King told Goldberg that the United States wound up financing three-quarters of France’s subsequent eight-year war, which killed 74,000 soldiers under the French flag among roughly a million casualties on all sides, including 250,000 civilians, before the underdog Vietnamese won a decisive military victory at the 1954 siege of Dien Bien Phu. Since then, three American Presidents had struggled in place of France to preserve the fallback partition of South Vietnam from what they called Cold War Communist takeover, while Ho’s followers struggled to complete what they called a revolutionary war for independence.
King recommended talks to resolve the sharp conflict by negotiation rather than force. Goldberg embraced talks as his specialized talent, and hinted confidentially that he agreed with King’s call for a bombing pause to facilitate them. Heartened, King faulted Ho Chi Minh for refusing talks until the United States withdrew its troops. He suggested that Goldberg could encourage Ho to negotiate by ending America’s own refusal to talk with Communist organizations, including the Chinese regime of Mao Zedong. Goldberg, seconded by assistants, replied that direct talks were impossible because the United States did not recognize Mao’s government, and had blocked China’s admission to the United Nations since 1949. King doubted the wisdom of shunning Asia’s dominant power, especially since American officials argued that Vietnam took orders from Beijing. “Well, you know,” he said, “eight hundred million Chinese won’t disappear just because we refuse to admit their existence.”
Lawyer Harry Wachtel argued from his research into the 1954 Geneva Accords that the ongoing war to unify the country seemed driven much more by the Vietnamese themselves than by Communist sponsors. For all their vituperation against the capitalist United States, both the Soviet Union and China had pressured Ho to accept far less at Geneva than his armies had won from the disintegrating French colonials. The “temporary” division of Vietnam into a Communist North and non-Communist South had defused confrontation between the nuclear superpowers, said Wachtel, but Cold War arrangements did not explain the allegiance to Ho Chi Minh among peasant farmers. Even Senator Richard Russell, President Johnson’s staunch supporter on military issues, had just conceded on national television that Ho was “a very dangerous enemy” because he would win a fair election across both halves of Vietnam. Therefore, Wachtel thought Ho’s supporters within South Vietnam should be included in negotiations to protect American interests. “Why can’t you talk to the Viet Cong?” he asked.
Goldberg fudged on the delicate issue. “We don’t say we won’t talk with them,” he replied, “but we don’t say we will, either.” The session lasted seventy minutes before Goldberg withdrew to focus on a crisis over Kashmir, where the Indian and Pakistani armies were clashing. He thanked King for his leadership in the shared cause of civil rights, expressing full confidence in his own capacity for dialogue, and left the visitors with such a positive reception that, after spirited debate among advisers, King decided to outline his “unthinkable” suggestions candidly for the U.N. press corps waiting outside. He mentioned a bombing pause, talks with the Vietcong, and U.N. recognition of China. “In short,” he told them, “my plea was that we have a negotiated settlement of this very difficult and agonizing and terrible conflict.”
The first sign of seismic reaction was that Goldberg soon rushed out of his Kashmir meeting to address the same television reporters. “We will not be forced out of South Vietnam,” he declared. “On the other hand, we do not covet any bases there. We do not seek any territory.” He said King’s settlement ideas had been received without response. King heard within hours that civil rights colleagues were rebuking his dangerous “intrusion” into foreign affairs, then that Senator Thomas Dodd used similar phrases in Washington to denounce King’s “intemperate alignment with the forces of appeasement.” Dodd’s haste matched his fury. With the Senate already adjourned Friday afternoon, he did not wait for Monday to speak from the floor and instead issued a public statement. Assuming the mantle of racial champion himself—“I was fighting civil rights cases in the South in the 1930s, when Dr. King was still a boy”—Dodd professed an extra measure of sorrow that the Vietnam overture “will make it impossible for me hereafter to regard Dr. Martin Luther King with quite the same respect.” King possessed “absolutely no competence to speak about complex matters of foreign policy,” Dodd charged. “And it is nothing short of arrogance when Dr. King takes it upon himself to thus undermine the policies of the President.”
King convened an emergency conference call that Sunday, September 12. “I want a little advice from all you distinguished wise Americans,” he teased, to lighten his introduction.
“Flattery will get you nowhere,” quipped Stanley Levison, among the half-dozen scattered advisers coming onto wiretapped phone lines.
King promptly confessed surprise at the spasm of political signals. “I am convinced that Lyndon Johnson got Dodd to say this,” he said, beginning painful reinterpretation of his direct presidential conversations that summer. What faded was his wishful hope that Johnson’s private anguish about Vietnam meant he was open to settlement ideas. Vividly in its place rose the import of Johnson’s sidelong comments that King was perceived to be a public opponent of his war. King now read the U.N. meeting as a trap to draw out his dissent over Vietnam; alternatively, he saw Goldberg as a poor messenger to lay down a blunt demand for political loyalty. Dodd, by contrast, would be a shrewdly effective choice. Many people might read his statement as reasonable, and “say yes, Martin has gone too far,” King observed. “Some Negroes would say this.” Yet King saw in Dodd the Senate’s “strongest supporter of the FBI,” which revived the clandestine threat of enforcement by personal attack. Once more, as with J. Edgar Hoover’s “notorious liar” outburst before the Nobel Prize, King discussed the chance that the FBI may have acted independently, but this time he sensed politics orchestrated from the White House.
“I really don’t have the strength to fight this issue and keep my civil rights fight going,” King told the advisers, as the FBI promptly reported back to the White House. He said he would continue “being a minority of one” if his spearhead dissent could be productive, but he believed that none of the warring parties would respond positively to the call for negotiation, including Ho Chi Minh and Zhou Enlai of Communist China. “So I have to find out how I can gracefully pull out,” King proposed.
Staff sentiment rallied briefly for a publicity campaign to defend King’s stance. Harry Wachtel already had arranged a lunch with the editorial board of the New York Times. Andrew Young thought they could generate positive articles from a few senators and prominent religious figures, including Reinhold Niebuhr. Bayard Rustin reported support for King’s stand from a broad range of movement leaders including Bob Moses of SNCC. Union leader Cleveland Robinson reported that Whitney Young of the Urban League was telling New Yorkers that he “wouldn’t pretend to be as ‘godlike’ as Martin,” and that therefore he refrained from second-guessing President Johnson. “I have no doubt that he has been poked by the Administration,” said Robinson, who begged to confront Whitney Young and others for circulating “vicious” innuendo about King’s motives. King warned that Senator Robert Kennedy might at most defend his right to speak, far short of endorsing his ideas on Vietnam or China. A close student of journalism, he also cautioned that war criticism was inherently personal, which risked triggering latent condescension toward Negroes. “Once the press takes a negative position to you,” he said, “they are very slow to support you.” He predicted that character defenses for war dissent “will get very little play.”
The advisers agreed that Vietnam negotiations should be promoted by surrogates rather than King himself. Stanley Levison and Clarence Jones, who had not been present for the Goldberg meeting, privately criticized Wachtel and Rustin for letting King add the sensible but politically “insane” proposal to recognize the government of China. This idea displaced Vietnam altogether in headlines—“Dr. King Wants Red China in U.N.”—that luck
ily remained confined to back pages. On the conference call, Levison prevailed with a strategy to reduce King’s exposure on Vietnam by starving the publicity. Beginning with the Times board, King declined to explain, modify, or revoke his proposals. He stifled questions by repeating woodenly that he had said his piece on Vietnam and was returning to civil rights.
King’s regret lingered over the coming weeks. “Should I say in this speech how wrong we are in Vietnam?” he asked on a wiretapped phone line. “I think someone should outline how wrong we are. Uh, I don’t know if I’m the person to do this.” When Levison reminded him of the considered decision—“Martin, we’ve just gone over this”—King acceded. On October 5, an opaque public statement quietly withdrew his promise to send peace letters to the major world leaders, including Ho Chi Minh. King declared for the record that “certain factors bearing upon the Vietnamese situation,” including the U.N.’s “creative role” to calm the nations fighting over Kashmir, “indicated that at this time it is no longer necessary for me to adopt the course upon which I had decided.”
TWO MORE quick storms clouded the political alliance. King inadvertently delayed the lesser one six days by holding off Vice President Humphrey’s last-minute dinner invitation until his first opening for travel to Washington. (From wiretaps, FBI executives labeled this date-making exchange a “refusal” by King, which they branded “another example of the high-handed attitude he has taken toward top officials in Government.”) In the interim, King attended much of a weeklong SCLC staff retreat at the Quaker Penn Center on St. Helena Island, near Beaufort, South Carolina, shoring up the bedrock commitment to nonviolence. Rev. James Lawson, the roving Gandhian instructor who had prepared Nashville students for the sit-ins, led large interracial workshops. There were spirited arguments about priorities at an odd juncture of giddy triumph and primitive gloom, with laws passed but rights advocates still targeted to a murderous extreme, like Jonathan Daniels and George Metcalfe. They debated the limits of nonviolence for battle-weary practitioners as well as for expanded targets in Northern cities and foreign wars. Singing, gathered in circles on folding chairs, King basked in the inspiration but also mentioned his escape wish to have a simple church outside the movement.
On Tuesday, September 21, heads of the major civil rights groups boarded the presidential yacht Honey Fitz for Humphrey’s cloistered “stag” dinner cruise. “For the first time in history,” integrated leadership had occasion “to enjoy some of the splendor of executive power and exchange ideas,” declared the Negro weekly Jet, whose reporters later ferreted out the menu of roast beef “topped off with peach shortcake.” The cruise began with decorum befitting patriotic scenery down the Potomac River to Mount Vernon and back. King and Whitney Young concealed their tensions over Vietnam. Andrew Young asked discreetly whether the Goldberg meeting had poisoned Johnson against King, and was assured to the contrary. When Vice President Humphrey began the after-dinner discussion with an outline of historic tasks now open to partnership, CORE director Floyd McKissick complained about slow enforcement of the big civil rights laws. Debate ensued about whether the federal registration of 43,000 new voters was a fast start or a minimal change contained within a dozen counties. The running count of desegregation plans—now submitted by all but a hundred of several thousand school districts across the Southern and border states—was arguably a breakthrough in principle, as local officials themselves renounced segregation, or mere camouflage for the tiny handful of students thus far able to brave “freedom-of-choice” integration.
McKissick attacked disconnected analysis with a fiery speech about learning that his own daughter was beaten in a recent demonstration. Freshly out of a Bogalusa jail himself, he said FBI agents still watched passively and that not much had changed. Wiley Branton, Humphrey’s aide, retorted that civil rights groups still undercut the urgent need with press releases trumpeting their own progress, to which John Morsell of the NAACP objected with vehemence that his colleagues recognized from a running insiders’ feud. Branton, former foundation director at the Atlanta-based Voter Education Project, had privately accused Morsell’s NAACP of inflating voter registration figures to boost its share of available funds. Louis Martin, the White House specialist in minority politics, further inflamed his civil rights cohorts by challenging them to bring solutions into government as well as demands from outside. He said affected agencies were eager to know what the civil rights leaders proposed to do about the sensational Moynihan report on broken Negro families. This topic escalated the dispute about what was evasion or raw truth.
Clarence Mitchell, the renowned NAACP advocate in Washington, rose angrily to point a finger at Branton. “You are colored,” he said. “You should be representing us in your job and not opposing us.” Branton retorted that Mitchell could no longer hoodwink officials about what the NAACP actually did. Bystanders traded recriminations over changing roles close to government. They carried on a verbal brawl laced with the word “traitor,” according to one anonymous participant, which “almost turned the boat over.”
The next day, President Johnson stripped Humphrey of coordinating responsibility for equal rights. The Vice President returned from the White House mystified and in shock, having been forced to sign a surprise memo in which he recommended his own removal, and Wiley Branton reluctantly accepted a staff transfer to spare Humphrey the embarrassment of his public resignation. Reporters soon questioned the effect of the coup; participants and scholars would remain puzzled over its motive. Some believed the demotion of Humphrey hurt civil rights, while others called it a promotion for the White House to take any issue from the weak office of the vice presidency, especially since Johnson considered Humphrey a bumbler. Still others diagnosed simply a cruel case of Johnson’s penchant for dominance. The civil rights leaders, fearing the worst, were consoled by evidence that the move had been planned for weeks. While it afforded some comfort that leadership quarrels seemed inscrutably human and messy at the zenith of white politics, too, the minority mood shifted uneasily into a larger fishbowl. All Humphrey’s dinner guests except John Morsell and Clarence Mitchell signed an October truce letter sent to the publisher of Jet, minimizing unseemly details that had leaked into the lone published account of the cruise. King and Whitney Young carefully denied any “yacht-wide discussion of Vietnam.”
FAR GREATER trouble erupted from a September 28 news leak that Chicago had a “green light” to receive the first federal money to be appropriated under the new Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The city’s initial share of $31 million would supplement the school budget by nearly 10 percent, the Chicago Tribune happily declared, triggering panic first in Washington. Officials at the Office of Education, who knew that Chicago had not yet even applied for funds, feared the premature announcement was a ploy by Superintendent Willis to lay claim to the money regardless of legal requirements. Documents already in private circulation suggested, accurately, that Willis had earmarked $2 million to purchase more Willis Wagons, the mobile classrooms used mostly for minority students, which would expose Washington to scandal for subsidizing the most controversial symbol of de facto segregation. Quickly, to forestall inertia, Commissioner Francis Keppel informed Willis and the Illinois school superintendent on September 30 that decisions about new payments for Chicago would be deferred until review of their submitted plans. Keppel did not mention reports that Willis intended to spend the money in two wealthy school districts, which would violate the education law. He did cite the pending complaints, filed by Al Raby and the Chicago movement in July, about acts “of discrimination in the Chicago school system which are in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.” Clearly seeking a defensible settlement of responsibilities under both new laws, Keppel pressed Willis for meetings “to resolve these matters as quickly as possible.”
Willis instead convened reporters on October 2 to disclose the “despotic, alarming, and threatening” notice, which he called an illegal punishment before trial. He expressed hop
e that the Keppel letter “may serve to alert the public to the capricious and autocratic actions emanating from the federal education offices,” and political lightning in fact did flash. Chicago Representative Roman Pucinski declared within hours that his education subcommittee would never approve “another nickel” if such “arbitrary and dictatorial” abuse should stand. On October 3, at an otherwise festive occasion in New York, Mayor Daley pulled Lyndon Johnson aside to deliver a sputtering mad tirade against the administration’s insult to Chicago. Staff briefings feverishly assured Johnson that the Office of Education had no quarrel with Daley, who “has never liked Willis,” but the President judged it foremost a blunder that underlings had pitched Daley and himself into mutual, public embarrassment without prior notice or accommodation, let alone clearance. By the afternoon of October 4, Johnson’s special emissary reached agreement in Chicago to “restore” the $31 million while transferring the segregation complaint from Washington back to the local school board itself for evaluation, with predictable results.* Pucinski hailed complete victory as Keppel sank into bureaucratic quarantine. “I was hopeless,” he confided. “I was replaced very soon.”
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