Fifties (112 page)

They were at risk all the time, for the mobs perceived them as liberals, Jews, and Communists. Several
Life
magazine reporters were beaten badly by the mob early in the crisis, and then the reporters were arrested by local officials for having been beaten up. The network people, because of their high visibility, the familiarity of their faces, and the obvious presence of their cameramen, were particularly vulnerable. Chancellor soon found that when he walked down the street, he would often be followed by cars full of segregationists, hate contorting their faces as they stared at him. At first he would panic.
Should I run?
he would ask himself, but he soon learned
merely to keep walking. The locals became angrier and angrier—for television, in particular, was holding up a mirror of these people for the outside world to look at it, and the image in the mirror was not pretty. If you went to the sheriff’s office to do an interview, Chancellor remembered, you gave your name and organization to the deputy, who would holler back so the entire office could hear, “Sheriff, there’s some son of a bitch out here from the Nigger Broadcasting Company who says he wants to see you.”

Because of the dangers, there were certain rules—a reporter never carried a notebook that he could not hide in a pocket. Popham’s first rule of coverage was: Never take notes in front of the crowd. It was better to dress casual than sharp. A reporter never went out on a story alone. One did not argue with the segregationists or provoke them. Whatever moral abhorrence a reporter felt about the events taking place in front of him, it was to be kept bottled up. Ben Fine of the
Times,
an indoor man in the vernacular, had lost his cool when he comforted Elizabeth Eckford. He had started to argue with the mob and the
Times
had been forced to bring him back to New York.

Watching these journalists in Little Rock, as he had watched them almost two years earlier in Montgomery, Alabama, was a man named Will Campbell. A native of a tiny town called Liberty in south Mississippi, he had earned a bachelor’s degree from Wake Forest and a master’s from the Yale Divinity School: He was technically the Rev. Will Campbell, though for most of his life he never had a church. He liked to describe himself as “a Baptist preacher, but never on Sunday.” The contradiction between his own liberalism and the conservatism of his church amused him, and he liked to say that he “was a Baptist preacher of the South, but not a Southern Baptist preacher.” During the early days of the civil rights movement, he became an important but anonymous player. Sometimes his face would appear in the back of a photograph taken during some particular confrontation, but he would almost never be identified, just as his name would never appear in the news stories themselves, by agreement with the journalists for whom he had already become a valuable source. He was quoted hundreds of times in newspapers but never by name, instead, always as an anonymous reliable source, which he in fact was. He was a shrewd recorder and interpreter not only of the facts but of the intentions of the many different players involved, and he had important friends on all sides in these confrontations. His first job after school had been to serve as the chaplain at the University of Mississippi, but his liberal views on integration
had almost immediately gotten him fired. Although violence had never been directed at him at Ole Miss, at one reception he had given, a turd had been discovered in the punch bowl. That had convinced him his days at Ole Miss were numbered. In 1956 he took a job as a kind of roving field agent for the National Council of Churches based in Nashville. Acting as a friend and adviser to those blacks threatened or in trouble, and connecting them to sympathetic people and agencies in the North, he was a ubiquitous figure, always on the move. The national reporters discovered he was able to move back and forth between different groups, bringing them information and making quiet, astute suggestions about what was likely to happen next.

Will Campbell, then thirty-three, understood as much as anyone the growing power of the media and what it meant to the Movement. Earlier in Montgomery, he had gained a sense of how it could define this story in moral terms. But one day early in the crisis at Little Rock, he had an epiphany about the importance of the media. He had been out in the streets watching the mob when a friend nudged him and pointed to a slim young man who seemed to be talking into the air. “That’s John Chancellor of NBC,” the friend noted. Campbell had never seen Chancellor in the flesh before, though he had heard of him. There seemed nothing remarkable about his appearance, nor did he seem to know anything more than Will Campbell himself about the violent situation playing itself out in front of them. But a few hours later, back in his hotel room, Campbell happened to turn on his television set and there was the very scene he had witnessed earlier in the day: Chancellor, shrunk now to about three inches on his screen, was calmly giving a summary of what was happening as the mob jostled and jeered behind him. The commentary, for most Americans, was chilling, and it struck Campbell in that instant that these modern journalists, both print and television, were the new prophets of our society. Moreover, they had, because of television, what the prophets of old had lacked—a mass audience to which they could transmit with stunning immediacy the events they witnessed. It was in their power, as it had been in the power of the prophets before them, the tent and brush-arbor revivalists, to define sin, and they were doing it not to a select few of the chosen but to the entire citizenry. They did not think of themselves as modern prophets and they did not think they were actually defining sin, but what they were doing, in Will Campbell’s view, was just that, for there was no way that an ordinary citizen could watch these events through their eyes and words and pictures and not be offended and
moved. What John Chancellor might as well have been doing, thought Campbell, was letting the film roll and repeating again and again, “This is a sin ... this is a sin ... this is a sin ...”

Locally, Harry Ashmore had never had any doubt what he intended to do with his paper once Faubus drew the line, but he warned the paper’s elderly owner, J. N. Heiskell, what the price of telling the truth and upholding the law would be. Heiskell brushed Ashmore’s warnings aside. He had no desire to accommodate such demagoguery even if it meant losing subscribers and advertising (which, in a subsequent boycott of the
Gazette,
it did). “I’m an old man,” Heiskell answered, “and I’ve lived too long to let people like that [Faubus] take over my city.” Most editors at American newspapers of the era were not so brave. More often than not, they put their own survival first and tried not to offend local sensibilities. Often, in moments of crisis, their instinct would be to protect the community against its critics, to soften accounts of its failings and, above all, to blame outsiders. Harry Ashmore was having none of that. This was the moment, he was sure, when he would be judged with a finality.

Ashmore was fearless not only in how he covered the crisis in his own paper but also in opening up its resources to visiting reporters. That was true not only at the beginning of the crisis, when most of the Little Rock establishment supported the integration plan, but in the months to follow as well, as people (including, most notably, his competitors on the rival
Arkansas Democrat
) who once praised the plan began to falter and switch sides. Relatively early on, a top Justice Department official called Ashmore to get a reading on what was happening: “I’ll give it to you in one sentence,” he answered. “The police have been routed, the mob is in the streets and we’re close to a reign of terror.”

His paper became the general press headquarters. Visiting reporters would head over there every day, in effect to be briefed by Ashmore and his reporters on the day’s events. Then, if they wanted to, they could go out for dinner with him as he talked on into the night, regaling them with stories of Arkansas politics. Orval Faubus might have been able momentarily to block the school integration, orchestrate the mob, and confuse the President of the United States as to his true aims, but he had met his match in Harry Ashmore. (Some thirty years later, at a conference at Fayetteville where panelists looked at the events of Little Rock in retrospect, Faubus began to sanitize his version of what had happened. His view by then, created to tidy up his place in history, was that through his actions he had only been trying to push President Eisenhower to act. Some
one thousand people, almost all of them pro-integration, were attending the symposium, and one morning just before Faubus spoke, he and his old antagonist Ashmore had breakfast together. Faubus gave his version of what he was going to say, and Ashmore wished him well in getting away with it. “But remember, Orval,” he said as the latter had gotten up from the table to give his speech. “This time I’ve got the mob on
my
side.”)

Both the nation and the world watched with horror and fascination as Faubus steadily moved into the vacuum created by the Eisenhower administration. Largely unsympathetic to the idea of integration, the President had given little thought to the question of what might happen if the Southern states rebelled. Despite the constant rumblings about the possibility of serious Southern resistance, Eisenhower seemed ambivalent about the events unfolding so dramatically in the month after the
Brown
decision. Meanwhile, the job grew steadily more difficult, until in Little Rock the governor seemed to be openly defying the law of the land. A few men around Eisenhower, more committed to civil rights—Herbert Brownell, Richard Nixon, and Bill Rogers—thought that the President had underestimated Faubus from the start and that Faubus was aiming for a major constitutional confrontation for his own political gain.

Soon after the
Brown
decision, Attorney General Brownell, as the chief law enforcement officer of the country, had met with the attorneys general of the Southern states and spoken informally about what they could all do together to expedite the process of integration. He had asked for suggestions on how federal and state forces could make the transition as easy as possible. When he finished he was met by thunderous silence. Afterward one state attorney general took him aside and pointed out that each man in this room intended one day to become governor of his state. None therefore wanted to be seen as partners of the U.S. government in carrying out local integration. In fact, the state attorney general added, Brownell should expect significant opposition rather than assistance.

Ike was very much in conflict within himself over whether integration was right or wrong; his essential sympathies were with neither the nine children nor the mob in the street but primarily with his new and extremely wealthy and conservative Southern golfing and hunting friends, those old-fashioned Southern traditionalists who found integration objectionable. As such the President remained silent on the issue and continued to dally. This was alien and extremely uncomfortable territory for him. Conservative by nature, he saw even the smallest change in the existing racial order as radical
and upsetting. In the brief period while he was president of Columbia University it had been decided (but not by him) to give Ralph Bunche an honorary degree. Bunche was then at the peak of his career at the UN, and possibly the most honored and least controversial black man in the country. But Ike was uneasy with the choice, because it meant Bunche and his wife would have to join the other recipients for drinks and dinner. It wasn’t that Ike was against Bunche receiving the degree, he confided, but he wondered if
the other
recipients would object to socializing with the Bunches. To his considerable surprise, the evening went off smoothly and several of the other recipients went out of their way to seek out the Bunches. The man to whom Eisenhower told this story, his friend Cy Sulzberger, was quite shocked; it showed, he thought, not only how biased Ike was about black people but how little he understood his own bias. Now, in the midst of a major constitutional crisis, to aides who suggested that he speak in favor of integration on the basis of moral and religious principles if nothing else, he answered somewhat disingenuously that he did not believe you could force people to change what was in their hearts. To those who suggested he meet with black leaders to talk about the nation’s growing racial tensions and the threat of increased white Southern resistance, he answered, in a particularly telling moment, that if he did, he would have to meet as well with the leaders of the Ku Klux Klan.

Eisenhower did finally meet with Faubus in Newport, Rhode Island, much against Brownell’s wishes. The attorney general warned the President repeatedly that the governor was thinking only of his reelection campaign. Faubus at first played Eisenhower extremely well: He had come not to exploit the issue, he claimed, but as an anguished moderate who wished only for a little more time. Ike, it seemed, was amenable to that: a little more time to do something that he himself could not readily understand. He began to speak of a compromise solution. Faubus later wrote that Eisenhower turned to Brownell in one of their sessions and asked, “Herb, can’t you go down there [to Little Rock] and ask the Court to postpone this thing for a few days?” Brownell answered, “No, we can’t do that. It isn’t possible. It isn’t legally possible. It can’t be done.” Brownell explained that the case was in the jurisdiction of the courts. Ike still seemed uncertain. Faubus noted: “I got the impression at the time that he was attempting to recall just what he was supposed to say to me, as if he were trying to remember instructions on a subject on which he was not completely assured in his own mind.” Eisenhower, with no moderate solution available, finally turned up the heat and
believed that he had gotten Faubus to agree to back down. But then as soon as Faubus returned to Little Rock, he reneged on his promise. When asked if he hadn’t backed off his promise made at Newport, he answered, “Just because I said it doesn’t make it so.”

That did it as far as the President was concerned. “Well, you were right, Herb,” he angrily told Brownell. “He did just what you said he’d do—he double-crossed me.” If Eisenhower did not entirely comprehend the moral issue at stake, or for that matter the legal one, he certainly understood a personal challenge. A man who had been a five-star general did not look kindly on frontal challenges by junior officers. After vacillating for so long, he came down hard, seeing the issue not as a question of integration so much as one of insurrection. He sent in troops of the 101st Airborne to protect the nine children and he federalized the Arkansas National Guard. For the first time since Reconstruction days, federal troops were sent into the South to preserve order. Little Rock, Dean Acheson wrote Harry Truman at the time, terrified him, “a weak President who fiddled along ineffectually until a personal affront drives him to unexpectedly drastic action. A Little Rock with Moscow and the SAC in the place of the paratroopers could blow us all apart.”