President Wilson had a real and long history of stroke and suffered a massive seizure in California while campaigning for Senate ratification of the peace treaty and the League of Nations after World War I. Thereafter he lay paralyzed, unable to speak or move. Johnson was frightened because he was certain that he would have such a stroke and suffer the same disability. Now in the dark he walked to Wilson’s portrait in the Red Room, which was painted late in his presidency and recorded the great strains of his presidency. Kearns wrote that Johnson “found something soothing in the act of touching Wilson’s picture; he could sleep again. He was still Lyndon Johnson and he was still alive and moving; it was Woodrow Wilson who was dead.”
Some nights, especially early in 1968, he was unable to sleep for another reason. “I lay awake picturing my boys flying around North Vietnam.” He had personally picked their bombing targets that day. “What if one of those targets you picked today triggers off Russia or China? … Or suppose one of my boys misses his mark … [and] one of his bombs falls on one of those Russian ships in the harbor?” He would picture himself lying on a battlefield in Danang when an American plane was shot down. “I saw it hit the ground, and as soon as it burst into flames, I couldn’t stand it any more. I knew that one of my boys must have been killed.” He jumped out of bed, put on his robe, and with the flashlight found his way to the Situation Room in the White House basement.
At 3 a.m. the Situation Room, which worked around the clock, buzzed with activity. Five or six professionals from the Pentagon and the CIA monitored the heavy inflow of military messages. As the data changed, they put markings on a giant map on the wall. It was here too that Johnson followed another deployment of “his boys,” the Marines in the bloody battle for Khe Sanh.
Lyndon Johnson, Kearns found, had long struggled with paranoia. When the war was young and he expected a quick victory, he toyed with the opposition. In 1965 he said to Fulbright, “Well, Bill, what have you been doing today to damage the Republic? … Now you tell your wife I love her and I am sorry you’re so damned cranky and grouchy all the time.” By early 1968, when the war had become a catastrophe, he would deliver false and poisonous attacks on his presumed enemies—the intellectuals, the big-city press, the TV networks, the liberals, and the Kennedys. “To believe oneself the target of a giant conspiracy,” Kearns wrote, “was such a leap into unreason that it could only mean some disintegration of Johnson’s thought, that the barriers separating thought and delusion were crumbling.”
Samples: “No matter what anyone said, I knew that the people out there loved me. … Deep down I knew—I simply knew—that the American people loved me.” “The problem is that I was sabotaged. Look what happened whenever I went to make a speech about the war. … The St. Louis Post-Dispatch or the Boston Globe or CBS News would get on me over and over … and pretty soon the people began to wonder. … They began to think that I might be wrong about the war.” “Two or three intellectuals started it all. … And it spread … until it appeared as if the people were against the war. Then Bobby began taking it up as his cause and with Martin Luther King on his payroll he went around stirring up the Negroes. … Then the Communists stepped in. They control the three networks, you know, and the forty major outlets of communication. It’s all in the FBI reports.”
Johnson had a captive audience for these delusions—the White House staff. “They listened to the President’s name-calling,” Kearns wrote, “[and] were frightened by what seemed … signs of paranoia. … [His] voice would become intense and low-keyed. He would laugh inappropriately.” He would open a meeting this way: “Why aren’t you out there fighting against my enemies?” But none of them dared tell their commander-in-chief that he had delusions.
Despite these difficulties, by the end of March 1968 Clark Clifford prevailed; he turned the President away from the comforting fantasies of his paranoia to face the hard realities of the war. While one cannot pinpoint the exact moment of Johnson’s shift, it had to be some time between Wednesday evening, March 27, and Friday morning, March 29. On Wednesday evening Johnson met alone with Mansfield for three and a half hours. He read parts of the speech draft he then had to the senator and it contained nothing about halting the bombing. “I thought,” Mansfield said, “it would be a mistake to make the speech because it offered no hope to the people and it only indicated a further involvement.” While Johnson mentioned the possibility of stopping the bombing, he clearly had not made that decision. By Friday morning, as McPherson learned, Johnson was working on a “peace” draft of the speech calling for a reduction in the bombing. Perhaps he finally listened to Mansfield.
The Clifford strategy was concerned solely with Vietnam. But Johnson added something himself—withdrawal from the presidential race. By making this change, he gave himself a rationalization for his action on Vietnam.
The speech was scheduled for broadcast at 9 p.m. on Sunday, March 31. The President devoted much time to the address on Friday and Saturday, particularly his renunciation of the presidency, going over it with Horace Busby, his press officer George Christian, and his wife, who read it for the “umpteenth time.”
The Johnsons arose early on Sunday to greet Lynda, who had just seen her husband off to Vietnam in California, and then had flown home on a red-eye special. Her mother thought she looked like a “ghost.” After breakfast they went for mass to St. Dominic’s, which the President found “simple and restful” for prayer. They then stopped at the Humphreys to inform the Vice President of the decision to step aside and to say goodbye before they left for Mexico City. Then back to the speech with Busby. Arthur and Mathilde Krim (he was a motion-picture executive and Democratic wheel) were close friends who were staying at the White House. Johnson read them the renunciation and Krim tried to dissuade him from going through with it. He pointed out that he could no longer unite the country. Again to the speech. At 8:10 p.m. he gave it to his secretary to put on the teleprompter. At 8:40, as he finished dressing, Walt Rostow and Clark Clifford arrived and he showed them the final paragraphs. Rostow was silent. Clifford said, “After what you’ve been through, you are entitled to make this decision.”
They walked to the Oval Office, which was strewn with cameras and cables. The President was surrounded by people he loved—Lady Bird, Luci and her husband, the Krims, the Cliffords, the Rostows, Marvin Watson, and George Christian, who brought in the small White House press corps. Just before he went on the air, Lady Bird walked to him and said, “Remember—pacing and drama.” He began to speak at 9:01.
“Tonight,” the President opened, “I want to speak to you of peace in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.” In order to promote talks, he was “unilaterally” ordering a cessation of bombing of North Vietnam except in the area immediately above the demilitarized zone. He was ready to send his negotiators “to any forum, at any time, to discuss the means of bringing this ugly war to an end.” The American team would be headed by Averell Harriman. He called upon Ho Chi Minh to “respond positively, and favorably, to this new step toward peace.” Further, the U.S. was “prepared to withdraw our forces from South Vietnam as the other side withdraws its forces to the north, stops the infiltration, and the level of violence thus subsides.”
The strength of America, Johnson said, lay in the “unity of our people first. I have put it ahead of any divisive partisanship.” Now “there is division in the American house.” He called upon Americans to “guard against divisiveness and all its ugly consequences.” Thus, “I should not permit the Presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year.”
The concluding paragraphs, which were all that most Americans paid attention to, were:
With America’s sons in the fields far away, with America’s future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world’s hopes in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office—th
e Presidency of your country.
Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President.
The President, Theodore White wrote, was “poised, smooth and collected” as he delivered this speech. He seemed utterly different from the man White had interviewed five days earlier. Perhaps it was “inner peace” or “the cosmetician’s art.”
The peroration was an artfully contrived argument. The President was not leaving because, as he said privately, he was no longer able to unite the country. Rather, he said that he must avoid a partisan race in order to use every moment that remained to him to gain peace in Vietnam.
Clifford, reflecting on the “stunning event I had just witnessed, had two deep regrets.” One was that Johnson should have withdrawn earlier and have separated that decision from the war. By putting them together he led many to draw the conclusion that he was being driven out of the White House by Tet (and Bobby Kennedy). His other and more basic regret was that Johnson had made a “grievous error” by failing to inform his closest advisers. “Had I known that the President would be a lame duck with ten months left in office, I would have argued for a full bombing cessation.” He might have persuaded Rusk to go along.4
The immediate reaction to the President’s speech from his friends, Congress, the press, and the public was very favorable, in some quarters euphoric. But it was fleeting. This was because in three critical areas—the war, race, and the presidential campaign—it had no visible impact and that fact became quickly evident.
Hanoi, convinced that Tet had shaken U.S. resolve, had decided on a settlement dialogue prior to the speech. Thus, Ho quickly took up Johnson’s offer to meet. An American delegation headed by Harriman and a North Vietnamese under Xuan Thuy, an official of the second rank, sat down in Paris on May 10, 1968. With occasional moments of hope which were quickly dashed, they would sit there for five years listening to each other’s endlessly repeated and irreconcilable arguments. The U.S. demanded that the North Vietnamese withdraw from South Vietnam and rejected Vietcong participation in the Saigon government; the North Vietnamese insisted that the U.S. pull out of South Vietnam and that the Vietcong become part of the government of South Vietnam. Neither side would give.
In America the President’s speech was widely considered to be the “turning point” in the war. This was a fiction. In fact, the meetings in Paris were window-dressing. The stalemate in the war solidified and the nine months of fighting following the speech were the deadliest. On April 1 Westmoreland ordered his commanders to put “maximum pressure” on the enemy, and that same day Hanoi’s high command directed its troops to “intensify” their attacks. There were major Communist offensives in May and August. In the short period between May 5 and 18 alone 1800 Americans were killed, double the rate of Tet, and 18,000 were seriously wounded. The U.S. estimated the enemy killed at over 43,000.
Ronald H. Spector wrote,
The nine months following LBJ’s historic speech saw the fiercest fighting of the war. From January to July 1968 the overall rate of men killed in Vietnam would reach an all time high and would exceed the rate for the Korean War and the Mediterranean and Pacific theaters during World War II. This was truly the bloodiest phase of the Vietnam War. …
Even while American forces were experiencing greater success on the battlefield and in the contest for the countryside, American GIs were beginning to show signs of coming apart under the continued strain of fighting a costly stalemated war for objectives that were never clear or compelling. It was during 1968 that the U.S. forces began seriously to encounter the problems related to racial tensions and drug abuse which were to lead to their near disintegration in 1971 and 1972. …5
In the early months of 1968 Martin Luther King was deeply depressed and he spoke frequently, in public as well as privately, about his imminent death. His Chicago campaign to desegregate the schools and open up housing had failed. His attack on the Vietnam War had gotten nowhere and had earned him widespread denunciation. His Southern Christian Leadership Conference was broke and was deeply divided over his idea to launch a massive poor people’s march on Washington in April 1968 for jobs and incomes.
On February 12, 1968, Lincoln’s Birthday, Local 1733 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees struck the city of Memphis for recognition, higher wages, and decent working conditions. It represented 1300 garbage collectors, virtually all black. Mayor Henry Loeb III flatly refused to deal with the union and hired strikebreakers. Many of the sanitationmen attended the Centenary Methodist Church, the pastor of which, James M. Lawson, Jr., mobilized the black community to support the strike. Lawson and King were old and dear friends. On February 23 the police used mace heavily to break up a peaceful march. “To many,” Gerold Frank wrote, “it was the moment that a labor dispute became a racial struggle.”
Lawson invited King to come to Memphis to speak out for the strikers. Though reluctant, King agreed and addressed a rousing mass meeting of 10,000 packed into Mason Temple. Lawson urged him to return to lead a march of the Memphis poor as the prelude to the march on Washington. King again assented and it was scheduled for 9 a.m. on March 28.
By that hour a huge crowd had gathered at Clayborn Temple. But King’s flight was late and it was almost 11:00 before he arrived. A group of black militants, calling themselves the Invaders after a TV program, had penetrated the crowd. They had no aversion to violence. Shortly after the march to City Hall began King heard the shattering of glass. The Invaders were smashing shop windows and looting followed. The police were on the streets in riot gear. A peaceful march degenerated into a pitched battle. For his own safety King was whisked away to a motel. By the end of the day one black youth was dead, 60 had been clubbed, and almost 300 were arrested. Troops patrolled the streets and Loeb imposed a curfew.
This experience left King despondent; he and the black community were blamed for the violence. If this was, indeed, the precursor of the poor people’s march on Washington, it was an omen of disaster. “No Memphis,” he told his friends, “no Washington.” He determined to return for a peaceful march on City Hall. It was scheduled for April 5. But he was not certain that he would come back because of his premonition of death.
James Earl Ray, like Lee Harvey Oswald, was a loser, a misfit who never found a niche for himself in American society. He was born and raised in a miserable family that lived in extreme poverty in the worn-out Illinois towns across the Mississippi from St. Louis. He hated school. The teacher’s report when he was nine read: “Attitude toward regulations: violates them all. Honesty: needs watching. Appearance: repulsive. Courtesy: seldom if ever polite.” He was kicked out for stealing. At the end of World War II he worked in a shoe tannery for a supervisor of German extraction who was an ardent Nazi. Ray hoped to get to Germany.
He enlisted in the Army right after the war and was assigned to the Quartermaster Corps in Nuremberg. His military career, Gerold Frank noted, was not distinguished, and in the end he was discharged “for ineptness and lack of adaptability for military service” and sent home from Germany in the last days of 1948.
In 1955 Ray was arrested for stealing and forging U.S. postal money orders and was sent to Leavenworth. The probation officer wrote: “He is a confirmed criminal and a menace to society when in the free world. … Just what motivates him to commit crime is not known.”
When he got out of jail Ray became an intinerant thief. In the mid-sixties he was again behind bars in the Missouri State Penitentiary with a twenty-four-year sentence. He was contemptuous of blacks, speaking of Martin “Lucifer” King or Martin Luther “Coon.” He made three attempts to escape and was successful in April 1967.
The next year Ray roamed the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, keeping his distance from the police, washing dishes in restaurants, and stealing when he needed money. On March 17, 1968, he filed a change of address card to general delivery in Atlanta. A week later Ray drove his white Mustang into the city. He had
a map with King’s home, his church, and SCLC headquarters circled. On March 27 Ray was in the Gun Rack in Birmingham asking the clerk about hunting rifles. On the 29th he was in the Long-Lewis Hardware Store in nearby Bessemer, raising similar questions. Later that day he bought a Remington .243 at the Aeromarine Supply Company in Birmingham. The next morning he exchanged it for a more powerful Remington 30.06. The press reported that King would soon be in Memphis.
On March 31 King was astonished and heartened to hear the President announce his withdrawal. He thought this opened the way to the election of a compassionate President who would save the cities and make peace in Vietnam. In his mind this increased the urgency of the poor people’s march.
On the evening of April 3 a white Mustang pulled into the New Rebel Motel in the outskirts of Memphis. Eric S. Gait registered and went to Room 34. Ray knew that King was staying at the Lorraine Motel because he read it in the Memphis Commercial Appeal and he knew that he was in Room 306 because news photographs showed him entering a door with that number. On that day Ray checked out and rented Room 5B at Mrs. Brewer’s rooming house, registering as John Willard. He drove the Mustang to the York Arms Company, where he bought a pair of Bushnell binoculars. He returned to the rooming house and carried the rifle wrapped in a bedspread and the glasses to 5B.
From the window in his room he had an unimpeded view of the Lorraine Motel, 200 feet away. In the bathroom down the hall the view was even better. King’s room, like the others, opened onto the balcony. Late that afternoon Ray watched the coming and going of the black leaders in the parking lot and on the balcony.
Around 6:00 King suggested to his friends that they go out to dinner and they began to dress. Gradually activity increased in the courtyard and on the balcony. Ray left his room with his rifle and walked the few steps to the bathroom, latching the hook when he had entered. King finished dressing and went out onto the balcony to greet friends in the courtyard below, leaning against the railing. Ray put his feet in the bathtub and steadied the muzzle of his rifle on the windowsill, taking aim at King. As King started to rise from the railing, Ray fired. The bullet ripped away King’s jaw, leaving a gaping hole and dropping him sprawled across the floor of the balcony. He died instantly.
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