At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  Vivian muttered questions to stall, then smiled, realizing that King was reading his staff again for unguarded reaction, the way he sampled crowds and cities. King let it go, and Vivian changed the subject. “I just heard that Vernon Johns died,” he said.

  King sagged. “Johns died?” he asked. “You sure of that?”

  Vivian said he was. Like much about the vagabond scholar who had preceded King at Dexter Avenue Baptist in Montgomery, his demise weeks earlier was passing from rumor through fact to legend. It was said that the old man had appeared from somewhere at storied Rankin Chapel of Howard University, without laces in his shoes, to deliver without notes a last sermon entitled “The Romance of Death,” then wandered off again to be discovered prostrate by strangers weeks later. A recording survived. “I’m almost afraid to say this, but I can prove to you in less than a second that it’s true,” Johns had growled to end his lyrical reflections. “Unless a person comes to the place where he wants to die, he has been licked by life.”* Vivian knew King had modeled his thematic speech on Lazarus and Dives after the mischievously profound Johns sermon of 1949, “Segregation After Death.” From common association, they shared in the car a flood of memorial stories on Johns the peddler and irascible prophet, who once announced a watermelon sale as the chastening benediction for a wedding ceremony that joined two of Dexter’s proudest families.

  Chicago reporters confronted King after a canceled event early Monday as he emerged pasty and feverish from a doctor’s office, diagnosed with bronchitis. “I need to rest,” he told them, then lagged two hours behind. At lakefront Buckingham Fountain, King climbed a blue truck to address roaring, restless marchers numbered at some twenty thousand. “We sang Going to Chicago until there were as many of our people in Chicago as Mississippi,” he cried, reviewing the half-century of exodus. “Now we see the results. Chicago did not turn out to be a New Jerusalem…but a city in dire need of redemption and reform.” With Al Raby, Dick Gregory, and John McDermott of the Catholic Interracial Council, King led a walking mass the full width of Balbo Drive that stretched forward an hour to State Street, Madison, and up LaSalle to City Hall. He offered there a formal prayer for “a greater vision of our task,” vowed to be back when needed, and flew to his next trial movement in Cleveland. Mayor Daley, reappearing in Chicago from a hasty trip, adroitly minimized differences with King. “There can be no disagreement that we must root out poverty,” Daley announced, “rid the community of slums, eliminate discrimination and segregation wherever they exist, and improve the quality of education.”

  PRESS SECRETARY Moyers whispered to President Johnson for permission to release simply the names of the men gathered in the Cabinet Room on Monday, July 26. Johnson vetoed it, growling that reporters would only press them more doggedly for clues. Hair-trigger tensions of superpower conflict had intruded upon the serial Vietnam meetings in their sixth consecutive day. Although the North Vietnamese had shot down fifty-five U.S. planes earlier during the Rolling Thunder bombardment, military intelligence officials believed the weekend loss of an American F-4 jet was the first casualty from new surface-to-air missile (SAM) defenses operated by Soviet technicians, some forty miles northeast of Hanoi. “Are you sure they’re Russians?” President Johnson asked. Rusk conceded that “killing the first Russians” in Vietnam would be dangerous, but joined McNamara and military commanders in recommending air strikes on the SAM sites themselves. “You cannot order pilots to bomb without helping them get back,” he said.

  The President declared a recess, admonishing everyone again to absolute secrecy, and called his friend Richard Russell. “We think that the Russians are manning them,” he said. “We don’t want to say that. We don’t want anybody to know that.” The new SAM sites were mobile and harder to hit, but to bomb the permanent sites near Hanoi would drive the feuding Chinese and Soviet governments toward unified support of North Vietnam. “You’ll have them all in the war in fifteen minutes in my judgment when you go to bombing in Hanoi,” said Johnson, wary of North Vietnamese strategy. “I think they’re trying to trap us into doing it.”

  Russell confronted the immediate choice on the mobile sites instead. “Well, I’d say yes, get them tonight if we could,” he advised, “but I’d hate like hell to try to get them and miss them.” He renewed commiseration with Johnson on the overall war, especially his premonition that “these damn Vietnamese” allies would skulk to the rear and leave the fighting to Americans. “God, that just scared the hell out of me,” Russell confessed.

  The President reconvened the group in the Cabinet Room late Monday. Arthur Goldberg, hours after being sworn in as U.N. ambassador, asked for assurance that no spasm by hostile superpowers would spoil the chance of diplomatic settlement. CIA Director Raborn reported that Soviet leaders were “expecting us to come” with bombs to counter their missiles, and were likely to remain reserved. Clark Clifford, who had argued the George Ball position to President Johnson at Camp David, urging withdrawal to avoid “catastrophe for my country,” reversed counsel in an atmosphere of command decisions under fire. “We are not going to be pushed out of South Vietnam,” he said. “We show the enemy our determination by taking out number 6 and number 7.” McNamara said the suspect SAM sites designated by these numbers were only “semi-mobile,” raising the odds of success. “Take them out,” ordered the President. He called the Pentagon Situation Room through the night—at one o’clock, 3:30, and 7:35 Tuesday morning—for mission reports that flattened his hopes. Ground missiles shot down six of the forty-four attacking U.S. aircraft, all F-105s. From postmortem reconnaissance indicating that number 6 was a dummy site, and number 7 vacant, Bundy concluded that the mobile SAMs sighted “may have been a DRV trap,” referring to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, that is, North Vietnam.

  Between Tuesday’s three secret deliberations, beginning at 8:40 A.M., the President posed for photographs with the Sons of Italy, new HEW Secretary John Gardner, and with a Boy Scout who had bicycled from Idaho on a fitness project, among others, and approved a reply to Martin Luther King’s thanks for the appointment of Thurgood Marshall. (“I am convinced that God has sent you to lead us out of this difficult and agonizing wilderness at such a time as this,” said King, in a letter dictated from the road.*) Johnson also called Harry Truman, met for two hours with Abe Fortas, and signed into law the Cigarette Labeling Act of 1965, which placed a specified health warning on every pack sold. Despite the mandated labels, consumption would rise toward a record 520 billion cigarettes in 1966, while research sponsored by the American Medical Association, underwritten with nearly $20 million from tobacco sources, corroborated none of the government’s alleged ill effects. On the contrary, one newly publicized study team led by a Nobel laureate found that regular smoking fostered higher intelligence. “Let it be clear that we do not intend to create geniuses,” microbiologist Daniele Bovet told the Times, “but only put the less-endowed individual in a position to reach a satisfactory mental and intellectual development.”

  On Wednesday, July 28, the President ordered his staff to rustle up cushioning news to surround the Vietnam announcement at noon. Twelve minutes beforehand, Johnson himself called Abe Fortas. “How is your blood pressure?” he asked coyly.

  Decades later, Vietnam War historian Stanley Karnow wrote that President Johnson “could not conceal his decision, but he could muffle it.” This explained why, agreed biographer Robert Dallek, he “announced the expansion of the war at a press conference rather than in a speech to a joint session of Congress,” disclosing only 50,000 of the 100,000 new troops ordered to Vietnam, saying more were likely soon. Still, anticipation made for an electric, somber moment in the packed East Room. No great distance or mitigating hope, the President declared, should “mask the central fact that this is really war.” Surveys recorded a daytime television audience of 28 million, with only 4 percent of sets tuned elsewhere. “Once the Communists know, as we know, that a violent solution is impossible,” said Johnson, “then a peaceful solut
ion is inevitable.” Reporters noted that Lady Bird Johnson covered her face, near tears, as he reprised from his Selma speech—“Let me add now a personal note…as I have said before”—a defining purpose since boyhood that he resolved not to see “drowned in the wasteful ravages of cruel wars…. But I also know, as a realistic public servant, that as long as there are men who hate and destroy, we must have the courage to resist or we’ll see it all—all that we have built, all that we hope to build, all our dreams for freedom—all, all, will be swept away on the flood of conquest. So, too, this shall not happen. We will stand in Vietnam.”

  Defying undertow, President Johnson rose buoyantly to other matters. He introduced his newly appointed director for the Voice of America, NBC News correspondent John Chancellor, “whose face and whose mind is known to this country and to most of the entire world,” and presented as a startling surprise, even to himself, the soon-to-be-appointed Justice Fortas.

  Not waiting for Johnson to finish questions from the press, Vice President Humphrey called the Oval Office from “a room full of senators over here at the Capitol” to dictate a message of unanimous enthusiasm. “I just couldn’t be happier if they’d had Christmas every day,” he added, “and every dream I’d ever wanted came true.” The President himself rushed back to more congenial tasks with energized relief, pushing Katzenbach at the last hurdle for voting rights, and concurrent victories lifted him to euphoria. “We repealed 14-B today,” he crowed to Arthur Goldberg that night, saying he forgave the veteran labor lawyer for telling him once that the anti-union section of the Taft-Hartley Act was forever impregnable. “I put it in the message, and then I backed it up with votes,” boasted Johnson. “And we got Social Security passed today.”

  Thursday’s New York Times spread war news across three giant tiers, “JOHNSON ORDERS 50,000 MORE MEN/TO VIETNAM AND DOUBLES DRAFT/AGAIN URGES U.N. TO SEEK PEACE.” Surrounding front-page stories headlined restraint—“Most in Congress Relieved,” said one, alongside “Economic Impact Is Called Slight.” The Times editorial rested on his “vital” point that the war must be “held down to the absolute minimum necessary to prove to Hanoi and Peking that military aggression is not worthwhile,” and the principal news dispatch, “NO RESERVE CALL,” recognized that the President avoided congressional scrutiny of a disruptive, costly deployment by declining to activate Reserve forces. He called instead for an extra 18,000 draftees per month.

  Draftees would supply politically convenient soldiers only for the moment, as Johnson well knew, but his overriding worry was that candid mobilization would touch off hawkish alarms for unfettered war. “Don’t pay any attention to what the little shits on the campuses do,” he told George Ball. “The great beast is the reactionary elements in this country.” At the same time, Johnson railed that realistic disclosures would backfire to the aid of dovish critics. Public exchanges “just put water on Mansfield’s and on Morse’s paddle,” he fretted to Eisenhower, longing for acquiescence on all sides. “If we could get Morse and Ford to quit talking,” he opined, “it would be a lot better.” To minimize debate, and the need for concurrence, he assumed the burden of war on his own claim of authority. An elastic conscription law allowed him to commandeer manpower for Vietnam by quiet executive decree, at the price of inevitable protest that no such autocratic power should compel young Americans to kill or be killed in the name of free government.

  WHEN EVEN the legendary White House telephone operators failed to locate Martin Luther King, the Attorney General called the FBI at 9:15 that same Wednesday night, July 28. In doing so, Assistant Director DeLoach noted with satisfaction, Katzenbach swallowed his distaste for FBI surveillance methods to the point of admitting he “desperately” needed help to find King about the “damned bill” on voting rights. From tracking agents, DeLoach guided him to call Suite 9-B at the Sheraton after a rally in Cleveland’s civic arena, and negotiations went late over the wording of a King statement about the poll tax. The voting rights bill was likely to remain stuck unless key representatives on the House-Senate conference—chiefly Harold Donohue of Massachusetts and Peter Rodino of New Jersey—accepted assurance that civil rights supporters could retreat honorably from a poll tax amendment the House had added July 9 over the Johnson administration’s opposition. Katzenbach agreed to substitute an express declaration by Congress that the poll tax abridged the right to vote, plus a directive that the Justice Department “institute forthwith” lawsuits to void the practice, and King agreed before morning that Katzenbach could quote his exact appraisal of the compromise, ending: “I am confident that the poll tax provision of the bill—with vigorous action by the Attorney General—will operate finally to bury this iniquitous device.” He agreed also that Katzenbach could call final enactment of the voting rights law his “overriding goal.”

  Word of the midnight intercession leaked in Washington, where Southerners professed shock that an Attorney General would quote such a person in the official business of the United States, “taking orders” from King. The indignant refrain changed few votes, however, and did not erupt until Katzenbach steered the compromise through Thursday’s conference to the floor of the House and Senate.

  King, for his part, returned to troubles on the Northern tour. His bronchitis had worsened since Chicago to a fever of 102 degrees. He canceled a New York stop after two warning phone calls from Adam Clayton Powell, and used a day’s break to work on several festering issues that menaced the upcoming SCLC convention in Birmingham. He authorized his attorney Chauncey Eskridge to seek collection from a Negro bondsman of misappropriated interest on nearly $400,000 of bail bonds that SCLC had posted in 1963 with borrowed money—the bonds being held at risk because Birmingham still refused to drop more than a thousand criminal cases against young people arrested for protesting segregation. Meanwhile, King mediated a complex pulpit dispute that blocked access to the historic seat of the Birmingham movement at 16th Street Baptist Church. There were fears expressed that the church would be bombed again if he returned, along with quarrels over the allocation of repair funds collected worldwide, plus lingering resentment of high-handed conduct by King’s colleague Fred Shuttlesworth. Abernathy had just inflamed the latter situation with a letter banning the celebrated movement choir director at 16th Street Baptist, Carlton Reese, from SCLC events until he apologized satisfactorily for having “disrespected” Shuttlesworth, stressing to Reese that “you and your group must not repent for these acts of insubordination just for the convention, but it must be a move to get right with the movement permanently.”

  Adam Clayton Powell could not resist tweaking King about why he should stay out of Harlem. “I told him to go to cities where they had no real Negro leadership,” he announced to reporters, “like Chicago, Cleveland, and Washington.” Powell’s colorful disparagement attracted press notice, baiting Negroes who cooperated with King, and the NAACP chapter president in Philadelphia sent up a temperamental flare before the movement tour reached his city. “Moore Assails Two-Day Visit Here of Dr. King,” headlined the July 30 Philadelphia Inquirer, reporting that Cecil B. Moore denounced King as “an unwitting tool” of manipulations by “appeasers, social climbers, and the egghead white power structure” to degrade what Moore called “my stature in the Negro community.” The friction instantly generated a sympathetic FBI report on Moore’s confidential plans to harass King as unwelcome. King, still stalled and sick in Cleveland, sent word that he did not want to impose on Philadelphia, which touched off protests against Moore.

  With two planeloads of legislators, President Johnson soared over the heartland into Kansas City, Missouri, on Friday afternoon, July 30, then proceeded by motorcade to Independence. Crowds lined the streets. At a ceremony in the auditorium of the Truman Library, the former President spoke only briefly. “I’m glad to have lived this long, and to witness today the signing of the Medicare bill,” said Harry Truman, now growing feeble at eighty-one. He first had proposed national health coverage for older Americans in 1945, three mo
nths after the end of World War II, and Johnson praised him for inspiring the uphill battle ever since. The new law made 19 million Americans instantly eligible for medical benefits as a supplement to Social Security, which promised over time to lift old age itself above a primordial curse as the most impoverished stage of life. “No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine,” said Johnson. “No longer will illness crush and destroy the savings that they have so carefully put away over a lifetime…. No longer will young families see their own income and their own hopes eaten away simply because they are carrying out their deep moral obligations to their parents and to their uncles and their aunts.”