Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  Lodge, facing a new coup against Khanh (there would be four more regimes that year), favored dispensing altogether with the troublesome formality of a South Vietnamese government so that the United States might assume more efficient direct command, but this idea horrified even the supremely confident McNamara as reckless and shortsighted. He and Lodge compromised on a package of military assistance that promised to stave off immediate disaster. The President put their recommendation far more positively in his formal request to Congress on May 18, saying the $125 million increase would enable the new Khanh government to “mount a successful campaign against the Communists.”

  Johnson confronted apprehensions about Vietnam in dozens of secret conversations through May. Senator Mansfield’s written proposal to “neutralize” South Vietnam by international agreement was “just milquetoast as it can be, he’s got no spine at all,” he complained to National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy. “But,” came his next word, “this is a terrible thing we’re getting ready to do,” and Johnson pressed Bundy for specific actions to stop the drift toward losing the war.

  “Well, I think that we really do need to use some target folder work, Mr. President, that shows precisely what we do and don’t mean here,” Bundy replied. “And the main object is to kill as few people as possible while creating an environment in which the incentive to react is as low as possible. But I can’t say to you this is a small matter.”

  Johnson sought more soulful advice from his intimate friend and civil rights antagonist Senator Russell, chairman of the Armed Services Committee. “What do you think of this Vietnam thing?” he asked. “I’d like to hear you talk a little bit.”

  Russell made baleful jokes about how bad the situation looked to him. “It’s a mess,” he said, “and it’s going to get worse.” His best idea, which he outlined three times, was to engineer a new South Vietnamese government by coup, “and get some fella in there that said they wished the hell that we would get out. Then that would give us a good excuse for getting out.” When Johnson asked about strategic loss of Vietnam, Russell scoffed, “It isn’t important a damn bit….

  “I don’t know, sir, you’d better get some brains from somewhere,” advised Russell, who said he found the administration’s foreign policy leaders somewhat opinionated, perhaps because they had been “kicked around” on Asia already. Russell seconded Johnson’s confidential charge (“I don’t want this repeated to anybody”) that Ambassador Lodge was “one of our big problems out there, Dick…he ain’t worth a damn,” saying that he had found Lodge ineffective since joint service in World War II. “He thinks that he’s dealing with barbarian tribes out there, and that he’s the emperor and he’s going to tell them what to do,” Russell said. “And there’s no doubt that, in my mind, that he had old Diem killed out there.”

  Johnson and Russell also were agreed on fears that overpopulated China would enter any ground war against the United States in Vietnam. (“We’d do them a favor every time we killed a coolie,” said Russell, “and when one of our people got killed, it would be a loss.”) Johnson said his military and security advisers were pretty well agreed that the Chinese would not intervene, “and in any event, that we haven’t got much choice, that we are treaty bound, that we are there…and that we’ve just got to prepare for the worst.”

  Within the internal consensus to “show some power and force,” Johnson praised McNamara as a “pretty flexible fellow” who “thought he was biding his time and that we could get by until November. But these politicians got to raising hell…Lodge, Nixon, [New York Governor Nelson] Rockefeller, Goldwater all say move, [and] Eisenhower.” They were advocating air campaigns to stop the enemy while minimizing American casualties.

  “Oh, hell, it ain’t worth a hoot,” said Russell. “That’s just impossible.” He told war stories of dropping “millions and millions and millions of pounds of bombs day and night,” blowing whole mountains down over roads and railbeds only to find them operating again the next morning. “We never could actually interdict the lines of communication in Korea,” said Russell, “although we had absolute control of the seas and the air…. And you ain’t gonna stop these people either.”

  “Well, they’d impeach a president that would run out, wouldn’t they?” Johnson asked. He said he always pictured one particular sergeant from his White House detail. “When I think about making this decision,” he told Russell, “and sending that father of six in there, and what the hell are we going to get out of his doing it, it makes the chills run up my back.”

  “It does me, too,” said Russell.

  “I just haven’t got the nerve to do it,” said Johnson. “But I don’t see any other way out of it.”

  “It’s one of those things, heads I win, tails you lose,” said Russell. “…We’re in the quicksands up to our neck, and I just don’t know what the hell to do about it.”

  “I love you,” said Johnson, “and I’ll be calling you.”

  ON MAY 11, the day of the foiled terrorist attack on McNamara in Saigon, Governor Wallace of Alabama took his presidential campaign to the small Maryland town of Cambridge, where a proclamation of martial law had throttled sporadic rallies against local segregation for nearly a year. When SNCC’s Gloria Richardson defiantly led a line of marchers from the Negro Elks Hall through Cambridge toward Wallace’s campaign event—hoping to protest what she considered a rally for segregation, and to dramatize its sharply contrasting official protection—nearly five hundred state troopers and National Guard soldiers massed along Race Street to block and disperse them. Through the next several nights, as Wallace completed a hasty, ten-speech campaign elsewhere, soldiers wearing bipodal gas masks returned to the same spot to arrest, tear-gas, and skirmish with demonstrators, including seven Catholic priests and SNCC Freedom Rider Stokely Carmichael.

  Over the same span in nearby Washington, the civil rights bill surpassed the longevity record for Senate filibusters on any subject, eclipsing an 1846 debate on British occupation rights in territorial Oregon. With President Johnson holding firm, the U.S. Senate transacted no other official business for a tenth consecutive week, although security officers did clear a large tourist buildup from the Senate steps by removing Roger Mudd and his CBS cameras to a more secluded outdoor location. On Tuesday, May 19, as the rotating trio of divinity students approached 750 hours of continuous prayer at the Lincoln Memorial, Governor Wallace won 43 percent of the Democratic vote in the Maryland presidential primary. Elated, Wallace instantly regretted his decision to run a token campaign in only three states. (“I wish I had entered California,” he sighed.) Elsewhere, the Maryland result registered as a third Wallace nightmare. “Most distressing of all,” declared a Times editorial, “is the fact that an actual majority of the white voters apparently cast their ballots for him.” In a rare sign of alarm, the front page of the august newspaper projected an oddly comforting nuance into the motives of Wallace supporters: “Maryland’s Vote Held Anti-Negro/Wallace’s Showing Is Viewed as Protest over Militancy, Not over Rights Bill.”

  Undaunted, President Johnson gazed beyond the millennium. At the University of Michigan on May 22—exactly six months since the Kennedy assassination—he challenged a giant commencement audience of eighty thousand to “help build a society where the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the Nation.” The entire urban United States must be rebuilt over the next forty years, he said, because “our society will never be great until our cities are great.” He also set out to restore what he called the “natural splendor” of the American landscape. “Today that beauty is in danger,” said Johnson. “The water we drink, the food we eat, the very air that we breathe, are threatened with pollution.” Beyond that, he vowed to expand and reform outmoded education. “Nearly 54 million—more than one-quarter of all Americans—have not even finished high school,” he declared. “…So we must give every child a place to sit and a teacher to learn from. Poverty must not be a bar to learning, and
learning must offer an escape from poverty.” He summoned up the will and imagination of Michigan youth to “advance the quality of our American civilization,” and thereby refute “those timid souls who say this battle cannot be won, that we are condemned to a soulless wealth.”

  On the presidential jet back to Washington, Johnson glowed with satisfaction. After twenty test runs over the past month, he had adopted his own signature slogan by raising “Great Society” into capital letters ten times in a single speech, and now with a Scotch highball he bounded rearward to sound out the reaction in the press compartment. Reporters noted that the speech received “a hell of a reception.” One of them respectfully announced that he had counted twenty-seven interruptions for applause.

  “No, no,” Johnson insisted. “There were twenty-nine.”

  23

  Pilgrims and Empty Pitchers

  ON THE DAY before Johnson’s Michigan speech, Malcolm X returned to New York from his five-week journey abroad. The most conspicuous changes in him were religious: his new Sunni Muslim name—El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz—his African walking stick, and his reddish goatee after the fashion of orthodox pilgrims to Mecca. To the few who had followed him out of the Nation of Islam, where facial hair remained strictly forbidden, these features gave Malcolm an exotic cast, like a desert nomad from his favorite film, Lawrence of Arabia.

  His new message was no less bizarre to the fifty reporters who mixed uncomfortably with spellbound Muslims, turning a welcoming reception into an impromptu press conference. “Incredible!” Mike Handler kept muttering to himself as he furiously scribbled notes in the airport’s Skyline Room. Handler’s story two weeks earlier in the New York Times—“Malcolm X Pleased by Whites’ Attitude on Trip to Mecca”—had touched off a buzz among journalists and Muslims alike. The homecoming generated further headlines, such as “Malcolm Rejects Race Separation,” and corollary reports about his revised opinions on Judaism. (Instead of lumping Jews together with devil whites, as before, Malcolm declared that “we can learn much from American Jews.” He recommended a cultural and psychological Pan-African migration, rather than a physical one, modeled on the Jewish bond with historic Israel.*) Editors generally relegated these follow-up stories to small corners of back pages.

  There was calculated naïeveté behind the newsworthy letters Malcolm had sent home to Handler, James Farmer, and many others, announcing his discovery that true Islam included “pilgrims from all over the world…of all colors, from blue-eyed blonds to black-skinned Africans.” The letters allowed him to rise above the Nation’s “white devil” doctrines without admitting that he had known of white Muslims for many years, and even discussed them in public, or that he had joined in what amounted to the Nation’s pulpit trade secret—propagating theological black supremacy as a shock attraction for primitive “lost-found” Negroes who would not otherwise entertain Islamic ideas. Malcolm’s revelation gambit succeeded in spite of its flimsy plausibility. While most Americans did not know or care whether he would revamp his religious philosophy on sighting a white Muslim, many seized upon what the Times called his “new, positive insights on race relations.”

  The religious surface of the new Malcolm was incidental to nearly everyone but Malcolm himself, whose claims of “spiritual rebirth” carried his distinctively naked candor. He had fled the country alone in April under repeated threat of death, marked as an apostate. Making his way through Jedda, Saudi Arabia, to complete the hajj pilgrimage as prescribed by the Q’uran, Malcolm found himself snatched from the masses passing through a checkpoint toward Mecca, then detained as a questionable Muslim because he carried an American passport and bungled the ritual Arabic. Uncomprehending, clad only in the prescribed pair of white towels—the Izar around the waist and the Rida over the left shoulder—he was confined through the day and night in a crowded dormitory among people who spoke no English. “I never had felt more alone, and helpless, since I was a baby,” he recalled. He began to copy the prayers and prostrations of his neighbors.

  Coming upon a strange-looking telephone in the holding compound, Malcolm recalled that he had brought one Saudi Arabian phone number belonging to the son of an Islamic author, who turned out not only to speak English but to open the hospitality of his relation by marriage, the Saudi Crown Prince Faisal. From this third-hand contact, Malcolm found himself catapulted upward with a royal interpreter through the hajj court, which accepted him as an authentic Muslim, and into a state limousine for an escorted drive to Mecca. Seven times he marched around the stone kaa’ba—venerated as the holy shrine created by the first prophet Abraham, in submission to the merciful God who spared his son from willing sacrifice—and he joined ecstatic multitudes who prayed for six solid hours on the spot where the prophet Muhammad is said to have preached his last sermon.

  Completion of the hajj briefly lifted the siege of Malcolm’s life. As dictated to Alex Haley, descriptions of the journey would sustain an interval of delight through more than forty pages of his autobiography. The hunted Malcolm gloried in safe adventure, and the daredevil outsider unabashedly relished attentions due a touring head of state—“Chinese Ambassador and Mrs. Huang Hua gave a state dinner in my honor…a small motorcade of five Ambassadors arrived to see me off!” In Ghana, he snapped photographs of the library, gardens, and summer home of the late W. E. B. Du Bois, excitedly collecting evidence to contrast the honor Du Bois received in Africa with the scorn and criminal prosecution from his native United States.

  Hailed as a world citizen, and oracle of boldness, Malcolm bumped into new regions of politics. African Marxists pressed him to see race as a component of the class struggle, against writer Julian Mayfield’s argument that Karl Marx was a shield for selfish white control. African presidents were intrigued by Malcolm’s proposal to redefine American race practice as a violation of fundamental human rights, and to haul the United States before the United Nations for sanctions, but even the powerful Ghanaian president, Kwame Nkrumah, shied away from the idea publicly for fear of offending the U.S. government.

  On his last night in Accra, Ghana, Malcolm ran into Muhammad Ali outside the Ambassador Hotel. After an awkward pause, the new heavyweight champion rebuffed Malcolm’s greeting and turned away with an entourage led by his business manager, Elijah Muhammad’s son Herbert. Though hurt by this snub only three months after their shared triumph over Sonny Liston, Malcolm knew better than to try to pry Ali’s young mind from sealed captivity within the Nation of Islam. He merely hinted at the gigantic beckoning world of hajj Islam. “Because a billion of our people in Africa, Arabia, and Asia love you blindly,” he wired Ali the next day, “you must now be forever aware of your tremendous responsibilities to them.” (Ali dismissed the advice by joking to reporters that he had come to the Muslim world to find four wives: one to shine his shoes, one to feed him grapes, one to rub olive oil on his muscles, and one named Peaches. He ridiculed Malcolm to reporters as a loony in a “funny white robe…. Man, he’s gone. He’s gone so far out…. Nobody listens to that Malcolm any more.”)

  Upon his tumultuous homecoming to New York, Malcolm X presented orthodox Islam as the reconciling link between his new ideal of brotherhood and his continuing indictment of white America. “America needs to understand Islam,” he declared, “because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem.” On another occasion he said, “True Islam removes racism,” and within days he flatly evangelized those he had scorned as devils: “The American whites should adopt the Islam religion.” These religious appeals lasted no longer than candles in the hurricane of attention to Malcolm’s recantation as applied to white people generically, and specifically to Americans. From the first question in the Skyline Room—“Do we correctly understand that you now do not think that all whites are evil?”—reporters swarmed over his newsworthy mix of forgiveness and vengeance. Calls from journalists intruded on the intense dictation sessions for his autobiography, to the point that Alex Haley once pacified a Life correspondent by plac
ing the phone receiver near enough to pick up some of what Malcolm was telling an interviewer from ABC.

  Among those Malcolm received personally at Harlem’s Theresa Hotel was the Yale author Robert Penn Warren, collecting material for his forthcoming book, Who Speaks for the Negro? Like other writers, Warren did not bother with distinctions between world Islam and the Nation of Islam, which outsiders called the Black Muslims, but he burrowed into cross-racial psychology. “I begin by asking if the Negro’s sense of a lack of identity is the key for the appeal of the Black Muslim religion,” he reported. Malcolm X briskly agreed but then distinguished between a cultural void and a sense of religion. “The two must be separated,” he said.

  Like an attorney at the bar of history, Warren cross-examined Malcolm as a stand-in witness for all Negroes living and dead—probing the far limits of guilt and grievance, asking to what degree they were individual or collective, empirical or attitudinal, inherited or created anew. Occasionally, a plaintive tone crept into the diagnostic questions. “Can any person of white blood—even one—be considered guiltless?” Warren asked. Taken aback, Malcolm denied the validity of “blood damnation” on a religious basis but observed that it would be difficult to filter out the actual “criminal oppression of the American Negro.”

  “Let’s take an extreme case,” pressed Warren. He postulated that “a white child of three or four—an age below decisions or responsibility—is facing death before an oncoming truck.” Did such a child bear guilt for the oppression of Negroes?