Master of the Senate (144 page)

White indignation rose, and with it, a white sense of responsibility. There had really been two verdicts, not one, rendered at Sumner, I. F. Stone wrote. One was the “not guilty” against Bryant and Milam. “The other, unspoken, unintended, unconscious but indelible, was a verdict against the rest of us and our country…. The murder and the trial could only have happened in a sick countryside. Where else would a mother be treated with such elementary lack of respect or compassion?” Stone urged Negroes to fight, to “rouse themselves to make their indignation felt in some dramatic way.” The “American Negro,” he wrote, “needs a Gandhi to lead him, and we need the Negro to lead us—into a better, more just, world.” And the feeling expressed by Stone and Kempton was beginning to spread beyond the audience traditionally commanded by the Stones and Kemptons.
Commonweal
, the magazine of liberal Roman Catholics, said that the “moral disease” responsible for Till’s murder was not confined to Mississippi. “The same disease…created the Northern ghetto in which he lived, [and] the southern shack from which he was taken to his death,”
Commonweal
said. “The illness that ultimately killed him confines Negroes to inferior homes, schools and jobs” in the North as well. And at least some northern whites took the point. Now the rallies in the North demanding anti-lynching legislation and other civil rights legislation—demanding justice—were held not just among blacks, but among Jewish organizations and labor organizations; a resolution adopted by the Jewish Labor Committee, which represented half a million members of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, denounced “this evil, bigoted act.” As David Halberstam was to write, “The Till case marked a critical junction for the national media.” The
Brown
decision had created “for the first time” a “national agenda on civil rights. The national media was going to cover … the entire South.” And now, with the nation ready at last to read about the South, the Till case had provided reading material more dramatic than school desegregation lawsuits. “The educational process had begun”; the Emmett Till trial “became the first great media event of the civil rights movement. The nation was ready; indeed, it wanted to read what happened.” Some Mississippians still thought the episode was a joke. Two years after the trial, when John Bartlow Martin visited Sumner while researching a book on school desegregation, the head of the local Citizens Council pointed to the Tallahatchie River, and, chuckling, said, “You wouldn’t come all the way down to Mississippi and not see Emmett Till’s River.” But their laughter showed that they didn’t understand. At a recess during
the trial, reporters had heard a white spectator say, nodding in the direction of the Tallahatchie, “That river’s full of niggers,” and they had reported the statement, had made America hear it. They had felt the depth of what the
Times
called the “controlled hostility” in Mississippi, and they had made America feel it; wrote Dan Wakefield of
The Nation
, “You lie in bed at night listening to the hounds baying, and during the day you see more men wearing guns than you ordinarily do outside your television screen. I am not ashamed to confess that I was afraid.” Congressman Diggs was to call Mose Wright’s unflinching “Thar he” inside that sweltering, hate-filled courtroom an “historic” two words, and they
were
historic, because thanks to Wright, there had been a trial. The brutality and injustice of white treatment of Negroes in the South was several centuries old, but now the entire nation—the entire world—had been able to read about it for itself.

A
ND THEN
it could see it for itself.

In December, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, a quiet, dignified black seamstress, Rosa Parks, refused to move to the back of a bus to make room for a white passenger, and was arrested for violating the Alabama bus segregation laws. A meeting in the church of Mrs. Parks’ pastor, a twenty-six-year-old black preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. who, as Taylor Branch has written, “looked and acted much older than his years,” called for a boycott of the buses on the following Monday morning, but since many of Montgomery’s blacks would have no alternative means of getting to their jobs except to walk for miles, no one was really sure the boycott would work. On Monday morning, the Reverend King’s wife, Coretta, was looking anxiously out her window to see the first morning bus, which was usually jammed with Negro maids on their way to work. Then she saw it. It was empty. “So was the next bus, and the next,” Branch reported. “In spite of the bitter cold, their fear of white people, and their desperate need for wages, Montgomery’s Negroes were staying off the buses.” That morning, there was another startling development. At the courthouse where Mrs. Parks was being tried—she would be fined fourteen dollars—the only spectators expected were the usual few relatives of the accused. Instead, when the door to the courtroom was opened, five hundred black Americans were standing in the corridor and spilling back down the stairs out onto the street. That evening, Martin Luther King Jr. was drafted as the first president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, and he made his first speech to the group. And with his first sentence, “We are here in a general sense, because first and foremost—we are American citizens—and we are determined to apply our citizenship to the fullness of its means,” there was a murmur of assent, and when he said, “And you know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron heel of oppression,” there was a sudden, rising cheer, and when he cried, “If we are wrong—the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, God almighty is
wrong! … If we are wrong—justice is a lie,” a mighty leader was born. And the Montgomery Negroes made the boycott stick; at last southern Negroes had found a weapon—nonviolence—with which to challenge white supremacy, and had found the courage to use it. And again, as in the Till case, their courage, like Mose Wright’s courage, furthered the “educational process.” The bus boycott was in a big city, not an isolated hamlet, and it went on not for a week as the Till trial had, but for months. Television coverage increased. With the fuel from the Montgomery bus boycott added to the national fire started by the Till case, the furor in the North was not going away.

W
HICH MEANT THAT IN
J
ANUARY, 1956
, Lyndon Johnson, returning to Washington after his heart attack, was going to have to make a decision, a decision that was to bring to the surface, within a character filled with deep contradictions, perhaps the deepest contradictions of all.

L
ATER, WHEN HE WANTED
his presidency to be remembered in history for its great civil rights legislation, Lyndon Johnson would often declare that he had, during his entire life, been free from racial prejudice. “I’m not prejudiced nor ever was,” he told one biographer. “I never had any bigotry in me. My daddy wouldn’t let me.” His biographers took him at his word, and so did his assistants. In a typical comment—one of a hundred (one of hundreds, really) of similar comments from Johnson’s aides—George Reedy says, “The man had less bigotry in him than anybody else I have ever met… Johnson had none in him…not racial, ethnic, or religious prejudices.” So did his friends, or, to be more precise, those of his friends to whom he “talked liberal.” “I’m telling you this man does not have prejudice,” Helen Gahagan Douglas was to insist.

Like everything else about Lyndon Johnson, however, the question of his prejudice wasn’t so simple. While in Georgetown he talked one way to men and women of liberal views, of tolerance toward human beings of other colors and persuasions, talked to them so passionately that they believed
he
was tolerant toward minorities, anxious to help them, waiting only for the right moment; talked so passionately that even civil rights crusader Virginia Durr accepted his response to her reproaches about his long silence on civil rights (a comradely hug and an assurance that “Honey, you’re dead right! I’m all for you, but we ain’t got the votes. Let’s wait till we get the votes”), he talked quite another way in Suite 8-F of the Lamar Hotel in Houston to men of intolerance, to men who felt that Negroes and Mexican-Americans were inherently dumb, dirty, lazy, stupid, looking only for handouts (“gimmes,” as 8-F’s presiding spirit, Herman Brown, called black Americans) and talked to them, too, so passionately that they believed he shared
those
feelings, shared them fully.

Their beliefs about Lyndon Johnson, their descriptions of the way he talked to them, were not made a part of the journalism of the time, or of the
history that has been written about it, because these men, unlike the Georgetown liberals, did not talk to journalists or historians—for more than twenty years after they became legendary figures in Texas, Herman and George Brown tried to avoid giving interviews, and every time an historian proposed writing a history of Brown & Root, they blocked the attempt. But their opinion of Johnson’s attitudes is just as strong as the liberals’ opinion; and what they felt was that, while he had to be diplomatic and not express them publicly, his attitudes were the same as theirs. And although their names are not known to history as are those of the Washington liberals, they were just as close to Lyndon Johnson as the liberals were: Herman and George were the major financiers of his rise; Ed Clark, who “bought a ticket” on him in 1937, was his principal lawyer, and the man who kept Texas in line for him, for thirty years; when Johnson left Washington at the end of each congressional session, it was to the watering holes of these men—Falfurrias, St. Joe, Fort Clark—that he repaired, for the week-long, whiskey-soaked hunting trips that played so crucial a role in his political career. His rise was financed by men so bigoted that to talk to them when their guard was down was to encounter a racism whose viciousness had no limit; sitting in his apartment on Austin’s Nineteenth Street on the day that signs went up with the new name the Austin City Council had given the street—“Martin Luther King Boulevard”—Clark was so filled with rage that as soon as the author of this book walked in, Clark told a “joke”: “Did you hear about how the
Reverend
King went to Africa to look for his roots, but as he were climbing the tree, a baboon shat in his face?” During an earlier interview, Clark had been asked if Lyndon Johnson’s views about Negroes and Mexican-Americans were any different from his own. Smiling a slow, amused smile, he replied in his East Texas twang, “If there were any difference at all, it were not apparent to me.”

To take Lyndon Johnson at his word—his word that “I never had any bigotry in me”—it is necessary to ignore other words of Lyndon Johnson’s: his own words, written, in his handwriting, in a private diary he kept (the only time he kept a diary) during the month he spent in the Pacific during the Second World War. To take him at his word, it is necessary to ignore still other words—words spoken in his own voice, and preserved on a tape recording made not in the Oval Office with an eye on posterity but by a Lyndon Johnson who thought no one was listening, not knowing that while he was talking to employees on his ranch over a radio telephone in 1967 and 1968, an Associated Press photographer, Steve Stibbens, assigned to take photographs for a feature story on Johnson, had found himself, by accident, listening to the conversations, and had decided to record them because, as he recalls, “I was so shocked—I couldn’t believe what I was hearing—I mean, this was the great civil rights President.”

Crossing the Pacific in May, 1942, the big four-engine Coronado flying boat on which Lyndon Johnson was traveling would put down for refueling at
small islands, and Johnson would observe the natives’ behavior. On May 17, on the island of Nouméa, he wrote in his diary, in a neat, cramped script: “Natives very much like Negroes. Work only enough to eat.” After he reached Australia, he was at an air base in Brisbane on June 4 when a violent incident involving black servicemen occurred. John Connally, with whom Johnson later discussed the incident, explained that it reinforced Johnson’s belief that Negroes had a predilection toward drunkenness and violence. “Negro problem—no hard liquor as order Lieutenant,” Johnson wrote in the diary. “Negroes and constables knife threat.” The tape made during Johnson’s presidency a quarter of a century later shows that he subscribed to some of the stereotypes about Mexican-Americans, too. Complaining about the laziness of Mexican-American workers on his ranch to Dale Malechek, his ranch foreman, he said, “I don’t think Mexicans do much work unless there’s a white man with them, so from now on I want a white man with every group.”

A firm hand was necessary with Mexicans, Johnson felt. “I know these Latin Americans,” he told the journalist Tom Wicker in 1964. “I grew up with Mexicans. They’ll come right into your back yard and take it over if you let them. And the next day they’ll be right up on your porch, barefoot and weighing one hundred and thirty pounds and they’ll take that, too. But if you say to ’em right at the start, ‘Hold on, just wait a minute,’ they’ll know they’re dealing with somebody who’ll stand up. And after that you can get along fine.”

To accept Lyndon Johnson’s contention, it is necessary to ignore notes taken by reporters on statements he made in off-the-record conversations—statements that never made their way into print at the time Johnson made them or during the more than three decades that have passed since, but that are available in the Lyndon Johnson Library yet are never included in any of the now-numerous biographies of Lyndon Johnson—statements that further document his acceptance of stereotypes: a belief, for example, that blacks are aggressive motorists. In a conversation with a correspondent for
Time
magazine on January 29, 1968, he explained why he didn’t want to dispatch gunboats to protect vessels like the U.S.S.
Pueblo.
“If we started sending gunboats out to protect everybody gathering information we’d have a budget of five hundred billion dollars every year,” Lyndon Johnson said. “That harassment is part of the job. It is just like you driving home at night and you come up to a stop light, and there’s some nigger there bumping you and scraping you.”