As a young woman in the early 1920s Estelle Griswold had dreamed of being a professional singer; she had even spent some time in Paris trying to make a go of it. Then she’d come home to Connecticut, where she’d fallen in love with an aspiring ad man. They’d married in 1927. From then on she’d followed his career, moving from Hartford to New York to Washington, DC, and finally, in 1945, to war-ravaged Europe, where he’d been sent by the State Department. There she found work with various aid agencies that were dealing with the staggering number of refugees the war had caused. For the next five years she immersed herself in the world of public service organizations, helping to coordinate resettlement efforts around the globe, until her husband’s assignment was done and they headed home.
She spent her first year back in Connecticut continuing the work she’d done abroad. But the agency was based in New York, she and her husband had settled in New Haven, and she quickly tired of commuting back and forth. She quit in 1951. New Haven wasn’t brimming with demand for her particular set of skills. So it took her to the end of 1953 to get a suitable job offer. It came from the Connecticut branch of Planned Parenthood, the birth control advocacy group. Griswold didn’t know much about the subject—when she was hired, she said later, she didn’t even know what a diaphragm was—but the branch needed an executive director. She needed a job. And it would certainly be challenging work; that much was clear from the start.
For decades the branch had been trying to get state officials to repeal Connecticut’s law prohibiting the sale, distribution, or use of any form of birth control, the most restrictive in the nation. But the law had been on the books since 1879 and no one was inclined to remove it. At first Griswold tried lobbying the legislature too. She didn’t have any more luck than her predecessors. So, in 1958 she changed tactics. Rather than working to get the statute rescinded, she decided to challenge the law’s constitutionality. She found four married couples—it never occurred to her to recruit single women—who were willing to claim in court that Connecticut had no right to deny them access to birth control. Slowly the case, Poe v. Ullman, worked its way through the legal system, until it reached the U.S. Supreme Court in March 1961. There it hit a wall. Four of the justices wanted to rule on the couples’ case. But the other five pointed out that, while Connecticut had the law in place, no one actually enforced it. And without enforcement, the couples faced no real harm; they had come before the Court, read the majority opinion, to battle “harmless, empty shadows.”1
That’s when Griswold decided to get herself arrested. Through the summer of 1961 she made the necessary arrangements. On October 2 she announced through the local paper that her office was opening its own birth control clinic, where married couples could come to get whatever information or devices they needed—right in the heart of New Haven. She assumed that such public defiance of the law would force the police to respond. When they did she’d have another test case, this one based not on a couple’s right to acquire birth control but on her right to distribute it.
On the clinic’s first day of operations, though, the police didn’t come by. Chances are they wouldn’t have come the second day either, had it not been for James G. Morris. A forty-two-year-old father of five and a fiercely devout Catholic, Morris believed that using birth control was a grievous sin. As soon as he read Griswold’s announcement of the clinic’s opening, he decided that the authorities had to shut it down, just as they would a brothel. Immediately he ran into a wall of official indifference. First he tried to file a complaint with the Connecticut state police. They told him to contact the New Haven police. When he called the local station house, the officer who answered the phone said he had to talk to the police chief. Instead Morris called the mayor, whose secretary sent him back to the assistant chief of police, who promised to take up the matter with the circuit court prosecutor. Morris waited an hour and then called the prosecutor himself. He hadn’t received a complaint, the prosecutor said. So Morris marched down to his office to make sure one was filed. Even then the prosecutor tried to put him off. But Morris was so insistent that the prosecutor finally agreed to investigate the situation. A few hours later two New Haven detectives walked into the clinic’s waiting room and asked to talk to whoever was in charge.
Out bounded Griswold, who swept them into her office, sat them down, handed them a stack of birth control pamphlets, and launched into a detailed explanation of the clinic’s services. For more than ninety minutes she talked, packing in “all the medical terminology I knew,” she said later, while the detectives desperately tried to take notes. When she finished they stood up, shook hands, and left to file their report. A week later, on November 10, 1961, the detectives returned with a warrant charging that Griswold “did assist, counsel, cause and command certain married women to use a drug, medicinal article and instrument for the purpose of preventing conception.”2 Morris had his arrest. And Griswold had her test case.
Then everything slowed to a crawl. In January 1962 Griswold was convicted of violating Connecticut’s birth control prohibition—a crime she readily admitted to committing—and was fined a hundred dollars. Her lawyers appealed to a three-judge state panel, as the rules required, arguing that her conviction should be overturned because the law itself was unconstitutional. There her case sat until January 1963, when the panel finally ruled against her. Again she appealed, this time to the Connecticut Supreme Court, which took another year and a half to affirm the lower court’s decision. That left her one last appeal, to the U.S. Supreme Court. Her lawyers filed the necessary papers in September 1964. In early December the justices unanimously agreed to take her case, with oral arguments scheduled for the following March.
Bruce Scott came to his test case from a very different direction. Except for his time in the army in World War II, he’d worked for the U.S. Department of Labor for most of his adult life, first in its Chicago office and then—after the war—in Washington, DC. He undoubtedly would have stayed there, a middle-aged bureaucrat moving through an ordinary career, had his office not been ordered in 1956 to review its security procedures. In the process his boss discovered that on a Saturday night in October 1947 Scott had been arrested for loitering outside of the men’s restroom in Lafayette Park, Washington’s best-known gay cruising spot. It was the only time his sexual orientation had reached into the public record. Once was enough. The department told him that he should resign rather than face the firing that was sure to follow now that he’d been outed, another victim of the federal government’s ongoing Lavender Scare.
Over the next five years he struggled through a string of short-lived jobs, each one ending with the revelation of his misdemeanor more than a decade before. But he didn’t have any way to challenge what had happened to him, until the Mattachine Society of Washington offered him one. The society wasn’t exactly a powerhouse: its founding meeting in August 1961 drew just sixteen people, one of them an undercover cop. It had a fine name, though, taken from a small national organization that since 1950 had been promoting the remarkable proposition that gay Americans ought to have equal rights. It had a few connections, the most important to the Washington office of the American Civil Liberties Union. And it had in Frank Kameny—a Harvard PhD who’d lost his government job over a single men’s room arrest—a president determined to use those connections to confront the injustices that the Lavender Scare had created. Within a few weeks of their first meeting Scott had agreed to give Kameny the court case he wanted.
Three times in late 1961 and early 1962 Scott applied for positions the federal government had opened. He aced the required Civil Service exam. From there his applications went to the Civil Service Commission for review. On May 16, 1962 it sent the inevitable news that his “immoral conduct” disqualified him for government service. He spent the next five months pursuing the three appeals available to him, on the grounds that the commission hadn’t spelled out what immoral acts he’d committed. They all failed. But along the way he got an official letter explaining that he’d been rejected because he’d engaged in homosexual conduct, in violation of social standards, a perfect piece of bureaucratic precision to take to court.
His ACLU lawyers filed suit against the Civil Service Commission in April 1963. At the center of their case they put the commission’s clearly stated equation of homosexuality and immorality, which they said was arbitrary and discriminatory. Their position seem to baffle the government’s blue-blooded attorney—the son of Dean Acheson, Harry Truman’s secretary of state—who thought homosexuality was so obviously indecent he barely bothered to make a counterargument. The judge couldn’t see the point either: on January 14, 1964, he summarily dismissed Scott’s claim. Up the line his lawyers went, to the U.S. Court of Appeals, whose three-judge panel heard arguments in mid-December, 1964. Then the judges went silent while they decided how they wanted to rule.
So it was by chance of timing that Estelle Griswold and Bruce Scott came to trigger one of the revolutions of 1965.
The Dogs of War
FOR LYNDON JOHNSON 1965 began in triumph. His landslide victory over Barry Goldwater had given him the political stature he’d always dreamed of having. It had also handed him the most liberal Congress in thirty years. No more would he have to worry about breaking southern Democrats’ grip on Capitol Hill, nor appeasing the Republicans, as he’d had to do in the long battle to pass the Civil Rights Act the previous year. Now he had all the votes he needed to turn his entire legislative agenda into law.
At its center stood the stunning array of programs LBJ saw as constituting his war on poverty. There’d be more funding for the Economic Opportunity Act, which had launched the war in 1964, and more innovative new programs as a result. There’d be national health care for the poor and the elderly—Medicaid and Medicare, the programs would be called—along with an increase in Social Security payments not only for retirees but for the poor and disabled as well. There’d be a billion dollars in federal aid for grade schools and high schools in impoverished areas, along with federal loans to help underprivileged kids go to college. There’d be a boost in the minimum wage and a broadening of its coverage to include nine million more workers. There’d be a raft of new public works programs in struggling sections of the country, which would come with a fair share of jobs. There might even be a chance to completely rebuild inner cities, to replace sagging tenements with new housing, crumbling streets with vibrant communities, isolation with integration.
In the flush of victory, though, Johnson’s ambitions stretched beyond combating poverty. Liberals had talked about strengthening consumer protection laws; he’d support them. They’d said they wanted to deal with air and water pollution; so did he. And some of them, at least, had long wanted to reform the discriminatory immigration laws that had been put in place in the 1920s. Abandon the law’s quotas, the reformers argued, and put in their place a process that favored immigrants with skills employers needed or with relatives already living in the United States. They were willing to accept one key new restriction: for the first time the United States would cap the number of people it accepted each year from the rest of the Western hemisphere, a revision that they assumed would slow a migration that had increased Latinos’ share of the population to about four percent. The reform’s other provisions would overturn the rules that had choked off immigration from much of Europe and almost of Asia—four decades after the quotas were put in place, Asian Americans still made up less than one percent of the population—while making the system more rational and more humane. That was good enough for LBJ. When the Senate Judiciary Committee took up their bill in February, they’d have the president’s backing.
It wasn’t simply a matter of passing laws, though, as much as Johnson loved the legislative process. Bill by bill, act by act, he could fulfill—and extend—the vision that had been guiding him since Dallas, to unleash the power of government in pursuit of justice. That was the mandate the voters had handed him. And he was going to seize it, as he made clear in his inaugural address, delivered on a sun-drenched day in late January. “Underneath the clamor of building and the rush of our day’s pursuits, we are believers in justice and liberty and in our own union,” he said. “We believe that every man must someday be free. And we believe in ourselves. . . . Is a new world coming? We welcome it, and we will bend it to the hopes of man. And to these trusted public servants and to my family, and those close friends of mine who have followed me down a long winding road, and to all the people of this Union and the world, I will repeat today what I said on that sorrowful day in November last year: I will lead and I will do the best I can.” In such a glorious moment there was no need to raise the one danger he saw looming, not in a meaningful way at least. Better to brush past it with a reference to American lives being lost “in countries that we barely know.”3 Better not to say the word “Vietnam.”
It was fifteen months since the Kennedy administration had acquiesced in the coup that toppled the government of Ngo Dinh Diem. Kennedy had hoped that the generals who would put themselves in his place could stabilize South Vietnam. But it was clearly a gamble; the generals had no experience running a government, no control over the bureaucracy Diem had built, and no plan for combating the Communist insurgency that by American estimates controlled almost half the South Vietnamese countryside. Nor did they get time to solve those problems. At the end of January 1964 they were themselves overthrown by yet another general, Nguyen Khanh.
The serial coups might have given LBJ the cover he needed to scale back the United States’ commitment. Instead he embraced each new government as it came. “Go back and tell those generals in Saigon that Lyndon Johnson intends to stand by our word,” he ordered his ambassador at the end of his first briefing on Vietnam, three days after Kennedy’s assassination. When they were deposed he swung behind the new government just as quickly. “This Khanh is the toughest one they got and the ablest one they got,” he told a sympathetic newspaper editor two days after the January coup. “Now it’ll take him a little time to get his marbles in a row, just like it’s taking me a little time. But . . . it’s not the Americans’ loss.”4
Johnson’s response reflected the particular circumstances of his early days in office: a president still learning how to handle international affairs, surrounded by the martyred Kennedy’s brilliant advisers—the Rhodes scholars and Harvard professors, career diplomats and corporate whiz kids—who had handled the Cuban Missile Crisis with such skill just two years before. How could he possibly change the course they had set? But there was more to it than that. Johnson had seen how conservative Republicans had used Mao Zedong’s 1949 triumph in China to batter away at Harry Truman, charging that he was too soft to stand up to the Communist threat, too weak to fight the Cold War as it ought to be fought, perhaps even complicit in China’s fall. The assault had all but destroyed Truman’s presidency. LBJ was sure the Republican Right would do the same to him, given half a chance. “I am not going to lose Vietnam,” he said at the end of that first briefing. “I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.”5
At first Johnson thought he could manage the situation much as Kennedy had. “The only thing I know to do is more of the same,” he told William Fulbright, the highly respected chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “and do it more efficiently and effectively.”6 So, in January 1964 he approved a plan to increase covert operations in North Vietnam. And over the next few months he sent more advisers and more financial aid to South Vietnam, in hopes that the help would stabilize the situation there. It didn’t. Throughout the first half of 1964 Nguyen Khanh struggled to maintain even a minimal level of control over his government—rumors of yet another coup constantly crept through Saigon—while the Communist insurgency pushed farther and farther into the South Vietnamese countryside. By mid-May Johnson’s key advisers were telling him that the war could be lost in six months, unless the administration forced the North Vietnamese government to end its aggression against the South. And the only way to do that, they said, was by unleashing American military power.
Together, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy set the central strategy. Working through secret channels, the administration would tell the North Vietnamese that if they didn’t stop supporting the southern insurgency they’d face serious consequences. When that warning failed, as it almost surely would, the United States would hit North Vietnam with an air war so punishing it would force the Communists to back down. The message was delivered to the North Vietnamese prime minister, Pham Van Dong, on June 18, 1964. As expected, he brushed it aside. But LBJ wasn’t ready to begin a sustained assault on North Vietnam, not in the midst of a presidential campaign he planned to center on his opponent’s frighteningly belligerent foreign policy. Instead he settled for a single strike, wrapped in layers of deception. The episode began on August 2, when three North Vietnamese patrol boats fired on the USS Maddox, an American destroyer operating in the Gulf of Tonkin, ten miles off the coast of North Vietnam. Immediately the White House warned the North Vietnamese that a second attack wouldn’t be tolerated. Then it sent the Maddox back into the gulf, along with another warship, the USS Turner Joy. For the next two days the destroyers prowled along the edge of North Vietnam’s territorial waters, while administration officials waited for word of another incident. On the morning of August 4—night in Vietnam—it arrived.
That evening the ships’ crews had engaged in a furious firefight against what they believed to be North Vietnamese patrol boats. No one had actually seen the boats except on radar screens. It was the sort of night—moonless with heavy squalls—that could produce false readings. And neither ship had been hit, even by small arms fire. The reports were so weak even LBJ didn’t believe them. But the truth didn’t matter. Shortly before midnight Washington time, Johnson went on national television to announce that North Vietnam’s “aggression by terror against peaceful villages of South Vietnam has now been joined by open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America. . . . Repeated acts of violence against the armed forces of the United States must be met not only with alert defense but with positive reply.”7 As he was speaking, eighteen American warplanes were bombing a North Vietnamese naval facility, a preview of the power the administration would bring to bear if the Communists didn’t stand down.
The following day LBJ sent Congress a draft resolution authorizing the president “to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist [South Vietnam] in defense of its freedom.” It was a remarkably open-ended proposal; the equivalent, said one senator, to a “predated declaration of war.”8 But virtually no one wanted to go on record opposing freedom just as American sailors had come under fire. After a few hours of hearings and a lackluster debate, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution sailed through the Senate by a vote of eighty-eight to two and through the House without any dissent at all. Afterward the president praised the process as a demonstration of national unity. Really it was a triumph of manipulation. With just a little bit of lying, LBJ had coerced Congress into handing him complete control over American policy in Vietnam.
There the administration’s show of force had very different consequences. By all accounts North Vietnamese officials hoped to avoid a full-scale war with the United States. But they were also determined not to seem cowed by American threats. So, they decided, in their own show of bravado, to increase their support for the southern insurgency. Nguyen Khanh, meanwhile, used the Gulf of Tonkin raid to impose a state of emergency in South Vietnam, a move that gave him virtually dictatorial power. That decision triggered protests in the streets of Saigon as severe as the ones that had crippled the Diem government in 1963. Khanh responded by abruptly resigning. For a week or so at the end of August it seemed as if South Vietnam was about to collapse, until the American ambassador convinced Khanh to return. He did so having been stripped of what little popular support he’d once had; had it not been for Washington’s backing he wouldn’t have been able to govern at all.
As it was, the White House spent the autumn hoping Khanh could hold on until Johnson was elected. Through September and October reports of impending disaster poured in. Many of South Vietnam’s government offices were no longer functioning. The South Vietnamese military was refusing to fight the insurgency. The Viet Cong controlled 50 percent of South Vietnam’s territory during the day and 75 percent at night. It wasn’t even safe to travel some of the major roads leading out of Saigon. Still LBJ refused to start the bombing campaign McNamara, Rusk, and Bundy had proposed the previous spring. At times the president went further, explicitly running against the strategy his advisers had defined. “There are those who say you ought to go North and drop bombs to try to wipe out the supply lines, and they think that will escalate the war,” he said at an Oklahoma campaign rally in late September. “We don’t want our American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys. . . . We are not about to start another war. . . .”9 On the day before the election, though—with Nguyen Khanh still in place and his own landslide assured—LBJ told his advisers to begin final planning for the bombing to come.
They set a tentative date of January 1, 1965. But Johnson wanted to launch the campaign only in response to a North Vietnamese provocation. He passed on his first opening—a Christmas Eve bombing of a Saigon hotel that killed two Americans—because it didn’t seem right to wage war on a holiday. Six weeks later, on February 7, 1965, the Viet Cong handed him another. It was a typical insurgent action: a late-night guerrilla raid on a forward base in South Vietnam’s highly contested Central Highlands, 250 miles north of Saigon. But this time the base was filled with American soldiers, eight of whom were killed in the attack. Within a few hours Johnson had ordered a retaliatory strike on a North Vietnamese military compound, to be carried out by 132 US warplanes, the first ferocious assault in what would quickly become Operation Rolling Thunder, the sustained bombing of North Vietnam.
A handful of advisers urged Johnson to back down, none more vigorously than his newly inaugurated vice president, Hubert Humphrey. “American wars have to be politically understandable by the American public,” he wrote the president on February 11. “There has to be a cogent, convincing case if we are to enjoy sustained public support. . . . Politically, people can’t understand why we would run grave risks to support a country which is totally unable to put its house in order.”10 But instead of slowing the administration’s march toward war, the instability in South Vietnam pushed Johnson forward. On February 18 a junta of South Vietnamese army officers finally toppled Khanh from power. In the chaotic days that followed, American commanders began to fear that the South Vietnamese military couldn’t be trusted to protect the sprawling US air base at Da Nang, from which the bombing runs would be launched. So, on February 22 they formally asked the president to send two marine landing teams—a total of 3,500 men—to South Vietnam to secure the base.
Again a few advisers objected. “As I analyze the pros and cons of placing any considerable number of Marines in Da Nang . . . I develop grave reservations as to the wisdom and necessity of so doing,” cabled the US ambassador in Saigon, JFK’s once-favorite general, Maxwell Taylor. “Such action would be [a] step in reversing long standing policy of avoiding commitment of ground combat forces in SVN. Once this policy is breached, it will be very difficult to hold [the] line.”11 But Johnson sided with the current military men. The marines would arrive in South Vietnam on March 8. After a year and a half of deliberation and deception, the American ground war in Vietnam was about to begin.
Democracy Itself
ON THE DAY of the officers’ coup in South Vietnam, an Alabama state trooper shot twenty-six-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson at point-blank range. The attack shouldn’t have been a surprise, not after so much blood had already been shed. Still, it was appalling that a man could be murdered simply because he wanted to vote.
For months the civil rights movement had been roiled by politics. For their part, SNCC’s leading figures had spent the autumn of 1964 struggling to make sense of Freedom Summer. They’d seen the promise of democracy fulfilled in the 80,000 African Americans who’d defied Mississippi’s terror to join the MFDP. Then they’d brought that idealism up to Lyndon Johnson’s convention convinced, said a veteran organizer, “in the ultimate morality in national political institutions and practices—‘They really didn’t know, and once we bring the facts about Mississippi to national attention, justice must surely be swift and irrevocable.’ ” But LBJ had known, as had the liberals he’d dispatched to offer the activists their two symbolic seats. They just didn’t care. “White liberals and the so-called affluent Negro leader . . . will sell us down the river for the hundredth time to protect themselves,” insisted John Lewis. “We all saw this in Atlantic City.”12
But it wasn’t at all clear how SNCC could move forward now that its liberal allies had been exposed. Despite the convention’s bitter turn, Lewis clung to his dream of building a Beloved Community. Bob Moses desperately wanted to keep the focus on grassroots organizing, though he feared that his celebrity had begun to overshadow the local people he’d devoted himself to empowering. Others talked of turning SNCC into a centralized, ideologically disciplined organization that could undertake radical political action, an American version of the revolutionary movements that were then sweeping across sub-Saharan Africa. “We want much more than token positions,” one of SNCC’s founding members said shortly after the Atlantic City debacle. “We want power.”13
So did Bayard Rustin. But nationalism wasn’t the way to secure it, he argued in a widely read article published in early 1965. In fact the March on Washington, the passage of the Civil Rights Act, even SNCC’s convention challenge all proved what was possible when African Americans worked with liberal politicians, unionists, and church groups. LBJ’s landslide opened still greater possibilities. With the Democrats’ southern bloc broken, Rustin said, the civil rights movement could begin to demand of Congress “radical programs for full employment, abolition of slums, the reconstruction of our educational system, new definitions of work and leisure”—an agenda of revolutionary reach, to be secured through mainstream politics. But the movement could only do so in alliance with its progressive partners, he concluded, “for there is a limit to what Negroes can do alone.”14
Martin Luther King believed in alliances too. From Atlantic City he’d been pulled into the presidential campaign, set on a schedule of appearances so grueling he ended up in an Atlanta hospital suffering from exhaustion. While there he learned that he’d won the Nobel Peace Prize, a triumph he celebrated by going back on the road, sweeping through the African American sections of Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles on Johnson’s behalf. On election night he wired the president his congratulations, politely passing up the chance to mention the huge margins LBJ had amassed in the areas King had visited. Then he announced that come January he would launch a new crusade, aimed at forcing the federal government to break that portion of the southern racial regime the Civil Rights Act had left untouched: the systematic denial of African Americans’ right to vote, an injustice King planned to shatter with the power of redemptive suffering.
His most volcanic adviser, James Bevel—the architect of the 1963 Children’s Crusade—picked the target. Since 1962 SNCC had been struggling to build a voter registration campaign in Selma, Alabama, a town of 28,000 deep in the Black Belt, fifty miles west of Montgomery. The campaign’s organizers had managed to mobilize a portion of the African American population. But they’d been ground down by relentless intimidation—led by Selma’s version of Bull Connor, Sheriff Jim Clark—and an intense level of legal repression, capped by a 1964 injunction that prohibited SNCC from holding a meeting of more than two people. Bringing King to Selma was sure to intensify white resistance, perhaps catastrophically, which was exactly why Bevel wanted him there.
And why Johnson wanted him to stay away. He agreed that the southern system wouldn’t be broken until the federal government intervened. He’d even ordered his new attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach, to secretly draft a voting rights bill. But he had a massive legislative agenda to pass before he was willing to start another fight over civil rights. After the Nobel ceremony LBJ invited King to the White House for a private discussion. The talk quickly turned to the movement’s plans. “I’m going to do it eventually, but I can’t get voting rights through in this session of Congress,” Johnson insisted. “It’s just not the wise and politically expedient thing to do,” though he should have known by then that arguing for expediency wasn’t the best way to stop the newest laureate from taking to the streets.15
King opened the campaign with a stirring appearance at Selma’s Brown Chapel AME Church on January 2, 1965, in defiance of the previous year’s injunction. “We must be ready to march,” he told the 700 people jammed into the church to see him. “We must be ready to go to jail by the thousands.”16 The protests started in mid-January, after two weeks of whirlwind organizing. By early February more than 2,000 people had been arrested, most for marching on the registrar’s office. As the numbers rose, so did Sheriff Clark’s ferocity. One group of protesters he bashed down the courthouse steps. Another he pushed into a three-mile forced march; those who lagged behind his deputies were shocked with cattle prods. The worst he reserved for Bevel, who was arrested while leading a demonstration on February 8. That night Clark’s men hosed Bevel down, then threw open his cell window to let in the winter air. By morning he was so feverish he had to be transferred to a local hospital. Clark insisted that Bevel be shackled to his bed.
The movement’s spokesmen met the violence with defiance, promising to extend the campaign from Selma into the surrounding countryside, already on the edge of revolt. King himself drove down to tiny Camden, Alabama, forty miles south of Selma, to join the seventy protesters who’d decided to march on their registrar’s office. His longtime aide Andrew Young slipped out to rural Lowndes County, east of Selma, to encourage the local folks who were thinking of taking on an electoral system that had prevented every African American in the county from voting in 1964, though Blacks made up 80 percent of its population. And another SCLC organizer headed twenty-seven miles northwest to Marion, Alabama, where community activists had been trying to mount a voter registration drive for the previous two years. Within days of his arrival he was leading protests almost as large as Selma’s, though Marion was one-sixth the size.
It was 9:30 p.m. when they started the February 18 march, a dangerous time in an area where white vigilantes had always ruled the night. But they were only going two blocks, from the rally at Zion Methodist to the Perry County Jail. And all they wanted to do, once they got there, was to sing some freedom songs. When they started out of the church, though—400 protesters walking two by two—they were stopped by a phalanx of 200 Marion policemen, sheriff’s deputies, and Alabama state troopers. The police chief told the marchers to turn around. Zion’s minister asked if they might have a moment to pray. Then the streetlights went out and the policemen attacked, pummeling those in the front of the line, beating them down with their nightsticks, wading through the wounded to reach the marchers closer to the church doors.
That’s where Jimmie Lee Jackson was standing, alongside his mother, sister, and eighty-two-year-old grandfather. In the chaos of the moment they stumbled back behind the church, following a dozen other panicked marchers into the safety of Mack’s Café. They were there a minute or two when the troopers burst in. There’d be claims and counterclaims about what happened next. It seems that a trooper charged Jackson’s grandfather. When Jackson’s mother tried to pull him off, he threw her to the ground. Jimmie Lee rushed to protect her—some said he lunged for her—and three other troopers turned on him.
Jackson died early in the morning of February 26, eight days after the assault in Marion. All that week King had been haunted by violence. First came the news that Malcolm X had been murdered, shot while giving a speech at Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom on Sunday afternoon, February 21. One of the assassins had been seized as he ran out of the building, the other two arrested shortly thereafter. All three were devout members of the Nation of Islam, acting—it was rumored—on Elijah Muhammad’s wishes if not his command, the father claiming the life of his once-beloved son. On Monday the attorney general called King to warn him of death threats coming out of Marion. On Wednesday King flew to Los Angeles, the latest stop in an endless round of fundraising. At the airport he was told of yet another threat, this one from neo-Nazis, its details serious enough that the LA police gave him around-the-clock protection. When reporters picked up the story, they badgered him with questions of how nonviolence would survive should he be killed. Now the Selma campaign had claimed Jimmie Lee Jackson. And Martin Luther King was in a heavily guarded LA hotel room, two thousand miles away.
The idea was Bevel’s. By all rights he should have cleared it with King. But he was swept up in the emotions of the day. And it wasn’t his style to obey lines of authority. Instead he used that evening’s mass meeting in Selma to express his grief. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “the death of that young man is pushing me kind of hard.” He talked of the need to carry on. And he talked of George Wallace, who as governor commanded the troopers who’d killed Jackson. Then his address took a sudden turn. “I must go see the king!” he announced. “Be prepared to walk to Montgomery! Be prepared to sleep on the highway!”17
It was an utterly reckless proposal—a fifty-mile march from Selma to the state capital, across a countryside steeped in white violence, to honor the memory of a man who’d been killed for threatening to walk two blocks—and as soon as he heard of it King doubted its wisdom. But he’d also been unsure of Bevel’s decision to bring children into the streets of Birmingham in 1963, and that had changed the nation. On the day of Jackson’s funeral King announced that the march would leave Selma the following Sunday, March 7.
King was in Atlanta, preaching at Ebenezer Baptist, when the protesters started out of Brown Chapel on Sunday afternoon. His colleague Hosea Williams took his place at the head of the line, alongside John Lewis, who was marching despite SNCC’s official decision not to participate, the result of a bitter Friday night debate that had pivoted on the pointlessness of pushing Washington for meaningful change. Behind them trailed 600 men, women, and children set in the same formation as the Marion marchers. They walked five blocks east on Water Street, then turned right onto the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which curved over the Alabama River on the edge of town. “I noticed how steep it was as we climbed toward the steel canopy at the top of the arched bridge,” Lewis said later. “It was too steep to see the other side. . . . When we reached the crest of the bridge I stopped dead still. So did Hosea.”18
Just beyond the bridge’s end stood a solid wall of state troopers dressed in riot gear, gas masks in place; behind them were Sheriff Clark’s men, some on horseback, their nightsticks already drawn. There was a network news van pulled off to the side, around it a cache of reporters and cameramen waiting for the confrontation to come.
Slowly, silently, Williams and Lewis led the line to within fifty feet of the troopers. Again they stopped, as one of the officers started to speak to them through a bullhorn. “It would be detrimental to your safety to continue this march,” he said. “And I’m saying this is an unlawful assembly. You are to disperse. You are ordered to disperse. Go home or go to your church. This march will not continue. Is that clear to you?”
For a minute nobody moved. Lewis suggested to Williams that they pray. Then the officer put down the bullhorn and turned to the men behind him. “Troopers, advance,” he shouted.19
Across the fifty feet they moved in tight formation. Lewis and Williams took the first hit, a vicious cross block that sent them tumbling into the row behind them. As the first bodies fell the troopers’ discipline broke. Into the crumbling line they waded, assaulting whoever got in their way, Clark’s deputies rushing to join them, spurring their horses into a gallop, pounding through the tear gas the troopers had released—plumes of choking smoke—the clatter of hooves tangling with the screams of the crowd. For half an hour the assault went on, until the marchers had been beaten back to Selma and the wounded cleared from the streets.
Lyndon Johnson was hosting a small dinner party when the three major television networks interrupted their regular evening broadcasts with footage of the troopers’ attack. But he didn’t want to think about Selma that night, not when he was waiting to hear that the first battalion of American marines had arrived safely in South Vietnam. The soldiers sloshed ashore at 9:30 p.m. Washington time. Not long after, the president said goodnight to his guests and went straight to bed. In the morning he awoke to national outrage.
By then there were pickets outside the Justice Department, demanding federal intervention in Selma, with a SNCC-led occupation of the attorney general’s office soon to follow. All day telegrams condemning the violence poured into the White House—from the Los Angeles City Council, the New Jersey State Assembly, the Anti-Defamation League, the Harvard Law faculty, the Jewish War Veterans, the ACLU, the Young Businessmen’s Club of Montgomery, the mayor of New York, the governor of Massachusetts, and thousands of ordinary Americans. On the Senate floor Texas’ Ralph Yarborough urged George Wallace to atone for Alabama’s sins, while on the House side Michigan’s James O’Hara called the assault “a savage action, storm-trooper style, under direction of a reckless demagogue.” But by far the most important news came from Atlanta, where Martin Luther King told the press that he was heading back to Selma to continue the protests. And he was asking “clergy of all faiths, representatives of every part of the country” to join him, so that together they could “testify to the fact that the struggle in Selma is for the survival of democracy everywhere in our land.”20
It was as if he had issued a call to prayer. By Tuesday morning some 450 ministers, rabbis, priests, and nuns had poured into Selma: prominent men come to lend their prestige—Lyndon Johnson’s pastor among them—as well as ordinary religious people come to bear witness. There was a tense afternoon march, a symbolic turn across the bridge and back. Then evening fell and the danger rose.
James Reeb was a thirty-eight-year-old white Unitarian minister who’d rushed down from Boston when he heard of King’s call. He’d had supper with two fellow clergymen at a Black-owned diner. When they were done the three of them headed toward SCLC’s makeshift office nearby. Along the way four white men descended on them. The other ministers they beat to the ground. Reeb took a club to the head, a blow so vicious his colleagues had to support him as they stumbled to safety, though they were bleeding profusely themselves. By morning Reeb was on life support in a Montgomery hospital. By Thursday night he was dead.
All week the national outcry mounted. On Tuesday 10,000 people marched on the federal building in Detroit to demand a voting rights bill, the procession led by Michigan’s Republican governor, George Romney, and the city’s Democratic mayor, Jerome Cavanagh. On Wednesday protesters established around-the-clock pickets at the White House. On Thursday, as Reeb was dying, twelve activists slipped into the tour line and launched a sit-in that shut off part of the East Wing for most of the day. News of the campaign’s latest martyr pushed the protests to a fever pitch. Through the nation’s smaller cities the rallies ran: 1,500 people marching in New Haven, Connecticut; 2,500 in Poughkeepsie, New York; 3,000 in Columbus, Ohio; 3,500 in Louisville, Kentucky. In major urban centers the turnouts were massive. That weekend 15,000 people paraded through Harlem to demand a voting rights bill, with Bayard Rustin at the front of the line. Another 15,000 filled Washington’s Lafayette Park, close enough to the Oval Office that LBJ could hear their chants. Twenty-five thousand packed Boston Common. And down in Selma the clerics kept coming, until the Black side of town was awash in yarmulkes, habits, and pectoral crosses. “There is a time,” a New Jersey rabbi told a reporter, “when man must choose between man’s law and God’s law.”21
For Johnson the time had come. Later his aides would point to Saturday afternoon as the pivotal point. He’d suffered through a series of painful meetings with civil rights advocates, followed by a three-hour session with George Wallace that he dominated as only LBJ could, his chair pulled uncomfortably close to the governor, his face pulled closer still, his message blunt and brutal. “George, you’re fucking over your president,” he said to Wallace at one point. “Why are you fucking over your president?”22 When they were done Wallace slunk away, while Johnson went before the press corps to announce that on Monday, March 15, he’d be submitting a comprehensive voting rights bill to Congress, the very step he’d refused to take three months before. And he’d be doing so with a personal appearance on Capitol Hill, to be televised live to the nation, wisdom and expediency be damned.
It was an electric evening, the president marching down to the House floor, past the seats left empty by the congressmen from Mississippi and Alabama, who refused to attend; past the justices of the Supreme Court and the president’s cabinet; up to the podium where the Speaker of the House was waiting to gavel the night to order; beneath the galleries where Lady Bird sat with a coterie of priests and ministers. As the applause died down he opened the speech in front of him and started to speak.
The president talked of the assault on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and of the death of Reverend Reeb, of the nation’s values and purposes, of the rank injustice of denying any American the right to vote. He laid out the barriers that Jim Crow had created and outlined the remedy he’d be proposing, which would give the federal government the power to register voters when the states refused. He called on Congress to pass his proposal as quickly as possible. Then he reached beyond the moment. “What happened in Selma,” he said, “is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”23
They were just song lyrics: three words to anchor the chorus. But behind them lay the promise that had sustained the movement for so many years. That someday justice would roll like a river and righteousness like a mighty stream, that the crooked places could be made straight and the rough places plain. That someday we—not you, not they, but we—shall overcome. Martin Luther King was watching the speech in Selma. When he heard the president use those three sacred words, he wept.
A Penumbra
GRISWOLD V. CONNECTICUT reached the Supreme Court two weeks after Johnson’s brilliant performance on Capitol Hill. The proceedings were swaddled in the Court’s decorous traditions, a world removed from Selma’s brutality. There’d be two hours of oral argument, evenly divided between the two sides, after which the justices would retreat to their chambers to begin shaping a decision, leaving no indication of what they were thinking except for the clues they’d dropped during the lawyers’ presentations.
But the justices weren’t ciphers. They were nine white men, all of them married—William O. Douglas, three times. One was Catholic, one Jewish, the remainder Protestant. Four had been appointed by a Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, five by Democrats, the most recent by LBJ. And though they didn’t share a judicial philosophy, in recent years they had demonstrated a decided commitment to civil liberties. There was the epic Brown decision, of course. But in the previous three years alone the Court had also handed down landmark rulings protecting the rights of accused criminals, prohibiting prayer in public schools, defending freedom of the press, loosening obscenity laws, and undercutting states’ manipulation of the vote. If the lawyers wanted to win the justices over, it was best to play to their proclivities.
From the start almost everything went Estelle Griswold’s way. Her attorney, Yale Law professor Thomas Emerson, opened his argument by reviewing the facts of the case, stressing that Griswold’s clinic offered contraception only to married women. How did the clinic know its clients were married? asked Justice Arthur Goldberg. The staff asked them, Emerson replied. Justice Hugo Black cut in. Why draw a distinction between married and unmarried women? Wouldn’t it be discriminatory to allow married women to use birth control and prohibit single women from doing so? Maybe, Emerson said. But he wasn’t asking the Court to settle that question. This was a case about marital rights.
There the justices kept the discussion, despite the efforts of Connecticut’s attorney, Joseph Clark, to move it in other directions. He tried to argue that the statute prohibiting the distribution and use of birth control was meant to prevent sexual intercourse outside of marriage. “Well, the trouble with the argument is that, on the record, this involves married women,” Justice Potter Stewart countered. Clark shifted to the question of religious liberty, arguing that the statute reflected the views of Connecticut’s many Catholics and Jews. Again Stewart stepped in. “Well, you would have had quite a different case if the State of Connecticut compelled all married couples to use them,” he said. “That’s when you’d run into the argument you’re now making, that this violates the religious precepts and beliefs of certain groups. . . . We’re dealing here, by definition and on this record, with advice and the furnishing of devices to married women who asked for such advice.” Finally Clark tried to question the validity of the medical testimony Griswold’s lawyers had collected. This time Stewart wouldn’t let him even pursue the point. “What we have here,” the justice insisted, “is the freedom of people, of married couples to do this just as they want and therefore I don’t quite see the relevance of what you’re telling us now, when you remember what this case is about.”
Clark knew he’d been pushed into a corner. “Well, if your Honor please,” he replied, “I can only say that married couples do not have the freedom to do what they want.”24
Griswold’s lawyer couldn’t have asked for a more helpful response than that. “I would be much surprised if we didn’t win,” he wrote his client shortly after oral arguments, most likely by a margin of seven to two.25
He had the count exactly right. The justices met to share their views of the case three days after the lawyers’ presentation. Around the table they went in the order tradition required, beginning with the chief justice, Earl Warren, and ending with the Court’s newest member, Arthur Goldberg. The only votes to support Connecticut’s claim came from Hugo Black and Potter Stewart. Neither supported the law—Stewart called it “uncommonly silly”—but they didn’t see a legal basis for declaring it unconstitutional.26 The others thought that it ought to be voided, though they didn’t agree on the grounds for doing so: some wanted a sweeping ruling, others a narrow one. It was something of a surprise, therefore, that after the justices took their vote Warren assigned the opinion to the most ardent of the Court’s civil libertarians, William O. Douglas.
Douglas was famous—some said infamous—among Court insiders for the speed with which he wrote opinions. This time he took ten days to finish a draft. It was only six pages, double-spaced, but it had an imposing reach. “The association of husband and wife is not mentioned in the Constitution nor in the Bill of Rights,” Douglas wrote. But the Court had already identified a general right of association as a “penumbra” to the First Amendment, not explicitly listed in the text but logically extending from those rights that were. Now the Court should extend that right to married couples, to protect “the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms.”27
When Douglas circulated his draft, his fellow liberal, William Brennan, found the argument strained. The Court had defined free association in political terms: states couldn’t prevent someone from joining the NAACP, for instance. That hardly seemed applicable to the highly personal relationships that lay at the heart of the Griswold case. Within a few days Brennan’s clerks had come up with a new formula. Just as the Court had identified free association as being derived from the First Amendment, the revision read, so should the Court identify the right to privacy as an extension of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments. Brennan sent the suggestions back to Douglas, who was more than pleased with what he read. Little wonder. His first version had tried to apply an existing right. Brennan’s approach created an entirely new one, a civil libertarian’s dream made real by the logic of the law.
The Court handed down its decision on June 7. The opinion followed Brennan’s reasoning almost entirely. But the words were Douglas’s. “We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights,” he wrote, “older than our political parties, older than our school system. Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring and intimate to the degree of being sacred.”28 And the sacred ought not to be profaned by the state’s intrusion. By order of the Court Connecticut’s eighty-six-year-old ban on birth control was to be set aside, the marital bed protected by a constitutional right that until that moment hadn’t existed.
Nine days later the U.S. Court of Appeals handed down its ruling in Bruce Scott’s test case. Compared to Griswold it was a spare decision, laid out in six straightforward paragraphs. Scott certainly didn’t have a right to be hired by the federal government, it read. But he did have a right to have his application treated fairly. The government could have done that by saying precisely what immoral acts he had committed and why those acts made him ineligible for the jobs he wanted. Instead it had rejected him purely on its assumption that homosexuality was by definition immoral. That was discriminatory, the appeals court concluded, because even a gay man had rights that had to be respected.
Three Revolutions
THE INITIAL RESPONSE to the two cases was decidedly underwhelming. “The impact of the decision . . . is likely to be very limited,” wrote the Washington Post’s reporter on the day that Griswold came down, since it had nothing to say about unmarried women’s use of contraception. The Catholic Church’s spokesman said the American bishops weren’t concerned. Although Catholics consider birth control to be sinful, he told the press, “The Church does not seek to use the power of the state to compel compliance with its moral views.”29 Even Estelle Griswold didn’t seem particularly excited. She dutifully posed for photographs holding the New Haven Register’s front page, where the Court’s ruling had been given second billing to news of the latest space flight. But her primary reaction was a matter-of-fact announcement that she’d be reopening her clinic as soon as possible. At least Griswold made the front pages. Only the Post reported on the Scott ruling, in a page three story that never mentioned his name, much less asked him to comment on his victory.
In any case Griswold and Scott weren’t likely to have riveted public attention, not when there were far more compelling stories to follow. Through the spring the nation’s major news outlets had detailed the inexorable bombing campaign the United States waged against North Vietnam: 3,600 sorties flown in April, 4,000 in May, 4,800 in June. The more dramatic news came on the ground. Just as Ambassador Taylor had argued in March, once the administration committed the first contingent of combat troops to South Vietnam it wouldn’t be able to resist the military’s request for more. In April Lyndon Johnson agreed to deploy 40,000 additional American soldiers, enough for the United States to launch limited excursions against the Viet Cong in the South Vietnamese countryside.
As American troop levels rose, the South Vietnamese military buckled. In May the National Liberation Front launched an offensive in the Central Highlands that devastated South Vietnam’s forces. Surging casualties pushed up the desertion rate—in some sections of the South Vietnamese army it reached 50 percent—and undercut the government’s already tenuous will to fight. Again the White House was consumed by talk of imminent collapse, unless the United States was willing to intensify its bombing of North Vietnam and dramatically expand its combat operations in the South. “You must take the fight to the enemy,” insisted the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “No one ever won a battle sitting on his ass.”30 And no one fought a land war without troops. On the day the Court issued its ruling in Griswold, the Joint Chiefs asked the president for another 150,000 men. LBJ hesitated—already the death toll was mounting, with 141 Americans killed in April and May alone—and then authorized the deployment of 100,000, with the implicit promise of more to come.
Up on Capitol Hill, meanwhile, Johnson’s voting rights bill raced toward passage. The Selma campaign had created such overwhelming support that the administration’s proposal went to the Senate with 66 sponsors, just one vote shy of the number needed to defeat a filibuster. The southerners tried anyway, but it was nothing more than posturing for the folks back home. On May 25, after five weeks of debate, 70 senators voted cloture. The following day the Senate passed the bill itself, 77 to 19, the only opposition coming from below the Mason-Dixon Line. The vote might have been just a little less humiliating had three southerners—Texas’ Ralph Yarborough and Tennessee’s Ross Bass and Al Gore—not sided with the majority.
For another month the bill languished in the House Rules Committee, under the thumb of Virginia’s Howard Smith. But the pressure was too great to resist for long. On July 1 Smith’s committee sent the proposal to the House floor. Eight days of maneuvering followed before the Speaker felt confident enough to call for a vote. “It’s going to be close and it’s going to be dangerous,” LBJ told Martin Luther King as the roll call approached.31 It was neither. On July 9 the House approved its version of the bill by a margin of 333 to 85.
Off it went to a conference committee, whose members spent three weeks smoothing out the differences with the Senate bill. The reconciled version cleared the House on August 3, the Senate on the 4th. At noon on the 6th Johnson went back up to the Capitol for the signing ceremony, this time to the Rotunda. His handlers had placed the presidential podium directly beneath John Trumbull’s great painting of Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, a pointed reminder of the moment’s revolutionary antecedents. Johnson drew the connection tighter still. “Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield,” he told the guests the White House had assembled. “Yet to seize the meaning of this day, we must recall darker times. Three and a half centuries ago the first Negroes arrived at Jamestown. They came in darkness and they came in chains. And today we strike away the last major shackle of those fierce and ancient bonds. Today the Negro story and the American story fuse and blend.”32
On that last point the president was clearly wrong: the Negro story and the American story had been fused for centuries, the nation’s fate shaped to a dramatic degree by the darkness and the chains. But he was right to see the Voting Rights Act as revolutionary. For more than sixty years the South’s embrace of Jim Crow had made a mockery of the American promise. Now the southern system’s central structures had been shattered, its legal authority destroyed by the blood sacrifice of ordinary people who dared to believe that they had, in fact, been endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. There were other bonds yet to break, as activists well knew. But in 1965 the civil rights movement had brought the American Revolution a dramatic step closer to fulfillment.
LBJ’s decision to escalate the war in Vietnam marked a very different sort of revolution. For a decade American policy makers had tried to keep the Vietnamese tangle within the standard practices of containment. The United States would embrace a friendly government, even if it didn’t enjoy public support. It would give that government considerable financial and military aid. It would dispatch American troops in a limited way to bolster a failing regime or block an insurgency it believed to be threatening. It had even followed the containment strategy to the edge of nuclear annihilation. Only once since the onset of the Cold War, though—in Korea in 1950—had a president committed the country to a full-scale war. And in that case he was reacting to a Communist state’s unprovoked invasion of its neighbor. Johnson didn’t think of himself as breaking with past policy. He believed, fairly enough, that he was keeping his predecessor’s promises. But he was doing so in a new and horrifically dangerous way.
Then there was Estelle Griswold, committing a crime that no one wanted to prosecute on behalf of a practice that by the time her case was settled had become commonplace, and Bruce Scott, challenging a fragment of the federal government’s sprawling bureaucracy. Yet they’d triggered a revolution too. Griswold hadn’t changed American women’s use of birth control; the pill had done that. She hadn’t even changed Connecticut women’s practices, though she undoubtedly made their decisions a bit easier. But she had fundamentally transformed the relationship between the government and a wide swath of its citizens. Gone was the state’s right to police the morality of married couples’ most intimate choices. In its place stood their right to be left alone. Scott hadn’t come close to extending that right to gay Americans: he’d simply forced the government to be more precise in saying why it wouldn’t hire him. Still, by breaking the government’s linkage of homosexuality and immorality he’d opened the tiniest crack in its criminalization of gay life. And there could always be another Scott, and another Griswold, willing to push against the boundaries the justices had set, to see how far they could be moved, because once a revolution starts, there’s no saying where it might end.