May–June 1967
CLEVELAND Sellers intercepted King in Atlanta for emergency counseling. He was twenty-two, polite and sturdy by nature. His parents, a schoolteacher and a rural entrepreneur, had implored him in 1962 not to risk their hard-earned tuition to diversions at a college outside South Carolina—only to watch him disappear from Howard University into a maelstrom of protest and jail they preferred not to hear about. Now Sellers recalled late-night debates on the Meredith march to tell King he could no longer raise a spiritual objection to violence and was resolved instead to take a political stand against the draft. Such a defense would only weaken bleak prospects in court, King replied, but he advised Sellers to make sure he could look at himself and others with belief to last beyond a maximum five-year prison sentence. Satisfied, he offered prayer for strength, and Carmichael provided escort to the showdown on Monday, May 1, whispering, “Don’t let them get to you.” Like Ali, Sellers made national news—“Rights Leader Refuses to Be Inducted into Army”—by ignoring the ritual order to step forward. A New York Times account of the tense ceremony stressed fashion details: “He showed up at the induction center at 7 A.M. wearing a mustache, sunglasses, a green turtleneck sweater and a brown collarless jacket. He wore brown shoes but no socks, and his brown and white checkered trousers came to about six inches above his ankles.” Carmichael told reporters that sixteen SNCC colleagues had been drafted so far by a Selective Service system just now accepting its first black officials—one of 161 board members in South Carolina, five of 509 in Georgia—to offset charges of biased conscription for a racist war.
Sellers attracted notice as program secretary for a national organization of greatly magnified public presence since its black power doctrine and sharp attacks on American purpose in Vietnam, but zestful alarm in the press masked organizational disintegration already far advanced. Only about seventy SNCC staff members remained. With the ranks thinned of extraordinary figures such as Bob Moses, Diane Nash, and John Lewis, those who still endured persecution and fatigue joked that every word in SNCC’s storied name was now a misnomer. They were no longer students or nonviolent. They no longer coordinated sacrifice beyond the wisdom and courage of the nation’s elders, nor operated by egalitarian grassroots committee. Instead, they competed for celebrity attention while reverting to youthful disputes as tawdry as snipes at their clothes.
One feud snapped over car keys, as Carmichael battled Bill Ware and separatist colleagues who had spearheaded votes to expel white staff members at December’s Peg Leg Bates conference. When Ware’s Atlanta project refused to surrender a Plymouth from the tiny SNCC fleet, Sellers tracked down and hot-wired the car for a trip to Mississippi, but Carmichael had a flat tire on the way, and, lacking a trunk key to reach the spare, had to flag down a passing motorist to borrow a jack so he could hitchhike with the damaged tire in search of repair. When Sellers filed a police report to recover a commandeered station wagon, Ware denounced him for stooping to “a racist henchman cop of the white master Allen of Atlanta to settle an internal dispute between the supposedly black people of SNCC.” Ware’s telegram to James Forman threatened retribution for “calculated conspiracy to destroy the black ideology”: “We have tapes and other information that could fall into black people’s hands across the country.” Carmichael sent the Atlanta project a one-sentence reply: “You have been fired from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.” Elsewhere, he suspended the North Carolina project, closed dysfunctional support groups in Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and confided that staff members were dodging eviction in Washington, where “most of the equipment has been stolen from the office.”
Other strains snapped when the program secretary caught his live-in girlfriend repeatedly in trysts with staff member Hubert G. Brown. Sellers cursed and beat her in a savage outburst—for which he would offer public contrition—shrieking that such betrayals tore apart SNCC’s already frayed network of trust. Brown, who had met with President Johnson as a student leader during the Selma crisis, supervised Alabama registration projects since Carmichael left to become SNCC chairman. Late in March, he addressed the second anniversary meeting of the Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights. Brown somberly discussed the two recent arsons at movement churches, but he brightened with sly speculation about a subsequent arson of white property. “Lightning hit over here at Good Hope Presbyterian,” he cried, relishing hope above murmurs and laughter that the amazing coincidence “straightened things out in white folks’ minds.” SNCC worker Scott B. Smith took the floor to make a blunt speech. “I have learned how to hate,” he said. “I know how to hate.” An old man waved his cane to object that their mission was to make everybody “be better people, both white and colored.” Black Panther leaders John Hulett and Sidney Logan already had rolled a trailer onto the ashes of the anti-poverty site to rebuild homemade furniture for job classes, but vigilante mystery stirred. Logan’s baby bull was found shot in the head. Twenty cattle owned by Probate Judge Harrell Hammonds were poisoned, prompting hushed debate about whether it was Klan punishment for letting Panther candidates on the 1966 ballot or a black warning not to trust white moderates. When gifts of fresh beef arrived for the refugees still living in the tent city on Highway 80, Scott B. Smith hinted that African butchers had been recruited in the night from Tuskegee’s veterinary school, and there were rumors of bull genitals hung from Klan mailboxes. “Burning churches and killing cows ain’t going to do it,” Panther candidate Robert Logan told a mass meeting. “Our movement is stronger than ever.” Still, upstarts adopted a refrain of sarcastic swagger: “Yeah, lightning.”
Stokely Carmichael issued a statement on the church burnings—“Black people are now serving notice that we will fight back”—and ended public remarks about arson with a vow: “We’ll all worship in one church or we’ll all worship outside.” These cryptic references, like Carmichael’s mixed reception on black campuses, failed to make news. Some students at Miles College in Birmingham called him a reverse supremacist and a “damned fool” for advocating an all-black faculty, while Carmichael scolded them for accepting a lame curriculum—“You are all a bunch of parrots”—and needled them for bourgeois self-absorption. (“Why are you here?” he asked females enrolled at Morgan State. “So you can kick down a door in the middle of the night to look for a pair of shoes?”) What registered beyond the halls was his daredevil cry against white America. At Tougaloo, reported the Baltimore Afro-American, “Carmichael’s strong anti-Vietnam statements set off almost five minutes of chanting, ‘We ain’t going, hell no!’” At Miles, reported the New York Times, he exhorted students to repudiate American law. Quoting Frederick Douglass, that there could be no freedom while slaves obeyed their masters, he won thunderous acclaim for his updated maxim: “If you want to be free, you’ve got to say, ‘To hell with the laws of the United States!’” The Nashville Banner vainly urged Vanderbilt to forestall a riot by barring Carmichael, and on the night after his departure, an unruly customer at Fisk’s dinner club sparked three days of altercation that left ninety students arrested and fifty injured, three of them shot by the five hundred anti-riot police still massed on high alert. The Tennessee House of Representatives passed a resolution that Carmichael should be deported regardless of his U.S. citizenship. Shouts of vindicated alarm from all sides prompted a New York Times editorial, “‘Black Power’ in Nashville,” cautioning that “it is not easy to determine if these disturbances were touched off by Mr. Carmichael’s fiery words or by the preceding effort to silence him.” This aura enveloped SNCC’s chairman through the Mobilization rally down into federal court later in April, accompanied by Hubert Brown, to appeal his far-fetched conviction for inciting Selma’s black voters to riot before the November election.
DISTANT ADMIRERS of the Lowndes County movement launched a spectacular debut on May 2, one day after Cleveland Sellers refused Army service. They created an icon for the era, offered in tribute, but they could scarcely have imagined better images to conceal their inspiration from rural Alabama. Commotion riveted the California Assembly when a wall of reporters and photographers banged backward through the doors, facing the bearers of shotguns and rifles who had asked directions to the second-floor chamber in Sacramento. Legislators gasped in mid-debate. Many of them scattered as two dozen young black men pressed forward with guns pointed toward the ceiling, several in leather jackets and black berets, accompanied by six unarmed black women. One intruder loudly proclaimed citizens’ protest of a gun control bill endorsed by “the racist Oakland police” as officers converged into standoff. Defenders risked grabbing some but not all the stone-faced men, and discovered their weapons to be fully loaded, before a deal permitted Bobby Seale to read aloud a founding manifesto that denounced “the racist power structure of America” for historical repression of nonwhite people from native Indians to the Vietnamese: “The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense believes that the time has come for Black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.” Seale’s group then withdrew under an exit truce across the capitol lawn, past news cameras and gaping tourists, including an eighth-grade social studies class on a field trip with chaperones. A huge cruiser posse arrested twenty-six of the retreating demonstrators near a gas station four blocks away.
Such was the “colossal event” conceived by manifesto author Huey P. Newton, a twenty-five-year-old emigrant from Louisiana named for its late flamboyant governor Huey P. “Kingfish” Long. To defend followers in their showcase criminal trial, Newton invested his first Black Panther speaking fee in a pound of marijuana, which he cut into “nickel bags” for sale from the back of his roving Volkswagen. Issuing strict orders for his small, militarized command to resist targeted stops by Oakland police—“We don’t give up our guns, we don’t give up our dope”—he set a pattern for clashes until his own murder for drug debts outside a crack cocaine house in 1989. By contrast, Newton’s instant fame spread romantic theories about revolutionary violence. One New York Times profile—“A Gun Is Power, Black Panther Says”—explained his rationale for storming the Assembly. A longer article, which introduced the poster photograph of Newton staring with scepter and carbine from a flared cane-back throne, explored his debt to the writings of Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Mao Zedong. A front-page survey on May 7—“The New Left Turns to Mood of Violence in Place of Protest”—observed that the Argentine guerrilla Che Guevara gave burgeoning white activists across the country their own ethnic model in the mold of Malcolm X and Huey Newton. “When we have organized the white radicals, we can link up with the Negro radicals,” said Students for a Democratic Society leader Greg Calvert, who announced an active campaign to foment urban sedition. “We aren’t a bunch of liberal do-gooders,” claimed William Pepper of the more moderate Vietnam Summer coalition. “We are revolutionary.” The Times reporter noted parenthetically that New Leftists rejected liberal as “a dirty word.”
The birth of Oakland’s Black Panthers resonated also in mainstream politics. It guaranteed passage of the bill Bobby Seale denounced before the Assembly, as Governor Reagan soon would sign new firearm restrictions with an extra provision banning weapons in public places, but Pyrrhic victory for gun control already had backfired on a grander scale. Less than a week after the sensational scare in California, officers of the National Rifle Association made front-page headlines—“Rifle Club Sees Guns As Riot Curb”—with a counterpoint study showing Negro involvement in nine of eleven selected mob actions, arguing without historical precedent that armed private citizens “could prove essential” to maintain public order. The NRA harvested fear across the color line while crusading for unfettered weaponry as vociferously as the Black Panthers, and Governor Reagan gained political stature from the specter of Huey Newton’s guns. Appearing on the traumatized capitol grounds just as Bobby Seale drove away, he reassured voters by keeping a picnic date with the social studies class. Poise in crisis elevated a battered new governor who was roiling his political base with the largest state tax increase in history and the first major law to permit “therapeutic” abortion. (“I had been led to believe there was a honeymoon period,” Reagan quipped, “but evidently I lost the license on the way to the church.”) Now he renewed attacks on “central casting anarchists” with the authority of a candidate who had vowed to clamp down on unruliness from Watts to Berkeley. On May 15, debating Robert Kennedy in a town forum televised from London, Reagan said protest undermined domestic hope and prolonged war abroad. While Kennedy defended difficult ground—disputing students who called U.S. intervention immoral, groping for peace talks and elections (“Can you deliver the North Vietnamese?”), confronting urgent complexity from “a heritage of 150 years we’ve been unjust to our minority groups”—Reagan said the problem “lies in the hearts of men,” and pictured welcome change since his early years in radio when “the rulebook called baseball ‘a game for Caucasian gentlemen.’” He imagined a bright future “if the Berlin Wall should disappear.” Surprised reviewers thought the disparaged rookie governor held his own with his simple story lines.
ON MAY 12, at Paschal’s Motor Hotel in Atlanta, some colleagues rolled their eyes when Stokely Carmichael told a crowded press conference he was “stepping down” from tedious administrative duty to resume his preferred post as a grassroots field organizer. In truth he enjoyed little support for reelection to head SNCC, even from those who valued his charisma and agreed with his black power stand. Many thought he had subverted their brotherhood collective with showmanship, popularizing the derisive term “honky” for white people and mocking the politic piety that good Negroes looked to them only for friendship: “The white woman’s not queen of the world—she can be made like anything else.” SNCC women in particular thought Carmichael succumbed to shooting-star celebrity that mistook headlines and saucy clichés for a political program. Executive Secretary Ruby Doris Smith had upbraided him most directly, and was dearly missed at the gloomy Atlanta elections because she was dying swiftly at twenty-five of virulent lymphosarcoma. The new chairman, who emerged from the compromise between urban separatists and those who still pushed for electoral black power in the tattered rural projects, was introduced to the press as H. Rap Brown, having dampened the given name Hubert in favor of a movement nickname earned with rare talent to “rap” poetic in assorted dialects. (His spontaneous routines had supplied free entertainment for the Alabama wedding reception of Gloria Larry and Stuart House.) A first intelligence report on the new SNCC officers gleaned no prior FBI information about Brown. Reporters asked if the new chairman would generate publicity like Carmichael. “Hopefully not,” he replied.
Rap Brown presided over a review of personnel that consumed two more days. The central committee sifted the status of dissenters, casualties, and slackers (“It was difficult to get her out of bed”), along with faint hopes to harness Carmichael’s world travel now that he dwarfed SNCC itself in the media. Late on May 14, when tension finally wore down avoidance, Bob Zellner was admitted to address the troublesome petition for him and his wife, Dorothy, to work in the white community under SNCC sponsorship. The question was whether a project of arm’s-length cooperation would accommodate the white exclusion policy set at the Peg Leg Bates conference. “I think I have gotten over the emotional stage,” Zellner nervously told a dozen peers seated before him. “I am not completely tied up emotionally, but I do want some things to be settled.”
Disputes surfaced about whether the central committee possessed authority to revise what had been decided by the hazy votes in New York. Some questioned Zellner about the evolution of SNCC’s purpose, and most who favored the project itself wobbled on his incorporated request to affirm SNCC membership. When Bill Hall of Tuskegee tried to separate the issues, wondering if white workers might be retained on the staff but excluded from policy meetings, Zellner asked to speak before being excused for the vote. “We don’t have to go into the history of my relationship,” he said, boiling down a statement his wife had submitted for them, “but I feel and have always felt that SNCC was as much a part of me as anybody else, and that I was SNCC and will always be SNCC…. I will not accept any sort of restrictions or special categories because of race. We do not expect other people to do that in this country, and I will not accept it for myself.”
With Zellner waiting again outside, Rap Brown opened debate “in the light of our hope to become a revolutionary force and also in light of the fact that this may occur again and again.” Tortured clashes echoed segregationist dynamics. While defending the exclusion policy as necessary, one speaker criticized implementation thus far as “very sloppy and kind of barbaric.” Bill Hall, drawing analogies to the anti-colonial war in Algeria, said the question was not Zellner’s race but whether he could subordinate his identity to be used “as a technician” in the event of armed black struggle. Fay Bellamy considered it “very unfair of Bob Zellner” to bring sentiment and personal history into a political question, saying he should recognize the public disadvantage of having even one white person on a committee devoted to black power. “Now it shouldn’t make any difference,” she conceded, “but it does.” Ralph Featherstone, newly elected to replace Cleveland Sellers, agreed with Hall but cautioned that Zellner had more than nostalgia on his side. “In principle, Bob is right,” he said. “When we say that whites should not make policy about black communities, that is a two-way street.” Stanley Wise, newly elected to replace Ruby Doris Smith, quoted Frederick Douglass on gaining the upper hand—“it is absolutely crucial that we strike the first blow”—proposing to look past unfortunate regrets to build the capacity for all-black decisions, “but, as Fay said, understanding that there is no racism involved.”
James Forman, visibly agitated, said, “I think we are confusing some things. Bob is my best friend.” When a voice above the hubbub taunted, “You said the same thing about Fay the other day,” Forman’s explosion silenced the room: “That is right, goddammit! I have two best friends!” He thundered that Zellner had every right to be emotional, evoking his long service since police in the primitive McComb of 1961 had beaten Zellner into jail with Bob Moses and SNCC chairman Charles McDew, but Forman calmed to recommend that the membership question be deferred until the next meeting of the full staff. Bill Ware moved instead to offer everything except a staff vote, but others denounced another “shucking and jiving proposal” they felt would expose SNCC to Zellner’s rejection of second-class citizenship. Speakers wrestled with contradictions until they collapsed behind a countermotion to sever membership entirely. Before Zellner was resummoned, Forman browbeat his colleagues to clarify that the vote applied to all white people and not merely the one “who had the guts to come before this body.” Rap Brown prefaced a terse verdict by quoting to Zellner his own promise that SNCC bonds could not be broken, then added: “The only thing that is being cut is your privilege as a staff member.”
“I think it is a mistake, but that is among us,” Zellner replied. Promising silence to the press, he asked only for the recorded transcript of his words to assure his wife that he had stood firm through what she would call the worst experience of her life. SNCC’s leaders veered from searing fatigue with their original principles toward uncertain new revolution, and soon would lose the remaining black members, too.
A RAW egg splattered Dr. Benjamin Spock outside the White House on May 17. Police hauled away one counterdemonstrator who called him a traitor, and Spock kept vigil for three days among two hundred Mobilization supporters. James Bevel and Coretta King stood with him jammed against locked gates, trying to deliver an unanswered appeal for President Johnson to meet with the leadership of the April 15 protests. Coretta represented her husband, who was promoting the voter registration drive in Cleveland. Bevel had talked his way into Washington’s St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Secret Service officials privately advised, where undercover agents observed that a rector favored for worship services by President Johnson “actively participated” in strategy sessions as “Bevel made numerous inflammatory remarks.” The Mobilization leaders scheduled a follow-up national protest for October 21, centered in Washington. On May 19, a polling analysis assured the President that 70 percent of Americans and nearly half of Negroes disagreed with King on Vietnam. The study issued a caveat, however, based on “sketchy data” about his brief antiwar push since April: “Dr. King may well have within his power a capability of influencing between a third to one half of all Negro voters behind a candidate he might endorse for President in 1968.”
President Johnson had summoned Senator Russell the previous week about a pending order to bomb the power station near Ho Chi Minh’s headquarters, which McNamara advocated and Rusk opposed. Russell counseled that all such bomb targets were incidental now, as he believed only a full invasion of North Vietnam would be decisive. Harry McPherson, the sole aide present at the somber consultation, volunteered to inspect the southern war zone as a fresh if amateur set of eyes for his vexed President. He was making notes to himself about the immense scale of the military effort from a Huey helicopter on the way to Da Nang—“an air strike in progress…a division camp here, a battalion forward area there…great areas have been scraped off the hilltops…we have just about paved the road-side for a hundred miles”—when U.S. jets first raided within the city limits of Hanoi to bomb the power plant. North Vietnam scrambled thirty fighters to meet them on May 19, Ho Chi Minh’s seventy-seventh birthday, and Luu Huy Chao would recall antiaircraft ground fire so thick that it downed several fellow MiG pilots along with five Americans.
That same day in Washington, Secretary McNamara showed the President his draft response to Westmoreland’s request for 200,000 more soldiers. Its central conclusion marked a wrenching turn for McNamara and deeper crisis for Johnson: “The war in Vietnam is acquiring a momentum of its own that must be stopped.” Although McNamara amassed details behind one consoling achievement—“there is consensus that we are no longer in danger of losing this war militarily”—he could see no constructive end. The CIA supported him with maddening new conclusions that nearly total destruction (85 percent) of power plants and petroleum storage had failed to diminish the opposing flow of manpower—and worse, that both major alternatives, more bombs and fewer bombs, would only harden North Vietnam’s popular will to persevere. “Twenty-seven months of U.S. bombing of North Vietnam have had remarkably little effect on Hanoi’s strategy,” McNamara wrote. As for American troops in South Vietnam, he found that massive exertion and heroism generated greater than proportional opposition, while nominal allies from the South Vietnamese army grew “tired, passive, and accommodation-prone.” McNamara stressed that even Westmoreland’s plan for 670,000 soldiers, which would require national mobilization of the Reserves, predicted no North Vietnamese willingness to negotiate until well after the 1968 U.S. elections. He recommended against the additional troops because he foresaw no gain to offset a bloodier stalemate, and warned of pitfalls instead. “There may be a limit beyond which many Americans and much of the world will not permit the United States to go,” McNamara wrote. “The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.”
These haunted words might have made McNamara welcome in the Mobilization vigil outside the White House fence, which was dispersing from its final day. For President Johnson, who had backed into Vietnam with Cold War inertia bottomed on his naked political fear of being called a coward, apprehensions long shared with his advisers ran into a number more real than any of McNamara’s famous calculations. “I’ve lost ten thousand boys out there,” Johnson kept saying. His war would become “increasingly hostage to the dead,” author Thomas Powers later observed.
A SUPERSEDING crisis struck before Johnson could devise a course between McNamara and Westmoreland. On Monday, May 22, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt closed the Strait of Tiran, which cut off Israel’s shipping lifeline from the Red Sea into its sole southern port at Eilat. On Tuesday, Secretary-General U Thant complied with Nasser’s legal notice evicting United Nations peacekeepers from the Sinai Peninsula, where the Egyptian army now marched. Arab forces instantly mobilized from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to Libya, and Iraqi units convoyed to support Jordan and Syria. In a single day, wrote historian Arthur Hertzberg, “the mood of the American Jewish community underwent an abrupt, radical, and possibly permanent change.” Outcries went up for U.S. intervention to save Israel. President Johnson, worried that Soviet reaction on the Arab side might draw the superpowers into a world war, appealed publicly for restraint on Wednesday while Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban pleaded to the United Nations. The forces encircling Israel were openly bent upon her annihilation, he said, with a twenty-five-to-one advantage in population plus a three-to-one superiority in war planes and tanks. On Thursday, urging Eban to hold tight for diplomacy, Defense Secretary McNamara offered his confidential military judgment that Israel could defeat the Arab nations on all fronts within a week, despite the numerical odds.
These war spasms caught Martin Luther King on his way to a peace conference in Switzerland. He was just leaving a retreat at the Frogmore Center in South Carolina, already swamped by fiscal and political demands. Some seventy staff members complained of abandonment by SCLC’s senior executives. Jesse Jackson’s office telephones in Chicago were about to be cut off for unpaid bills. Workers still assigned to beleaguered Grenada, Mississippi, confessed a worn-down commitment to nonviolence even among themselves. “We control ourselves in public,” said one, “and then come home and attack each other viciously or in petty ways.” King listened, then tried to rally spirits grown weary as the movement stretched to encompass Northern projects along with Southern holdovers and broader initiatives to stop war. He preached again on the connection between civil rights and Vietnam, adding for these colleagues a candid confession that he once succumbed to official blandishments about an imminent peace. “I backed up a little when I came out in 1965,” he said. “My name then wouldn’t have been written in any book called Profiles in Courage. But now I have decided. I will not be intimidated.” From stops in Chicago and New York, King flew to Geneva for the Pacem in Terris convocation sponsored by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Soviet delegates suddenly canceled along with Ambassador Goldberg and most American government representatives. King drew large crowds, but James Reston told Times readers that the threat of Middle East war reduced the novel concept of hybrid peace exploration to a “prayer meeting.” Back in New York, FBI wiretappers picked up Stanley Levison’s May 31 lament that Vietnam politics “is suffering badly because half the peace movement is Jewish, and the Jews have all become hawks.”
Harry McPherson gamely continued westward from South Vietnam across India into Tel Aviv airport before dawn on Monday, June 5. An Israeli general in escort told him after breakfast to ignore air raid sirens and radio warnings of Egyptian bombardment massed from Sinai, which was McPherson’s first hint that preemptive Israeli strikes had just destroyed nearly all Nasser’s war planes on the ground. From the United Nations in New York, Middle East envoy Ralph Bunche woke the Secretary-General at home: “War has broken out!” The Moscow–Washington hotline jangled alive at 7:47 A.M.—in McNamara’s office because the equipment was not yet rigged to the White House. By afternoon, incoming Jordanian artillery opened a second front to a crippling counterattack from the air, and Israeli soldiers swiftly captured all of Jerusalem for the first time in 1,900 years. At 2:30 P.M. on Wednesday, according to war historian Michael Oren, the chief rabbi of the Israeli Defense Forces climbed the Temple Mount inside the walled Old City and emotionally proposed to blow up both Muslim structures built there in the long Jewish exile: Al Aksa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Generals Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Rabin overruled him, but to secure military possession in the ongoing battle they ignored instructions to surrender holy sites to the control of civilian clergy from the three Abrahamic religions. World powers and the belligerents needed three more chaotic days to implement a cease-fire, during which time Israel drove Syria from the Golan Heights on a third front. McPherson returned home Sunday from immersion in two successive wars—one endless, one lightning—amazed by solidarity in Israel. “The spirit of the army, indeed of all the people, has to be experienced to be believed,” he told President Johnson.
THE SIX DAY WAR spawned lasting shock in world politics. Egyptian citizens heard bulletins of glorious success toward liquidating “the Zionist entity” only hours before bloody remnants of their army retreated pell-mell across the Nile, leaving 15,000 dead and five thousand prisoner. Ho Chi Minh, who once gratified patriarch David Ben-Gurion with the offer of sanctuary in Hanoi for an Israeli government-in-waiting—back when the Vietnamese independence movement of 1946 was briefly more established than Jewish guerrillas trying to create Israel—proved no more accurate than Radio Cairo with his first-day proclamation that Israelis were “doomed to ignominious defeat” as “agents of the United States and British imperialists.” The ideological force of Pan-Arab nationalism all but evaporated. For the Soviet Union, which had switched its support abruptly from Israel to the Arab nations in 1954, the disaster wasted massive military aid and deflated claims of invincible Communist sponsorship.
Miracle reprieve shifted Jewish identity. “The whole world fell in love with us,” said Orthodox theologian David Hartman. “To be Israeli was really sexy.” Jews prayed again at the Western Wall of Herod’s Temple as biblical places reentered everyday life. Rabbi Heschel rushed to Jerusalem among pilgrims. “There is great astonishment in the souls,” he wrote. “It is as if the prophets had risen from their graves.” In New York, at a nationwide celebration only two days after the war, the traditional prayer of thanksgiving for another day of life dissolved into waves of nearly universal weeping that Arthur Hertzberg said swept up assimilated Jews previously “remote to the synagogue” and indifferent to Israel. Outdoors in Washington, manning one of the emergency tables that collected an astonishing $100 million, Office of Economic Opportunity official Hyman Bookbinder was struck by a modest woman who donated her savings of $1,700. Bookbinder, a secular Jew born to Polish Bundists during World War I, soon quit government to work for the American Jewish Committee and would join his first synagogue after the Yom Kippur War of 1973.
A warrior’s exultation hardened the awakening of Jewish spirit. “We grew so fast into a visible central power that the seeds of arrogance as well came in,” observed David Hartman. First news of Israel’s deliverance prompted a vulgar outburst from Abe Fortas in his Supreme Court chambers: “I’m going to decorate my office with Arab foreskins.” The implications of the war were so fantastic as to be hushed in numb realization that tiny Israel not only thrashed the surrounding Arab hosts single-handed, against restraining counsel from Washington, but also administered a sting to her aloof benefactor. For three hours on Day Four, Israeli war planes strafed and torpedoed the plainly marked U.S.S. Liberty spy ship in international waters off the coast of Egypt, killing thirty-four American sailors, wounding 170. Official statements of regret would leave the origin and anatomy of the attack shrouded in secrecy, as if both sides needed to muffle the repercussions. Writer Jonathan Kaufman later analyzed a new strain of “muscular Judaism” that sprouted beside cultured moralism built through many centuries of Diaspora, when scattered communities had relied on Jewish teaching to promote tolerance and social justice in host countries. Immediately after the Six Day War, the American gadfly I. F. Stone charged that the intoxicating rebirth of mighty Samson actually reduced Israel into the clench of her enemies. “Both Israelis and Arabs in other words feel that only force can assure justice,” he wrote. “A certain moral imbecility marks all ethnocentric movements. The Others are always either less than human, and thus their interests may be ignored, or more than human, and therefore so dangerous that it is right to destroy them.”
In America, the Six Day War crystallized two historic transformations of Jewish political culture—both stoked for a century in the cauldron of ideological ferment that had arrived with destitute immigrant families. Much of the evolving debate applied arcane Marxist vocabulary to competitive polemics over which factions invented, rescued, or betrayed the best comprehensive plan to uplift oppressed people everywhere. Countless theories adapted to the onslaught of the Depression and Holocaust into the Cold War, but few experts or ideologues had expected a significant mass movement to rise from the black South. While Jewish activists participated heavily in the strange inner workings of church-based nonviolent politics, leading writers held back in guarded approval. A seminal essay of estrangement appeared just before Birmingham in 1963, when Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz wrote that although he had grown up paying lip service to civil rights, “I was still afraid of Negroes. And I still hated them with all my heart.” Dismissing integration and democracy as false hopes for “the Negro problem in this country,” Podhoretz saw no solution until “skin color does in fact disappear,” and confessed a desperate fantasy: “it means—let the brutal word come out—miscegenation.” In early 1967, the New York Times Magazine published debate from the premise of a broad divergence in nature. To a screed from James Baldwin, “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White,” Robert Gordis of the Jewish Theological Seminary replied, “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They Want a Scapegoat.” The Six Day War accelerated an ideology of progress projected through rather than against the established power of the United States, allied with Israel as the strong model democracy of the Middle East. Black power served as a foil of squandered potential. Sudden prosperity in arms made ideas more martial, as did fading concern with minorities and the poor, but the pioneer intellectuals still aspired to a visionary outlook. In Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, Irving Kristol traced idealistic political philosophy from his Trotskyite youth to the commanding center of 1980s Washington, with no mention at all of the nonviolent civil rights era.
A parallel line of influential Jewish thought followed the extraordinary arc of Max Shactman, the Polish-born party leader who on a starry-eyed 1925 delegation to Moscow had hailed the Communist International as “a brilliant red light in the darkness of capitalistic gloom.” From firsthand knowledge, Shactman broke first with Stalin, then with Leon Trotsky for underestimating Stalin’s monstrous perversion of workers’ opportunity, then also with Norman Thomas and A. J. Muste among many “second-rate” anti-Soviet rivals, and finally with the idea of an independent socialist presence in American politics. In 1965, as the spellbinding luminary of backroom New York dialectics, Shactman stunned the regulars in “our socialist loft on 14th Street” with an offhand comment that American stooges running South Vietnam “may be no worse than the thugs in Hanoi.” Bayard Rustin, among many protégés then building a “Shactmanite base” within the American labor movement, chafed under demands from new union employers to support the Lyndon Johnson Vietnam policy. In 1967, Dissent magazine founder Irving Howe made notes on Rustin’s misery under group pressure not only to compromise his lifelong pacifist stance but speak favorably of the American war cause. Rustin pleaded for leeway to salvage his ties within the civil rights movement, where very young leaders like Courtland Cox and Stokely Carmichael, who had idolized Rustin for years, blamed him for the betrayal that spurred their revolt against nonviolence. Unlike Rustin, socialist leader Michael Harrington split with Shactman over Vietnam, and he coined the word “neoconservative” for Shactman’s coalition thrust. As the term gained currency in the intellectual beehive of Manhattan, it suggested strong military purpose with a utopian residue focused on Israel. The powerful neoconservative school in American politics would grow from a merger of labor-wing Shactmanites into the larger movement associated with Irving Kristol.
Instantly, by contrast, the outbreak of the Middle East war threw the Vietnam peace movement into a political crossfire. Martin Luther King, back from Geneva, smarted from criticism that he had abandoned nonviolence by lending his name with Reinhold Niebuhr and other religious leaders to a prewar New York Times ad that sounded alarm over the hostile Arab encirclement. As he hopscotched between Cleveland and Chicago, King complained that “the Times played it up as a total endorsement of Israel.” On Day Two, Stanley Levison told King that people were too emotional to see that war “settles nothing” beyond survival. On Day Five, J. Edgar Hoover rushed to the White House a report suggesting that King’s subversive advisers would risk Israel to undercut President Johnson in Vietnam. Meanwhile, Rabbi Heschel endured mounting criticism on the same point. Israeli emissaries warned that his Vietnam protest threatened vital American protection, and colleagues at the Jewish Theological Seminary further ostracized Heschel in their zeal for both wars. Movement leaders compressed decades of agonizing reappraisal into the short week of battle. Andrew Young told King he feared Israel would not compromise on its conquest of Jerusalem. Levison and Harry Wachtel said the great powers should impose a comprehensive peace—but would not do so. By June 11, one day after the cease-fire, King complained to advisers that he had interpreted his nonviolence to support Israel’s right to exist, “and now Israel faces the danger of being smug and unyielding.”
Doubts about consistency so plagued the antiwar clergy that several times they gathered secretly at the Union Theological Seminary office of John Bennett, chief organizer of the prewar ad in the Times. Could they oppose one war and praise the other in good faith, and exactly how should they draw the distinction? Rabbi Heschel, who was pouring forth a book of joyful meditation on Israel, fared badly with his first efforts to justify the Israeli war by character as well as circumstance, stating almost giddily that the Jewish soldiers were reluctant and hardly meant to hurt anyone. Harry Wachtel would recall that Heschel was “roughly handled” for such effusions by colleagues who normally deferred to him. Heschel and the priest Daniel Berrigan fell into temperamental strain. King mostly listened. Rabbi Balfour Brickner said the CALCAV group should pursue settlements for Vietnam and the Middle East, arguing that immediate peace advocacy was the surest way to keep legitimate self-defense from becoming a loophole for violence. Most participants thought the combination would make two difficult tasks impossible. Heschel, from his delicate experience as a Jewish contact inside the Vatican Council, said a religious peace campaign for Israel would provoke anti-Semitism. John Bennett sent Al Lowenstein and others a running tally of the contrasts between the two wars, but pragmatism recommended separate treatment. Heschel preserved his ecumenical wonder in his new book—“All men are created equal, yet no two faces are alike”—which would include a stern rebuke from the Talmud: “When the Egyptians who had enslaved the children of Israel were sinking in the Red Sea, the angels were jubilant and wanted to sing a song of praise and triumph. But God, the Father of all men, said to the angels, ‘My creatures are drowning—and you sing!’”
King regretted the immobilizing effect of Middle East passions on Vietnam protest. “It has given Johnson the little respite he wanted from Vietnam,” he told Levison. To King, Vietnam was the ongoing war for which Americans must assume civic responsibility, and he had no way of knowing about doubts within the government. On June 13, Harry McPherson gave President Johnson his raw impressions of Vietnam, stressing the blatant corruption among the South Vietnamese and the candor of American soldiers. He quoted a lieutenant general: “Before I came out here a year and a half ago, I thought we were at zero. I was wrong. We were at minus fifty. Now we are at zero.” McPherson’s report strained to understand the baffling ferocity of the enemy without demonizing the Vietnamese. If he were a young peasant in the hamlets he saw, McPherson bluntly conjectured, and were offered the chance of “striking back at my Frenchified oppressors and their American allies, and of rising to a position of leadership in the VC, I would join up.” Yet he cast his lot loyally in battle. “Every aspect of our national life and our role in the world is involved in Vietnam,” McPherson assured Johnson. “I feel that I am only another of those many men who have a part of their souls at stake there.”
THE FABLED summer of 1967 jumbled extremes of hope and horror, many of which penetrated King’s life with special force. On Monday, June 12, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down laws against interracial marriage in sixteen states through the landmark case Loving et Ux. v. Virginia, which grew from a bedroom police raid and the subsequent conviction of Richard and Mildred Loving for cohabitation under pretense of wedlock. Until then, Virginia declared void any marriage with only one partner classified white by its written legal standard: “such person as has no trace whatever of any blood other than Caucasian.” Mildred Loving’s ancestry blended Europe, Africa, and Cherokee Indian. Against Virginia’s appellate courts, which found in the antimiscegenation statute a legitimate state purpose to prevent “the corruption of blood,” “a mongrel breed of citizens,” and “the obliteration of racial pride,” the Justices ruled that a racial definition of crime violated Fourteenth Amendment guarantees of equal protection under law. Their decision confronted sexual taboos long at the heart of violent white supremacy. Most Americans within a generation would find it quaint or fantastic that three-quarters of citizens in 1967 opposed interracial marriage, and not even the wildest imagination on record from the 1960s predicted that turn-of-the-century politics would divide closely on the rights of same-sex couples.
That same Monday, ending their annual term, the Justices narrowly sided with a legal quest from Alabama to reimprison King and seven fellow ministers for violating a court injunction against protest. The 5–4 decision in Walker v. City of Birmingham grew from the pivotal Good Friday decision early in the 1963 Birmingham campaign, and carried implications far graver than the remaining contempt sentence of only five days. Andrew Young noted on the first shocked conference call that much longer sentences trailed in cases on appeal. Stanley Levison said the ruling could cripple any movement. In vigorous dissent, Chief Justice Earl Warren scolded colleagues for holding that although the Birmingham injunction did unlawfully abridge the right of protest, it should have been obeyed through the four years of litigation on its validity, remaining “entirely superior in the meantime even to the United States Constitution.”
“Now even the Supreme Court has turned against us,” King lamented in private. A New York Times editorial, while opining that retroactive jail for King “is profoundly embarrassing to the good name of the United States,” rejected Chief Justice Warren’s dissent: “The majority held—we think rightly—that obedience to the law and to the normal procedures set forth in the law has to be paramount.”
News coverage of demonstrations heightened weariness and fear of disorder. Stokely Carmichael, who no longer bothered to declare that he had submitted to nonviolence for five harrowing years, learned of Monday’s Supreme Court decisions in the Prattville, Alabama, jail, under arrest for incitement to riot. Police officers confiscated a news photographer’s film showing that he had addressed a Sunday afternoon workshop of twenty young women on folding chairs in the shade outside a Baptist church. His sharp remarks about persistent surveillance—shouting “black power” at police patrols, demanding to be called “Mr. Carmichael”—led to his arrest followed by a night of marauding gunshots in and out of the black neighborhood and rumors that he had been lynched. John Hulett arrived from adjacent Lowndes County to investigate, only to be beaten early Monday near the Autauga County courthouse. SNCC chairman Rap Brown issued a press statement from Atlanta: “We feel that this is a part of America’s Gestapo tactics to destroy SNCC and to commit genocide against black people. We are calling for full retaliation from the black community across America. We blame Lyndon Johnson.” By Monday afternoon, when Brown posted bond for Carmichael, they walked from jail through two platoons of young Alabama National Guardsmen lined stiffly with fixed bayonets. Federal Judge Frank Johnson would sort through competing charges for the balance of the year to conclude, “Fault is on both sides.”
On Tuesday, June 13, President Johnson informed his black assistants Louis Martin and Clifford Alexander that he was about to integrate the Supreme Court. “You know, this is not going to do me a bit of good politically,” he told them, grousing for effect with a host of reasons. When Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall arrived, concealed from the press by elaborate stealth, the President fretted in jest that he was fated to ruin a good friendship just as President Truman had broken with the retiring Justice Tom Clark over an adverse legal opinion. Marshall said the President might be correct if he expected a yes-man on the Court, which made Johnson beam that he was appointing a man of common sense much like himself. “He doesn’t have a Harvard degree like you, Cliff,” he told Alexander in a customary dig. Johnson announced Marshall from the Rose Garden at noon, and news stories flashed about jubilation among civil rights leaders that the great-grandson of a slave would become the first of any minority to occupy a top rank in one of the three constitutional branches of government. Nearly all the other questions were about world stability after the Six Day War.
King appeared for a relatively evenhanded interview on the nationwide Sunday broadcast Issues and Answers about race relations in the midst of two difficult wars. On the Middle East, King thought a complex peace required security for Israel and development for the Arab nations. “The whole world and all people of good will must respect the territorial integrity of Israel,” he said, listing the vital ports and trade routes. He proposed also a “Marshall Plan” to relieve desperate poverty among the mass of Arab citizens and refugees. “So long as they find themselves on the outskirts of hope,” he said, “they are going to make intemperate remarks. They are going to keep the war psychosis alive.” King sparred with the correspondents over assertions that civil rights leaders cared mostly for black soldiers in Vietnam, and bristled at charges that he foolishly targeted President Johnson for insult. “I have never called President Johnson’s name in dissenting on the war in Vietnam,” King said firmly. He insisted on collective error through four Presidents, beginning with Harry Truman’s decision not to recognize Vietnamese independence in 1945. This was a point of common emphasis with Coretta, who had drawn a mixed response at a San Francisco Mobilization rally by calling Johnson an “uncertain president” torn over conflicting advice.
President Johnson sent again for Senator Russell on Monday evening, June 19. He sought advice about whether to pursue a summit meeting when Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin visited the United Nations, but Russell, “knowing his abhorrence for being alone,” confided to his diary that he thought the President simply needed company. The Georgia senator took the chance to bemoan the choice of Thurgood Marshall without expecting to derail his Senate confirmation, pining for a Supreme Court Justice who could quote something “other than the 14th Amendment, which is used solely now to excuse striking down the rest of the Constitution.” Russell thought he made some small impression with his proverb that a loss of tradition kills “at least one half of patriotism.” The President maneuvered afterward to meet the Soviet Premier for three days at Glassboro, New Jersey, halfway between Washington and the United Nations, on a calculated hunch that the Soviet disaster in the Middle East might induce the colorless Soviet bureaucrat to engineer a settlement with North Vietnam. Kosygin, however, talked secretly to Johnson like an exasperated uncle. He said he knew from direct reports that American soldiers were fighting well—in fact, as bravely as he could wish for his own soldiers—but he could not understand what Johnson hoped to accomplish except to maim young Americans for a decade or more. U.S. battle deaths exceeded 1,000 for June and averaged 770 per month throughout 1967, up from 412 in 1966. The joint statement from Glassboro reported frank discussion and little progress.
ON JUNE 24, during the Johnson-Kosygin talks, King called Stanley Levison from California about the poor reception for his new book, Where Do We Go from Here, Chaos or Community? Levison offered a practical suggestion to boost sales by sending a promotional copy to all 18,000 SCLC contributors of $20 or more, but King was more distressed about the slight interest he encountered while “running all over the country, Cleveland and Chicago, back and forth.” The New York Times Magazine had published an excerpt about the Meredith march and black power, which proved to be a stale controversy. Harry Belafonte added star power by joining King for a network television interview about the book, but the material was inherently difficult. “I am opposed to violence,” Belafonte told viewers. “I really am, whether it is in the black hand or in the white hand.” He said he believed that although a significant percentage of black people would endure committed nonviolent struggle against the most intractable problems, “it is the resistance on the part of the white community to respond that is indeed the Achilles heel of the democratic process in America.” King argued from the book that white supremacy was an ever-present force in history, making it a cause rather than a result of black frustration and violence. On the other hand, he warned that courageous all-black politics in isolated Lowndes County “cannot be made a measuring rod for the whole of America.” He challenged violence across the board. A member of the television audience sharply objected that Communists were a national enemy and therefore anyone who shirked the fight in Vietnam was a traitor. “And what would you say to that, sir?” he asked King.
Reviews of the book were slow to come and tepid at best. Eliot Fremont-Smith of the Times said a “return to nonviolence” was no more wistful than other miracles King had championed, and “perhaps one shouldn’t despair until he does.” Several critics thought the author seemed bewildered by the range of attack since the triumphs of a simpler time. One said his method was being treated “like a pre-historic relic,” and another gave faint credit for “standing up strongly now in opposition to the use of riots and violence in pursuit of racial change.” Nearly all reviewers assessed King’s argument for nonviolent politics by its suitability to others, especially to black people in cities. “The Negro male, too, is now bent upon proving his manhood,” observed a New York reviewer, “and many—particularly the young—appear to see violence as a more valid sort of proof than nonviolence.” The most scathing white critics rebuked King for “irrelevancy” to black people. “It is as if he is misdefining black power in order to make it easier to reject,” wrote David Steinberg for Commonweal. “He had simply, and disastrously, arrived at the wrong conclusions about the world,” charged Andrew Kopkind in The New York Review of Books. “Whites have ceased to believe him, or really to care; the blacks hardly listen.” Kopkind listed many insights King “could have seen” or “might have understood” had he not been so credulous, ending with a bedrock assertion—“Morality, like politics, starts at the barrel of a gun”—on which he dismissed King’s promise from the left before anyone condescended so boldly from the right. Vietnam and black rebellion “have contrived this summer to murder liberalism—in its official robes,” Kopkind concluded. “There are few mourners.”
Young people dominated mass culture in the crossover summer when baby boom Americans under eighteen peaked at seventy million. On June 25, the first full television program ever beamed by satellite to most of the world featured the Beatles from London with a new song, “All You Need Is Love.” A music festival from Monterey, California, flashed into icon status along with its pop discoveries from Janis Joplin to Jimi Hendrix, and the show trials of June showcased young defendants. A jury convicted Richard Speck in the mass murder of eight Chicago nurses. A court-martial sentenced Captain Howard Levy to three years at hard labor, rejecting his defense that medical duty in Vietnam would implicate him in atrocities suggested by the casually graphic testimony of Green Berets author Robin Moore about bounties paid for severed ears (“Brutality is a way of life over there”). Attorney Charles Morgan represented Levy as well as Muhammad Ali, who on June 20 received the maximum sentence of five years for draft evasion. Two years later, Morgan’s questions of an FBI witness would elicit the first official revelation of government surveillance directed at civil rights leaders, when Special Agent R. R. Nichols acknowledged in appeals court that he once overheard Ali over a wiretapped phone line, talking with Martin Luther King, in his capacity as manager of the King wiretap unit in Atlanta. Director Hoover banished Nichols to Oklahoma City for a candor that began to pry open the FBI’s clandestine political machinery.
Hoover stood unchallenged through King’s lifetime. A Life magazine story aborted the fitful, anemic Senate investigation into wiretap and bugging practices by charging that corrupt senators only sought to weaken the FBI in order to protect Teamster boss James Hoffa. Hoover’s letter of congratulation to committee chairman Edward Long goaded the New York Times into a plaintive editorial: “There is—or should be—something extraordinary about a career civil servant like Mr. Hoover patting a member of the United States Senate on the head in this fashion.” The result hovered in the news background with stodgy adult politics. A Mississippi jury acquitted the eight defendants charged with beating Grenada children on the first day of school. Of the major religious denominations in convention that June, Southern Baptists reserved judgment on any withdrawal from Vietnam “apart from an honorable and just peace,” and Southern Presbyterians voted to end separate racial jurisdictions despite objections from Mississippi and Alabama. In Portland, Oregon, Northern Presbyterians completed an eight-year saga to adopt the first belief statement since the Westminster Confession of 1647, narrowly defeating an overture from Washington, D.C., and elder Robert McNamara, to delete a phrase some feared would bar Presbyterians from sensitive positions in government: “The church, in its own life, is called to practice the forgiveness of enemies and to commend to the nations as practical politics the search for cooperation and peace. This search requires that the nations pursue fresh and responsible relations across every line of conflict, even at risk to national security.”
A. D. King, who was among the eight preachers ordered back to jail in Birmingham, tracked down his brother while in the grip of chronic alcoholic depression, threatening again to kill himself. King roused friends by telephone to intervene in Louisville until A.D. calmed down, and he preached a sermon called “Ingratitude” at Ebenezer on the third Sunday of June. Decrying an “acid,” universal affliction, he told of a wealthy black man in Chicago who had just touted his own model achievements before an audience without ever acknowledging his parents. He repeated a homily that most people were “dependent on more than half of the world” before breakfast every morning—soap from France, sponge from a Pacific Islander, coffee from South America. He said millions absorbed blessings without a thought that “we wouldn’t have a civil rights bill today if some three thousand children hadn’t packed up the jails in Birmingham, Alabama.” He called ingratitude a sin that overlooks both common bonds and the accumulated hurts still dividing humanity. “And finally ingratitude is a sin, because it causes one to fail to realize his dependence on God,” King preached. “I don’t mind what you call him, but there is a creative power in this universe.” He cited miracles of relief and refreshment. “How is it that you can close your eyes and somehow fade away as far as your conscious mind is concerned?” he asked the congregation. “And processes begin to take place. You dream, and you dream about things and you see things and you are away from everything. But then early in the morning you wake up. That’s a miracle to me. And this morning I want to thank God for sleep.”