Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  Others welcomed Freedom Day as an unexpected miracle. “Nothing like this ever happened to Selma,” exclaimed a seventy-three-year-old World War I veteran at the mass meeting that night. Like James Forman, he was jubilant that the reborn courage of the May mass meeting had moved outdoors and lasted all day. That night, Amelia Boynton reached Martin Luther King with an excited appeal for his personal support. Across town, whites expressed equal amazement that such things came to pass in the town where Alabama’s Citizens Councils had been founded. “I never thought it would happen in Selma,” declared a Citizens Council official. “But I tell you this. We are not going to give in.”

  On Thursday, October 10, the sandwich volunteers were tried and convicted in Selma on charges of criminal provocation. In New York, the United Nations passed a resolution—with the United States abstaining—urging South Africa to call off the Rivonia Treason Trial of eleven political prisoners* charged with plotting against the apartheid government, and from Saigon, highly classified cables warned Washington of reciprocal threats in Vietnam. “For Diem and Nhu even to be thinking of my assassination is so unbelievably idiotic that a reasonable person would reject it out of hand,” wired Ambassador Lodge. As a precaution, Lodge reported, he was sending a message to the South Vietnamese leaders that in the event of his death, “American retaliation will be prompt and awful beyond description.”

  The arrival that afternoon of Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko was a comparatively cheerful event for the White House. President Kennedy introduced the departing Russians to the next scheduled visitors, who arrived with the Attorney General. Before Colonel Blaik and General Royall could settle in for an off-the-record discussion of Birmingham, the President’s two young children bounded into the Oval Office ahead of an embarrassed White House nurse. They chased each other in giggling circles, and Uncle Robert allowed himself to be tackled playfully to the carpet. A trailing White House photographer took a picture of John Kennedy, Jr., then nearly three years old, crawling through a secret compartment of the Ulysses Grant antique desk before President Kennedy ended the amusement with a clap and a wave for the nurse. He was pleased to hear that his two emissaries had been received well in Birmingham, and had helped contain explosive tensions for three weeks since the church bombing. Before Blaik could introduce more difficult, substantive choices in Birmingham, beyond what he resented as his partner’s “bland, p.r. approach,” Kennedy took several interrupting phone calls from Defense Secretary McNamara about flashpoint confrontations with the Soviets along the East German autobahn. Backing off from the President’s troubles, Blaik mentioned a bumper sticker he and Royall had seen in Birmingham: “Kennedy for King—Goldwater for President.” The slogan briefly puzzled the quick-witted President, who was fond of royalty, until he realized that the hostile Birmingham driver meant to relegate him to Martin Luther King and the Negroes while putting Republican Barry Goldwater in the White House. Kennedy laughed uproariously along with his brother. He and Blaik fell to talking football, and eventually they decided to postpone the promised report on Birmingham.

  The Attorney General could not so easily put off J. Edgar Hoover. That same afternoon he reviewed his turmoil over the King wiretap request with Courtney Evans, his FBI liaison officer. There was nothing more risky, he said. Any leak would undermine the government by destroying credibility among Negroes and millions of whites coming to view King as a figure of democratic conscience. Worse, it would touch off fiercer resistance in Congress and the South by sanctioning the belief that civil rights was infected with the Communist enemy. On the other hand, Kennedy needed leverage precisely because of King’s swelling influence since Birmingham and the march. Wiretaps would help the administration tack against King when necessary, even if they supplied nothing more than accurate foreknowledge of his moves. Kennedy told Evans that a wiretap was the most likely method to prove ties between King and the Communist party, if there were any, although two years of blanket coverage on King’s presumed Communist channel, Levison, had turned up nothing Soviet or spylike. Still, once the question was framed as one of knowing or not knowing, the Attorney General leaned toward reliance upon Hoover. Emphasizing “the delicacy of this particular matter,” as Evans reported to the Bureau, Kennedy signed the wiretap request.

  The undertow of the October 10 wiretap decision registered within a week, as Hoover’s FBI completed and disseminated throughout the government a monograph describing Martin Luther King as “an unprincipled man” who “is knowingly, willingly, and regularly taking guidance from communists.” Horrified when he found out, Robert Kennedy personally demanded that Hoover retrieve all copies before politically ruinous accusations leaked out of the State Department or Pentagon. Hoover was only too glad to comply—by Kennedy’s later account he even suggested that the FBI take responsibility for the recall—because the King paper had served notice already that the FBI was freshly independent in security matters. If challenged within the government, or in Congress, Hoover could justify practically any attack on the civil rights movement by pointing to Robert Kennedy’s trophy signature on the King wiretap authorization. Moreover, the signature severely reduced Kennedy’s ability to influence the FBI’s overall priorities, and it undercut his unique leverage as the President’s brother—especially since Robert Kennedy still needed favors from the FBI intelligence files to protect the President through the first Senate hearings in the Bobby Baker investigation, where the Ellen Rometsch affair threatened to erupt.

  Hoover moved to consolidate his advantage by forwarding a request to place wiretaps on all four telephone lines at King’s SCLC office in Atlanta. Robert Kennedy, while “still vacillating…still uncertain in his own mind,” signed it on October 21, just as Andrew Young, in King’s private world, glumly recommended that SCLC pull out of the South altogether to register voters in the North. A few days later, the FBI obtained Kennedy’s permission for wiretaps on Bayard Rustin, too. Still shaken by Hoover’s King monograph, the Attorney General could say variously that he was humoring the FBI, hedging political bets, or taking extra security precautions, but in reality the King wiretap severely eroded his control over the FBI. For King, who did not yet know, the wiretap was a permanent addition to his enemy load. Whatever shape the movement might take, from grounded ship to rolling hymn, henceforth he must push forward not merely through hulking reluctance but the FBI’s more or less unfettered hostility.

  12

  Frontiers on Edge: The Last Month

  KING SUFFERED enemy trouble over an automobile ride. In Birmingham on October 15, he and several preachers had stalled in the parking lot at the Gaston Motel just as Thelton Henderson of the Justice Department by chance pulled in to retire. (As a Negro, Henderson shared the Gaston Motel with the movement, while the white government lawyers stayed elsewhere.) King explained hurriedly that he was late, as usual, between a mass meeting at New Pilgrim Baptist Church and a promise to Amelia Boynton that he would speak still later that night down in Selma. Henderson lent the King party his rental car for the trip. Three days later, Governor Wallace accused the Kennedy administration of abetting subversion against Alabama law by serving as King’s chauffeur.

  Alabama members of Congress demanded to know whether a prevaricating Justice Department was in cahoots with King. A month after the church bombing, with that criminal investigation at standstill or worse,* state investigators swarmed over car rental records with a contrasting thrill of the hunt. Two state grand juries collected testimony about what Judge James Hare of Selma called “men high in the circles of Federal Government maliciously lying,” and U.S. courts of appeal would be drawn into state claims that the car ride charges ought to disqualify the Justice Department’s other work in Alabama, such as the marathon voting rights suits in Selma. A disheartened King lamented “so much fuss,” as he put it, over the “rather insignificant matter” of the car ride. With racial politics so highly charged that murders were treated like car rides, and car rides like murder, he resisted plea
s for the big Nash-Bevel campaign on voting rights.

  In Mississippi, shortly after announcing the Freedom Vote campaign on October 14, Bob Moses convinced a reluctant Rev. Edwin King, chaplain of Tougaloo College, that no other white candidate was available to run for lieutenant governor with NAACP chairman Aaron Henry on what became Mississippi’s first integrated ticket of the century. With his right cheek still bandaged from injuries in June, which marked him as a survivor of demonstrations with Medgar Evers, King appeared alongside Aaron Henry at Negro mass meetings.

  Once fully committed, with candidates and a goal of “getting 200,000 Negroes to vote in a mock election which will act as a trigger for a stepped-up registration drive,” campaign manager Moses wrote out what amounted to a formal recruitment charter for Al Lowenstein as chairman of the “Aaron Henry for Governor” advisory committee, and Lowenstein pulled off a firebell tour of college campuses to call in nearly a hundred student volunteers, mostly from Yale and Stanford. He obtained large contributions from a New York philanthropist and from UAW president Walter Reuther, among others, and alerted his far-flung network of contacts. (“Dear Al,” wrote Frank Porter Graham, retired president of the University of North Carolina, “I am sending this check for $50 in case you or any of the Yale students need bail again.”) On his return to Mississippi, Lowenstein was arrested twice the same day in Clarksdale—once while riding with Aaron Henry from a campaign rally, later when trying to walk from a parked car to his hotel. “We all go through the most unpleasant harassment,” Lowenstein wrote his family in New York, “much worse than what South Africa used to be, though South Africa has gone ahead recently.”

  Many students arrived with Ivy League confidence and missionary enthusiasm. “Any white Northerner who’s had the good fortune to achieve even an average education in the North is going to be, just by virtue of this fact, so much more talented than the Negro leadership in the movement in the South, that in one day, he can make a significant contribution,” one history major declared in a recruiting speech. The most presumptuous recruiter could not have expected the vigilant notice that adult Mississippi gave students on leave from premed courses and literature seminars. The first volunteer to reach Yazoo City drove straight to a prearranged meeting with three Negro leaders, where police called within half an hour to announce that they had the building surrounded, and the local leaders, deciding that the Freedom Vote was too dangerous, delivered the student for police escort outside the city limits. Five days later, on October 28, the first carload of Yale volunteers completed the thirty-hour drive to Hattiesburg just after midnight and collapsed at an assigned home in a Negro neighborhood, only to be dragged from bed to jail early the next morning. “My experiences here in two days of field work have bordered on the unbelievable,” wrote one of the students to his senator in Washington. Shortly after posting his letter, the student was beaten by an irate white taxi driver who saw him canvassing for Freedom Votes, and Hattiesburg police arrested the student again, this time for assault.

  Similar reports from across Mississippi put the Stanford University campus into what the student editor called “a whirlwind.” At a spontaneous rally on October 28, some three hundred students volunteered as reinforcements, and an early busload pulled out for Mississippi before the Hattiesburg police chief called the Stanford Daily that evening to warn of $500 fines and six-month sentences awaiting “any white agitator” who disturbed his town. This message pitched campus leaders again into a late-night strategy session, at which they decided to divert their energies from recruiting to fund-raising. A hefty collection left for Mississippi by the next morning, when Lowenstein was grasping for positive developments. “Norman Thomas, bless his heart, is coming down Thursday,” he wrote of Thomas—the seventy-nine-year-old patrician socialist and six-time candidate for President—“Most astonishing and cheering of all is that Stanford has sent $4,300.00!!—which is making all the difference in the world.”

  Young white volunteers who reached Mississippi tumbled through flattery, terror, and awe. A philosophy major from Stanford found that Negroes in the college town of Oxford were too afraid to talk with him under the gaze of the police cruiser that trailed slowly behind. He soon “decided to confine my activities to the telephone.” A Yale volunteer, in shock from the moment a Delta policeman greeted him with a drawn pistol, retreated to stealthy canvassing on the rural plantations, where sharecroppers were conditioned to avert their glance from his face and agree automatically with anything he said. The volunteer figured to collect more votes if he “cut the palaver” about the meaning of the Henry-King candidacy and simply instructed the sharecroppers to mark the Freedom Ballots, which worked efficiently until a Negro SNCC worker admonished him to treat the sharecroppers with full respect. Through the ensuing discussion, the Yale volunteer recalled that he and the SNCC worker “spent a decade together in thirty-six hours.”

  Not all the two hundred recorded cases of intimidation targeted the highly visible white volunteers. When police detained Bob Moses at the Rankin County airport, a squad car followed the four SNCC workers who retrieved him, pulled them over at a gasoline station near Jackson, and a patrolman accosted them as “NAACP niggers” stirring up trouble. Charlie Cobb pointed out that they were not NAACP—“We’re SNCC,” he said—but the correction infuriated the officer enough to spread-eagle Ivanhoe Donaldson for interrogation while his partner held the others under guard. Several times he struck Donaldson’s knuckles with the butt of his revolver for unsatisfactory answers, and put the barrel against Donaldson’s head while working himself up and down in fitful rage about “killing you right here and right now,” until his partner said it was not the place. Donaldson, who had been arrested two weeks earlier in Selma, and again since then in Greenwood, collapsed in the back seat upon release. Eventually he began to recover through gallows humor, congratulating Cobb’s panicky efforts to educate the officers on basic differences between civil rights organizations. “That was gonna cool them right off,” he teased.

  Lowenstein, when not attending mass meetings or bail crises, bombarded the long-distance wires with appeals for political help. One contact in the House of Representatives reported that he had carried out instructions to petition Senator Wayne Morse only to find that “Morse was on the phone with you when I called.” Norman Thomas did keep his promise to fly in from New York to speak at a rally for the three-week Freedom Vote campaign. Attackers rammed a car in his caravan as it left the site, and the novelty of Thomas exhorting a crowd of Negroes on Halloween night in Greenwood helped capture nationwide press interest. “A drive to get votes that are not legally cast for candidates who are not on the ballot began in Mississippi Saturday,” the Washington Post wryly reported.

  Most of the 85,000 ballots finally collected for the mock election were signed and delivered at church meetings, or at hideaway polling places such as Vernon Dahmer’s store in Hattiesburg. At an emotional rally for Aaron Henry and Edwin King on the last night in Jackson, Moses quietly praised the movement workers for sounding hope in a crushed silence. “The measure of freedom has now been heard in every part of Mississippi because you took it there,” he said. “There may be towns where you got only one or two votes, but the people there have heard…the whisper of freedom is spreading.”

  Lowenstein also spoke, emphasizing the national significance of the event. “This is the first time in America it was necessary to campaign underground,” he said. The presence and the suffering of the white students had encouraged many Freedom Voters as a marvel, but Lowenstein himself considered the students more valuable as antennae for the outside world. At the victory rally, network reporters jostled for interviews with the sons and daughters of leading American families. The history major who had recruited them for superior education begged the reporters to interview the local Negroes instead, already ashamed of his prior arrogance. At a homecoming press conference on the Stanford campus, photographers took pictures of wounds, and reporters pressed for shocking detail
s. (“Well, besides being shot at once, I was hit on the head once by a policeman standing outside of a church,” one student replied.) The impact of the Freedom Vote volunteers began to spread not only through the press but more directly within campus culture, as curious Yale students jammed the law auditorium to hear from returning volunteers. An open forum on their reminiscences captivated many future activists while putting others off. A writer from the Yale Daily News made fun of the clash between Jacobin passion and the cocktail sherry atmosphere, observing tartly that Mississippi hardships seemed to create “a bond stronger than the Whiffenpoofs.”

  BEFORE DAWN on Friday, November 1, secret cables alerted the White House that South Vietnamese generals were launching their coup against President Diem’s government. Rebel units knocked out regular communication lines in Saigon, but the coup plotters maintained contact with Ambassador Lodge over a direct wire installed between their officers’ club and the U.S. embassy. During the early fighting, before Kennedy’s breakfast, Lodge confidently advised that he had invited the Vietnamese generals over to legitimize their anticipated victory, and Kennedy, always sensitive to the risks of U.S. complicity, sent Lodge instructions to make sure that the coup leaders “will not call on you in [a] large group, thus giving false impression they were reporting to headquarters.” Some hours later, the Vietnamese generals gave a hideously different show of independence by murdering Diem and his brother Nhu in the back of a troop carrier after they had surrendered unarmed from refuge in a Catholic churc, then hacking up the bodies with machetes and clumsily announcing that the prisoners had committed suicide.

  The brutality of regicide in unfamiliar foreign lands was sport for some wags across the sea—“No Nhus is good news.” Ambassador Lodge boasted privately to Kennedy that “the ground in which the coup seed grew into a robust plant was prepared by us,” and some of the future’s harshest critics of the American war in Vietnam hailed the coup as a messy but decisive improvement for the larger war against Communism. Still, the grisly murders shook President Kennedy as something closer to an underworld hit on two brothers running an allied family. For months, consumed by the difficulty of controlling the plot while avoiding the appearance of responsibility, his government had created a policy world of deniability, contingency planning, and a clean change of government. The mutilated corpses ripped away artifice, animating the mountain of secret cables—evasion, remorse, and bloody determination, like speeches from Macbeth.