But for a pragmatic would-be politician like Reagan, Goldwater’s triumph presented a nagging problem: Where did the movement go from there?
After all, you only had to read the newspaper to understand that federal spending and Soviet espionage did not exactly top the list of most Americans’ concerns. Goldwater’s followers, however many of them there might be, would be working against the public mood, not with it.
That seemed just fine with their candidate. Goldwater had never had much appeal to the faint of heart. His persona was one of adolescent rebellion, the senator bored by the conventions of the staid Senate, the Republican willing to throw rocks at no less a revered figure than Dwight David Eisenhower. “Out here in the West and Midwest, we’re not constantly harassed by the fear of what might happen,” Goldwater said. “Sure there are risks, but we’ve always taken risks.”
Long before Kennedy’s death, Goldwater’s supporters in the party were arguing for “a choice, not an echo”—the line Schlafly memorialized in her book. The choice, as they saw it, was clear. On one side were the liberals in both parties who offered appeasement abroad and statist policies at home. On the other side were conservatives who would confront the Communist menace, unchain the spirit of individual freedom in America, and return the nation to its frontier values. Had Kennedy lived, he and his campaign aides would have painted Barry as a dangerous extremist, most likely with great success. But against Kennedy, Goldwater’s critique would have garnered a kind of legitimacy from Kennedy’s own rhetoric. Again and again, Kennedy argued that the work before the country would be hard, that the country’s bright future could not be achieved without sacrifice. The progressive program he envisioned was not possible without risk. The choice in the never-to-be Goldwater/Kennedy election would have been a choice over which side’s risks were acceptable, which side’s vision was so enticing it was worth taking a chance.
But that choice had died with Kennedy. The public had learned that day in November all about the downside of risk. Now the new president was running a nonstop campaign to convince the public that the time of trauma had passed, that all was fine. With power passing from Kennedy to Johnson, the Democrats’ message had changed, and the new message was clearly what average Americans wanted to hear. Yet the Goldwater message didn’t change at all. He kept talking of imminent danger, of the nuclear war that was just around the corner, of the liberal policies of appeasement that amounted to a “suicide pact.” To believe in Goldwater’s vision was to rebel against the great national project of proving that all was right in America again. To believe in Barry Goldwater, you had to believe that things had been going wrong in America for quite some time and that things were about to get much worse. Johnson was the kindly uncle who had come in to take charge of an orphaned nation after the loss of a beloved father figure. Barry was a maniac, rushing in to say the house was burning down.
Reagan understood the rage Goldwater’s supporters felt. He shared it. In his speeches before them, he articulated that rage perfectly—so perfectly that his conservative audiences couldn’t help but rise to their feet. But he knew, by instinct and by years of training, that there were other audiences that a man in politics would have to appeal to, bigger audiences, with different wants and needs. “There is no point in saving souls in heaven,” he wrote in Where’s the Rest of Me? “If my speaking is to serve any purpose then, I must appear before listeners who don’t share my viewpoint.” He knew the same thing that the new president in Washington knew: that a preacher who wanted to win converts had to do more than scare people to death.
But no one around Goldwater seemed to know this. They didn’t seem to have much interest in converting anyone. At Goldwater’s California victory party, Reagan varied his usual speech, trying out a new theme in addition to the familiar encapsulation of outrage. He spoke of unity. “We are going to have to forget an awful lot of bitterness,” he told the crowd. “We don’t want to win a convention, we want to win an election. Let’s start making love to Democrats.” He reminded them that he had been a Democrat once, a Democrat who had worked to elect Harry Truman. This was not what the crowd wanted to hear. They booed and hissed in response.
That was the impression in Reagan’s mind as he pondered his future that summer: swooning cheers for rage, boos and hisses for “making love.”
Reagan was a true believer. He would continue to work for Goldwater, he would keep giving his red-meat speeches, he and Nancy would attend the San Francisco convention as enthusiastic supporters. He believed in the conservative movement, and he fervently hoped that its day would soon come.
But he was not ready to risk his career on it. Not yet. That same year, a new acting job came along. Reagan’s advertising executive brother, Neil, was helping to produce a TV Western called Death Valley Days, sponsored by one of his clients, the Pacific Coast Borax Company, maker of 20 Mule Team Borax and Boraxo hand cleaner. The show needed a new host, someone who could introduce the short teleplays that ran in each episode. Neil knew his brother needed work, and he tried to persuade him to take the job. As always, Reagan played hard to get, he wasn’t sure it was the part for him. But just as had happened with Johnny North, after a lunch and some ego stroking, he relented. He signed a contract committing himself to host Death Valley Days into 1966, long after the presidential election was over. What else was he supposed to do? It was “good, steady work,” his daughter Maureen would later write. Reagan “jumped at the gig.”
CHAPTER SIX
Everybody’s Scared
Summer 1964
As spring 1964 ended and summer approached, more than a thousand young Americans were heading toward Mississippi, hoping to change the world. These were the idealistic college-age volunteers for the Mississippi Summer Project, known as the Freedom Summer in the national press. From late June through August 1964, they would infiltrate the Deep South, educating black voters on their constitutional rights and helping them register to vote. In the process, they knew, they would provoke clashes with white segregationist law enforcement, clashes that would draw national attention and outrage. Most of the volunteers were white middle-class college students from the North. They knew Mississippi only as a ghastly idea. “A desert state,” Martin Luther King, Jr., had called it in his 1963 March on Washington speech, “sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression.”
But for one young man working in the Freedom Summer, it had always been a very real place. James Chaney, a native of Meridian, Mississippi, was a black man who knew what the desert state’s sun felt like. He was not a college student; he had not even finished high school. His friends and family would later say he signed up in part because he thought it would be a good way to meet girls.
When his mother asked her son if he was frightened by the work he had taken on, Chaney answered no. “Mama, that’s what’s the matter now,” he told her. “Everybody’s scared.”
Early in his presidency, Johnson welcomed civil rights leaders to the Oval Office: (left to right) Martin Luther King, Jr.; Johnson; Whitney Young; and James Farmer.
© Yoichi Okamoto/LBJ Library
It was a core belief of the civil rights movement—that fear was the problem and that fear was something that could be overcome. But Chaney was also describing the nation in which he lived. In the summer of 1964, America remained as it had been—a nation enjoying unprecedented prosperity, a nation that was firmly committed to proclaiming that everything was okay. But fear remained, unspoken, a kind of background noise. Like the buzz of an old fan in a sweltering room, it would go undetected by placid minds. But in agitated ears, it would stick and smother, until it was impossible to hear anything else. All over the country that summer, people with far fewer reasons to be scared than James Chaney had summoned fear from the background and waited for catastrophe to come.
At some point on June 21, the longest day of the year, fear most likely came to Chaney. We can only speculate as to when. Perhaps it came that morning. At the Meridian office of the civil
rights group Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), reports had come in that Mount Zion Methodist, a black church in Longdale, Mississippi, had been burned to the ground by a white mob. CORE had planned a freedom school at the church, and Mickey Schwerner, a young white northerner who headed the group’s Meridian office, wanted to find out what happened. With Chaney, and another white volunteer named Andy Goodman, he set out toward Longdale to investigate.
Chaney, the native Mississippian, drove the car. Perhaps fear first came as he and his colleagues crossed into neighboring Neshoba County, known for its heavy Ku Klux Klan activity. Or perhaps fear came in Longdale, where Chaney saw kerosene cans lying near the cold ashes of Mount Zion. “The sixty-five-year-old structure had been totally consumed,” write the journalists Seth Cagin and Philip Dray in their definitive account of the events in Neshoba County on the twenty-first of June. “All that remained was the bell, some blackened hymnals and a grotesquely twisted piece of metal that had been the roof.” Perhaps fear first came when Mount Zion’s parishioners delivered a message to Schwerner, whose activities in the county had raised the ire of its white folk: The people who did this were looking for you.
Or perhaps fear came on the long drive back toward Meridian when a police car appeared in Chaney’s rearview mirror. Or not long thereafter, when Chaney’s right rear tire gave out and the station wagon came to a halt. Or perhaps it came when the police car stopped behind the station wagon and the menacing figure of Neshoba County deputy sheriff Cecil Price emerged. Ordering the three men out of the car, Price told them that they were under arrest. It was unclear exactly what their crime was. They didn’t ask. Price was carrying the Southern policeman’s nightstick—the leather blackjack.
Behind bars in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the county seat, the men waited out the afternoon. Deputy Price had hauled them into the Neshoba County Jail and then disappeared. When the prisoners asked if they might make a phone call back to Meridian, the local jailers said no. Perhaps there in the quiet of the jail cell, as the bountiful daylight of the summer solstice slowly slipped away, fear came to James Chaney. It was an article of faith among civil rights workers never to let anyone release you from jail after sundown. You never know who’s going to come find you at night.
At ten o’clock, when full darkness had settled in, a returned Deputy Price informed his prisoners that they were free to go. The three men emerged from the jail into the thick, muddy night, free but not safe. “Now let’s see how quick y’all can get out of Neshoba County,” Deputy Price had said as they left the jail. As Chaney drove away, he could see the deputy’s headlights following behind.
Then, at the edge of town, the lights disappeared. There was only the dark countryside and the desolate road. Somewhere in the distance was the county line and then Meridian—out of sight, but there. The station wagon sped forward. Maybe the men inside thought they would be safe after all. Maybe, for a moment, their fear slipped away.
But then came headlights again, speeding toward the station wagon. Chaney, who knew what happened on dark roads in Mississippi, hit the gas. The safety of Meridian was too many miles away. Most likely out of desperation, he pulled off onto a narrow gravel road, perhaps hoping to lose his pursuer. But the headlights still followed close behind. Then, as the station wagon careened through the darkness, it was suddenly filled with a flashing red light. A police signal. Chaney pulled the station wagon to a stop on the side of the lonely highway, where the three men inside awaited another encounter with their pursuer, Deputy Price.
“I thought you were going back to Meridian if we let you out of jail,” the deputy said.
“We were going there,” Chaney offered in reply.
“Well, you sure were taking the long way around,” said Price. “Get out of the car.”
This would have been an unappealing offer, for the deputy was not alone. Shortly after Price pulled the rights workers over, a car pulled up behind him. It was packed with passengers: civilians, not police. There were six of them. And they were all white.
Price ordered his three prisoners to get into the backseat of his own vehicle. The two white men obeyed. For a moment, Chaney held back. Perhaps he was thinking about what happened to black men in Mississippi on dark roads in the dead of night. Perhaps the fear had paralyzed him. Or perhaps he was trying to summon strength.
That’s what’s the matter now. Everybody’s scared.
Then he felt Price’s leather blackjack cracking into his skull.
“WHAT DO THEY think happened? Think they got killed?”
Lyndon Johnson was on edge. It was two days later. That morning’s New York Times bore the headline from Mississippi “3 IN RIGHTS DRIVE REPORTED MISSING.” All morning, frantic relatives and fellow activists had been badgering the White House for federal assistance in the search for Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman. Johnson could see trouble coming his way. He asked an aide, Lee White, what exactly the activists’ families were suggesting. What did they think had happened to these men?
“So as far as they’re concerned,” White told him, “they just disappeared from the face of the earth. This means murder, as they see it.”
Fear over the young men’s fate had spread quickly. In the Meridian CORE office that Sunday, their colleagues began to worry when the men did not return by 4:00 P.M. as planned. They spent that afternoon calling around to local law enforcement authorities, asking if they had the men in custody. A call to the Neshoba County Jail yielded no information. No such persons, said the jailer, were in custody at that time. By nightfall, word was spreading throughout the affiliated groups of the civil rights movement and to contacts in the national press: three of their men were missing in the Mississippi night.
The next day, news came from Neshoba County that the men in fact had been held in custody there. But they had been released after dark the night before. That day, two journalists, Claude Sitton of The New York Times and Karl Fleming of Newsweek, arrived in Neshoba County to report on the missing men. In Philadelphia, Mississippi, the journalists were greeted by a crowd of hostile white locals. Sitton’s dispatch for the next day’s paper was coldly factual: “Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation began arriving here in force early tonight after the Justice Department offered a full-scale search. The Mississippi Highway Patrol issued a missing-persons bulletin, but a spokesman in Jackson indicated late today that it had no plans at present for further action.”
News editors across the country were reading these words and planning their own coverage. That meant that Neshoba County was now Johnson’s problem. He knew that the outcry from the friends and relatives of the missing men would only grow. But he remembered well the recent history—and the not-so-recent history—of the South. He was desperate to avoid a confrontation over federal authority in Mississippi.
The local authority in Mississippi, meanwhile, was disinclined to admit that the men had gone missing at all. Sitton’s dispatch quoted Deputy Price’s boss, Neshoba County sheriff L. A. Rainey. “If they’re missing,” said Rainey, “they just hid out somewhere, trying to get a lot of publicity out of it, I figure.”
“I don’t believe there’s three missing,” Mississippi senator James Eastland told Johnson on the phone that Tuesday afternoon, “I believe it’s a publicity stunt.… There’s no white organizations in that area of Mississippi. Who could possibly harm ’em?… It’ll take a crowd to make three men disappear.”
“That depends on the kind of men, Jim,” an indulgent President Johnson said. “It might take a big crowd to take three like you. I imagine it wouldn’t take many to capture me.”
Presently, their conversation was interrupted by a call from FBI director Hoover, who had details from his investigators on the scene. Some Choctaw Indians had come upon a burned-out station wagon near a swamp. “Apparently, what’s happened,” Hoover said, is “these men have been killed. Although, as I say, we can’t tell if anybody’s in there, in view of the intense heat.”
Johnson wondered if he ou
ght to send word to the missing men’s families.
“I don’t like you having to see these people,” Hoover said, “because we’re going to have more cases like this down South …”
THAT WAS WHAT Johnson feared most. The charred station wagon in the forest changed things. Now there was a picture around which the TV networks could build a story. More reporters rushed to Neshoba County. Soon the newscasts were showing the familiar Southern story: a sinister local sheriff backed by a sullen white citizenry, statements of outrage from civil rights leaders, a swarming federal presence. Hoover would have more than a hundred men in the area by week’s end. At Johnson’s urging, McNamara would mobilize members of the armed forces in the region to aid in the effort.
But still the missing workers were nowhere to be found. “Officially, at the weekend, they were missing,” wrote Newsweek; “unofficially, few doubted that they were the first martyrs of a fiery Mississippi summer.” The first, the magazine suggested, but hardly the last. “There were those in Washington who feared that the summer so grimly begun might yet end in a Federal occupation amounting to no less than a second Reconstruction.”
This was exactly the kind of talk Johnson did not want. The following week, he expected to pass the 1964 civil rights bill, an attempt to bind up the South’s wounds once and for all. Johnson’s strategy of calling the Republicans’ bluff on civil rights—“they’re either the party of Lincoln or they ain’t”—had paid off. Two months into the Southern filibuster of the bill, the Democrats had offered a new, slightly watered-down bill in hopes of attracting Republican support for breaking the southerners’ back. On June 10, the break came in a fiery speech from Republican leader Dirksen on the Senate floor in which he declared, “Stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come.” It was set to be the signal accomplishment of the Johnson presidency to date.
Landslide Page 19