Pillar of Fire (64 page)

For all the Director's skillful accommodation, it did not escape notice that he spent the night of July 10 at the Sun 'n Sand, one of the few Jackson motels to accept integration, or that he frankly agreed with a reporter's suggestion that the three missing civil rights workers must be presumed dead after three weeks. These small contradictions of segregationist conceit confirmed for wary Mississippians Hoover's unmistakable purpose. His FBI deployment merely fueled “the wild ‘to-do' the government is making out of the disappearance of three civil rights workers,” complained the
Meridian Star
, which blamed President Johnson for trying to “prove to COFO that he is their devoted slave.” A state senator denounced renewed federal “occupation” as a “calculated insult,” and resentful commentators urged citizens to shun FBI investigators with protective silence. “With so many FBI agents sleuthing in our state,” wrote one, “we should keep our eyes open and our mouths shut.”

FBI officials passed their first test when the Director noticed nothing flimsy or fake about the FBI's new Mississippi headquarters, which he had ordered created on Tuesday. By Friday, having labored frantically around the clock as Roy Moore, the freshly assigned Special Agent in Charge, shouted, “Money is no object!” teams of agents had leased and furnished two stories of Jackson's First Federal Building well enough to pass as a fully functional state headquarters for dedication by Hoover, despite empty files and dummy walls hiding bare concrete. FBI Inspector Joseph Sullivan then delivered a status report on his search for the Neshoba County victims, which earned a nod from Hoover but a subsequent reproach from Washington aides for unwanted detail when the Director needed his sleep. The same aides decided not to wake Hoover that night when several callers promised to shoot their former hero the next morning as a traitor to states' rights. Instead, the aides quietly reinforced the guard detail that whisked Hoover from the Sun 'n Sand to the airport. “Hoover Leaves State/Negro Church Burned,” announced the Saturday
Clarion-Ledger
, but Mississippi's ninth church loss of the summer was a footnote to weekend chaos ahead. Before Hoover landed in Washington, his office logged three emergency calls from Walter Jenkins and another from Lyndon Johnson about a predawn bushwhacking in Georgia.

 

O
F THE MANY
Army Reserve officers who completed two-week summer training about midnight Friday at Fort Benning, three friends—all Negroes unsure of finding safe overnight lodging—decided to drive straight through to homes in Washington. They made it as far as Highway 172 near Colbert, Georgia, when a car pulled alongside their 1959 Chevrolet. From a range of three to four feet, two. 12-gauge shotgun blasts obliterated both windows on the driver's side. One missed Lieutenant Colonel John Howard as it tore through a suitcase into Army uniforms on hangers at the far side of the rear seat. In the front, Major Charles Brown snapped awake to find his friend Lieutenant Colonel Lemuel Penn slumped over the steering wheel beside him, dead of massive wounds to the neck and head. When Brown managed to bring the careening Chevrolet to a stop, and noticed through heavy fog that the attack vehicle ahead seemed to be doubling back, he and Howard moved Penn's body aside to retreat at such high speeds that they ran off the road down an embankment, turning the Chevrolet on its side.

Bulletins greeted Hoover at an afternoon flight layover in New York. His orders summoned Assistant Director Joseph Casper from vacation in Myrtle Beach, and Casper commandeered reinforcements from Newark, New York, and Washington into Georgia for instant Saturday travel and all-night interviews, which boiled down to a day-after report for the White House about five “good suspects” from the Athens, Georgia, Klan. Agents had already spread word that “a substantial payment will be made by the Bureau for good information,” and were dragging the Broad River with a magnet in hopes of recovering shotguns. “Press vigorously,” instructed Hoover on Penn case memos.

Hoover called President Johnson on Sunday, by which time superseding alarms were sounding out of Natchez, Mississippi. In the Old River, a bayou formed by the shifting Mississippi, fisherman James Bowles had discovered the badly decomposed lower body of a young Negro male, his legs tied together. Armies of reporters converged there and also upon Meridian a hundred miles east, on the chance that this might be James Chaney. “FIND HEADLESS BODY IN MISS.,” screamed the
Chicago Defender
.

On Monday, when President Johnson called Robert Kennedy for suggestions on the Penn investigation in Georgia (saying, “That was a dastardly thing, wasn't it?”), the Attorney General deflated his hopes for a breakthrough in Mississippi. “Evidently it's not any of the three,” said Kennedy, but he confessed that his information did not come from the FBI. In fact, Kennedy asked the President to “give us a hand with the Bureau…because most of the stuff now we get we read in the papers. For instance, the body, we just, hell, we don't know.” Within minutes, before Johnson could check with Hoover, White House aides rushed in with television reports that search teams had found a second floating torso in the Pearl River, tentatively identified as Chaney.

“No, that's not correct,” Hoover told the President. “The second body has just been found, within the last hour…. It looks like we've got another case.” Before Hoover signed off, Johnson squeezed in Kennedy's request that he ask Hoover to dictate for the President a basic diary of his Mississippi trip—and send a copy to the Attorney General. In Mississippi, forensics experts identified neither body as James Chaney, and the disappearance seven weeks earlier of Charles Moore and Henry Dee,
*
both nineteen, began to register as a phantom event that had been unreported to the civil rights movement or authorities. FBI agents eventually arrested—though state officials declined to prosecute—two Franklin County Klansmen who confessed kidnapping Moore and Dee off the streets of Meadville, beating them to death on a far-fetched suspicion of Black Muslim conspiracy, then sinking their bodies weighted to a Jeep motor block.

Later on Monday, Inspector Sullivan imported Navy frogmen to scour for Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman in case killers were using the Old River bayou as an all-purpose disposal area. For emergency manpower and equipment, he found himself jostling across two states with Atlanta SAC Joseph Ponder, who was running the FBI's investigation of the Lemuel Penn murder. In Washington, meanwhile, an exchange of letters set a tone of governmental calm. Hoover assured the White House that he had opened “a fully staffed FBI field office in Mississippi…without the rancor and bitterness of a Federal ‘take over,'” and Johnson replied that it was a “great solace to lean on an old friend [for] such delicate assignments.”

R
EPUBLICANS OPENED
their national convention in the San Francisco Cow Palace that same Monday, July 13. All three television networks covered the four-day national pageant more or less continuously, anticipating an abrupt regional and ideological shift of power toward Senator Goldwater's Western conservatives from the long-dominant Eastern business interests. There was little suspense beyond a slight possibility that Dwight Eisenhower, the only Republican president of the past thirty years, might throw his transcendent influence publicly against Goldwater. Eisenhower was known to resent Goldwater for calling his administration a “dime store New Deal,” and privately he had threatened to renounce the Goldwater forces for reckless exploitation on civil rights, saying that if Republicans “begin to count on the ‘white backlash,' we will have a big civil war.” Rumors of a decisive Eisenhower statement quickened when his brother Milton delivered a passionate nominating address on behalf of William Scranton, the surviving alternative to Goldwater, but Eisenhower remained neutral to the end. He could not bring himself to split his party in support of Scranton, a sure loser to Goldwater, and he had never been comfortable speaking about racial harmony, anyway.

In his speech to the convention on Tuesday night, Eisenhower himself stirred the passions for which he blamed Goldwater. “Let us not be guilty of maudlin sympathy for the criminal…roaming the streets with switchblade knife,” he declared. The Cow Palace came alive with roars of approval. (“The phrase ‘switchblade knife' means ‘Negro' to the average white American,” explained a dismayed Roy Wilkins in a newspaper column entitled “Ike Struck Lowest Blow.” Wilkins could only hope that a speechwriter had inserted the sentence without Eisenhower's knowledge.) Eisenhower evoked still greater emotion when he attacked the press, urging his audience to “particularly scorn the divisive efforts of those outside our family, including sensation-seeking columnists and commentators, because…these are people who couldn't care less about the good of our party.” This time the delegates responded with standing cheers, many shaking angry fists at the reporters' booths around the Cow Palace.

Campaign historian Theodore White described the release of pent-up anger as a turning point for the convention, if not for the role and reputation of the American press. Before then, White contrasted the “well-dressed and well-mannered Goldwater delegates” favorably with “civil rightsers” marching and picketing outside the Cow Palace,
*
but the Eisenhower speech opened the convention itself to confrontation. Goldwater delegates and the spectator galleries showered New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller with catcalls and boos when he tried to speak against extremism. Hostilities erupted on the convention floor. Afterward, neither the triumphant Goldwater conservatives nor the defeated Rockefeller-Scranton liberals smoothed their raging antagonism in the interest of party unity. “Hell, I don't want to talk to that son-of-a-bitch,” Goldwater growled when Rockefeller called him to concede the nomination.
Life
magazine bemoaned the “ugly tone” of the entire convention.
†
The
New York Times
called it a “disaster” for both the United States and the Republicans, saying the Goldwater nomination could “reduce a once great party to the status of an ugly, angry, frustrated faction.”

On the morning after his acceptance speech, Senator Goldwater sought an audience with General Eisenhower, who was straying again toward rebellion over Goldwater's chief applause line, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Echoing a widespread public outcry, Eisenhower demanded to know how Goldwater could see “extremism” as good politics when it smacked of kooks. More personally, he told Goldwater that the slogan reminded him of right-wing zealots who had called Eisenhower himself “a conscious agent of the communists” in the White House, which was “utter tommyrot.” Goldwater stammered through several unsuccessful replies before trying a D-Day analogy. What he meant was that patriotism required sacrifice, said Goldwater, and that General Eisenhower had been the ultimate “extremist” for liberty when he sent the Allied troops across the English Channel against Hitler. This interpretation transformed Eisenhower's mood. “By golly, that makes real sense,” he said with a smile of relief that nearly matched Goldwater's. Still, this close call within the Republican bosom shook the new presidential candidate, who resolved never to repeat his signature phrase during the campaign.

 

N
EWSWEEK
PRONOUNCED
the San Francisco convention “stunningly total—and unconditional…an authentic party revolution, born of deep-seated frustration with the existing order, executed by a new breed of pros with a ruthless skill.” Other mainstream outlets speculated about Eisenhower, the rejection of Wall Street Republicans, or Goldwater's poor prospects against Lyndon Johnson, but their excitements were mild beside the acute distress of Negro publications. “GOP Convention Spurns Negroes,” cried the
Cleveland Call and Post
. “Negro Delegates to GOP Convention Suffer Week of Humiliation,” headlined the Associated Negro Press newswire. “The Great Purge of Negroes,” announced
Jet
. “GOP Negroes Washed Away by the Goldwater Ocean,” said the
Chicago Defender
. Their focus was less on the Goldwater nomination itself than on the institutional rejection of cherished Republican fixtures such as George W. Lee of Memphis, delegate to every GOP convention since 1940, who had “seconded the nomination of Robert A. Taft” in 1952. The San Francisco convention, sweeping aside Lee's credentials claim that he and two hundred “regular” Negro Republicans had been railroaded out of the Shelby County caucus, seated “lily-white” delegations in Tennessee and every other Southern state “for the first time since Reconstruction Days,” reported the
Pittsburgh Courier
, noting that the caucus of Southern Republicans, “to add insult to injury,” named its hotel headquarters Fort Sumter. Southern Republicans reformed as a homogeneous group. Of the region's 375 convention delegates, all were white and at least 366 supported Goldwater.

Minority observers mourned the loss of Republican stalwarts far beyond the sinecures
*
and patronage posts of the South. In “Cal. GOP/ White Man's Party,” the
California Eagle
of Los Angeles protested a seldom-mentioned fact about Goldwater's victory over Rockefeller in the decisive June 2 primary: it gained convention seats and control of party machinery for a slate of eighty-six California delegates that “by deliberate choice” was exclusively white. Nationwide, by slating no Negro candidates and defeating most opposing tickets, Goldwater strategists whittled the number of Negro delegates to a minuscule fourteen of 1,308, roughly one per hundred, in what newspapers called the fewest “ever to be certified to a Republican convention.”

At the Cow Palace, the rolling invective that startled television viewers fell personally upon this tiny remnant. The
Cleveland Call and Post
reported that George Fleming of New Jersey ran from the hall in tears, saying Negro delegates “had been shoved, pushed, spat on, and cursed with a liberal sprinkling of racial epithets.” George Young, labor secretary of Pennsylvania, complained that Goldwater delegates harassed him to the point of setting his suit jacket on fire with a cigarette. Baseball legend Jackie Robinson summarized his “unbelievable hours” as an observer on the convention floor: “I now believe I know how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler's Germany.”

The
Chicago Defender
raised the Nazi analogy to a blaring headline: “GOP Convention, 1964 Recalls Germany, 1933.” Editor John H. Sengstacke eulogized the lost tradition reaching back to the armies of Grant and Sherman: “The Grand Old Party, which fought against slavery, which kept the flame of hope burning on the altar of freedom…which sustained the faith of the Negro people…is gasping its last breath in the Cow Palace.” In the South, where Negro Republicans could imagine no substitute haven among Democrats, editors and owners of the few Negro newspapers writhed under the assault to their Republican identity.
Atlanta Daily World
owner C. A. Scott first denied the Cow Palace revolution (“Scranton on the Move”), then mitigated its effect (“stands to reason…that the party as a whole will not be carried too far from traditional Republican principles”), then pretended it was good (“…may have a stimulating effect on the development of a real two-party system in the South”), and finally called upon the scalded, soul-torn Old Guard to “hold the fort” no matter what. He praised the Negro delegates for deciding not to walk out of the Cow Palace in abject resignation. They had endured only a “graphic demonstration” of what Democrats—“the party of Bilbo, Eastland, Thurmond, Barnett, Wallace”—inflicted regularly through the past half century, wrote Scott, concluding solemnly that it was “useless for a Negro today to think he solves the race issue in politics by jumping from one major party to the other.”

 

W
HITE VOTERS
could jump, too, in numbers of far greater impact. “I think we just gave the South to the Republicans,” President Johnson told his staff on the way to his Texas ranch after signing the civil rights bill. Aides debated his words in strictest confidence. One alarmist feared that Johnson could lose the election solely on the race issue. Others thought Johnson was hoping he could win even if he lost the entire South. There was precedent for white Southern Democrats voting Republican on presidential ballots—Eisenhower and Nixon had cracked through to win a few Southern states—but it was daunting for any Democrat to contemplate the terrible math of running against rather than with the full weight of the traditional “solid South.”

Only hindsight suggested that Johnson had glimpsed a more dramatic, permanent change. Bill Moyers recalled Johnson saying that he had delivered the South to Republicans “for your lifetime and mine,” which would turn the whole structure of politics on a fulcrum of color. In their direst visions, after the Goldwater convention followed hard upon the civil rights bill, neither established experts nor shell-shocked Negro Republicans anticipated a wholesale switch of party identification down to the roots of congressional and local offices. Historic affiliations were too well fixed, with Republicans more united behind Negro rights than Democrats. In Congress, fully 80 percent of House Republicans and 82 percent of GOP senators had just voted
for
the civil rights bill, with Democrats lagging behind because of their entrenched segregationist wing. In precincts and state conventions, Republicans everywhere were organized in part around the glorious memory of Emancipation, which was precisely what had reduced them to near extinction among Southerners. For generations, none but the occasional eccentric Republican had bothered to contest elections for Southern statehouses, legislatures, or courthouse jobs. Of forty-one U.S. representatives from the core Deep South states of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina, Republicans in 1964 numbered zero.

The century's first handful of promising Deep South Republican candidates arrived at the San Francisco convention hopeful of novel success in the fall elections. One of them, James D. Martin of Alabama, met alone with Senator Goldwater on the roof of the Mark Hopkins Hotel to propose George Wallace's hastily conceived terms for a campaign alliance. Wallace wanted a public reward—veto power over Supreme Court nominees, or, shockingly, a place on the Republican ticket as Goldwater's running mate—in exchange for his agreement not to run as an independent presidential candidate, which likely would doom Goldwater in Southern states. Goldwater declined, knowing he had more to lose than to gain, saying Wallace after all was still a Democrat. Martin returned to circulate on the Cow Palace floor with his message that Republicans should rise above crude racial appeals to larger issues such as federal heavy-handedness, which he called “Bobby Kennedy tearing around like a predator at the constitution of Mississippi and the registration laws of Alabama.” Wallace himself formally withdrew from the presidential race three days after the Republican convention, leaving behind a tacit endorsement of Goldwater and a claim that he had changed the language of political debate. “Today we hear more states' rights talk than we have heard in the last quarter century…,” he told
Face the Nation
interviewers on July 19. “…The American people are sick and tired of columnists and TV dudes who…try to slant and distort and malign and brainwash this country.”

Only four years earlier, when advocates of civil rights had received a congenial welcome at the Republican convention in Chicago, Negro delegates had walked out of the
Democratic
convention in protest of Kennedy concessions to Southern segregationists. Now Negro leaders of both parties recoiled from the concerted hostility of the Cow Palace Republicans, which they could only hope was an aberrational coup traceable to Goldwater, disconnected from both old tradition and new racial progress. Martin Luther King and others denounced the Republican ticket on its first official day and nearly every day thereafter. With a peculiar mix of vehemence and care, King took pains to stop short of partisan endorsement, saying he was more against Goldwater than for Johnson, hoping that a sound enough defeat for Goldwater might restrain both parties from political white flight.