by Hill, Clint
I walked the entire two-mile route alongside the car—which at least kept the blood flowing, because it was cold—and while I wore a glove on my left hand for warmth, I kept my right hand—my shooting hand—gloveless in case I suddenly needed to grab for my gun.
Shortly after the parade began, there was a lull, slowing the car almost to a complete stop, and the president spotted several band majorettes from Southwest Texas State College, his alma mater. I could hardly believe my eyes when the president opened the rear door, got out, and strode over to the young ladies to shake their hands.
We could have a foolproof security plan, but when the president himself chose to disregard it, all bets were off. Several of us rushed to surround him, urging him to get back into the car. Fortunately, he did as we asked and remained in the car for the rest of the parade.
That evening, the president and Mrs. Johnson attended all five of the Inaugural Balls. At each one LBJ made a short speech of gratitude, had a first dance with Lady Bird—who glowed adoringly at her husband all night long—and then proceeded to waltz around the room in the arms of numerous other women.
The Inauguration on January 20, 1965, was LBJ’s moment to shine, and he bathed in every drop of the glory. I don’t think he could have possibly fathomed what the future had in store for him, and how he would be tested like few presidents had ever been tested before.
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The Civil Rights President
Four days after the Inauguration, Special Agent in Charge Rufus Youngblood informed me I was being promoted to shift supervisor, with the formal title Assistant to the Special Agent in Charge (ATSAIC). Although my pay would stay the same, it was confirmation that I was doing my job well and was a respected member of the detail. I welcomed the additional responsibility.
While I had been with Mrs. Kennedy in New York for most of the previous year, the major political issues confronting President Johnson had been of little consequence to me because they had no effect on Mrs. Kennedy’s safety. Now that I was back at the White House on the president’s protective detail, however, tensions over civil rights and U.S. involvement in Vietnam were gradually escalating, and in turn, threats to the president himself had increased exponentially.
Despite being a Southerner, President Johnson was a proponent of civil rights, and in the months immediately following President Kennedy’s assassination, he had made the passage of a meaningful Civil Rights Act his primary priority. His passion stemmed from a heart-to-heart conversation he had had with one of his domestic employees, Gene Williams, a black man who had served as Johnson’s driver for many years. In the four years I spent on Johnson’s protective detail, I heard the president tell the story many times.
Back when LBJ was a senator, he’d fly back to Texas for the summer, and Gene Williams would drive the Johnsons’ car from Washington to Texas, accompanied by his wife, Helen, who was the family’s cook. One year, LBJ asked Williams to bring the family dog along with him, and when Williams balked, Johnson asked him what the problem was about bringing the dog in the car.
Williams responded, “A Negro has enough trouble getting through the South without a damn dog.”
When LBJ queried him to elaborate, Williams replied, “We drive all day, but when we want to go to the bathroom just like you all do, we have to go out a side road and our women have to get behind a tree, because we can’t go into a filling station like you do. We get hungry and we’ve got to eat just like you do, but we have to go across the tracks to a grocery store and get some cheese and crackers because we can’t go into a café. Or if some hamburger stand would take a chance on being insulted, we have to go around to the back and wait till everybody else is served to get something to eat. We drive hard all day long, and it comes to ten or eleven o’clock and Helen and I want to go to sleep. We can’t go into a motel or a hotel. We have to drive across the tracks and find some boarding house way down there where they’ll take us in for the night, because we’re not allowed in the hotels or motels. But you’re not allowed in any place, even across the tracks, if you’ve got a damn dog with you.”
Every time Johnson told the story, it nearly brought tears to his eyes. It was heartfelt. With twenty-eight years in Washington politics—having first been elected to Congress in 1937, and subsequently to the Senate in 1948—President Johnson was not only adept at navigating bills through both the House and the Senate, he also knew each and every congressman and senator on a personal basis. These personal relationships, built over nearly three decades, combined with his unmatched powers of persuasion, are what ultimately helped him pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, just seven months after becoming president.
Despite the broad reach of the Civil Rights Act, however—which prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sex, or national origin, and required equal access to public places, as well as the right to vote—some individual states continued to make it almost impossible for minorities to register to vote. Two major civil rights groups—the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, known as “Snick”)—had developed campaigns to register black voters, but their efforts were increasingly being shut down by horrific violence. President Johnson understood that without unrestricted access to the ballot, blacks and other minorities had no political power whatsoever. He had developed a good relationship with Martin Luther King Jr., and he urged King to find “the worst condition” of black folks being denied the right to vote in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, or South Carolina, and to “get it on the radio, get it on television, get it in the pulpits.” LBJ was convinced that if people all across America saw the injustice, they wouldn’t tolerate the unfairness, and that would drive the momentum to get Congress to act with legislation.
The “worst place” Dr. King found was Selma, Alabama, where less than one percent of eligible black voters were registered. King and the leaders of SCLC and SNCC organized a fifty-mile protest march from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital, despite a warning from Alabama’s governor, George Wallace, that such a march was unlawful.
President Johnson had a bank of three television sets in the Oval Office so he could monitor all three television networks at the same time, and on Sunday, March 7, he watched in horror—along with the rest of America—as Alabama state troopers, under the orders of Governor Wallace, fired tear gas into the crowd of six hundred black protestors and brutally attacked them with billy clubs as they walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.
Just as LBJ had predicted, the incident sparked outrage. In cities all across the country, blacks and whites walked together in protest over the events in Selma, demanding federal guarantees of the right to vote and the right to assemble peacefully. Police reinforcements were required to handle demonstrations in New York City, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Detroit.
In Selma, people poured in from all over the country—rabbis, nuns, priests, and sympathizers of all ages—to march with Martin Luther King on Tuesday, March 9. Once again the state troopers forced the marchers back, but this time it ended without violence. Later that night, however, a white group beat and murdered civil rights activist James Reeb, a minister from Boston, who had come to Selma to march.
Meanwhile, we were closely monitoring a group of about one thousand protestors who were marching on the north sidewalk outside the White House fence, carrying picket signs and singing “We Shall Overcome.” Pennsylvania Avenue at that time was open to traffic, and there were safety concerns as the picketers started spilling into the street, in front of cars and buses.
The National Park Service conducted public tours through the White House every morning except Sundays, Mondays, and holidays, and in 1965 all you had to do to get on one of the “come one, come all” tours was stand in line. No identification was required, and there were no magnetometers; the uniformed White House police simply did visual checks on people as they entered. On Thursday, March 11, at shortly af
ter eleven in the morning, a group of a dozen young people, blacks and whites, walked in with the regular flow of tourists, but when they reached the East Hall, they sat down in a circle on the floor and demanded to meet with President Johnson.
The chief of the White House Police, Major Ralph Stover, calmly informed the students that they could not see the president without an appointment and that by sitting there they were in violation of the law. The students had no intention of moving, however, and they responded by locking arms and chanting, “We shall not be moved.”
The Secret Service has the right to forcibly remove anyone from the White House at any time for any reason, but if we hauled these kids out kicking and screaming, the press would have a field day, and President Johnson did not want that being the front-page story. So we let them stay, under close guard, as the president went ahead with his agenda, and all other visitors were rerouted around the hallway where the sit-in was happening. We thought they’d get hungry and leave at some point, but at four o’clock the protestors still had not budged.
Upstairs, the president was consulting with his aides, trying to figure out how best to handle the situation. A reception was scheduled for later that evening, and the hallway needed to be used. Finally, the president summoned Rufus Youngblood and told him, “This damn thing has gone on long enough. Get ’em outta here.”
All at once, a group of agents and uniformed officers surrounded the students and we physically removed them from the White House, taking them out the rear door, where there were several police vehicles waiting to whisk them away. The story made front-page news, but fortunately there was no violence and the reception went on as planned.
Meanwhile, we in the Secret Service were reevaluating our security procedures in light of the sit-in. Nothing like this had ever happened at the White House, but there was no doubt others would attempt to do the same thing. It was a tricky situation, because we didn’t feel it warranted discontinuation of the White House tours to the public, but it did require an immediate increase in security, including additional officers and agents posted throughout the White House, as well as undercover detectives and Secret Service agents posing as tourists.
On Pennsylvania Avenue, the picketers continued around the clock, their chanting and singing clearly audible inside the White House, where President Johnson was working every angle to find a solution—meeting with civil rights leaders, legal and political advisors, and lawmakers. The entire country was on the verge of exploding in violence, and as I watched the various groups coming and going from the White House, I was impressed by the fact that President Johnson was meeting with people on all sides of the issue in an effort to find a solution.
The biggest adversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery marchers was Governor George Wallace, who reluctantly agreed to meet with President Johnson on Saturday, March 13, at the White House. Johnson and Wallace met for about three hours, after which they appeared in the West Wing Lobby for a hastily arranged press conference. Standing more than half a foot taller than Wallace, Johnson towered over the beleaguered-looking governor, and with the power of the White House behind him, the president vowed to use federal troops, if necessary, to ensure that “the offense of last Sunday cannot and will not be repeated.”
It was a masterfully orchestrated event by Johnson, with the Alabama governor standing next to him as if in unity, when the reality was that Wallace had just been bulldozed, and he looked like he was still trying to figure out what had just hit him.
Two days later, on Monday, March 15, just eight days after what came to be known as Bloody Sunday, President Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress. In an eloquent forty-five-minute speech, broadcast live on television, Lyndon Johnson spoke from the heart as he implored the country’s lawmakers to pass his Voting Rights bill without delay.
“I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy,” he began. “At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.”
Speaking with clarity and conviction, the president announced that he would be sending to Congress a law designed to eliminate illegal barriers to the right to vote, and he urged the members of the House and the Senate to pass the bill as quickly as possible.
“We have already waited one hundred years and more, and the time for waiting is gone,” he said. “What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it’s not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us, who must overcome the rippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.”
He looked around at the lawmakers seated before him, and then he turned directly to everyone watching on television and, with utter conviction, declared, “And we shall overcome.”
With that phrase—the lyrics of the anthem that had become the movement’s theme song—he was making a promise to black Americans that their fight had become his fight, and come hell or high water, he was going to get that bill passed.
It would take a lot of arm-twisting, negotiating, and compromising, but Lyndon Johnson knew how to play the game better than anyone else, and on August 6, 1965, he signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 with numerous civil rights leaders by his side.
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A President’s Burdens
Vietnam did not begin with President Johnson; it was an inherited situation that developed during the Eisenhower administration in 1954, when the United States joined with seven other nations to form the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). The intention of the treaty was to combat the spread of Communism—much like NATO in Europe—and each treaty member agreed to resist armed aggression against any member nation. When North Vietnam began a large-scale military campaign against South Vietnam in the late 1950s, President Eisenhower began sending American military “advisors” to assist the South Vietnamese in protecting their freedom. President Kennedy continued to honor SEATO, gradually adding more support, and by the time of his assassination, we had more than fifteen thousand American troops in Vietnam. Kennedy’s key advisors—Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff—had all remained in their positions when Johnson became president, and their unanimous recommendation was that the United States had no choice but to stay the course in South Vietnam.
By early 1965, however, the North Vietnamese had stepped up their military aggression to the point that the United States had to make a decision to either withdraw completely or escalate our military involvement. So at the same time President Johnson was sending troops to Selma, Alabama, to protect the civil rights protestors, he also authorized a substantial increase of American soldiers in Vietnam, including ground force combat troops. About four hundred Americans had already been killed in the conflict, and this new move sparked a wave of antiwar demonstrations. The president realized he needed to convince the American people that our continued involvement in this war on the other side of the world was critical, so a speech was scheduled for the evening of April 7 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
The day before the speech, we got word that another six Americans had been killed in the past twenty-four hours, including a four-man helicopter crew that had been shot down by Vietcong ground fire. This news wasn’t going to make the president’s speech any easier. He remained at the White House all day, constantly on the telephone or in meetings, fine-tuning the language of the speech until just before seven in the evening, when he left with his special assistant, Jack Valenti, to make a brief appearance at the Smithsonian Museum of History and Technology for the ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new science and engineering exhibit. He stayed for less than half an hour, and then go
t back into the presidential limousine for the short drive back to the White House.
It had been raining on and off all day, but there was a steady drizzle now, and as the car proceeded down Constitution Avenue, the president spotted four reporters—three men and one woman—walking in the rain without umbrellas.
President Johnson told the driver to slow down, and as the car came alongside the group, he rolled down the rear window, stuck his head out, and said, “You walkin’ or ridin’?”
Sid Davis, Charlie Mohr, Bill Evenson, and Muriel Dobbin—all reporters in the White House press corps who had been at the Smithsonian covering the president’s remarks—looked at each other in wonderment. Was the President of the United States offering them a ride?
Thirty-five-year-old Sid Davis, a whip-smart reporter from Westinghouse Broadcasting who had been in the motorcade when President Kennedy was assassinated, didn’t hesitate.
“We’ll take a ride, Mr. President,” he said.
“Come on in, then,” Johnson said. “Jack, make some room.”
Jack Valenti moved to one of the jump seats, while the four reporters climbed into the car, squeezing into the rear compartment with Johnson and Valenti.
“When’s my next appointment, Jack?” the president asked Valenti.
“Your next appointment’s been waiting, sir,” Valenti said.
“I’ve got time to buy these folks a Scotch and soda,” the president said with a wink.
When we arrived at the White House, the president brought the group upstairs to the family quarters, calling for the stewards to bring everyone a Scotch and soda. He gathered them in the Yellow Sitting Room, and as the drinks were served, President Johnson began talking about the War on Poverty and the need for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that he’d just passed through Congress.