At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  “I’ve heard nothing from President Johnson,” King admitted to reporters in Mississippi. “It’s terribly frustrating and disappointing. I don’t know what I’m going to do.” Attorney General Katzenbach had delivered the administration’s only public comment on the egregious persecutions inflicted along the march, saying he regretted the Canton attack because tear gas “always makes the situation more difficult.” A deputy White House press secretary said the President himself had “no specific reaction.” King had learned from sit-in students six years earlier that the most eloquent sermons alone could not move entrenched habits of subjugation, and that oratory must be amplified by disciplined nonviolent witness. That lesson helped ignite since Birmingham and Selma a chain reaction locked within many meanings of the word “movement,” from small personal inspiration to historic national change. “In the past, he had been able to deliver the power of response in Washington,” wrote Paul Good. “Not now…. The silent rebuff made the Nobel Prize winner just one more put-down Negro.”

  THE PSYCHOLOGY of war consumed President Johnson throughout June, when perplexity and frustration over the Vietnam death toll registered in public support numbers declining steadily from 46 percent to 40. The Joint Chiefs long had proposed to bomb petroleum storage facilities near the principal North Vietnamese cities, but Johnson withheld approval, weighing the risks of hitting Soviet ships in Haiphong harbor or diplomats in the capital of Hanoi. Military and intelligence analysts, who doubted that success would reduce supplies significantly to the battlefields in South Vietnam, gave way in policy debates to the charged image of any gallon of fuel spared for the transport of foe or matériel to kill an American soldier. Not to bomb “is to pay a higher price in U.S. casualties,” Johnson told the National Security Council on June 17. “The choice is one of military lives versus escalation.” By June 28, wrestling with final approval for bombers poised to strike, he looked again for positive assurance that “we get enough out of this for the price we pay,” but McNamara confirmed instead the relentlessly circular claims of force. “I don’t see how you can go on fighting out there, Mr. President, without doing it, to be frank with you,” he said. “I don’t see how you can keep the morale of your troops up. I don’t see how you can keep the morale of the people in the country who support you up, without doing it.”

  “Okay, Bob, go ahead,” ordered the President. That night, he violated a security pact with McNamara not to divulge the imminent attacks to his lone dinner guest. Richard Russell of Georgia threatened “a lot of trouble to us,” Johnson had warned, because the Senate’s champion of military strength still grumbled against the war as folly. Russell once proposed covert schemes to install a South Vietnamese government that would invite American defenders to leave, for instance, and had startled television viewers with his pronouncement that free elections would unify Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh. He made headlines that spring by denying the strategic value in Southeast Asia, scoffing at the fabled “domino theory,” and calling for withdrawal unless a Vietnamese survey or plebiscite legitimized an invitation to foreign troops. All Russell’s peace flares vanished quickly for lack of interest. War critics showed no inclination to make common cause with the venerable segregationist, even to follow his political lead out of Vietnam, but President Johnson courted him ardently to go in deeper—flattered him, patted his head like a country granddad, assured him yet again that their bosom intimacy from the Senate survived what Russell called “the vast chasm between our views on the misnamed civil rights issue.” At dinner, Johnson described the Meredith march as a kind of penance for his domestic break with Russell. He praised Mississippi authorities for preventing greater violence and claimed to have dispatched Martin Luther King to counteract firebrands such as Stokely Carmichael, for whom the President predicted death by assassination within ninety days.

  “He was obviously in high good humor,” Russell wrote that night in a diary memo, “and from my acquaintance with him, I decided that some policy had suddenly resolved itself favorably or that he had finally arrived at a decision on something that had been troubling him. It was the latter.” Russell realized the stakes when Johnson rolled out target maps and confided that bombers were about to take off. As the senator left, resolved to endorse a decisive commitment to arms, the President asked his converted daughter, Luci, whether any Catholic sanctuary would receive him that night. “The monks live in the church,” she replied of a parish order she knew, and called ahead to have St. Dominic’s opened to receive a stealthy prayer motorcade. Returning to the White House, Johnson stayed awake to receive ten flash relays before dawn on June 29. Walt Rostow, who had replaced McGeorge Bundy as National Security Adviser, reported black clouds spread over fifty square miles at twenty thousand feet above Haiphong. “So it looks like we burned up quite a bit of oil,” he said. From the Pentagon, Cyrus Vance advised skepticism toward the preliminary estimate of 80 percent damage to Hanoi targets. The President, braced to hear otherwise, cross-examined him about the safe return of all pilots and the strange absence of antiaircraft fire. “Thank you,” he said finally. “Let’s go to bed.”

  Four of five Americans consulted in polls believed the drastic new bombing campaign would end the war soon, and majority approval rebounded for the balance of the year. Meanwhile, military analysts confirmed secret projections that the actual flow of war matériel would recover in spite of the bombing, as the North Vietnamese dispersed not only oil supplies and transportation lines but urban families into the countryside. (The population of Hanoi dropped by December from 800,000 to 200,000.) Knowing that the Vietnamese could replace their losses indefinitely, and were doing so, American war planners counted on the psychological wear of modern airpower upon a land-bound adversary. McNamara pictured enemy soldiers under combined assault in the South, utterly devoid of flying machines for mobility or retaliation in the sky. “They also know that nobody is protecting North Vietnam,” he told Johnson, “and we have a free rein.” The mismatched punishment lured McNamara to defy his own numbers that pointed stubbornly to a savage stalemate. “The only thing that will prevent it, Mr. President, is their morale breaking,” he said. More than faith in the cause, or the steely will to marshal sacrifice, a strange identification across the line of slaughter consoled American leaders through their own dire apprehensions. “And if we hurt them enough, it isn’t so much that they don’t have more men as it is that they can’t get the men to fight,” McNamara anticipated. “I myself believe that’s the only chance we have of winning this thing…because we’re just not killing enough of them to make it impossible for the North to continue to fight. But we are killing enough to destroy the morale of those people down there, if they think this is gonna have to go on forever.”

  Ho Chi Minh responded with a national appeal on July 17, warning that “the Johnson ‘clique’” may send a million men into a war that could last twenty more years. “Hanoi, Haiphong and other cities and enterprises may be destroyed,” he said, “but the Vietnamese people will not be intimidated.” Ho advised Washington by indirect channels that much of his population had never known anything but war. Weakened by lung disease at age seventy-six, he called for mobilization of reserves in words that soon would be carved on his mausoleum: “Nothing is more important than independence and freedom.”

  Beyond males of every age, some 1.5 million North Vietnamese women formed combat and support brigades that included air defense units. By 1967, seven thousand antiaircraft batteries, two hundred missile sites, and a meager hundred airplanes would oppose U.S. bombers overhead. The government already celebrated as a patriotic heroine twenty-year-old Ngo Thi Tuyen, who would defend and repair the Dragon’s Jaw Bridge under perpetual bombardment until laser-guided American bombs wiped out the vulnerable link of Highway 1 in 1972. Nhan Dan, the Communist newspaper, acknowledged “feudal” resistance to the policy of equal advancement: “Many Party members do not wish to admit women because although they think that they are courageous and diligent, they also b
elieve that ‘women cannot lead but must be led.’”

  Ho Chi Minh’s call generated 170,000 emergency youth troops, nearly all girls, who marched south with knapsacks, cooking pots, and shovels to maintain the heavily bombed Ho Chi Minh Trail. Vu Thi Vinh said she defied her parents, lied about her age to join at fifteen, and wrote competitive essays to be selected for “dare to die” teams that defused unexploded ordnance. A cohort volunteered even though she loathed socialism and the “peasants” running the government. “Many of us temporarily lost our hair from malaria,” recalled Nguyen Thi Kim, “and living in the jungle for so many years made us look terrible.” By 1975, the emergency troops had shepherded war matériel south and an estimated 700,000 wounded soldiers back to North Vietnam, while helping air defenders bring down some of the 8,558 U.S. aircraft lost in Southeast Asia. Women survivors, who often would be left sterile, disfigured, and bitterly alone in a society that treasured the extended family, adapted to unspeakable carnage in war. “It was terrible,” said volunteer Le Minh Khue, “but we were young and we made jokes.” They arranged work choruses according to a proverb that songs are louder than bombs, and made up nicknames for dreaded jets such as the “genie of thunder” F-105. “When the helicopters dropped soldiers,” a female veteran observed of American deployments, “they looked like dragonflies laying eggs.”

  AMERICAN WOMEN stirred politically on the day U.S. bombers first struck Hanoi and Haiphong. A small caucus convened over a seminal speech that accused the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission of trivializing the legal rights accorded women two years earlier by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Rep. Martha Griffiths of Michigan said the EEOC had reduced thousands of sex discrimination complaints to amusing asides, wondering in its newsletter whether punishment could reach employers who refused to hire “a woman as a dog warden or a man as a ‘house mother’ for a college sorority house.” She cited two exceptions to prove the rule of heedless condescension. First, the EEOC had just allowed “Help Wanted Male” and “Help Wanted Female” advertising sections to continue in newspapers nationwide, with a declaration that the separation rested on a lawful intent to “obtain a maximum reader response and not on a desire to exclude applicants of a particular sex.” Griffiths called this precedent a capitulation to the newspaper lobby as well as a transparent contradiction of the EEOC’s moves to abolish separate job listings by race, and she denounced no less sharply a second sex discrimination case in which the EEOC reserved BFOQ (bona fide occupational qualification) status for the airline industry’s policy of firing any stewardess who married or reached the age of thirty-three. “Is it because the Commission does not want to recognize that women’s rights are human rights?” she asked on the House floor. “Or is it an unconscious desire to alienate women from the Negroes’ civil rights movement? Human rights cannot be divided into competitive pieces.”

  Tempers flared in the June 29 caucus at the Washington Hilton Hotel. Legal strategist Pauli Murray among others proposed a new organization modeled on the NAACP to push for gender equity in the enforcement of Title VII, but some dissenters felt the parallel would diminish women. Several women with influential positions believed they could seek parity more effectively within regular channels, and others argued that a self-proclaimed women’s lobby would be perceived as arrogant and unprofessional. The last point was too much for Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, who had been recruited as an independent voice. “Get out! Get out!” Friedan cried. “This is my room and my liquor!” The quarreling confederates fell back on plans to petition the state and federal agencies represented at the Third National Conference of Commissions on the Status of Women, but overtures were rebuffed the next morning as improper for advisory bodies and government employees.

  By noon on June 30, Dr. Kay Clarenbach of Wisconsin led a handful of well-tailored but chagrinned moderates to concede that the activists may have been correct, and Friedan made up for shortcomings in collaborative tact with her facile pen, sketching on a lunch napkin the consensus brief for an ad hoc civil rights group “…to take the actions needed to bring women into the mainstream of American society, now, full equality for women, in fully equal partnership with men. NOW. The National Organization for Women.” Twenty-eight charter members contributed $5 toward the initial expenses. The founding announcement in October drew no major press notice until November 22, when the New York Times covered a repeat performance by Friedan on the fashion page beneath Thanksgiving recipes: “Speaking in a gravelly alto from the depths of the large fur collar that trimmed her neat black suit, the ebullient author suggested that women today were ‘in relatively little position to influence or control major decisions. But,’ she added, leaning forward in the lilac velvet Victorian chair and punching the air as if it were something palpable, ‘what women do have is the vote.’”

  To protest government inaction, NOW members first carried giant balls of red tape on thin picket lines. Martha Griffiths, their forerunner and inspiration, spoke sometimes as brashly as Diane Nash or Stokely Carmichael on the Freedom Rides. “If you are trying to run a whorehouse in the sky,” she told airline executives at a congressional hearing, “then get a license.” Too slowly for participants, but swiftly relative to the antecedent momentum in race relations, a new women’s movement coalesced to transform daily life through politics.

  CHAPTER 30

  Chicago

  July–August 1966

  BLACK power followed the civil rights movement up the Mississippi River heartland, from the Delta’s primitive soil to Chicago’s granite expanse. Hosea Williams stayed behind in Grenada, where police outside the jail clubbed three hundred people to break up a sympathy vigil for forty-three others arrested earlier, and King charged publicly that local officials had reneged on “every promise made” during the Meredith march. Headlines favored the new national controversy—“CORE Hears Cries of ‘Black Power,’” “Black Nationalists Gain More Attention in Harlem,” “NAACP Head Warns ‘Black Power’ Means ‘Black Death’”—which framed the front-page coverage even for Chicago’s grand kickoff rally on July 10: “Dr. King and CORE Chief Act to Heal Rights Breach.” Floyd McKissick trimmed his speech at Soldier Field to fit a movement trumpeted with warm-up music that ranged from the Singing Nuns of Mundelein College to blues legend B. B. King. Reporters chased a roving band of the Blackstone Rangers gang to photograph their black power banner. A white limousine delivered Martin Luther King, who spoke under a parasol in clammy 98 degree heat. His children begged to see the headquarters of the famous Mayor Daley, but three-year-old Bunny collapsed on Andrew Young’s shoulders before the baked remnant of five thousand walked three miles downtown. She slept while King ceremoniously taped the parchment of fourteen demands to a locked door at City Hall.

  Mayor Richard Daley once again bracketed the challenge with official events. He announced one day before the rally that Chicago had moved to repair 102,847 apartments in 9,226 substandard buildings so far, with housing fines double those of the previous year, then hosted preliminary negotiations two days later on July 11. King conceded Daley’s evasive points that slum conditions existed in every major city and had preceded his administration, but declined entreaties to join or critique the local abatement drive. Likewise, Daley endorsed King’s goal but avoided comment on his “Open City” demands for integrated housing and employment. With each side firmly refusing to be drawn into the other’s agenda, the mayor complained of nonconstructive pressure and emerged ever the booster for Chicago—“We will expand our programs”—while King called for nonviolent direct action to reveal “the depth and dimensions of the problem.” James Bevel and Bernard Lafayette were leading drills for five hundred nonviolent volunteers to be deployed the next day, but a pothole intervened on the Near West Side corner of Roosevelt and Throop.

  While calling for roadside assistance, the driver of an ice cream truck saw children dart from his paralyzed vehicle with purloined treats, and he told the first arriving police that the culprits
were playing in the spray from nearby fire hydrants. Officers shut them off, drawing protest from adults who cited long-standing tradition and pointed to gushing hydrants only three blocks north. Beneath a crossfire of shouts—that the Italian neighborhood was in a different police precinct, with no reported ice cream thieves, versus complaints that three of the four closest swimming pools were off-limits to black residents—a sporadic duel of wrenches turned the hydrants on and off until officers arrested Donald Henry, who appealed to the gathering crowd: “Why don’t you do something about it?” A cascade of curses, splashes, and rocks brought thirty backup police cruisers. Broken windows radiated from street reports of black children whacked with truncheons for trying to cool themselves.

  King and Coretta, on their way to a mass meeting, detoured around jolting sights of zigzag marauders and a crescendo of sirens. Confused reports filtered into Shiloh Baptist Church about the terms set by gang leaders to parley about the ongoing violence—expulsion of white people from the church and/or proof that prisoners were alive. Responding to the latter, King made his way with gospel singer Mahalia Jackson to the 12th District police station and negotiated the release of six battered teenagers who presented their own grievances to a tumultuous Shiloh crowd, chiefly police brutality and the lack of playgrounds or swimming pools. King preached against riots and halfhearted reform. “It’s like improving the food in a prison,” he said. “One day that man wants to get out of prison.” He invoked President Kennedy on the urgency of the movement—“those who will make this peaceful revolution impossible will make a violent revolution inevitable”—and confessed his own anguish: “We have stood up for nonviolence with all our hearts…. I need help. I need some victories. I need some concessions.” For once he could not hold an audience against hecklers inside and the noise of urban chaos beyond the walls. Hundreds of young people stalked out. At a roadblock of garbage cans on Ashland Avenue, gang members shattered windows on a car and surrounded the occupants until Bill Clark of the West Side Organization jumped among them, pointing to familiar faces and shouting, “You gotta beat me if you’re going to beat these guys.” Rev. Archie Hargraves and Al Sampson of SCLC joined Clark in a human shield around three terrified Puerto Rican men. Nearly all night, leaders from the Chicago movement coalition roamed at their own peril with pleas for angry people to go home.