Pillar of Fire (30 page)

They were moving, said King, commencing a series of illustrations that fused their experience with those of the biblical prophets. “Caleb and Joshua have come back with a minority report,” he said. “They are saying we
can
possess the land.” (True) “Thank God, it is as well as it is.” (Come on now) “Atlanta is a better city today than it was three years ago.” King roamed in words over mountaintops toward the promised land: “We can say, ‘God of our weary years/God of our silent tears/Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way….'” In a cry of full possession, he recited the entire final stanza of James Weldon Johnson's hymn of Negro pilgrimage. The congregation recited along with him, and the Kennedy assassination was not so much missing from King's sermon as swallowed up already within a cultural heritage unbroken from slavery. Although much of the service was utterly foreign to him, Good responded to a universal comfort beneath the novelty, to a leveling passion that made an ancient companion of mortal suffering and milked hope from the blues. Almost immediately, Good resolved to ask ABC to transfer him to the South from his current base in Mexico City, becoming neither the first nor last visitor so swiftly redirected by exposure to a mass meeting.

 

A
T A
T
HANKSGIVING RALLY
in Queens, New York, Malcolm X endorsed a shopping boycott against merchants along Jamaica Avenue who refused to hire Negroes. His appeal violated Elijah Muhammad's ban against secular activism in the white world, but such a tiny, old-fashioned rebellion was lost among larger confrontations in the South. Similarly, when Malcolm first repeated statements that the slain President Kennedy had been no better than a “prison warden” to American black people—a “fox” distinguishable from the hateful “wolf” George Wallace only by his wily smile—the usual “white devil” doctrines failed to register upon the traumatized outside world. Malcolm remained sealed within the Nation's sectarian isolation. From Chicago, Elijah Muhammad sent out written orders forbidding all his ministers to make public comments on the Kennedy assassination, and on Sunday, December 1, he pointedly reminded Malcolm of the restriction before an afternoon rally. Doubly warned, Malcolm for the first time wrote out in advance the text of an entire speech, entitled “God's Judgment on White America,” which he read verbatim from the podium at the Manhattan Center. He accused President Kennedy of cowardice and all manner of devilment, as usual, but conditioned submission stopped him just short of the trigger words until someone in the audience asked explicitly about the assassination.

Malcolm—remarking out loud that reporters were baiting him for an expression of glee, knowing also that National Secretary John Ali, one of his chief antagonists, was there from Chicago to witness any disobedience—stepped consciously over the precipice. He described the Kennedy murder as a case of “the chickens coming home to roost.” White Americans had spread stealthy, controlling force against darker peoples at home and abroad, he said, citing Patrice Lumumba of the Congo and Diem of Vietnam among foreign leaders victimized by official American intrigue. These were the chickens that had come home to make the wife of an American head of state a widow, he said, and when the crowd of nearly seven hundred whistled and howled—amazed above all, said one delighted observer, that Malcolm “had the nerve to say it,” true or not—he pushed rebellion a notch higher by adding that as an old farm boy himself, “chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad, they've always made me glad.”

The next morning's
New York Times
recognized Malcolm X as a fresh threat in American race relations. Mike Handler, the night editor who had made a hobby of observing Malcolm, got an unsigned article into the paper as a full-fledged news story, and the
Times
promptly assigned one of its frontline reporters to replace Handler for a follow-up story about Malcolm and the “speech in which he mocked the assassination of President Kennedy.” Malcolm was fully prepared to defend himself before a broad population of shocked, hostile readers—not only whites newly introduced to him and the Nation but to the majority of Negroes who followed the mainstream white news. Even without knowing of President Johnson's private remorse over Diem, or his fears of plots by and against Castro of Cuba, Malcolm argued from history that the “climate of hatred” so widely blamed for the assassination was anything but marginal to American society. This was the gauntlet of an aspiring prophet—telling a nation that a revered leader had been struck down by righteous punishment instead of villainy, choosing words that might sink in like those of the biblical prophets Nathan, Amos, and Jeremiah, before the speaker was stoned to death.

On the day after the New York speech, Elijah Muhammad summoned Malcolm to Chicago under escort by John Ali and imposed a discipline of public silence. Shrewdly, Muhammad also instructed his officials to announce the punishment in telegrams to all the news outlets that had reported Malcolm's scandalous comments. As a result, Malcolm was flooded with press inquiries when he returned to New York. Having counted on the Nation's cloistered removal from the white world to give him space on the flank of the civil rights movement, Malcolm discovered instead that Muhammad had used his notoriety in the white press to undercut him.

Shaken, Malcolm X called Muhammad at his winter home in Phoenix to ask whether the Messenger really intended for all these news organizations to know of the Nation's internal business. Muhammad said he did, whereupon Malcolm asked whether the terms of his punishment permitted him to answer demands for a response to the press. Muhammad authorized him to say only that he submitted, no more. He forced Malcolm to choose between his Muslim identity and his ambition to move out into the larger world. Stranded, Malcolm submitted, and Muhammad soothed him with his approval. “I think it is good for the whole entire community,” he said, meaning that Muslim converts would take strength from the humble example of the famous disciple who for so long had drummed into them acceptance of Muhammad's semidivine will as the requirement of miraculous rebirth. Malcolm replied that the punishment had helped him already.

Public dispute over the chicken speech marked the debut of a Muslim presence in American politics. After nearly thirty-five years' gestation among urban refugees, the Nation of Islam attracted national attention through Malcolm's piercing oratory, with Elijah Muhammad in counterpoint as an exotic, wizened old man of pale Asiatic complexion beneath an embroidered fez, seeming to defend President Kennedy. “The nation still mourns the loss of our President,” Muhammad declared in his public statement on Malcolm's suspension, and he placed a commemorative photograph of President Kennedy on the cover of the next
Muhammad Speaks
. To reporters who asked whether he was softening his former teaching that all whites were devils, especially presidents, Muhammad said Kennedy deserved respect as head of a sovereign nation. When an editor from Los Angeles asked why he had decreed no punishment for Malcolm's earlier statement welcoming the plane crash that killed white Georgians after the Stokes riot, Muhammad replied that “my work is in accordance with God's plan.” To CORE's James Farmer, who promised to tell President Johnson that most Negroes welcomed Muhammad's rebuke of Malcolm, Muhammad minimized the action as “just a little spanking.” His enigmatic answers underscored his claim to arbitrary authority. The
New York Times
referred to him as “the ruler” of the Black Muslims, the popular term for the Nation of Islam.

Rumors of an impending split within the Nation surfaced almost immediately, but they suggested to most readers that the universal grip of the Kennedy tragedy had put even this bizarre anti-white group into leadership quarrels. Few within the Nation itself suspected that the sect was nearing fission. As soon as Malcolm submitted, Elijah Muhammad privately extended the speaking ban from public events to closed Muslim services, including those at Malcolm's base in Harlem. He also dispatched letters to Captain Joseph and several key “laborers” in New York, detailing exactly how he wanted Temple No. 7 to be run during Malcolm's suspension; they were to block him physically if he tried to address his congregation. Muhammad's ambush deprived Malcolm of administrative retreat into Harlem as well as his free public voice—all under cloak of Muslim orthodoxy—and a panicked Malcolm tested a defense in kind. From the Q'uran's accounts of Noah and King David of Israel, among others, he fashioned parables about how a prophet's concubines should be justified as wives and his bastard offspring raised above worldly scandal to fulfillment of purpose. On Saturday, December 7, he secured Elijah Muhammad's permission to bring specific substitute ministers to teach in his place at Temple No. 7—beginning with Minister Louis X of Boston and Minister Lonnie X Cross of Washington. On the surface, Malcolm presented his parables to them as a vigilantly orthodox precaution against rumors about Muhammad, the better to defend him, but in reality he was sounding out allies for a counterattack.

 

T
HAT SAME
S
ATURDAY
in Washington, Lyndon Johnson held his first news conference. While acknowledging that he had not yet slept in the White House, as Jacqueline Kennedy and her children were just then vacating the living quarters, he described the job as old. “I feel like I have already been here a year,” he remarked somberly of his two weeks in office. Beyond conveying a sense of calm, Johnson stressed a theme of frugality, announcing that Secretary of Defense McNamara had pledged to eliminate 25,000 civilian jobs at the Pentagon, then reciting in detail his efforts to submit in January a federal budget of less than $100 billion. Sound-money Senate conservatives had extracted that limit from him, refusing to accept the Kennedy tax reduction without spending cuts to keep the budget in balance, but Johnson soon would add his own economizing by prowling the White House at night, dousing unnecessary lights. “I don't want to waste a dime,” he told the reporters. (“I've never agreed,” he privately told economist Walter Heller, “that you had to prove you're liberal by showin' how much money you could throw away…. I'm a kind of a Harold Ickes liberal.”)

Immediately after the press conference, Johnson and Senator Russell of Georgia resumed their quarrelsome banter by telephone. “You destroyed me,” Russell complained, “putting me on this [Warren] commission.”

“You told me at least a hundred times that you were ruined,” scoffed Johnson.

“No, this is the first time,” Russell insisted.

He was calling, Johnson confided, because American military missions were “short of ammunition” both in Vietnam and Korea. To fix that, he wanted to route the supplies through the Pentagon budget, which Russell controlled in the Senate, rather than through the controversial foreign aid package. Russell bowed to patriotic duty. “I tried my best to keep them from going into Laos and Vietnam,” he said, recalling their emergency trip together as congressional leaders to the “last meeting we had under Eisenhower before we went in” to replace the crumbling French army in 1954. “Said we'd never get out,” Russell reminded Johnson. “Be there fifty years from now.”

Johnson steered Russell back to current military decisions, then invited his old friend to “come and sit in the warm water” of the White House pool. He ignored Russell's objections (“I've got this shortwinded business, I can't breathe”), sent a presidential car to fetch him from the Senate, and, by impulse or design, cut short the pleasantries to give notice of his determination on the civil rights bill. “I'm not going to cavil and I'm not going to compromise,” he told Russell, almost nose-to-nose. “I'm going to pass it just as it is, Dick, and if you get in my way I'm going to run you down. I just want you to know that, because I care about you.”

Russell returned fair notice. “Mr. President, you may be right,” he said. “But if you do run over me, it will not only cost you the South, it will cost you the election.” He warned that the Democratic party never had, and never would, win national elections if it split openly with the South on the race issue. Having staked their ground, the two men returned quickly to more congenial subjects in the White House pool, paddling naked.

Through December, Johnson revived and redefined other political associations that stretched back to his first days in Washington in the 1930s. He made peace with James Rowe, a former clerk to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes who as a White House aide had facilitated young Congressman Johnson's early appointments with President Franklin Roosevelt. Johnson and Lady Bird had made some lasting friendships with prominent young couples of the New Deal—Rowe's wife, Libby, still called Johnson “Uncle Lyndon” for kindnesses to her daughter—but more than a few bumps dotted the tumultuous decades since. In March of 1949, Rowe had objected to the overt racialism of Johnson's maiden speech to the U.S. Senate—a “we of the South…we cannot legislate love” defense of the filibuster rules—and they had argued again in 1954, when Rowe, despite his partisan distaste for Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, sent Johnson an apocalyptic letter warning that if he and Senator Russell did not allow the Republicans to stop Communism in Indochina, “there won't be any Senate, and what is vastly more important to me, there won't be any little Rowes either.” They had patched that up, too, but in 1960 Rowe kept pushing candidate Johnson to display more of the broad passion that had made him a favorite of the New Dealers—to become more than a strictly Southern balance for the Kennedy ticket—and Johnson raged in such towering insecurity that Rowe finally denounced him to his face as a “Mogul emperor.” They maintained an angry silence for three years before Johnson summoned Rowe to the Oval Office, where each insisted that the silly feud was his own fault until Johnson pulled rank, saying, “Damn it, can't you be content to be the first man the thirty-sixth President of the United States has apologized to?”