Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  Attorney General Kennedy, informed that President Johnson was filming a statement on Vietnam, left word in mid-afternoon that the President might want to issue a statement of personal sympathy for the families (“I think it’s the human equation that’s damn important for everything”), and recommended presidential calls to put pressure on Mississippi investigators. Johnson tried to return the call twenty minutes later, when Kennedy had departed to film an announcement that he would not run for a New York Senate seat in the fall, and promptly reached Katzenbach and Marshall instead. Both supported Kennedy’s impression of genuine crisis, and Katzenbach guessed it was “probably” a Klan murder.

  “How old are these kids?” asked Johnson.

  “Twenty and twenty-four and twenty-two,” replied Katzenbach. He and Marshall suggested that Johnson not see the families, which would set a precedent for presidential audiences in missing persons cases, but they supported the idea of discreet pressure on Mississippi. Anything public in a civil rights case, they warned, would make it politically ruinous for state officials to cooperate.

  Within minutes, the President was interrupting his own warm-up phone chatter about how much a dry Texas rancher envied the ample rainfall on Senator James Eastland’s Delta plantation. “Jim, we got three kids missing down there,” he said. “What can I do about it?” Eastland was ready with several reasons “why I don’t think there’s a damn thing to it,” beginning with local geography. He said the alleged disappearance took place in Neshoba County “right next to John Stennis’s home county,” where there was no Klan chapter nor even a Citizens Council. “There’s no organized white man in that area,” said Eastland, “so that’s why I think it’s a publicity stunt.” While expressions of White House concern were unnecessary, he conceded that they could not hurt and eventually offered to pass along encouragement to Governor Paul Johnson.

  The President pounced. “You just do that,” he said, “and I’ll say I’ve communicated with the proper people.”

  News from Mississippi swamp scavengers intervened before Eastland could relay the governor’s reply. Hours earlier, local FBI agent John Proctor had roared at high speeds over the thirty-eight miles from Meridian to the Choctaw Reservation outside Philadelphia to hear what the superintendent would not say over the telephone: Indians had come upon a smoldering Ford Fairlane in a thicket about eighty feet off the highway, just past the bridge over Bogue Chitto Creek, and they admitted stealing the hubcaps if that was important. As soon as Proctor rounded up agents to find the burned-out hulk, and saw that its license tag matched the CORE-owned station wagon driven by Mickey Schwerner, he drove to the nearest farmhouse, introduced himself as an insurance salesman, asked to borrow a telephone to avoid being overheard on police radio, and sent a coded message through New Orleans to FBI headquarters: car found, no bodies. Obeying orders to deliver updates every fifteen minutes, Proctor was returning from his second or third trip to the farmhouse, his insurance ruse wearing thin, when he was astonished to see FBI Major Case Inspector Joseph Sullivan supervising the grid search of the surrounding Bogue Chitto Swamp.

  Since completing his railroad sabotage cases in St. Augustine that spring, Sullivan had reviewed the stalled church-bomb murder investigation in Birmingham and happened to be in the Memphis FBI office the previous night to overhear the mobilizing orders to Mississippi. By rank and reputation, the FBI agents on the scene instantly deferred to the sphinx-like Sullivan—bald, pin-striped, and imposing—when Sheriff Rainey and Deputy Price pulled up with a fleet of Mississippi sirens. Sullivan blocked them on the swamp path, denying access to the car until FBI technicians could secure evidence. After a standoff in which the formidable Rainey first hotly denied that any federal agent could keep him from a crime scene in his own jurisdiction, the state forces withdrew, and Sullivan muttered his trademark phrase about not being there to make anybody’s hit parade.

  FBI Director Hoover insisted that he speak with the President at 4:05 P.M., six minutes after Johnson’s call to Senator Eastland. “I wanted you to know that we have found the car,” he announced, adding that “we can’t tell whether anybody’s in there in view of the intense heat.” Hoover regretted his dramatic, precautionary hedge about the bodies as soon as the President questioned him intently about why agents could not get close enough to look in the windows for telltale signs of burned bones or belt buckles. “You mean the car is still burning?” asked Johnson. In five more phone calls over the next four hours, Hoover introduced new exaggerations—“the entire inside of the car is melted into molten metal”—behind an adjusted, “offhand presumption” that the car was empty.

  Senator Eastland called back in the midst of these updates to report that Governor Johnson wanted the President to send an impartial observer to examine evidence of civil rights fraud. Mississippi investigators had established that the COFO people had reported the three boys missing in advance, said Eastland, and the governor “expects ’em to turn up…claiming that somebody has whipped ’em, when he doesn’t believe a word of it.”

  Johnson cagily heard him out. “Okay, now here’s the problem, Jim,” he said. “Hoover just called me one minute ago….” Senator Eastland groaned to hear of the burned car, but quickly recovered his aplomb. “The governor says if you’ll send some impartial man down here,” he emphasized, “that you’ll get the surprise of your life…. There’s no violence, no friction of any kind.”

  Within an hour, Johnson had the Goodmans and Nathan Schwerner brought from Capitol Hill to Lee White’s office and then into the Oval Office, where he informed them of the ominous discovery.* He called Defense Secretary McNamara in their presence, so they could hear his order that helicopters, Navy divers—“every facility of the department”—be made available to search for the missing sons. Word of these commitments was posted in the Jackson COFO headquarters within thirty minutes of the delegation’s emotional departure from the White House. Bob Moses turned on a cafeteria microphone during supper in Ohio. “The car has been found outside Philadelphia,” he announced starkly. “It’s been badly burned. There is no news of the three boys.”

  Well into Tuesday night, Johnson conferred at the White House with Robert Kennedy, Nicholas Katzenbach, and Burke Marshall on how, assuming the worst, to keep this gruesome triple murder from going unsolved, like the Birmingham church bombing, or from multiplying into similar crimes over the summer. Seeing little hope for initiative by Mississippi authorities, they discussed how to maneuver the FBI into the only state where Director Hoover steadfastly refused to open a full-fledged FBI office. Kennedy reviewed his exasperation that Hoover managed to fulfill the letter of every assignment and yet do only what he wanted, and Katzenbach remarked that Hoover seemed to respond at times to flattery. Both Kennedy and Marshall observed that Hoover liked spy intrigue more than law enforcement, which he seemed to regard as drudgery.

  President Johnson summarized the problem as a delicate manipulation of three distinct sovereignties: Mississippi, the United States, and his old friend J. Edgar Hoover. Perceiving a need for flattery with a sting, he fixed upon the opening for an “impartial observer,” reasoning that Governor Johnson could not now withdraw his invitation, and he proposed to send the retired CIA director Allen Dulles. The idea at first seemed silly to the Justice Department officials, but Johnson explained how much Hoover hated Dulles, having wanted to be CIA director himself, and told tales about Hoover’s sputtering mortification that Dulles already sat on the Warren Commission, positioned to protect the CIA at the expense of his beloved FBI. Dulles was the perfect motivational tool for the mission, reasoned the President, because Hoover would not passively endure hints of criticism or competition from his rival.

  Johnson initiated his plan with a swift display of semi-exhibitionist phone work. “We got the ox in a ditch, and we need a little help,” he told Dulles, and talked him into an emergency assignment as presidential emissary, leaving the next day. He sealed the mission by explaining it to Hoover as Governor Johnson�
�s idea, and to Governor Johnson as a mild, cooperative response. Burke Marshall, meanwhile, left to instruct John Doar to collect overnight reading for Dulles on the Mississippi Klan. Lady Bird Johnson patiently received her husband for supper after eleven o’clock, and the departing Justice Department officials, while variously uncomfortable with Johnson by background and taste, could not help marveling upon their first exposure to his style—an adroit, relentlessly unabashed application of raw personal chemistry to politics.

  PHOTOGRAPHS OF the charred station wagon circled the globe before a frantic Wednesday morning when Robert Kennedy postponed a scheduled journey to Poland, packed off John Doar and Burke Marshall as last-minute escorts for Allen Dulles to Mississippi, then received Myrlie Evers on the first anniversary of her husband’s burial in Washington. Kennedy and Evers emerged with Roy Wilkins to behold a dignified march of nearly two thousand NAACP convention delegates outside the Justice Department.Kennedy welcomed placards of prayer and outrage over Mississippi, eliciting cries of amazement that the Attorney General himself seemed to be joining a demonstration to spur federal resolve.

  Students threw up less congenial picket lines at other federal buildings—more than a hundred people in Boston and nearly seven hundred in New York, where a card was delivered in the morning mail to the stricken Goodman apartment, postmarked Sunday and written in the hand of the missing Andrew: “I have arrived safely in Meridian, Mississippi. This is a wonderful town and the weather is fine.”

  In Chicago, officers around the U.S. Attorney’s office used a tarpaulin to screen from photographers an all-day sit-in that led finally to the arrest of SNCC’s Bernard Lafayette, Charles McDew, Curtis Hayes, and Marion Barry.

  In Ohio, church leader Robert Spike successfully implored Bob Moses to discourage an incipient SNCC demonstration in Washington, warning that some rattled nerves there already were inclined to interpret the entire summer project as a plot to embarrass the Johnson administration. As an alternative, Moses took a delegation of volunteers immediately to the capital for private meetings to conserve a tide of support against an undertow of doubt. To refute worries that SNCC might have created Klan terror, they recited a long list of persecutions that predated the first thought of the summer project, and they parried criticism that faulted their motives as symbiotic to the Klan’s. (“It is a dreadful thing to say, but it needs saying,” wrote Joseph Alsop. “The organizers who sent these young people into Mississippi must have wanted, even hoped for, martyrs…[which] is not exactly admirable either.”)

  Moses then joined the converging rush to Mississippi behind SNCC chairman John Lewis of Atlanta and Dick Gregory of Chicago, who followed James Farmer of New York in a caravan of movement cars from Meridian past a roadblock at the Neshoba County line and on to an unproductive interview with Sheriff Rainey in Philadelphia. More than fifty state troopers pushed milling crowds off the courthouse square to stare from store windows at the temerity of such Negroes.

  Journalists covered the dramatic arrival of Allen Dulles in Jackson late that Wednesday, while Rita Schwerner, slight and intense, slipped from Ohio into the E. F. Young Hotel in Meridian. She issued a public statement, written on airline stationery: “Why can’t the FBI do something about cases of violence against voter registration workers….” At the Meridian airport, FBI Inspector Sullivan absorbed what for him was a major surprise when Assistant FBI Director Alex Rosen emerged from a government jet among the evidence technicians he had summoned from Washington. Known somewhat derisively within the FBI as “Hoover’s token Jew,” a consummate bureaucrat said to have confined himself within headquarters for many years, Rosen explained that only hours ago, when Director Hoover tried to assure President Johnson that he had a top FBI official supervising the Mississippi search from Washington, Johnson had barked, “Send him down there, too!” Rosen said he knew better than to pull rank in a field investigation, being out of his element, and he further mollified Sullivan with sage internal advice: always hold back at least one juicy detail from the daily flow of reports to headquarters, so as not to be caught empty-handed when Hoover demanded something extra.

  In Washington, President Johnson called the FBI Director late Wednesday about reports that Hoover’s man Deke DeLoach was upset over the Dulles mission. When Hoover mentioned press rumors that Dulles would “take over the investigation” in Mississippi, Johnson declared repeatedly that Dulles “wasn’t going to spy or be an investigator of any kind,” and he launched a soothing monologue that reduced Hoover to grunts of assent. “Now I felt like if the governor asked me to send an impartial observer, and I didn’t send it,” said Johnson, “I’d be in bad shape later on if I had to do something.”

  “Certainly would,” said Hoover.

  “…I haven’t got a better friend in this government than you,” said the President. “…Ain’t nobody gonna take our thirty-year friendship and mess it up one bit…. God bless you.”

  On Thursday in Jackson, Dulles blandly told reporters that his visit had nothing to do with the Neshoba County investigation, which was “in the very able hands of authorities here.” He received the private entreaties of Bob Moses and other civil rights leaders. He talked separately with Governor Johnson about how FBI Director Hoover might help isolate bad elements within the Klan, and nodded politely at intelligence briefings on Communist infiltration of the civil rights movement. Speaking as one spy to another, leaders of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission told Dulles that the missing civil rights workers were still being sighted here and there, most reliably in Alabama. By their analysis, the burned-out car had been left suspiciously near the edge of Bogue Chitto Swamp, as though intended to be found quickly, and there was something odd about the multitude of carefully placed phone calls out of COFO since Sunday—something paranoid or worse, consistent with a reverse conspiracy.

  Dulles left Jackson before the huge Thursday night campaign rally at which George Wallace denounced both national parties and “the manipulations of a soulless state.” Above the hearty cheers of ten thousand supporters, Governor Johnson seconded Wallace’s proclamation that the South’s 112 electoral votes were the fulcrum of national power, shouting, “It’s time the white people of our various states started bloc voting!”

  In Ohio, Bayard Rustin met with long silences as he dissected the psychology of nonviolence for the second-week volunteers. They may not be able to say so, he argued, but their whole purpose in Mississippi was to love their enemies in the special sense of bearing witness to a redeeming, common nature with the most bestial Klansman and with Senator James Eastland, the most callous defender of segregation—“to take power from those who misuse it, at which point they can become human, too.” Many of the trainees watched the national news after Rustin’s lecture. “Then it happened…,” one wrote home of a special report on CBS television. “…Walter Cronkite told how the whole country was watching Mississippi.” James Forman and other familiar speakers from the Ohio training sessions appeared on the screen along with Senator Eastland himself, who declared that Negroes were perfectly free to vote. News film showed U.S. sailors, mindful of swamp snakes, poking through Bogue Chitto for the three missing workers on orders of President Johnson, and when the audio portion took up the movement anthem “We Shall Overcome,” the volunteers in Ohio joined hands to sing along with the broadcast. “Stunned, I walked out alone into the night,” wrote the correspondent. “Life was beautiful. It was perfect. These people were me, and I was them.”

  Against the void of the disappearance, the most ordinary news from Mississippi seemed charged to the trainees in Ohio. Detailed reports filtered north of baths in backyard tubs using water heated over a fire, of heart-stopping trips to mail letters in town under the heavy gaze of white eyes, and of vivid sensory overload where “you feel the heat, breathe the dust, smell the outhouses, hear the kids and the chickens.” Already there were debates about whether the white volunteers should patronize segregated restaurants, and a daily ration of sketchy “incident”
reports shaped the middle ground of expectation for the second wave. On Thursday morning, Ron Ridenhour turned up shell-shocked in Jackson with notice that he and two other volunteers had been arrested Tuesday out of their host’s home in Moss Point, on the Gulf coast south of Hattiesburg, after which Ridenhour knew only that he had been moved to a different county for what he called mental torture culminating in the jailer’s solemn announcement that one of the co-workers had been found sawed in half. (A New York Times reporter established that the co-worker had retreated homeward in one piece.)

  Thursday afternoon, in tiny Itta Bena, an armed posse hijacked two volunteers from a railroad track where they and project director William McGee were walking with registration leaflets. McGee took refuge in Hopewell Church, where the smoke bomb raid a year earlier had touched off the summer-long incarceration at Parchman, and his phone alarms spread rapidly to nearby Greenwood and down to Bob Moses and John Doar in Jackson, interrupting their attentions to the Dulles mission. From Greenwood, sensitive to runaway regret over slow reactions the previous Sunday in Meridian, movement supporters flocked to Itta Bena and located the hijackers calmly holding their prey under shotgun at a gasoline station, waiting to ship them out on the next bus. Safe but undone, saying he had been warned graphically how he would “disappear” like the boys in Philadelphia if he stayed, one of the volunteers persuaded William McGee to drive him as far north as St. Louis before dawn.

  THURSDAY NIGHT, not long after the CBS report on the Bogue Chitto search, two SNCC leaders carefully made their way eastward from Greenville across Mississippi. Although Stokely Carmichael at twenty-two was only a year older than Charles Cobb, they were movement veterans, seasoned enough to undertake a dangerous clandestine initiative into Neshoba County, hoping to elicit clues about the disappearance from local Negroes. Before dark, they had stopped on the way to remonstrate over a mysterious decree that had thwarted one small outpost of the summer project all week. The mayor of Hollandale confirmed that it was indeed forbidden for any white volunteer to live with or otherwise “molest” local Negroes, and that only local citizens could appeal an unwritten ordinance to that effect—“that’s the law, and that’s that”—whereupon Carmichael and Cobb continued on Highway 12 until transportation problems, as usual, undermined their precautions.