Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  Journalists compiled an hourly “chronology of the crisis” on Sunday—not only in Washington, where President Johnson ordered the evacuation of all two thousand U.S. dependents from Saigon, and McNamara delivered a crisp briefing on the airstrikes with a map and pointer, but also in South Vietnam, where Bundy, described by the New York Times correspondent as “hatless, tense and pale,” flew by helicopter to visit the devastation at Pleiku and to a field hospital that lacked enough beds for the incoming wounded, including a gravely injured West Point major who told Bundy, “That’s the breaks.”

  Aboard Air Force One, heading home from his fatefully timed mission, Bundy solidified the resolve of the “fork-in-the-road” memo ten days earlier. He wrote a memorandum recommending an air and naval campaign of “sustained reprisal against the North,” not limited to specific incidents such as Tonkin Gulf. “We emphasize that our primary target in advocating a reprisal policy is the improvement of the situation in South Vietnam,” he wrote, explaining: attacks on the North would depress morale of Vietcong guerrillas in the South (“This is the strong opinion of CIA Saigon”), and raise morale of South Vietnamese allies behind U.S. initiative. “We have the whip hand in reprisals as we do not in other fields,” Bundy argued. Still, he confessed doubt as to whether sustained reprisal could prevent Communist victory. “What we can say,” he concluded, “is that even if it fails, the policy will be worth it.” His flight reached Washington in time for Bundy to give President Johnson the report before he went to bed Sunday night.

  MARTIN LUTHER KING was in Atlanta. He had rushed to catch up with his lost week in Alabama—first speaking in Marion to encourage the new movement there, which was battered, then meeting late into the night with leaders of the movement in Selma, which was tired. He had dispatched Andrew Young and James Bevel to see if they could open a supporting front in nearby Lowndes County, made hasty arrangements to throw together a registration march in Montgomery, and then gone home to preach at Ebenezer. All the while, Harry Wachtel was reporting that the Pleiku crisis had stirred the Johnson White House into a “hornet’s nest” over his public quest for an appointment. The most Wachtel could wheedle from Lee White was an offer that if King would settle for Vice President Humphrey on Tuesday, the President might “spontaneously” invite him by for a chat—provided that King kept the plan strictly secret. White insisted that Johnson would renege upon the first hint of advance publicity. King first held out for Monday, pleading commitments in Montgomery on Tuesday, but backed down when aides streamlined his schedule with charter flights. Wachtel and Clarence Jones negotiated a press release on the Humphrey appointment, which King released late Sunday from Atlanta. Unbeknownst to them, White was recommending that Johnson not see King at all.

  On Monday, in Selma, James Bevel led fifty volunteers into the courthouse to confront a symbol of the new procedures established under the Thomas court order: an “appearance book” on a hallway table outside the registration office. Victor Atkins, chairman of the Board of Registrars, informed him that while the office was closed that week, aspiring voters could guarantee a future place in line by signing the appearance book at any time. After Bevel objected that the Thomas order was a sham reform, marchers filed by the appearance book without signing, and followed Bevel outside to form a line of silent vigil. There were three visiting whites among them, two Unitarian ministers from Boston and a Catholic theologian from New York. Some marchers held signs calling for more registration days. Sheriff Clark came outside “shaking with anger,” observed the New York Times correspondent, that these people would spurn the county’s concession. “You’re making a mockery of justice!” Clark shouted at Bevel, jabbing him backward down the courthouse steps with his billy club. A deputy attacked Ivanhoe Donaldson at the rear of the line. When the marchers refused to disperse, Clark hauled all fifty upstairs so that Judge Hare could impose five-day contempt sentences for disturbing his courtroom. The local Times-Journal, in its first notice of violence against demonstrators, reported that “Bevel was roughed up somewhat” and that others on the way to the county jail “were jabbed by deputies carrying electric cattle prods.”

  At a Monday night rally in Montgomery, King urged citizens to join him “by the thousands” for a mass voter registration Tuesday morning, but fewer than two hundred showed up to march out of his former church home on Dexter Avenue. The meager turnout was embarrassing, although King knew that infighting had long since withered the local spirit of the bus boycott. Hosea Williams tried to convince reporters that his own poor staff work was to blame. At a press conference, running late for his midday charter flight, King conceded the existence of voter apathy among Negroes, then rushed off with Bernard Lee, Andrew Young, and James Forman of SNCC. In Washington, they gathered late Tuesday afternoon with Harry Wachtel and a swelling entourage in Vice President Humphrey’s office, where Attorney General Katzenbach and his staff lawyers joined the discussion on what kind of legislation might break down political barriers to Negro registration in the South. Former MFDP counsel Joseph Rauh submitted a rough draft of a bill. Lee White arrived from the White House next door, having informed President Johnson that King had kept silent as promised. As time passed, White parried anxious looks from Wachtel about whether Johnson would honor his reciprocal pledge.

  The President was in a crisis briefing, the first of a series that would bring members of Congress in groups of thirty or so almost daily. Undersecretary of State George Ball, substituting for Dean Rusk, who was ill, described the Vietnam conflict against the sweep of Chinese history. “We can’t forget that during the first thousand years of the Christian era, Southeast Asia consisted of vassal states of China,” he said, adding that in the present century the dominant geopolitical force in Asia combined a Communist revolution at its “raw, primitive, expansionist state” with the “imperial drive of a proud, arrogant, gifted people.” Unless the drive could be “checked in South Vietnam,” Ball warned, “sooner or later there will be an overrunning of the whole of Southeast Asia by Red China,” with a corresponding withdrawal of American power that would shake confidence from New Delhi and Tokyo to Berlin. “And in the long run,” Ball concluded, “the stakes here are very simply the question of the expansion of Communist power both from Peiping and from Moscow. And I think that our options are very limited.”

  President Johnson followed by introducing McGeorge Bundy as a witness fresh from his transpacific return. Bundy conceded a strong adverse tide while insisting that “the situation is by no means finished business.” To the positive headlines from his public comments the previous day (“Bundy Gives an Optimistic Report on Vietnam”), he added a report from the battle zone. “I met no American and no Vietnamese who did not think that the will and power and determination of the United States itself were perhaps the most important variable of all in this effort,” he said. Bundy emphasized that McNamara and he had made their crucial Vietnam recommendations before Pleiku. President Johnson resisted congressional entreaties to arouse the public against the Vietnamese adversaries, for fear of a war stampede.

  In Humphrey’s office, secretaries at last interrupted with word that the President was calling. Humphrey took the telephone briefly and then excused himself to answer a summons to the White House, triggering panic in those who were aware of the scripted plan. Lee White chased after Humphrey, who had simply forgotten, and the Vice President returned to invite the entire group along to see the historic rooms outside the Oval Office. President Johnson emerged for handshakes, then whisked King and Lee White away to discuss politics. Ten minutes later, King did not give waiting reporters the statement drafted for him by the White House (“We all appreciate the heavy demands on the President’s time…”), but neither did he disclose Johnson’s comments. Choosing a middle course, he spoke about his own suggestions for a voting rights bill, and shaped front-page news by referring to the President’s commitment to take action.

  THAT TUESDAY, February 9, French security officials detained Malcolm X o
n arrival at Orly International Airport and expelled him two hours later as an “undesirable.” They announced that his scheduled lecture at the Salle de la Mutualité in Paris might “trouble the public order.” Malcolm arrived seething in London, protesting that French authorities “would not even let me contact the American embassy.” He expressed shock to be branded an outcast abroad, where he had enjoyed refuge from close dangers at home.

  The next day, Malcolm delivered a furious lecture to a packed hall at the London School of Economics. He attacked as “absolutely unnoticed” the clandestine warfare waged by Western powers in Africa for colonial and neocolonial regimes—“American planes with American bombs being piloted by American-trained pilots, dropping American bombs on black people….” He said the United States was paying salaries to puppet presidents and employing mercenaries from apartheid South Africa. “Which means,” he added with sarcasm, “that I come from a country that is busily sending the Peace Corps to Nigeria while sending hired killers to the Congo.” The student crowd laughed. They applauded when he said that an independent Congo might topple Portuguese colonies in Angola and Mozambique, and bring pressure even against the white bastion of South Africa. They cheered when he predicted the demise of Ian Smith’s unpopular white supremacist government, which was defying Britain’s grant of independence to the colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). “And you can’t win in the Congo,” said Malcolm. “If you can’t win in South Vietnam, you can’t win in the Congo.”

  He paused to scattered snickers. “You think you can win in South Vietnam?” he asked. “…The French were deeply entrenched in Vietnam for a hundred years or so. They had the best weapons of warfare, a highly mechanized army, everything that you would need. And the guerrillas came out of the rice paddies with nothing but sneakers on and a rifle and a bowl of rice—nothing but gym shoes, tennis shoes…. They ran the French out of there. And if the French were deeply entrenched and couldn’t stay there, how do you think someone else is going to stay there who is not even there yet?” Guffaws over the shoe image competed with catcalls (“Shut up!”) and derisive comments about the flat presumption that English-speaking superpowers would fare no better than the French.

  Malcolm turned his lecture inside out on the consuming subject of hatred. A conqueror’s image of Africa had infected 100 million people of African descent in the West, he said, “and in hating that image, we ended up hating ourselves without even realizing it.” He teased Britain for producing the common Jamaican immigrant “running around here trying to outdo the Englishman with his Englishness.” He scoffed at affected innocence. “Some whites have the audacity to refer to me as a hate teacher…,” he said. “In America, they have taught us to hate ourselves. To hate our skin, hate our hair, hate our features, hate our blood, hate what we are. Why, Uncle Sam is a master hate teacher, so much so that he makes somebody think he’s teaching love when he’s teaching hate. When you make a man hate himself, why, you’ve really got it going.” The audience erupted in laughter.

  BY FBI COUNT, 161 students filed out of Brown Chapel for Selma’s Wednesday afternoon march, walking silently in small groups to comply with the city parade ordinance. Once safely past Wilson Baker to the courthouse sidewalk, they pulled from their clothing small signs ranging from “Let Our Parents Vote” to “Jim Clark Is a Cracker.” Sheriff Clark, under community pressure to try smothering the protest with nonreaction, permitted the group to stand unmolested, but he waved up two yellow buses to strategic spots that concealed the pickets from reporters stationed across Alabama Avenue. His obvious sensitivity prompted the students to detach roughly half their number around the corner to the Lauderdale Street sidewalk. Clark countered by moving one of the buses to block sight of them, which excited press interest in what the Selma paper called “a ludicrous game of ‘hide the demonstrators.’” The sheriff withdrew to confer with legal advisers in the courthouse.

  Clark emerged at 2:54 P.M. with a new plan. “Move out!” he shouted to the students, and his deputies herded them eastward in single file down the middle of Alabama Avenue. They crossed Broad Street and passed the City Hall jails. When students asked where they were going, deputies called out, “You wanted to march, didn’t you?” At Sylvan Street, instead of left toward Brown Chapel, Sheriff Clark turned the line right at a trot, down to a road that ran out of town along the bend of the Alabama River. Some deputies applied billy clubs and cattle prods to move the students along, while others brought up cars so that Clark and the others could ride alongside the flanks at a pace stepped up to a full-blown run past the Cosby-Carmichael gravel pit.

  At a creek bridge two miles up River Road, Clark posted a rear guard to block press photographers and private vehicles. Ahead, clumps of students began bolting into fields where pursuit was difficult. Some stopped to vomit. At a federal hearing on whether Sheriff Clark had violated the injunction to keep constitutional order around the courthouse, Letha Mae Stover would testify that she fell out and told a deputy that it would do no good to keep punching her in the back. The whole line of students was collapsed or dispersed within a mile of the creek bridge, and Clark returned to announce with a wink that he had been marching the students under truancy arrest six miles to the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge, his jails being full, when they “escaped.”

  There were overflow mass meetings Wednesday night, at which Silas Norman vowed to rise up against Sheriff Clark’s cattle drives for children, and King reported firsthand that Selma already made President Johnson “aware of our groans…aware of our yearnings.” Then, in a midnight strategy session at the Torch Motel, SNCC leaders challenged King’s pained recommendation to drop Bevel’s boycott of the appearance book. King called it a small positive step. Ivanhoe Donaldson called it an empty promise from the federal courts, objecting that ordinary citizens still had to walk past cattle prods to get into the courthouse. King said the movement needed relief from adverse press about the boycott, such as the AP story “Negroes Don’t Know What They Want.” SNCC leader Courtland Cox said the appearance book offered no hope to illiterate Negroes who could not sign it. When King and Andrew Young advocated resting Selma with dramatic moves into other counties, “in order to get a registration bill passed,” arguments broke out over who should speak for local people in strategic decisions. L. L. Anderson and F. D. Reese, the only Selma speakers recorded in the minutes, complained of efforts to exclude them because they were preachers.

  Before dawn, the SNCC caucus voted to end the boycott of the appearance book after all, saying they wanted every chance to gain enough votes to drive Sheriff Clark from office. King left for Montgomery to catch an early morning flight for fund-raising speeches in Michigan. He called Clarence Jones from the road, asking for speech drafts against what he called a “deterioration” in Negro-Jewish relations, and vented himself on the growing animosity of SNCC leaders. He told Jones it was the same as Albany in 1962, when they charged that he skimmed publicity off their groundwork. The most hostile ones were those who spent the least time in Selma, he said. They were irrational, and had “no sense of political timing.” Whereas he bit his tongue, King complained, they were carrying their bitterness to an eager market in the press.* Jones calmed him by volunteering to ask Harry Belafonte to moderate another truce meeting.

  Conflicting passions fell hardest upon Diane Nash Bevel. Her husband was running a fever inside the county jail. Prisoners sent word that his outspokenness and shaved head made him a special target for deputies who had hosed down his cell in the February cold. She had supported Bevel’s boycott of the appearance book at the Torch Motel, worrying out loud about setting a precedent for rural counties of high illiteracy, but she endured looks from friends who knew how openly Bevel was flouting their marriage. He excused serial rascalism behind a bluster of nonviolent theory. Hatred and violence sprang from the want of love, Bevel preached. He claimed that he gave and received abundant energy by resolving these “contradictions” in his bed. Unabashed, he seduced more than one m
ovement wife while her spouse, his bosom colleague, was in jail.

  The forced march of children compounded strains across town. Judge Hare’s pressure to resume mass arrests collided with growing opinion that polite segregation worked better than cattle prods, and a passionate editorial urged citizens to restrain senseless hard-liners “playing to a worldwide audience.”* Wilson Baker, who had smuggled SNCC workers beyond the creek barrier to retrieve injured students, saying, “I’m human, too,” threatened to arrest Clark himself if he lost his temper again. However, Baker warned that he would kill any students who dared to disturb Mrs. Baker by picketing near his home.

  On Thursday morning, when movement spirits rallied behind a student march four times larger than Wednesday’s, Nash desperately tried to rescue Bevel after a doctor at the jail diagnosed his fever as viral pneumonia. She called reporters and badgered Selma officials until she secured his transfer to segregated Berwell Infirmary, where she and Bernard Lafayette were stunned to find Bevel shackled to a hospital bed with a sheriff’s deputy guarding the door. Now she hounded the Justice Department by phone, as during the Freedom Rides of 1961, and secured letters that the shackles violated hospital procedures even for murderers. Her crusade pushed Sheriff Clark into a concession before dawn on Friday. He ordered the irons removed, then collapsed early that morning of chest pains, later diagnosed as exhaustion. The front page of Saturday’s New York Times featured a photograph of SCLC worker Richard Boone in a Bevel-style skullcap outside the white hospital, Vaughn Memorial, with movement students kneeling in prayer for Clark’s recovery. “Thus ended,” reported the Times, “the fourth week of street demonstrations protesting barriers against Negro voting in Alabama.”