Pillar of Fire (28 page)

In his second installment, White graded civil rights organizations beginning with “thoughtful” mainstays and fringe militants that “find a simple joy in what can be done by mischief.” Out beyond “still more sinister groups” such as the Communists, he described the “more serious penetration by unidentified elements made in SNCC—the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.” Twice, he asserted, “agents of this group tried to convert a peaceful march into a violent
putsch
on government offices,” and SNCC students had created “one of the most chilling documents this writer has seen recently.” What White called “violent
putsch
” attempts actually were the Medgar Evers funeral march and the aimless demonstration Diane Nash helped contain in Birmingham. The “chilling document” was the Bevel-Nash right-to-vote blueprint, which was destined to make history from Selma in 1965. Forman's young analyst easily identified factual distortions, but concluded that White's larger purpose was to create a deplorable image of movement students—“lunatics and aliens,” the series called them.

New racial images flooded the news media in November, a sure sign of identities in flux.
Jet
reported that high school students in Ohio nearly rioted when a vice principal referred to them as “black” instead of “Negro” students on the intercom. A Chicago professor called for massive reeducation of Southern whites as the necessary remedy. In Virginia, a Baptist convention adopted a resolution commending fellow clergy for “not leading too rapidly or pushing too far beyond the understanding of those who follow.”
U.S. News & World Report
published a special section on intermarriage in which one of seven experts identified miscegenation as the “goal of the Negro pressure groups.”

From Birmingham, Robert Kennedy's confidant at the
Birmingham News
sent word that the Justice Department's usefulness “has just about been brought to an end anywhere in this state” as a result of the Thelton Henderson scandal. Although Burke Marshall had fired Henderson and publicly apologized to Alabama, editor E. L. “Red” Holland advised, a feeling lingered “on the part of some who are not uninformed that Rev. King is in fact, and has been, used explicitly by Justice as a kind of agent.” Holland said the few whites favoring negotiation were reduced to tremulous bravado. “I talked with one of the three most prominent ministers in Birmingham only yesterday,” he wrote. “Oh, we will have to show courage—courage, he said. I have kin in his congregation. He has been told that if one Negro is ever allowed to cross the front doorstep, the majority of the monied members will leave and go to Canterbury in Mountain Brook. And they mean it. His courage personally I do not doubt. That it will register, no…. I assume this letter will be destroyed, of course.”

 

P
RESIDENT
K
ENNEDY
flew south to Florida on November 18. In Miami Beach, wearing a dapper bow tie, he delivered a foreign policy speech criticizing military coups and tyranny in Cuba, blending in language of social justice. “It is impossible to have real progress as long as millions are shut out from opportunity and others forgiven obligations,” he told the Inter-American Press Association. “In my own country, we have prepared legislation and mobilized the strength of the Federal Government to insure to American Negroes and all other minorities access to the benefits of American society. Others must also do the same for the landless campesino, the underprivileged slum dweller, the oppressed Indian. Privilege is not easily yielded up….”

Bands, bunting, and cheering crowds marked his motorcade routes past early Christmas decorations, as Kennedy—the first President ever to visit Tampa—sought business support from the Florida Chamber of Commerce. Profits were up, taxes down, and the gross national product had risen from $500 billion to $600 billion in the three Kennedy years, he said, and yet many businessmen feared socialism and bankruptcy, pointing to a national debt ceiling just then raised from $309 billion to $315 billion. Kennedy defended his $11 billion deficit as an aberration smaller than Eisenhower's 1958 deficit, and pointed out that the postwar federal government had shrunk relative to the states and the total economy. “While the Federal net debt was growing less than 20 percent in these years, total corporate debt—not my debt,
your
debt—was growing by nearly 200 percent, and the total indebtedness of private individuals rose by 300 percent,” he said, then flashed a Kennedy smile. “So who is the most cautious fiscal manager? You, gentlemen, or us?”

While pushing on that same day through an airport rally, a speech to steelworkers, a military review, and a campaign address at a baseball park, Kennedy did manage to duck with two Secret Service agents into a holding room for a quiet interval with Father Michael Gannon, the historian-priest who had guided Vice President Johnson through St. Augustine's Catholic mission in March. Gannon made his nervous pitch for a presidential visit in connection with the four hundredth birthday of the Oldest City, surprised that Kennedy's hair had a more reddish tint than he picked up on television. He presented a gift photograph of the oldest surviving European record in the Western Hemisphere—the first page of the St. Augustine Parish Registers, dated 1595—and, encouraged by Kennedy's enlivened interest in its survival, showed the President an assortment of drawings, maps, and models for the Quadricentennial celebration, which would include a giant, two-hundred-foot cross on the site where
adelantado
Menéndez had planted his mission in 1565. President Kennedy promised to keep in touch as he moved off. “What is your name again?” he asked.

 

O
N
N
OVEMBER
19, Martin Luther King and Rabbi Abraham Heschel appeared together at the annual convention of the United Synagogue of America, in Kiamesha Lake, New York. Since their introduction ten months earlier in Chicago, King had written his letter from the Birmingham jail, delivered hundreds of orations, including his “I Have a Dream” speech and the funeral address in Birmingham, and acquired among the mass of Americans a searing but selective fame. When not making news in a confrontational march, he easily could disappear into the Catskills to nurture private ties, commending the nineteen conservative rabbis who, before the marches of children, had solemnly walked into a Birmingham mass meeting as surprise reinforcements from United Synagogue's spring meeting.

Heschel introduced King to the convention as a prophet, saying, “The prophets' great contribution of humanity was the discovery of the evil of indifference. One may be decent and sinister, pious and sinful.” With his salute, Heschel also reminded King of the prophet's burden: “Mere knowledge or belief is too feeble to be a cure of man's hostility to man, man's tendency to fratricide. The only remedy is
personal sacrifice
, to abandon, to eject what seems dear, even plausible, like prejudice, for the sake of a greater truth, to do more than I am ready to understand for the sake of God. Required is a breakthrough,
a leap of action
.”

From Heschel, King accepted the convention's Solomon Schecter Award. “Freedom is not some lavish dish that the federal government will pass out on a silver platter while the Negro merely furnishes the appetite,” he said. “If freedom is to be a reality, the Negro must be willing to suffer and to sacrifice and to work for it.” In addition to his standard themes, King urged the delegates to rise up against the prevailing wisdom “that we will probably not get a civil rights bill in this session of Congress.” They must agitate for passage with reminders “that our nation is in danger of destroying its soul over this very issue.” King praised Heschel for following the prophets' example of speaking the harshest truths to the closest kin—in this case for saying that even Jews managed indifference to slow spiritual liquidation under Communism. King added a passage on the plight of Soviet Jews to his address the next day at the annual convention of Reform Jews in Chicago.

On his way there, King stopped over at Idlewild (now John F. Kennedy) Airport in New York to meet Clarence Jones and Stanley Levison about the Birmingham book project. King's planned account of the seminal campaign had been plagued not only by buffeting historical aftershocks—Medgar Evers, the civil rights bill, the March on Washington, the church bombing—but also by the loss of Stanley Levison as his practiced intermediary with ghostwriters, book editors, and business agents. Painfully, Levison had broken off his long association with King that fall. Bowing to the edicts of Hoover and the Kennedys, he had banished himself in order to spare his friend the awful choice between principled resistance and threatened damage to the national movement. (“I'm not going to let Martin make that decision,” Levison said.) Since then, unable to tell normal contacts of the spy blackmail, Levison had made awkward excuses—that he had handed the arrangements to Clarence Jones during his vacation, for instance, and was reluctant to take them back for fear of hurting Jones's feelings. Finally, with the book under threat of being scuttled, the wiretaps heard Levison confide uncomfortably to a friend, “You know, I'm, I'm not going to be seeing him [King], but I have to finish off this book thing that was started.”

Fully alerted by the installation early in November of the six wiretaps on King himself, FBI agents overheard the advance logistics in time to be posted from the Idlewild gate to the meeting room at the Intercontinental Hotel, on lookout when King met Levison and Clarence Jones. “Notwithstanding trying circumstances, both from a climatic and security standpoint,” headquarters later boasted, “our New York agents were able to secure a photograph of the aforementioned three individuals.” Oblivious to the substance of King's business, Hoover sent the photograph to Robert Kennedy as vindicating fruit of the King wiretaps—and as potential evidence in a criminal spy trial.

As King headed for Chicago, Heschel flew from Idlewild to Rome for emergency intercession with Cardinal Bea at the Vatican. Word had leaked into the
New York Times
a month earlier of Bea's long-standing consultations with Jewish leaders before November 18, when the Vatican Council formally opened debate on the 399-word schema entitled “The Relation of Catholics to Non-Christians and Especially the Jews.” In a jolting departure from the hushed pomp of two thousand church fathers in spectacular raiments, three Patriarchs denounced the schema as a political surrender to Israel, and Ernesto Cardinal Ruffini—Archbishop of Palermo, Sicily, spokesman for the entrenched Vatican bureaucracy—accused Cardinal Bea of heresy, saying the integrity of the faith forbade “giving honorable mention” to Jews. When Bea rose to address the crisis himself the next day, November 19, bishops in St. Peter's Basilica applauded before he spoke a word.

The historic Vatican Council—first since 1870, thirteenth of the millennium—seethed with conspiracy and emotional intrigue by the time Heschel arrived. Mysterious couriers delivered to every delegate a crudely anti-Semitic monograph. Pope Paul VI was rumored—accurately, as it turned out—to be planning a year's postponement of the entire Jewish question, moving to bury public acrimony with a stunning announcement that in January he would become the first Pontiff since the original Apostle Peter to set foot in the Holy Land.

Heschel took action most directly against an amendment that conditioned Bea's entire reform upon the eventual acceptance of Christianity by Jews. “As your Eminence knows,” he wrote Bea, “such an implication would deeply hurt the sensitivity of the Jewish people. The enemies of the Church will spare no effort in maintaining that the whole document is intended to bring about the end of the Jewish faith.” With this letter, Heschel managed at last to gain a private evening audience with the besieged cardinal. Bea's staff urged Heschel not to panic. The Church would defeat the offending amendment, they predicted, but delay might well be prudent. Bishops from Africa and South Asia, who had almost no exposure to Jews, thought the schema should be perfected as part of a larger statement on non-Christian religions. Cardinal Bea himself counseled patience. “What is put off is not put away,” he said.

A bullet interrupted. While escorting Rabbi Heschel back across the Tiber River to his hotel, one of Bea's aides was struck by an inscription in the Piazza Cavour: “The light shining in the darkness.” Another fixed upon the eerie hush among even the boisterous young people on the streets of Rome, whose whispers about a faraway murder in Dallas told of changes let loose in the world.

R
EPORTERS
from the press bus banged through the double doors of the Dallas Trade Mart, desperate to know why the motorcade had left them. Finding no clues in the blank stares of the two thousand waiting guests at the presidential fund-raiser, one of them called the New York Hearst office and shouted “Parkland Hospital” in a tone that drove them all back through the banquet hall. The
Herald-Tribune
correspondent bowled over a waiter carrying a tray of vegetable dishes and ran on without a backward glance. One observer retained a surreal perception of fear and awe “moving across that crowd like a wind over a wheatfield.” It registered with such clarity that the luncheon companion of Federal District Judge Sarah Hughes cried tears of apprehension even before a rumor of gunshots reached their table.

Outside the hospital, a disembodied radio voice announced, “The President of the United States is dead—I repeat…” just as Tom Wicker of the
New York Times
ran by Lyndon Johnson's limousine convertible, parked askew. Not far away, a hovering cloud of Secret Service agents shoved Johnson at a trot into three unmarked police cars and lurched off for the airport amid clashing orders about how to avoid follow-up assassins. Some agents shouted for more speed through the red lights, others for fewer sirens and motorcycle escorts so as not to attract attention. The Johnsons boarded
Air Force One
just ahead of Judge Hughes, who administered the presidential oath barely two hours after the rifle shots, and the jet roared off for Washington above a carload of reporters giving chase.

Lady Bird Johnson summoned the will to ask gently whether she might help Jacqueline Kennedy change clothes from her pink suit flecked with blood, one glove and one stocking thickly smeared. The new widow declined with a glint of ferocity—“I want them to see what they have done to Jack,” she said—then lapsed toward stoic remove. That night from his vice president's office, Johnson exchanged phone calls with world leaders and confidants. “Just ah, think, think, think,” he urged Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, pleading for advice to “unite the country to maintain and preserve our system in the world because I, if it starts falling to pieces…why we could deteriorate pretty quick.”

Before dawn on Saturday, November 23, President Kennedy's body arrived at the White House from overnight autopsy at the Naval Medical Center, and was placed under military honor guard in the East Room. Sargent Shriver sent home to retrieve a small carved wooden crucifix that a Benedictine priest had given him and his wife, Eunice, Kennedy's sister, as a wedding present. He laid the crucifix at a corner of the casket and placed a portable prie-dieu, or kneeling frame, beneath it on the floor. All was prepared—the corpse's waxen face sealed from view on orders of Robert Kennedy—before the new president and his wife arrived among dignitaries to pay respects in whispered bewilderment.

As Johnson's first business caller that morning, J. Edgar Hoover attempted to correct panicky errors of the previous day, when he had reported the murder weapon as a Winchester and a Secret Service agent among the victims. By now, FBI teams had traced the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle found in the Texas School Book Depository from the manufacturer through a Chicago sporting goods dealer to a mail order buyer under the name A.J. Hidell, whose receiving post office box in Dallas had been rented by Lee H. Oswald, the suspect under custody. Agents were rushing ballistics and fingerprints among a thousand details, but even Hoover confessed perplexity when Johnson asked about intelligence reports that suspect Oswald, a former expatriate to the Soviet Union, had visited the Soviet embassy in Mexico City two months earlier. “That's one angle that's very confusing,” Hoover told Johnson.

By one later survey, the average American adult watched ten hours of television news uninterrupted by commercials that Saturday—a pounding, repetitive mix of helpless mystery and bonding drama. That evening, long after former President Eisenhower and the senior members of the Cabinet, economist Walter Heller took his brief turn in the solemn procession of visitors who heard the new president ask their help through the emergency. Johnson also begged patience, saying he was not as quick-witted or sophisticated as his predecessor, but Heller noticed, after he reported how many points the stock market had dropped on assassination day, that Johnson calculated the loss at 3 percent before he could. Heller informed Johnson that he had given President Kennedy a status report about the economy only four days earlier on November 19. He omitted anecdotal details that would be maudlin during the wake—how toddler John Kennedy, Jr., had forced Heller and the stiff National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy to eat imaginary slices of cherry-vanilla pie off his plastic tea set, serving so many that Heller said, “I have to talk to your daddy first,” and how Kennedy had pilloried bankers with a rakish term that the reserved Heller euphemistically recorded as “his favorite expression.”

For Heller, who chaired the new Council of Economic Advisers, it was a risky, impulsive leap even to mention his esoteric poverty workshops on an occasion that cried out for brief solace. Since spring, when President Kennedy had proposed his controversial plan to lower tax rates, Heller's economists had pushed for a poverty initiative to offset the tax cut, whose benefits would flow disproportionately to wealthy citizens. And since June, when Kennedy had introduced his civil rights legislation, the economists had recommended a different balance based on the prevailing image of poor people as white hillbillies and migrant workers. “Having mounted a dramatic program for one disadvantaged group [the Negroes],” Heller told President Kennedy, it seemed “both equitable and politically attractive” to offer a program “specifically designed to aid other disadvantaged groups.” To Johnson, Heller acknowledged that Kennedy had qualified his interest in poverty with an instruction to “make sure that we're doing something
*
for the middle-income man in the suburbs,” and he only slightly exaggerated his presidential mandate to keep formulating an “attack on poverty.”

This was more than enough for Johnson. “That's my kind of program,” he said with enthusiasm. Heller had been processing the unfinished program under sleepy trial titles such as “Human Conservation and Development,” but now Johnson said to “push ahead full-tilt.” The President often recalled that as a young teacher in 1928 he had watched hungry Mexican children chew discarded grapefruit rinds behind his schoolhouse at Cotulla, Texas
†
—that their poverty had gnawed at him more than his own, and that his proudest moment as a young congressman was in 1939, when his dam project and his federal cooperative had lit up 90 percent of the farms in the Texas Hill Country with their first electricity for water pumps and radios and washing machines, lifting aeons of toil from hardscrabble people. That was the purpose of government, he told Heller. To make his point physically, as was his habit, Johnson forcefully shut the door that Heller had opened to leave, then grabbed the arm of the nonplussed economist to announce up close that he was a Roosevelt New Dealer at heart.

The next morning, Sunday, November 24, as Blackjack the riderless funeral horse escorted the casket to public viewing in the Capitol Rotunda, Johnson attended services at St. Mark's Episcopal Church nearby on Capitol Hill. The Rev. Bill Baxter urged his congregation not to forget that the shock of the assassination had dissolved the callous, selfish divisions of ordinary life, revealing them as insignificant against the shared bonds beneath. Visibly moved, Johnson covered his face with his handkerchief during the hymn “America the Beautiful.” Afterward, he walked spontaneously into the parish hall to shake hands, seeming to find relief in the contact. His Secret Service detail, already agitated by this first public outing since Dallas, roughly challenged more than a few churchgoers and practically dragged Johnson into his car minutes before a voice cried out on the street: “Jesus Christ, they've shot Oswald.” Millions of NBC viewers had just witnessed the first murder ever broadcast on live television.

Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, who had flown back from Vietnam to meet with President Kennedy, met instead with Johnson and his top foreign policy leaders three hours after church. He began by flatly denying that the United States had been involved in the coup three weeks earlier against President Diem, but his evident satisfaction indicated otherwise. Pointing to photographs of joyful crowds in Saigon, Lodge described the coup as a success that promised a favorable settlement with North Vietnam. He said his mission was pushing on all fronts—military, diplomatic, even religious—with Lodge now bound for Rome to reassure Pope Paul VI that the United States understood the political risk of losing the Catholic president Diem in Buddhist Vietnam, and was fully alive to “dangers of an anti-Christian move.” In recounting the coup, Lodge offered a veiled reference to the phone call in which Diem first asked urgently about the U.S. knowledge of and response to the military revolt, and reported his crisp reply that Diem should leave his country in prompt surrender. “Lodge said that we were in no way responsible for the death of Diem and [his brother] Nhu,” CIA Director John McCone recorded in his minutes, “that had they followed his advice, they would be alive today.”

While Defense Secretary McNamara, among others, objected that Lodge was overly optimistic about Vietnam, Johnson was merely formal and cool toward Lodge. The ambassador's boastful report did nothing to relieve his misgivings about the murder of Diem—a man he had praised in 1961 as “the Churchill of Asia,” whose portrait hung on a wall of the Johnson home. To confidants, Johnson soon confessed a vague fear that the Kennedy assassination was retribution for American plotting against Diem. “We had a hand in killing him,” he remarked to Senator Hubert Humphrey. “Now it's happening here.” Nor did Lodge improve the phantom chill that swirled through Johnson's early spy reports on Oswald, the Russians, and Cuba. Although Lodge did not work for the CIA, Johnson associated him with an unfavorable image of CIA officials as mediocre dissemblers from overbred patrician families. (“Whenever those rich people have a son they can't trust with the family brokerage,” Johnson once grumbled, “they ship him down to the CIA.”) Still, at his first foreign policy meeting, Johnson only hinted at his suspicions. A lot of people were upset about the overthrow of Diem, he told the assembled advisers, but nothing could be done about it now. He instructed Lodge to eliminate the meddlesome backbiting and hidden agendas within the American mission. With that, photographers were admitted and a bland press statement was distributed to the effect that Johnson was adopting the Kennedy course in Vietnam.

Within an hour of President Kennedy's burial on Monday, as television networks returned to afternoon soap operas after three days and nights of stupefying news, Johnson called Kennedy's chief congressional lobbyist, Larry O'Brien, and said, “I need you a lot more than he did.” It was an awkward moment for O'Brien, who replied that another time might be better because he was grieving with Kennedy's chief of staff, Kenneth O'Donnell, an Irish politician who had been close to the slain president and remained undone. Johnson disregarded the plea for privacy and said he needed O'Donnell, too, and that he admired the whole staff. “I don't expect you to love me as much as you did him,” he told O'Brien, “but I expect you will after we've been around awhile.” When O'Brien responded, “Right, Mr. President,” Johnson pressed forward with questions about upcoming votes in the Senate.

By the end of a long working day, Johnson had rearranged billions in the upcoming budget and reversed Kennedy's intention to push the civil rights bill to a vote before the tax bill. His late evening phone calls included one of thanks to Martin Luther King for public statements urging calm. King managed to squeeze in a few encouraging words that the new law would be “one of the greatest tributes” to Kennedy's memory, and the two virtual strangers spoke with a glancing intimacy common to the crisis. (King: “Regards to the family.” Johnson: “Thank you so much, Martin.”) Still later that night, Johnson complained to Kennedy's chief speechwriter, Theodore Sorensen, about the crush of ceremonial duty—“all these ambassadors…I bet I saw twenty of them this afternoon…I mean heads of state, [French President Charles] de Gaulle and [Canadian Prime Minister Lester] Pearson and all this crowd…then they're running fifteen more on me tomorrow….” Johnson tried to tell Sorensen gently that he planned to use other drafts than Sorensen's for his first major speech. “Well, anyway, you liked Galbraith,” Sorensen said glumly, referring to a draft that Johnson had solicited from Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. All the next day and night, Johnson snatched time to sift phrases from contributors ranging from U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson to his former Senate aide from Texas, Horace “Buzz” Busby, author of his Gettysburg speech.

On Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, Johnson delivered to a joint session of Congress an address that won acclaim as a nearly perfect first step to lead the nation out of its stupor. A
New York Times
critic noted the reassuring thread of Kennedy themes and even some trademark rhetorical devices such as the parallel inversion of phrases, as in Johnson's “We will demonstrate anew that the strong can be just and the just can be strong.” Still, the emotional core of the speech would have been too earnestly moral for Kennedy's taste. Johnson urged the country “not to turn about and linger over this evil moment.” He expressly joined the unknowable motive for the murder with the knowable hatreds of race, and drew from them jointly the healing, historical purpose of passing the civil rights bill. “We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights,” he said. “We have talked for a hundred years or more.” An audience conditioned for shock by the nightmare weekend embraced his colloquial, earthy style—his slow Texas twang and Southernisms (“…as I did in 19 and 57 and again in 19 and 60…”), his unabashed recital of “America the Beautiful,” and sentimental gestures such as placing Zephyr Wright, the Johnson family cook, prominently in the House gallery. (“Heavens to Betsy,” she told reporters, “I don't give my age out.”) Many tearful members of Congress interrupted him with applause—thirty-four times, by Johnson's count—most heartily when he denounced “hate and evil and violence” and, near the end, when he echoed Lincoln at Gettysburg: “So let us here highly resolve that John Fitzgerald Kennedy did not live—or die—in vain.”