Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  Campaign historian Theodore White described the release of pent-up anger as a turning point for the convention, if not for the role and reputation of the American press. Before then, White contrasted the “well-dressed and well-mannered Goldwater delegates” favorably with “civil rightsers” marching and picketing outside the Cow Palace,* but the Eisenhower speech opened the convention itself to confrontation. Goldwater delegates and the spectator galleries showered New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller with catcalls and boos when he tried to speak against extremism. Hostilities erupted on the convention floor. Afterward, neither the triumphant Goldwater conservatives nor the defeated Rockefeller-Scranton liberals smoothed their raging antagonism in the interest of party unity. “Hell, I don’t want to talk to that son-of-a-bitch,” Goldwater growled when Rockefeller called him to concede the nomination. Life magazine bemoaned the “ugly tone” of the entire convention.† The New York Times called it a “disaster” for both the United States and the Republicans, saying the Goldwater nomination could “reduce a once great party to the status of an ugly, angry, frustrated faction.”

  On the morning after his acceptance speech, Senator Goldwater sought an audience with General Eisenhower, who was straying again toward rebellion over Goldwater’s chief applause line, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Echoing a widespread public outcry, Eisenhower demanded to know how Goldwater could see “extremism” as good politics when it smacked of kooks. More personally, he told Goldwater that the slogan reminded him of right-wing zealots who had called Eisenhower himself “a conscious agent of the communists” in the White House, which was “utter tommyrot.” Goldwater stammered through several unsuccessful replies before trying a D-Day analogy. What he meant was that patriotism required sacrifice, said Goldwater, and that General Eisenhower had been the ultimate “extremist” for liberty when he sent the Allied troops across the English Channel against Hitler. This interpretation transformed Eisenhower’s mood. “By golly, that makes real sense,” he said with a smile of relief that nearly matched Goldwater’s. Still, this close call within the Republican bosom shook the new presidential candidate, who resolved never to repeat his signature phrase during the campaign.

  NEWSWEEKPRONOUNCED the San Francisco convention “stunningly total—and unconditional…an authentic party revolution, born of deep-seated frustration with the existing order, executed by a new breed of pros with a ruthless skill.” Other mainstream outlets speculated about Eisenhower, the rejection of Wall Street Republicans, or Goldwater’s poor prospects against Lyndon Johnson, but their excitements were mild beside the acute distress of Negro publications. “GOP Convention Spurns Negroes,” cried the Cleveland Call and Post. “Negro Delegates to GOP Convention Suffer Week of Humiliation,” headlined the Associated Negro Press newswire. “The Great Purge of Negroes,” announced Jet. “GOP Negroes Washed Away by the Goldwater Ocean,” said the Chicago Defender. Their focus was less on the Goldwater nomination itself than on the institutional rejection of cherished Republican fixtures such as George W. Lee of Memphis, delegate to every GOP convention since 1940, who had “seconded the nomination of Robert A. Taft” in 1952. The San Francisco convention, sweeping aside Lee’s credentials claim that he and two hundred “regular” Negro Republicans had been railroaded out of the Shelby County caucus, seated “lily-white” delegations in Tennessee and every other Southern state “for the first time since Reconstruction Days,” reported the Pittsburgh Courier, noting that the caucus of Southern Republicans, “to add insult to injury,” named its hotel headquarters Fort Sumter. Southern Republicans reformed as a homogeneous group. Of the region’s 375 convention delegates, all were white and at least 366 supported Goldwater.

  Minority observers mourned the loss of Republican stalwarts far beyond the sinecures* and patronage posts of the South. In “Cal. GOP/ White Man’s Party,” the California Eagle of Los Angeles protested a seldom-mentioned fact about Goldwater’s victory over Rockefeller in the decisive June 2 primary: it gained convention seats and control of party machinery for a slate of eighty-six California delegates that “by deliberate choice” was exclusively white. Nationwide, by slating no Negro candidates and defeating most opposing tickets, Goldwater strategists whittled the number of Negro delegates to a minuscule fourteen of 1,308, roughly one per hundred, in what newspapers called the fewest “ever to be certified to a Republican convention.”

  At the Cow Palace, the rolling invective that startled television viewers fell personally upon this tiny remnant. The Cleveland Call and Post reported that George Fleming of New Jersey ran from the hall in tears, saying Negro delegates “had been shoved, pushed, spat on, and cursed with a liberal sprinkling of racial epithets.” George Young, labor secretary of Pennsylvania, complained that Goldwater delegates harassed him to the point of setting his suit jacket on fire with a cigarette. Baseball legend Jackie Robinson summarized his “unbelievable hours” as an observer on the convention floor: “I now believe I know how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”

  The Chicago Defender raised the Nazi analogy to a blaring headline: “GOP Convention, 1964 Recalls Germany, 1933.” Editor John H. Sengstacke eulogized the lost tradition reaching back to the armies of Grant and Sherman: “The Grand Old Party, which fought against slavery, which kept the flame of hope burning on the altar of freedom…which sustained the faith of the Negro people…is gasping its last breath in the Cow Palace.” In the South, where Negro Republicans could imagine no substitute haven among Democrats, editors and owners of the few Negro newspapers writhed under the assault to their Republican identity. Atlanta Daily World owner C. A. Scott first denied the Cow Palace revolution (“Scranton on the Move”), then mitigated its effect (“stands to reason…that the party as a whole will not be carried too far from traditional Republican principles”), then pretended it was good (“…may have a stimulating effect on the development of a real two-party system in the South”), and finally called upon the scalded, soul-torn Old Guard to “hold the fort” no matter what. He praised the Negro delegates for deciding not to walk out of the Cow Palace in abject resignation. They had endured only a “graphic demonstration” of what Democrats—“the party of Bilbo, Eastland, Thurmond, Barnett, Wallace”—inflicted regularly through the past half century, wrote Scott, concluding solemnly that it was “useless for a Negro today to think he solves the race issue in politics by jumping from one major party to the other.”

  WHITE VOTERS could jump, too, in numbers of far greater impact. “I think we just gave the South to the Republicans,” President Johnson told his staff on the way to his Texas ranch after signing the civil rights bill. Aides debated his words in strictest confidence. One alarmist feared that Johnson could lose the election solely on the race issue. Others thought Johnson was hoping he could win even if he lost the entire South. There was precedent for white Southern Democrats voting Republican on presidential ballots—Eisenhower and Nixon had cracked through to win a few Southern states—but it was daunting for any Democrat to contemplate the terrible math of running against rather than with the full weight of the traditional “solid South.”

  Only hindsight suggested that Johnson had glimpsed a more dramatic, permanent change. Bill Moyers recalled Johnson saying that he had delivered the South to Republicans “for your lifetime and mine,” which would turn the whole structure of politics on a fulcrum of color. In their direst visions, after the Goldwater convention followed hard upon the civil rights bill, neither established experts nor shell-shocked Negro Republicans anticipated a wholesale switch of party identification down to the roots of congressional and local offices. Historic affiliations were too well fixed, with Republicans more united behind Negro rights than Democrats. In Congress, fully 80 percent of House Republicans and 82 percent of GOP senators had just voted for the civil rights bill, with Democrats lagging behind because of their entrenched segregationist wing. In precincts and state conventions, Republicans everywhere were organized in part around the glorious memory of
Emancipation, which was precisely what had reduced them to near extinction among Southerners. For generations, none but the occasional eccentric Republican had bothered to contest elections for Southern statehouses, legislatures, or courthouse jobs. Of forty-one U.S. representatives from the core Deep South states of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina, Republicans in 1964 numbered zero.

  The century’s first handful of promising Deep South Republican candidates arrived at the San Francisco convention hopeful of novel success in the fall elections. One of them, James D. Martin of Alabama, met alone with Senator Goldwater on the roof of the Mark Hopkins Hotel to propose George Wallace’s hastily conceived terms for a campaign alliance. Wallace wanted a public reward—veto power over Supreme Court nominees, or, shockingly, a place on the Republican ticket as Goldwater’s running mate—in exchange for his agreement not to run as an independent presidential candidate, which likely would doom Goldwater in Southern states. Goldwater declined, knowing he had more to lose than to gain, saying Wallace after all was still a Democrat. Martin returned to circulate on the Cow Palace floor with his message that Republicans should rise above crude racial appeals to larger issues such as federal heavy-handedness, which he called “Bobby Kennedy tearing around like a predator at the constitution of Mississippi and the registration laws of Alabama.” Wallace himself formally withdrew from the presidential race three days after the Republican convention, leaving behind a tacit endorsement of Goldwater and a claim that he had changed the language of political debate. “Today we hear more states’ rights talk than we have heard in the last quarter century…,” he told Face the Nation interviewers on July 19. “…The American people are sick and tired of columnists and TV dudes who…try to slant and distort and malign and brainwash this country.”

  Only four years earlier, when advocates of civil rights had received a congenial welcome at the Republican convention in Chicago, Negro delegates had walked out of the Democratic convention in protest of Kennedy concessions to Southern segregationists. Now Negro leaders of both parties recoiled from the concerted hostility of the Cow Palace Republicans, which they could only hope was an aberrational coup traceable to Goldwater, disconnected from both old tradition and new racial progress. Martin Luther King and others denounced the Republican ticket on its first official day and nearly every day thereafter. With a peculiar mix of vehemence and care, King took pains to stop short of partisan endorsement, saying he was more against Goldwater than for Johnson, hoping that a sound enough defeat for Goldwater might restrain both parties from political white flight.

  30

  King in Mississippi

  KING PRESIDED over contentious staff debates about SCLC’s next initiative. Hosea Williams wanted to fight on in St. Augustine, where he had made a movement name for himself with night marches and bombastic courage. James Bevel, beginning an intense rivalry with the upstart Williams, dismissed St. Augustine as a “waste of time” without new political purpose, and ridiculed Williams for bullheaded leadership—“niggers getting people killed so they can get their picture in the newspaper.” Williams debunked Bevel’s reputation as the visionary of Birmingham, saying everybody knew he was crazy, and he accused Bevel of harboring grandiose ambitions against King’s supreme role. To impose a temporary truce, King and others accepted a distilled essence of each warring criticism—that the St. Augustine movement was indeed stale, and that the Bevel-Nash plan for a massive voting rights campaign in Alabama was premature, especially now that SCLC’s Alabama affiliates were immersed in tests of the new civil rights law.

  Andrew Young, while leaning toward Bevel, favored an interval for repair of personal distress and administrative disorder. His new organizational chart for SCLC contained thirty-five boxes with crisscrossing lines of authority, and Young was defending himself from Septima Clark’s scolding reminders that he had neglected the citizenship classes for the buzz of excitement around King. (“There were many days when I thought I might be on the verge of cracking up,” he wrote Clark on July 20. “I know I had too much on me, but there seemed to be no way of getting around it.”) Still, Young argued that King could not refuse the most dangerous of the new diversions being pressed upon him: an invitation from Bob Moses to tour COFO’s embattled summer projects. This idea kindled another ferocious dispute. Some aides protested that the movement could not offer King as the premium bull’s-eye to Mississippi Klansmen who were killing civil rights workers already; others shouted that the movement could not shrink from violence. King himself raged against the choice, and when his own staff members denied his claim to “a normal life,” he stalked bitterly but briefly from a late-night retreat in St. Augustine.

  At midday on Tuesday, July 21, Attorney General Kennedy called the White House with notice that King was on his way to address the evening’s mass meeting in Greenwood. He said Mississippi authorities, while refusing to supply police escort, recommended that King not try to spend the night in the Delta. “It’s a ticklish problem,” Kennedy told President Johnson, “because if he gets killed, it creates all kinds of problems.” He laughed nervously. “Uh, just being dead, but also a lot of other kind of problems.”

  The President suggested that Kennedy have the FBI guard King, which produced an awkward silence. “Well, it’s difficult…uh they’re not, uh, I suppose,” Kennedy sputtered, then blurted out his most galling complication: “I have no dealings with the FBI anymore.” His frustration veered into bitter accusation. “I understand that he sends, you know, all kinds of reports over to you,” said Kennedy, “but about me.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked the President.

  Kennedy hesitated and then complained—accurately—that Hoover was painting him as a traitor to Johnson. “Well, I just understand he’s got me planning and plotting,” said Kennedy, “…plotting the overthrow of the government.” He added wryly, “Leading a coup.”

  “No, that’s in error,” the President replied. His flat, innocent denial led to a dead-end pause, after which Kennedy proposed getting back to the issue of King in Greenwood. When Johnson volunteered to arrange FBI protection himself, Kennedy fought tense chuckles over the absurd mix of treachery, helplessness, and polite manners. “I hate to ask you to be dealing with somebody that’s working over in the Department of Justice,” he said. “That’s not a very satisfactory situation.” The President joined briefly in the tickles before both men recovered to unspoken truce. “The other thing, Mr. President, is New York,” said Kennedy. He wanted the FBI to investigate reports that Communist groups were fomenting the recent disturbances in Harlem.

  President Johnson promptly called Director Hoover with orders to treat the Harlem troubles with regional balance—just as seriously as the Klan crimes in Georgia and Mississippi. “Maybe you can put a quietus on that Muslim X and all that stuff,” he suggested vaguely of Malcolm X. “I think the Communists are in charge of it.” The President introduced “another problem” without reference to the Attorney General, which would have been inherently inflammatory to Hoover, saying he had word that Martin Luther King was on his way to Greenwood.

  The Director was prepared. “I understand someone there’s threatening they’re gonna kill him,” he replied.

  “Yeah,” said Johnson. He thought it “the best part of wisdom in the national interest” to make sure “we don’t find another burning car.” He said it would be a good idea for “someone” to be “in front and in back of him when he goes in.” On the next pass, he added that there “ought to be an FBI man in front and behind to observe,” and finally he said King should have an escort of FBI agents “in front and behind.”

  Hoover got the point. Although there was suspicion in headquarters that King himself had planted assassination rumors through Burke Marshall in order to manipulate the FBI, Hoover threw the FBI into temporary high-speed reverse on two policies: his publicly announced stance against protecting civil rights workers and his special policy of aloofness about threats to King. He s
ent Assistant Director Alex Rosen back to Mississippi and ordered the leader of the New Orleans FBI office to command an emergency expedition of Louisiana agents.

  INSPECTOR SULLIVAN was excused from the first day of the “King special,” because he and his agents were combing Neshoba County by car and helicopter on the guidance of a young witness with a cardboard box over his head. The search was the culmination of a tip from local white women about the sufferings of Mrs. Fannie Jones, who showed agents a long letter from her son Wilmer about his May 30 arrest on suspicion of asking a white female store clerk for a date. The letter described how Sheriff Rainey and his deputy, Cecil Price, had slapped him around in the cell, cut off his scraggly new high school graduation goatee with a pocketknife, and finally released him around midnight to armed abduction by four Klansmen waiting outside the jail. Located and retrieved from his permanent hiding place in Chicago, terrified of reprisal against himself or his family, Wilmer Jones looked through holes in the cardboard to lead FBI agents through a tentative search for an isolated spot where the Klansmen had threatened to kill him if he did not confess lewd intentions toward the salesclerk. The caravan attracted intense curiosity and so many accurate whispers about his identity that Jones threw off the stifling disguise before the end of the day. Sullivan reconcentrated his ongoing search for the three MIBURN bodies around what the four kidnappers called “the place,” according to Jones’s letter—an abandoned well near a weather-beaten shack, through a barbed-wire gate. Even if that site yielded nothing, as proved the case, Sullivan hoped to rattle potential witnesses with graphic advertisement of FBI interest in “jailhouse giveaway” conspiracies, which was the working theory about how Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman had been murdered exactly one month before.