, a veteran of student protest at Berkeley, dismissed the visible structure of American politics as a facade to cover a throwback to dynastic powers. Critics and audiences divided over her portrayal of barons turning state crimes and even wars into props for rivalries plotted in frothy speeches of royal entitlement. “Two opposing Americas were rubbing sleeves,” observed The New Republic. Newsweek hailed in MacBird! “the total catharsis of satire.” The New York Times scorned “a crackpot consensus” against responsible government, blended from political left and right. “The cruelty and vulgarity are almost beyond description,” wrote Edith Oliver in The New Yorker, which refused a theater advertisement for the first time in the magazine’s history. “We deemed the whole thing in bad taste,” an executive said to explain the ban, “what with Vietnam and all.”
SNCC CONTINUED its disintegration behind the fame of black power. A December conference in upstate New York stalled for three rancorous days on a motion from the all-black Atlanta SNCC project to expel the last seven white staff members. Combatants tangled from definitions to dialectics, not excluding the thorny classification of Hispanics and Native Americans. Where established SNCC leaders saw petty distraction, Bill Ware of Atlanta argued tirelessly that revolutionaries against white racism must “cut the umbilical cord” of dependence. Stokely Carmichael and James Forman fought the motion on tactical points, having explained awkwardly to their caucus that it would be unwise to contest black solidarity in principle. Doing so would repeat Martin Luther King’s fundamental error, argued Carmichael, objecting that King stood inflexibly for nonviolence in a violent world. Ruby Doris Robinson supported black nationalism but railed against the separatists for chattering about white people instead of doing any work. Forman, bridling at suggestions of sentimental favoritism for longtime SNCC workers, or his white wife, raged that the historic brotherhood of sit-ins had degenerated into pot-smoking pretenders, and offered a substitute motion to disband SNCC entirely. Nearly half the members left in fatigue or disgust before the anti-white initiative passed by a single vote, 19–18, with twenty-four abstentions. Bob Zellner retreated silently to check out of the Peg Leg Bates Country Club with Jack Minnis, who called himself “a tough old bastard” but went years unable to speak of the scalding result. Clayton “Peg Leg” Bates, the strangely ecumenical host for a racial purge, had survived a childhood sharecropper accident to become the one-legged tap dancer for vaudeville’s Harlem Blackbirds and big bands from Duke Ellington to Jimmy Dorsey, a star on The Ed Sullivan Show, command performer at the British royal court, and hotel owner among the Jewish resorts in the Catskill Mountains. Back inside, motions to reconsider the vote trailed off in a fog of irritation, with the blunt Ivanhoe Donaldson muttering vacantly, “If it was so damned painful, why the hell did we have it?”
Many founders of SNCC had dispersed widely after seven years in the crucible of nonviolence. Two days after Christmas, Diane Nash was the youngest of four American women herded suddenly to a concrete bunker below one of Hanoi’s French hotels, thrown together in an air raid with foreign guests, including by chance correspondent Harrison Salisbury. They watched waitresses put on tin helmets to shoot rifles at American bombers with only the most remote chance of hitting one and marveled at war details so vivid they sowed controversy within the small delegation sponsored by peace groups, which had ventured far across cultures to experience fire from their own country. “There are no innocent civilians in North Vietnam,” one of them provocatively asserted after two weeks’ exposure to total war mobilization in a peasant society—riveted but troubled, with a tinge of admiration. Nash agreed with companion Barbara Deming that Americans must understand the Vietnamese resistance, which was unified even in the face of extermination from the sky. Deming, a journalist for a pacifist magazine, had met Nash less than four years earlier at the height of the Birmingham children’s marches against segregation. Now their delegation met Ho Chi Minh for an hour in the palace of the former French governor, and the venerable pacifist A. J. Muste talked separately with Ho a few days later. The North Vietnamese leader professed admiration for the American people as distinct from their government. “President Ho did not ask us to convey what he had said,” Muste wrote President Johnson, cautioning that Ho’s offer to receive Johnson hospitably for talks did not seem to indicate any weakening of military resolve. Muste and three of the women came home to have their passports seized for illegal travel. Their public comments gained little reaction. Nash delayed her return to the United States, laboring separately to sort out her immense arc since Selma—from the epitome of nonviolent discipline and vision into grudging respect for war, clarity adrift. She refused to speak with white reporters, finding them oblivious to the racial complexities of Vietnam.
Thoughts of Asia also tormented SNCC pioneer James Bevel. He stalled overtures from Muste to lead an antiwar mobilization planned for spring, and Nash, his estranged wife, broke off attempts to reconcile in the midst of serial philandering that he rationalized with bold incantations about truth experiments in nonpossessive love. Instead, she had stretched the concept of movement responsibility once again, as in the Freedom Rides, this time to a continent without black people, leaving him behind in Chicago with a moribund anti-slum campaign and rare domestic care of their two small children. Bevel’s agitation intensified until one day, watching a load of diapers wash in the basement, he surrendered to a mysterious gale of voices from the doorway. Recruiting emergency baby-sitters, he told Muste’s colleagues of a peculiar sign favoring the protest job and commandeered enough travel funds to reach Atlanta in search of Martin Luther King.
King had fled the country to escape daily intruders such as Bevel. Facing a draconian two-month deadline to produce a book manuscript, he managed to compose nearly three thousand words a day between speech trips into January, when the first showdown over Adam Clayton Powell demanded a response. “From my personal relationships with him, I really don’t care what happens,” King confided, “but I have to look beyond that.” Stanley Levison advised that, “unpalatable as it is,” King must defend Powell from an unconstitutional stampede to take his seat in Congress. King temporized with a telegram of personal sympathy, which Powell promptly released as a blanket endorsement. Meanwhile, from California, King agreed with Levison that any credible book must address Vietnam, but he dodged pleas to meet in New York with Al Lowenstein, Benjamin Spock, and Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin. This would be about politics, he anticipated, because Lowenstein already had told him that “a group of people” thought King should run as the antiwar candidate for President in 1968. January inaugurations added pressure for King to interpret the new wave of anti–civil rights governors: Lester Maddox in Georgia, Ronald Reagan in California, and Lurleen Wallace in Alabama. (The Times noted signs of moderation in Governor Maddox, who dropped the word segregation from his address and shook hands with Negroes, telling Julian Bond, “I see you finally got your seat.”) From Bimini, Powell brashly predicted triumph despite the January 10 House vote to bar him pending investigation, and claimed political strength to dominate even “‘Weak-kneed’ Wilkins and Martin ‘Loser’ King.”
Bayard Rustin warned a civil rights leadership summit on January 14 that Powell’s repellent arrogance could split the movement, while A. Philip Randolph decried irrationality for and against Powell, and King advised the group to be philosophical about joint efforts to uphold impartial standards. “Because Adam will turn right around next week and blast every one of us,” he said. “This is the way he operates.” Telling colleagues he must seal himself off to write, King flew to secluded rooms at Ocho Rios on the coast of Jamaica, beyond telephones and most newspapers but not an alarming story in which the SCLC staff vented its distaste for the Northern registration drive. “I don’t like Chicago,” Hosea Williams told the New York Times of January 16. Lester Hankerson underscored his vivid picture of frostbite and apathy with a quote explaining why he would rather get beaten again in Grenada: “The people here are not interested in first-class citizenship.” The story made King break isolation to call the mainland, where an infuriated Levison urged summary dismissals long overdue—“I mean the movement is entitled to that”—and Andrew Young was predicting that Williams would cry his way to forgiveness as always. King instructed them to postpone drastic punishment until his return. “I got so upset about it I could not write a line,” he said. “And I was doing well, too.”
Under the circumstances, Young swallowed notice that a possessed visitor had just bowled him over for a plane ticket and directions to the hideaway. Traveling aide Bernard Lee soon banged on King’s door, bracing the surprise with SCLC formality. “Mr. President,” he announced, “Bevel is here.” In rushed Bevel with his bizarre tale of tumbling diapers and noises that first had sounded like a host of familiar cousins but crystallized into one strange voice: “Why are you teaching nonviolence to Negroes in Mississippi but not to Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam?” Bevel recounted the questions that swirled around the basement and left him astonished, ending, “Are the Vietnamese not your brothers and sisters, like those you thought you heard at the door?” King, nervously adjusting his necktie, deflected any summons abroad as an abdication of his civil rights mandate from the SCLC board—“Ben Hooks and Joe Lowery wouldn’t stand for it”—and on January 19 managed to hustle Bevel out of Jamaica with temporary leave to join Muste’s staff. He called his top aides in distress, asking why Young had not noticed something badly wrong. “Bevel sounds like he’s off his rocker and needs a psychiatrist,” he said, recounting Bevel’s visionary instructions for King to take an open boat “peace shield” across the Pacific Ocean into the rivers of Vietnam, “preaching all the way that the war must end.”
Not for the first time, King dismissed theatrics from Bevel only to have them linger stubbornly in his mind. He kept turning to one item packed with his book research, transfixed by a twenty-four-page photo essay in the January Ramparts magazine of young Vietnamese with stump limbs, shrapnel scars, and faces melted by napalm, its text introduced by the pediatrician Spock: “A million children have been killed or wounded or burned…” It gnawed at King whether Bevel was crazier than the prevailing reasons for such carnage. He acknowledged that Bevel boasted of steering him with wild inspirations in Birmingham and Selma, but he also recognized a fine line between lunacy and wisdom in prophetic movements. No food would taste good, King told Bernard Lee, until he discovered his part to end the war. While cut off four more weeks in Jamaica, laboring feverishly every day for words to reinvigorate civil rights, he started with a January 25 letter to the Nobel Peace Prize committee in Norway nominating the exiled Vietnamese monk for the 1967 award: “Thich Nhat Hanh offers a way out of this nightmare…”
IN KING’S absence, Al Lownstein pursued many avenues to harness an antiwar coalition. The whirling law professor and citizenship activist orchestrated an open letter from fifty Rhodes Scholars questioning Vietnam policy, which made front pages on January 27, then escorted forty of the one hundred student body presidents who had just issued a similar appeal (“Student Leaders Warn President of Doubts on War”) into an audience with Secretary of State Rusk on January 31. They emerged in numb dismay over Rusk’s stolid reply to a question about what would happen if Vietnam escalated into nuclear war among the superpowers: “Well, somebody’s going to get hurt.” Lowenstein, working separately with chaplain Coffin of Yale (“462 on Yale Faculty Urge Halt in Bombing”), encouraged the ailing theologian Reinhold Niebuhr to make a declaration for peace, and helped Stanford theologian Robert McAfee Brown write a statement of conscience for more than two thousand religious leaders gathering January 31 in Washington. None of the nation’s 250 Catholic bishops attended, but Senator Eugene McCarthy, badgered by seminary constituents for his previous silence, concluded before a mass meeting that Vietnam policy failed Catholic doctrines of justifiable war. Rabbi Abraham Heschel exhorted the assembly to make witness through the corridors against complacency about violence: “In a free society, some are guilty but all are responsible.” After two days of vigils, Heschel calmed six fellow sponsors from CALCAV (Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam) on their way to the Pentagon, designating Coffin their spokesman with instructions to control his emotions. When Secretary McNamara parried them with an opening aside that religious leaders should have been more involved in civil rights, Coffin explained that most of those present had marched or been jailed like McAfee Brown and himself with the Freedom Riders. He and John Bennett, president of Union Theological Seminary, outlined Brown’s statement circumspectly until Heschel interrupted with a passionate jeremiad about the blasphemy of war upon the face and children of God. Tension spiked, but McNamara engaged in the moral dialogue to the point of missing appointments. He described religious dissent as legitimate and perhaps even a welcome balance, hinting at a far greater burden of political pressure to escalate the war. The delegation absorbed twin jolts in the cockpit of so much harm: Heschel’s spontaneous outburst and McNamara’s transparent regret.
Arriving in Jamaica on February 3, Andrew Young relieved Bernard Lee in the marathon flurry of dictation and handwritten changes for King’s book. He brought stateside reports on the antiwar fervor along with an “explosive” cover story in Commentary magazine, “The President & the Negro: The Moment Lost.” Levison warned King of its sweeping thesis by Daniel Moynihan that President Johnson was abandoning civil rights because movement leaders—“unable to comprehend their opportunity…[and] caught up in a frenzy of arrogance and nihilism,” had shunned the Moynihan report’s recommended focus on matriarchal pathology in the Negro family. “An era of bad manners,” Moynihan concluded, “is almost certainly begun.”
On February 13, King transferred his book operation to a Miami hotel for five days, exchanging draft chapters and revisions with an editorial team. He learned there of the heart attack in New York that abruptly felled A. J. Muste, without whom, King once said, “the American Negro might never have caught the meaning of nonviolence.” Commemorative speakers for the eighty-two-year-old scion of pacifism included Norman Thomas, Bayard Rustin, and James Bevel, the new coordinator of Muste’s antiwar mobilization set for April. They recalled his faith motto from the Book of Job—“Though he slay me, yet will I trust him”—which anchored the pacifist discipline Muste believed essential to progress. “If it does not have the spiritual connection,” he wrote in 1941, “I am sure that it will go wrong,” either by erosion of hope “or by going off the deep end on the use of violence.”
From Miami, King initiated a conference call about his desire to be more active for peace. He described the goading impact of the Ramparts photographs, but advisers split over participation with Bevel in a giant march to the United Nations. Union leader Cleveland Robinson was strongly in favor, citing the “naked reality” that the war had crippled their domestic work. Andrew Young wanted first to round up other black ministers to cushion the leap. Stanley Levison confessed his fear that clashes between civil rights and peace would neutralize King on both fronts, reducing him to “a small-time peace leader.” He urged an antiwar strategy of recruiting key political figures such as UAW president Walter Reuther, but King stressed the movement’s bottom-up experience in reaching the national leader who mattered most. “You have to have the masses behind you before you can go to the president,” he argued. Still, King shrank from more splits in the movement or damage to its economic base—“We would probably lose the Ford Foundation”—and Levison persuaded him to nestle his antiwar mission in respectable company.
On February 25, three days after the New York premiere of MacBird!, King joined four U.S. senators in California to address a Vietnam conference at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. The American war effort was pronounced unconstitutional by Ernest Gruening of Alaska, wrong by George McGovern of South Dakota, and misguided by Mark Hatfield of Oregon. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota raised doubts: “We should hesitate to waste our strength…in so highly questionable a cause.” King struck intimate tones in the keynote speech to an overflow crowd of 1,500 “Americans and lovers of democracy,” sketching recent history to lament cultural blinders on a heartfelt national purpose to establish freedom. “For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to re-colonize Vietnam,” he said, and his vision of the war echoed Thomas Jefferson’s haunted premonition of justice awakened for slaves. “When I see our country today intervening in what is basically a civil war,” said King, “destroying hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese children with napalm, leaving broken bodies in countless fields and sending home half-men, mutilated mentally and physically…and all this in the name of pursuing the goal of peace, I tremble for our world.” He likened America in Vietnam to the prodigal son of Christian scripture, “strayed to the far country,” and exhorted his audience to reclaim the prodigal like anguished parents. “I speak out against this war because I am disappointed in America,” he cried. “There can be no great disappointment where there is no great love.” The speech did make scattered front-page headlines—“Dr. King Advocates Quitting Vietnam”—but muted response thereafter signaled a passing nod for the fringe piety of harsh times.