American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  On the other hand, Kennedy was a seasoned and sophisticated politician who loved to prick banalities and challenge shibboleths. Believing more in the “confusion theory” of history than the “conspiracy theory,” he did not conjure up terrifying images of the Soviet Politburo sitting at the center of a web of world power and masterminding grand strategies for the military conquest of the West; indeed, tension between Moscow and Peking in these very years was refuting the theory of monistic communist power. As for the threat from Republican and other war hawks, he knew that at times presidential politicians must take risks in order to pursue responsible policies. And after all, who had won fame for a book called Profiles in Courage?

  Kennedy’s response to his own intellectual dilemma was reflected in the diversity of advisers he consulted. On Vietnam policy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Defense Secretary McNamara, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, Walt W. Rostow, and most of the military leaders were generally hawkish, at least initially; George Ball of the State Department, Chester Bowles, Averell Harriman, and Galbraith were decidedly dovish. Some of Kennedy’s advisers shared his view that the United States must recognize and even aid the revolutionary forces that were rising out of the peasant villages of Asia; others shared his view that the Indochinese revolutions were not good revolutions of the American or even the French variety, but malevolent revolutions of Marxist inspiration and Leninist strategy.

  The result was a tendency on Kennedy’s part to take the middle ground between strategies and advisers on the day-to-day problems that inexorably surfaced. Thus between those who argued for a heavy military commitment in Vietnam and those for a minimal one, he initially sent to Vietnam 400 soldiers from the Special Forces and 100 additional military advisers; and at the same time authorized secret warfare against North Vietnam by South Vietnamese trained and directed by the CIA and the Special Forces. He evaded a negotiated settlement but also spoke of the danger of escalation. He devoutly wished to win the allegiance of the peasants of Indochina but his Special Forces used tactics of defoliation, flesh-burning napalm, and forced penning of farmers in “strategic hamlets” that gained countless recruits for the communist adversary. He wanted Diem toppled but feared to take overt steps; his signal to Vietnamese generals that the United States would not “thwart a change of government” spurred a coup, but he was sickened by Diem’s brutal assassination. Each of the middle-of-the-road steps in fact pulled the Administration deeper into the Vietnam morass— but without the debate and decision, both comprehensive and focused, that at the least might have prepared the American people for the perils ahead.

  As he entered his third summer in the White House, John Kennedy’s progress in defining the dimensions and prospects of popular aspirations for freedom in the Third World was lagging far behind the benign rhetoric of 1960 and 1961. He and most of his advisers had assumed that peoples like the Cubans and the Vietnamese aspired at least as strongly to Western-style liberal constitutional procedures and Bill of Rights protections as they did to national independence and to revolutionary concepts of social and political equality. Chester Bowles, a key drafter of Roosevelt’s “Economic Bill of Rights” during the war and ambassador to India under Truman, had as Under Secretary of Stale in the Kennedy Administration a firsthand view of the White House “realists” who had made error after error in dealing with Third World nations. Exiled back to New Delhi in 1963 as a fuzzy-minded idealist, Bowles went off with the dismal conclusion that the Kennedy Administration had fallen far short of his hopes. He had found “almost no intellectual leadership that has seriously challenged the conventional wisdom or ventured beyond the limited and now inadequate concepts of the New Deal.”

  Even sterner challenges to Kennedy’s and Johnson’s intellectual leadership lay ahead, at the hands of some of their fellow Americans.

  PART III

  Liberation Struggles

  CHAPTER 8

  Striding Toward Freedom

  DURING THE KINDLING TIMES of the 196os hitherto little-known persons— blacks, women, college students, southern preachers—took moral and political leadership of the nation in boldly claiming their civil rights. For a few brief shining years, neighborhood people challenged authority, aroused the consciousness of followers as to their true needs, and spurred the conscience of their fellow Americans. Day after day, for weeks at a time, the national media—especially television and the picture magazines— brought into tens of millions of homes images of helmeted troops with upraised clubs, snarling police dogs lunging at protesters, black persons kneeling in prayer for their persecutors as well as for themselves. The black protesters—and the student and women activists who would follow—for a decade would stir the conscience of the nation.

  This assumption of leadership by the poor and the persecuted stood in sharp contrast to the nation’s policy making during previous decades. Franklin Roosevelt had come into office with little mandate from the people for programs except to “do something, anything” about the depression. New Deal policies were responses far less to local or regional initiatives than to proposals of Washington politicians and intellectuals who in turn drew from a bank of ideas built by liberal and left leaders of the progressive and Wilson eras. Truman’s initiatives such as the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan were responses to urgent appeals from abroad and to war experience, in an atmosphere of rising cold war hostility, and they led and shaped, rather than followed, public opinion. The Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision in 1954 was a result more of the justices’ collective conscience and practical wisdom than of nascent popular pressure; indeed, that decision in Brown would doubtless have failed of passage if it had been offered to the American electorate in the form of a national referendum.

  A renowned political economist, Joseph Schumpeter, wrote in the early 1940s that the people do not rule in democracies. The democratic method, he said, was “that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.” People did not autonomously take initiatives, organize themselves, and direct policy. This was a provoking contradiction to the great American faith in Lincoln’s “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

  Schumpeter’s observation was in fact only a half-truth. Historians could point to countless examples of spontaneous leadership by community or group activists in labor conflicts, populist upheavals, revolutionary situations. On a national scale Gandhi was showing, even as Schumpeter wrote, that a leader’s deep involvement with his followers could give them, in Erik Erikson’s words, a sense of participation that would raise them to power.

  But that was India. Had Americans become so manipulated from above, so enervated politically—had the national and state and even city governments become so distant and the presidency so powerful and all-encompassing—that people in their neighborhoods and communities could no longer take their futures into their own hands? Had the vaunted old frontier spirit, the populist rebelliousness, the famous community “get up and go” disappeared from American life? If collective action was necessary, how broad—reaching out to which groups and movements and regions and parties and national leaderships—must that collective action be? Or would heroic individual action be enough to get results?

  The protesters of the 1960s responded with actions as well as words.

  Onward, Christian Soldiers

  Dusk had fallen on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks, a tailor’s assistant, finished her long day’s work in a large department store in Montgomery, the capital of Alabama and the first capital of the Confederacy. While heading for the bus stop across Court Square, which had once been a center of slave auctions, she observed the dangling Christmas lights and a bright banner reading “Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men.” After paying her bus fare she settled down in a row between the “whites only” section and the rear seats, according to the custom that blacks could sit in the middle section if t
he back was filled.

  When a white man boarded the bus, the driver ordered Rosa Parks and three other black passengers to the rear so that the man could sit. The three other blacks stood up; Parks did not budge. Then the threats, the summoning of the police, the arrest, the quick conviction, incarceration. Through it all Rosa Parks felt little fear. She had had enough.

  “The time had just come when I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed,” she said later. “I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen.” Besides, her feet hurt.

  The time had come … Rosa Parks’s was a heroic act of defiance, an individual act of leadership. But it was not wholly spontaneous, nor did she act alone. Long active in the civil rights effort, she had taken part in an integration workshop in Tennessee at the Highlander Folk School, an important training center for southern community activists and labor organizers. There Parks “found out for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society.” There she had gained strength “to persevere in my work for freedom.” Later she had served for years as a leader in the Montgomery and Alabama NAACP. Her bus arrest was by no means her first brush with authority; indeed, a decade earlier this same driver had ejected her for refusing to enter through the back door.

  Rosa Parks’s support group quickly mobilized. E. D. Nixon, long a militant leader of the local NAACP and the regional Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, rushed to the jail to bail her out. Nixon had been waiting for just such a test case to challenge the constitutionality of the bus segregation law. Three Montgomery women had been arrested for similar “crimes” in the past year, but the city, in order to avoid just such a challenge, had not pursued the charge. With Rosa Parks the city blundered, and from Nixon’s point of view, she was the ideal victim—no one commanded more respect in the black community.

  Word of Rosa Parks’s arrest sped through black Montgomery. The Women’s Political Council, a civil rights group of black professional women, had been talking for months about a bus boycott. This was the time. Soon members were handing out leaflets and conferring with Nixon, who agreed to lead the effort. When he arrived home that evening he took a sheet of paper and drew a rough sketch of the city, measuring distances with a slide rule. He found that people could walk to work from anywhere in Montgomery if they wanted to. He said to his wife, “We can beat this thing.”

  Nixon realized, though, that the boycott could not succeed without the united support of the black ministers, the most influential black leaders in Montgomery as elsewhere. He called them one by one, starting with Ralph Abernathy, the passionate young pastor of the Baptist church Parks attended, a man with an earthy sense of humor and a “gift of laughing people into positive action.” Abernathy was enthusiastic. Third on the list was twenty-six-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr., minister of the Dexter Street Baptist Church, hardly more than a stone’s throw from the gleaming white state office buildings surrounding the Capitol.

  King had grown up in Atlanta, Georgia, a hundred fifty miles to the northeast, the son of a prosperous minister of one of the largest Baptist congregations in the nation. “Daddy” King had long been indignant over segregation; he had led efforts against discrimination as early as the 1930s, including a voting rights march to city hall. Though he ruled his home “like a fierce Old Testament patriarch” and often whipped his kids, Martin Jr. called him “a real father to me.” Martin, the second child and first son, showed extraordinary gifts. He seemed to excel at everything—school-work, sports (especially wrestling), dancing, debate, oratory. From age six he soloed hymns at church services and conventions, and by his early teens his voice had matured into a rich, deep baritone that awed his listeners in song or speech.

  Pricked by the thorns of segregation but steadied by his mother’s counsel to believe he was “somebody,” young King resolved to improve the lives of black people. At first he rebelled against Daddy King’s demand that he follow in his ministerial footsteps, but he changed his mind and served as assistant pastor in his father’s church. Later he graduated from Atlanta’s Morehouse College, attended Crozer Seminary in Pennsylvania, and earned his doctorate at Boston University. During these years King read Niebuhr, whose paradoxes fascinated him; Marx, whose materialism alienated him; and especially Walter Rauschenbusch, whose belief in a Christian commonwealth on earth, loving, spiritual, sharing, stirred his imagination. The young theologian searched for ways in which these ideas and those of the great Western philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle to Mill and Locke, could be converted to effective methods of social change. Hired to take over the Montgomery church, he moved there with his wife, Coretta Scott King, a gifted singer who had given up a musical career to marry him.

  In the eyes of Montgomery blacks, King was no zealot. His church was a respectable one, with a largely middle-class congregation, and though he had gained a reputation for being a social activist, he had just turned down a chance to head the local NAACP. But King’s brothers and sisters throughout Montgomery were already leading the way. Nixon had set up a meeting of black ministers and community leaders at King’s church. Women’s Political Council activists and ministers then spread word of the bus boycott to Montgomery’s 50,000 blacks over the weekend, especially at church services. Monday morning thousands were driven to work in black cabs with specially cut rates, or rode mules or horses, or walked. Barely a dozen blacks rode buses. The Montgomery Improvement Association was formed to coordinate efforts, but it was left to a mass meeting to decide whether the boycott would continue. And King, who had, to his surprise and despite his reluctance, been drafted to head the MIA, would address it.

  So fast were events moving that King had only twenty minutes to prepare what he believed would be the most decisive speech of his life—one that must not only fire up his audience but blend militance with moderation. Almost paralyzed by feelings of anxiety and inadequacy, he prayed; he had time only to sketch a mental outline and tore off to the church. He found it overflowing. As the meeting opened the powerful refrains of “Onward, Christian Soldiers” swelled through the church and outside, where three or four thousand people stood patiently in the cold night listening to the meeting through loudspeakers. After prayers and scripture readings, King walked to the pulpit.

  He gazed out at the audience, at the people crowded onto the floor and the balcony, at the television cameras. Speaking without notes, he told, simply but passionately, the story of Rosa Parks and others who had been mistreated on the buses. He exhorted the boycotters to use persuasion, not coercion, and ended: “If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, ‘There lived a great people—a black people—who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.’ This is our challenge and our overwhelming responsibility.” His electrifying words brought waves of applause, which rose again when Rosa Parks was presented. Abernathy read the boycott demands, to more wild cheering. This was, King wrote later, the first great meeting of the freedom movement.

  The city responded by forbidding black taxis to lower their fares. Undaunted, the boycott organizers set up an efficient car-pool system modeled on a similar Baton Rouge action two years before. A small army of ministers, businesspeople, teachers, laborers, and others, driving cars and dusty pickups and shiny new church-owned station wagons, collected passengers at forty-eight dispatch stations to carry them to work. Hymns wafted out of car windows as the “rolling churches” crisscrossed the city with what arch-segregationists at a White Citizens’ Council meeting glumly admitted was “military precision.” Some blacks preferred to walk. Mother Pollard vowed to King that she would walk until it was over.

  “But aren’t your feet tired?” King asked her.

  “Yes,” she said, “my feet is tired, but my soul is rested.”

  As mass meetings were rotated among churches, ministers took turns giving
rousing talks to maintain militance. But it was a carefully controlled militance. King had been fascinated by nonviolent doctrines ever since reading Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience at Morehouse and then studying Gandhi’s Autobiography at Crozer, but it was all intellectual until Rosa Parks made it come alive for him. Tutored also by the pacific reflections of Rauschenbusch and the advice in person of Bayard Rustin and others, King now got a quick education in the practice of satyagraha, or truth force. With his fellow ministers King toured the church meetings, turning them into schools of “Christianity in action,” nonviolent resistance, and direct-action techniques.

  Victory came, slow and hard. City officials, fighting every inch of the way, sought to divide the boycott leaders from one another, concocted a bogus settlement, and prosecuted King and hundreds of others. Moments arose during the year-long boycott when black commitment to tactical nonviolence was sorely tested by bombings of homes and churches. But the boycott was still going strong when on a climactic day in November 1956 the city won an injunction to shut down the car pools, the boycott’s circulatory system, while the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a prior ruling of the federal court in Montgomery that the city and state bus laws were unconstitutional.

  Four days before Christmas 8,000 souls voted to end the boycott, the largest and longest protest by black people in the nation’s history to that date. Soon the desegregated buses were moving smoothly despite sporadic acts of violence. Martin Luther King, Jr., emerged from the ordeal the most prominent black leader since Booker T. Washington, a man of quite different ideological cast. The freedom movement appeared to have taken off.