Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  A quieter drama interrupted President Kennedy’s coup watch. When he had returned to the White House from the morning mass for All Saints’ Day, when the fate of Diem was still undetermined, Robert Kennedy called about a troublesome letter from Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, asking whether or not Martin Luther King was a Communist. The President was fully up to speed on the matter, having worked well into the previous evening with the Attorney General and Burke Marshall, preparing three alternative replies for Robert Kennedy’s signature. Between a first draft that artfully dodged Russell’s question altogether, and a third draft that described Martin Luther King in some detail as a man clinging to Communist influences, Kennedy had selected a middle version portraying King as provisionally clean, dusted off under the prodding of the administration and the vigilant watch of the FBI. Now, however, the Attorney General called to say that J. Edgar Hoover objected to the use of the FBI as covering authority.

  President Kennedy asked his brother to read the FBI’s amended three-page draft over the telephone. If it was rare for a sub-Cabinet officer like Hoover to force reconsideration of communications already cleared by a President, and rarer still for a President to edit mail personally in the midst of a foreign crisis, the arcane gravity of the issue proved overriding. There was desperate hurry because Senator Russell had written to FBI Director Hoover more than three months earlier, on July 27. Since then, after Hoover promptly informed Russell that he was referring questions about King and Communism to the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy had procrastinated all through the March on Washington and the long ordeal over the King wiretap. Russell was demanding an answer on behalf of a constituent, and any day might denounce the administration for inexcusable neglect or incompetence. Three more times that day, the Attorney General called the White House to read new versions of the letter to President Kennedy, who had his national security team in the Cabinet Room with incoming flashes from Saigon. Three more times President Kennedy rejected the drafts.

  Part of the dilemma turned on the cosmetics of ego,* but the heart of it was raw politics. President Kennedy needed the FBI’s protective cover to tell Senator Russell that while the FBI was monitoring super-secret national security concerns, the administration still could vouch for the overall integrity of the civil rights cause. If stripped of the FBI qualification, the Robert Kennedy letter “‘clears’ King,” as FBI headquarters noted ominously of the first draft. For President Kennedy, this was a suicide ledge. Unqualified endorsement of King and the movement would cut off a line of retreat from the civil rights bill. It would put him directly at odds with Hoover, and repudiate—in writing—the very justification the Attorney General had just embraced—in writing—for the politically explosive wiretap order on Martin Luther King as an enemy suspect.

  The alternative course proved no better. Whenever Robert Kennedy himself adopted any part of the accusations against King that had been attributed to the FBI, the letter to Russell sounded as though the administration had ferreted out subversive information and was notifying the most respected and powerful of the Southerners fighting the civil rights bill. Unlike FBI intelligence, the Attorney General’s conclusions could not be stamped secret. They would be read on the floor of the Senate, and no amount of tinkering could render them less than a major political statement. In effect, Hoover held a dagger through King to Kennedy without risking the Bureau’s name or reputation, much the way Lodge had maneuvered the Vietnamese generals to turn on President Diem.

  President Kennedy finally scrapped the revisions altogether. Without Hoover’s cooperation, he could devise no way to finesse the Communist issue in writing, and therefore he directed Robert Kennedy to send Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to answer Senator Russell that very afternoon in person. Hauled in for urgent briefings on how to explain the delay and the unorthodox channels without hiding or revealing too much, Katzenbach was told to draw on his personal rapport. FBI liaison Courtney Evans went along to make sure he did not unwittingly disclose any of the national security incantations about Stanley Levison that Hoover had refused to transmit on paper.

  Alone with the sudden callers in his Senate office, Richard Russell quickly seemed to grow bored. What came across to the senator was not so much the words of Katzenbach’s rehearsed circumlocution as the acute discomfort of two tightly wound government officials. He interrupted to put them at ease, saying he pressed the letter only because any senator deserved the courtesy of a timely reply. As a Georgian acquainted with many Negro preachers like King and his father, Daddy King, Russell said, he already knew for himself that King was not a Communist, and wouldn’t make a Senate speech about such suspicions, anyway. Katzenbach was beaming with stunned relief as Russell made jokes about how serious he had looked on television confronting George Wallace. Ever the courtly Southener, Russell spoke distastefully of Wallace as a showboating demagogue whose self-defeating crusade against Communism among Negroes would injure the segregationist cause. “You and I are a mile apart on civil rights,” he told Katzenbach as he escorted his visitors to the door, “but I’ll tell you I’m a hundred miles away from George Wallace.”

  Courtney Evans took news of the anticlimactic resolution back to FBI headquarters. Senator Russell’s lack of interest in the subversive angle raised a significant barrier to FBI advocacy on race relations, but Russell had not criticized the Bureau, either, and Evans knew to stress the positive lesson that Robert Kennedy’s paranoid mishandling had allowed the whole inquiry to be “magnified into proportions finally reached.” J. Edgar Hoover declared procedural victory: “This shows wisdom of FBI prompt handling of our Congressional mail.”

  At the Justice Department, Katzenbach delivered a mission report of complete success. Senator Russell was satisfied; in fact, he turned out to be a “pretty good fellow” about not “hitting below the belt” on Communism. This good news arrived about six o’clock on Friday evening, just as a cable from Ambassador Lodge informed the White House that President Diem and his brother were surrendering on promise of safe conduct out of Vietnam.

  ON NOVEMBER 5, Burke Marshall included a sketch of St. Augustine, Florida, among his status reports for Robert Kennedy. “In summary,” he began, “the situation has been quite bad. There has been shooting, beatings, and one killing.” Since the Klan rally in September, carloads of joyriding whites had careened through Lincolnville almost nightly, firing shotguns, until one white teenager was killed by return fire. (When hit, the victim blew a hole in his own car by reflex action of his trigger finger.) Then, especially after Rev. Connie Lynch addressed a post-funeral Klan meeting, sniper fire intensified to the point that city police tried to impose a children’s curfew on Halloween night. Meanwhile, the four young Negro picketers remained incarcerated since July as wards of the state. Although the national office of the NAACP was moving carefully to expel Robert Hayling for unauthorized demonstrations, a number of formerly staid Negro leaders vowed to stick with him as a hero of fortitude.* Angry white leaders held firm against biracial meetings, let alone integration of the 1965 Quadricentennial, and the Klan threatened to assume active control of St. Augustine. “I do not see what we can do,” Marshall advised Kennedy, “unless you want me to explore the situation through political channels.”

  In Mississippi, racial forebodings shook the foundations of elective politics. Democrat Paul Johnson, elected governor of Mississippi on November 5, denounced the very existence of partisan competition in a state where white Republicans were said to be scarcer than polar bears. “Kill the threat of the ‘two-party’ system!” exclaimed his campaign literature, which warned that “a vicious two-party political system” would “divide the conservative white men and women of Mississippi into two political camps and thereby place the balance of power in the hands of the negro minority.” Johnson urged Mississippi voters to “bury Republicanism for another 100 years,” and his courthouse regulars did their part at the polls. “They are treating my workers like niggers,” protested the Republica
n gubernatorial candidate, Reubel Phillips, a fresh ex-Democrat who proclaimed that only Republicans could save Mississippi from race-mixing Kennedy Democrats. No Republican had bothered to run for governor since 1947, but Phillips multiplied that token showing by a factor of thirty, gaining more than 40 percent of the official vote.

  In the North, Malcolm X bluntly accused the entire country of adopting Mississippi’s raw preference for white supremacy. “Your democracy is nothing but hypocrisy where black people are concerned,” he told a white college audience in New York on November 7. He asserted that most of the 22 million former slaves were damaged—repugnant to themselves, to civilized standards, and to whites alike. “We know what’s wrong with you, and we know what’s wrong with us, and we try to look at both objectively,” he said. To rebuild themselves, he argued, the former slaves first must ignore sweet words and their own defensive pride. They must accept the harsh reality that whites treated them as vassals whether in the segregated South or sophisticated North, no better than imperial Romans might administer a conquered population of Nubians or Gauls.

  A few weeks earlier, Elijah Muhammad had removed Malcolm from his secondary assignment post at Temple No. 4 in Washington. His replacement there—a Ph.D. mathematician hailed as the first certified intellectual among the largely self-taught ministers in the Nation of Islam—noticed that the Chicago officials dropped surprisingly barbed comments about Malcolm’s independence and love of publicity. Malcolm, for his part, found that the Nation of Islam had consolidated its control of Temple No. 7 during his absence. National Secretary John Ali and other Chicago officials dealt directly with Captain Joseph, and often visited New York to monitor Malcolm’s sermons. Captain Joseph took his old mentor aside to say his words no longer sent chills up his spine, to which Malcolm replied that perhaps Joseph was not spiritual enough to hear. “Could be,” Joseph replied, “but I can’t dig you no more.” Malcolm confided nothing of the breach to his devoted assistant ministers, but they noticed fewer references to the guiding wisdom of Elijah Muhammad.

  “You may take offense at what I’m saying,” Malcolm told the bristling crowd at City College of New York, “but how in the world can you take offense when I say democracy brought the Negro in this country to the level he’s on, when it was democracy that has made us a slave?” Over gasps and a few catcalls, he pushed his thesis that the brute divisions of race were far stronger than the kinships of democracy. “It was people who advocate democracy who sold us like cotton and cows from one plantation to another,” said Malcolm. “It was people who advocate democracy who had black people lynched from one end of this country to another, and it is people who today represent themselves as defenders of democracy that let a government that represents itself as a democracy continue to deceive and exploit the so-called rights of black people in this country. All the hell our people have ever caught in this country, they have caught it in the name of democracy.”

  FOR THIRTY YEARS, since leaving Union Theological Seminary during the Depression, Myles Horton had made a life’s work of experiments in racial democracy. With the long-standing support of sponsors including Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter Reuther, Norman Thomas, and his former theology teacher Reinhold Niebuhr, Horton had run camps for interracial dialogue in the mountains of Tennessee, where he had known Rosa Parks before the Montgomery bus boycott, recruited Septima Clark as a citizenship teacher, and in tandem with Clark conducted weekend retreats that helped convert students like James Bevel into movement leaders. Beginning on Monday, November 11, 1963, Horton presided over a week-long workshop in Greenville, Mississippi, for more than seventy young veterans of the Freedom Vote campaign. Initial topics ranged from the movement’s moral responsibility for reprisals to techniques for enlisting barbers and beauticians in a registration campaign. By the weekend, focus shifted to a sparse, three-item agenda: “a. Role of whites b. Summer project c. Federal involvement.” Many of those present first learned of the tentative plan to expand the Freedom Vote drastically the following summer, with white college students, up to two thousand of them. The idea loosened a flood of pent-up controversy. Many of the staff—particularly the Negro college students from outside Mississippi, such as Charlie Cobb and Ivanhoe Donaldson, and some of the original state field workers, such as Hollis Watkins and Curtis Hayes—considered the white volunteers more trouble than they were worth, arrogant and yet naive, so clueless about cultural subtleties that they posed a constant danger to themselves and anyone around them.

  Past midnight on Friday, as recorded by SNCC adviser and historian Howard Zinn, they debated political necessity against personal reservations, and vice versa. For some, the rub was how much they resented the natural command of arriving white Freedom Workers, for others how much they admired their skills, for still others how much they resented admiring them. “I think one way and act another,” said one. “It’s not rational.” William McGee of Itta Bena supported integrationist whites however flawed as a stunning revelation to the backward areas, “that makes the people from Mississippi understand better.” Others replied that using whites as rescuers only reinforced the inner inferiority of Mississippi Negroes.

  A straw vote late Friday went against having a summer project for white volunteers at all. On Saturday, Bob Moses arrived late to speak up for Lawrence Guyot and Fannie Lou Hamer on the other side. “If we’re trying to break down the barrier of segregation,” said Hamer, “we can’t segregate ourselves.” To the rejoinder that something in America ought to be led by Negroes, Moses expressed a tellingly complex hope for the movement, saying he always thought “the one thing we can do for the country that no one else can do is to be above the race issue.” Under his sway, a second straw vote went in favor of the summer project, but the issue was deferred in hopes of later consensus, and the exhausted participants joined hands to sing “We Shall Overcome.”

  Outside pressures prolonged indecision. Moses received summary notice from Wiley Branton that the Voter Education Project was terminating voter registration grants to Mississippi for lack of concrete results. Although the sudden loss of subsistence grants pushed COFO to seek federal assistance, SNCC leaders also perceived signs that the Kennedy administration was turning against intervention in the South, which, if true, undercut the political rationale for the summer project. James Forman, suspecting correctly that Robert Kennedy had an unseen hand in the publication of a sweeping, two-part Life magazine article on race by Theodore H. White, assigned a Harvard honors student to analyze the contents at SNCC’s Thanksgiving meeting in Washington.

  White, whose best-selling The Making of the President 1960 established a new romance for superpower politics, began his Life series with a lurid overview of big-city demographics in an era when “Negroes, bursting out of inhuman, crowded slums, fleeing the smell and the rats and the noise and cackle, like flood waters under pressure, squirt and spill over adjacent neighborhoods.” By the 1980s—“almost tomorrow in the eyes of history”—White predicted that seven of America’s ten largest cities would have Negro majorities. Given that cities since Jerusalem and ancient Athens had been the cradle of Western civilization, he asked, “what kind of metropolitan civilization will we have?”

  In his second installment, White graded civil rights organizations beginning with “thoughtful” mainstays and fringe militants that “find a simple joy in what can be done by mischief.” Out beyond “still more sinister groups” such as the Communists, he described the “more serious penetration by unidentified elements made in SNCC—the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.” Twice, he asserted, “agents of this group tried to convert a peaceful march into a violent putsch on government offices,” and SNCC students had created “one of the most chilling documents this writer has seen recently.” What White called “violent putsch” attempts actually were the Medgar Evers funeral march and the aimless demonstration Diane Nash helped contain in Birmingham. The “chilling document” was the Bevel-Nash right-to-vote blueprint, which was destined to make hi
story from Selma in 1965. Forman’s young analyst easily identified factual distortions, but concluded that White’s larger purpose was to create a deplorable image of movement students—“lunatics and aliens,” the series called them.

  New racial images flooded the news media in November, a sure sign of identities in flux. Jet reported that high school students in Ohio nearly rioted when a vice principal referred to them as “black” instead of “Negro” students on the intercom. A Chicago professor called for massive reeducation of Southern whites as the necessary remedy. In Virginia, a Baptist convention adopted a resolution commending fellow clergy for “not leading too rapidly or pushing too far beyond the understanding of those who follow.” U.S. News & World Report published a special section on intermarriage in which one of seven experts identified miscegenation as the “goal of the Negro pressure groups.”

  From Birmingham, Robert Kennedy’s confidant at the Birmingham News sent word that the Justice Department’s usefulness “has just about been brought to an end anywhere in this state” as a result of the Thelton Henderson scandal. Although Burke Marshall had fired Henderson and publicly apologized to Alabama, editor E. L. “Red” Holland advised, a feeling lingered “on the part of some who are not uninformed that Rev. King is in fact, and has been, used explicitly by Justice as a kind of agent.” Holland said the few whites favoring negotiation were reduced to tremulous bravado. “I talked with one of the three most prominent ministers in Birmingham only yesterday,” he wrote. “Oh, we will have to show courage—courage, he said. I have kin in his congregation. He has been told that if one Negro is ever allowed to cross the front doorstep, the majority of the monied members will leave and go to Canterbury in Mountain Brook. And they mean it. His courage personally I do not doubt. That it will register, no…. I assume this letter will be destroyed, of course.”