The American Future (18 page)

In Atlantic City, I met Liz Moynihan, Pat's wife and managerial minder, a Texan, and thus a crucial link between the Kennedy-Irish connection and Johnson's Austin crowd. The importance of that bridge between two hostile camps became more evident when Pat got me into a reception that was ostensibly a fund-raiser for the Kennedy Memorial Library that was planned in Boston, but to anyone with eyes and ears, was Camelot at cocktails. There was the court historian Arthur Schlesinger, dapper in the usual bow tie; there were Bobby and Teddy not talking. The long wake for the fallen hero was still going on. People choked up in front of the photo of JFK and John-John on the beach. But between the hors d'oeuvres the air was also thick with plans for Act Two, to be launched with Bobby's campaign for the Senate. Pat, obviously signed up as spearbearer, was deep in conclave mode, surrounded by estranged courtiers. But then, while nodding vigorously and beginning one of his full-cheeked colloquies, he spotted me, paused, and gave me a conspiratorial wink.

I left the party heady with precocious insider wisdom. Strolling back along the boardwalk, past the entrance to the convention hall, I heard, for the first time, that voice. “We Shall Overcome” it was singing, and around it a chorus of great majesty had transpired; as if Mahalia Jackson and Aretha and Odetta and pretty much every voice that had ever been raised in painful hope had somehow gathered for rehearsal in Atlantic City. The Beatles were due in after the conven
tion had left town, and I was shamelessly riding the craze. “Do you know Lennon?” I'd be asked. “Loike a bruhther,” I'd reply, my voice as glottal as I could get it. But now they could keep “A Hard Day's Night.” This was the music I wanted to hear.

But who were the bad guys? A crowd was gathered around the shell of a blue Ford that had been trucked from Mississippi all the way to the boardwalk. The car was burned out, Naugahyde seats still acrid with scorch. This was what the Klan had done; what the Freedom Democrats were up against. They were also up against the power of the presidency. For Johnson—who thought he had already stuck his neck out enough for the civil-rights people—was incensed by the challenge of the Freedom Democrats. Fannie Lou, their most unstoppably vocal champion, had made it clear she would make the case public to the Credentials Committee, and if she secured just eleven of their votes, would have enough to take it to the Convention Floor. Each state delegation would then be asked to give their vote on whether the Freedom Democrats should replace the regular Mississippi delegation. The embarrassment such a scenario would present to Lyndon Johnson's claim to embody a post-traumatic American Coming Together was a nightmare. What had been planned as coronation might turn into chaotic farce.

It only got worse when Fannie Lou made the case in public before the Credentials Committee. The moving ruckus on the boardwalk; the split in the civil-rights movement, much to LBJ's chagrin, had got media traction. When she rose to speak, giving her name and address and pointedly adding the name of Mississippi senator James Eastland who had defected to Goldwater, every network camera was trained on her. The big beautiful voice was sternly resolute, tragically impassioned, as she told her life story. “If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated today, I question America,” she said. “Is this America where we have to sleep with the phone off the hook because we be threatened daily, just 'cause we want to register to vote to be first-class citizens?”

Beside himself, LBJ called an impromptu press conference on an inconsequential matter, just to get the cameras off the woman (he described her more coarsely) who had now become not so much an inconvenience as a personal nemesis. Minions were sent to Atlantic City to sway the MFDP into being Reasonable. An offer was made. Under no circumstances would the party leadership consider a full
MFDP delegation, but two black members could join loyalist white regulars. Senator Hubert Humphrey, a champion of civil rights since 1948 and one of the favorites to join LBJ on the ticket, put the offer to Fannie Lou. She wouldn't hear of such a thing. Had all the work, the danger, the suffering been for so meager a crumb? Exasperated, little Humpty Hubert, his egg-like dome glowing pale, asked the big black woman from Ruleville, “What
is
it you want, Mrs. Hamer?” “Why, Mr. Humphrey,” she said, looking sweetly back at Humpty, “don't you know? The Kingdom of Jesus; that's what I want.”

Fannie Lou didn't get it. LBJ did some more heavy leaning; threatened the zero-funding of a poverty program here, a school's budget there, and lo and behold, the numbers on the Credentials Committee sympathetic to the Freedom Party began to waste away. Martin Luther King was disinclined to be seen in their company. Could you blame him? There was an enemy to be fought, and its name was Goldwater. If everyone just behave there would be a Voting Rights Act on the books the year after the election. Why rock the boat? The obligations of pragmatism hung ominously over the boardwalk. The famous Atlantic City numbers game began to be a count of those singing along with Fannie Lou. One morning she showed up and the massed choir had become a chamber ensemble. Pressed once more to be reasonable, she stubbornly persisted in her rejection of so demeaning a proposal. That was it; offer withdrawn. The coronation could now proceed. On nomination night, Johnson, hitherto concealed from public view like a mysteriously veiled bride, ascended by hydraulic lift to the stage to be hailed by the roars of conventioneers while tiny plastic cowboys on parachutes rained from the ceiling. A week later in the Convention Center, the Fab Four sang “I Should Have Known Better” in front of orgasmically shrieking multitudes, while, an hour's drive away, North Philadelphia burned in the first ghetto riot of the year. Fannie Lou went back to Ruleville to see how Jesus was doing.

Hubert the Happy Warrior may have been thunderstruck or entertained by the naiveté of Fannie Lou's answer to his presidential offer, but she was in deadly earnest. She did want the Kingdom of Jesus in America.
Did people not talk that way in Humphrey's home state of Minnesota? (Actually, they did out on the prairie.) And they certainly talked that way in the Deep South when wrongs had to be righted. There were, to be sure, young militants of the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) like Stokely Carmichael whose disenchantment with the Democrats after Atlantic City led not to Jesus but to Malcolm X and to the Black Panthers. But the core of the civil-rights movement still thought of itself as a ministry. Take away the preaching from Martin
Luther
King, and you can have no idea of the might of his eloquence to shame America into living up to the precepts on which the country had been founded. If the unfulfilled promise of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” was routinely invoked against segregation and racism, so was St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians (3:28) in which the apostle pronounced that “there is no Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” It was precisely because the black churches dared to insist on color-blind Christian fellowship that their sanctuaries had become targets of arson and bombing. The reason for the selection of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner as murder victims was that they had been snooping around the burned-out ruins of the Mount Zion Methodist Church near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the place that had been designated a center of civil-rights education and voter registration by the Summer Project. Getting niggers all riled up about things they ought not to be bothered with was not what churches were for, the Klan thought. Hell, those preachers were all communists in dog collars anyway.

But that was exactly what the churches were for. Getting African Americans in the South, in fact all over the United States, to raise their voices, to brave things they had long been too reluctant or too intimidated to dare: sitting on the wrong side of lunch counters, riding in the wrong seats of the bus. But putting their lives on the line to do all this was inconceivable without the exhortation of the ministry. When another of the band of reverends, Fred Shuttlesworth, whose house had been dynamited by the Klan, was advised to get out of Birmingham, Alabama, as quickly as he could, he responded typically, “I wasn't saved to run.” Neither were others of the ministry—King himself of course but also Ralph Abernathy and Joseph Lowery, also Alabamians. When they resolved to be staunch for freedom, they saw
themselves as the inheritors of the long history of the black churches, from the clandestine converts of the slave plantations, to the itinerant preachers of the antebellum South and North; the militant abolitionists who called America to a Christian accounting with the original sin of the Republic; and the churches that had provided succor and solidarity through almost a century of Jim Crow segregation.

Which is why, when Barack Obama found himself under fire for associating with the confrontational Jeremiah Wright, his longtime pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, his immediate response was historical rather than polemical. In a speech delivered in Philadelphia, refusing to run away from the issue, Obama attempted an explanation of the union of race and religion in America; of the place of unseemly passion in the black church. When he first experienced the shouts and clapping of black worship, he remembered, it was a reclamation of “a moment we didn't need to feel shame about”; the recovery of “trials and triumph, at once unique and universal, black and more than black.” The anger embedded in those memories, he said, was real even if often unproductive. “To wish it away…without understanding its roots only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.” And suddenly the moment in American history seemed bigger than a political adjustment; and more like a call to reestablish moral community in the United States. Taking religion seriously, Obama seems to say, is not something that ought to divide the country more deeply but something that might actually bring it together; something white America could feel as intensely as black America. And then he went on to address sympathetically what he knew to be
white
anger. Put the two passions together, and a transformation might happen, he says.

But white rage isn't much in evidence at Woodstock, no not
that
Woodstock, the one about thirty miles northwest of Atlanta, surrounded by lovingly tended fairways. First Baptist Church sits at the end of a long driveway and is approximately the size of your average provincial airport terminal, only much better appointed. And if your idea of a house of worship involves damply smelling limestone and worn prayer hassocks, you had better go home to Barchester. For First Baptist is fragrant. Fresh-cut flowers stand at the Welcome Desk; the floors are polished tile and stone. Soaring glass walls are tinted subtly enough to let in light without heat. Escalators silently convey congre
gants (and there are 7,000 of them at this morning's “traditional” Sunday service) toward discreetly chiseled gold wall inscriptions attesting to the merciful love of God.

And why not? Pastor Johnny Hunt explains to me that just as people these days want a choice of mall, they are going to shop for their church. “That's just the way it is,” he says through his honeyed baritone, an unapologetic smile flashing from the dazzling orthodontics. We're at Bible class before the main event, and it's filling up fast with tall men in chinos and Ralph Lauren golf shirts and perfectly groomed women in pastel suede and cashmere. The scent that hangs over discussions of Micah is Chanel, not incense. Pastor Johnny, gamecock zesty, with wavy silver hair, a lime-green tie, and that sock-it-to-you smile knows exactly what he is doing. He is a full-service provider. First Baptist Woodstock is, in fact, a small town that works. Its revenues are secure, its accounting transparent, its mission clear, its outreach benign, and its spirits buoyant. What corporation or for that matter medium-size sovereign state could make the same claims? First Baptist is the government the well-heeled of Greater Atlanta thought they didn't want or need. It comes complete with schools, a college, medical services, social workers; entertainment (Christian rock is a multimillion-dollar business), retirement facility, and mortician. What Pastor Johnny understands is that for all the blowhard professions of rugged individualism you hear on right-wing talk radio, middle-class Americans are lonely; heartsick at the loss of community. Even if their parents and grandparents couldn't wait to hightail it out of the immigrant districts into the verdant suburbs, they were surprised to discover that what they needed, even more than the 8,000 square feet of McMansion, the four-car garage, the life membership of the country club, and the Viking Range kitchen, was fellowship, a laying on of hands; the comfort of social connection in a headset universe. They want this whether they have been busting their buns at the gym or busting their balls at the office. And they want this so
much
more than they want an evangelical at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, devoted, insofar as the Supreme Court and the Constitution will allow, to banning abortion and gay marriage.

Pastor Johnny understands American solitude, and the high-wattage smile tells his flock that when he deplores transgression, he knows whereof he speaks. Not that long ago (a few decades) Johnny Hunt,
half Lambee Indian, sharp in the pool room, his life measured out by the beer bottles, was tomcatting around bars and alleys. Then—isn't this always the way?—he was rescued by Janet the Cheerleader and her twirling batons. (“I noticed how pretty her baton was.”) Janet is at Bible class too, her self-evident sweetness not completely masked by pancake; hair impeccably streaked. Later in his sermon, Johnny would publicly celebrate her as his personal redeemer, right up there with Jesus, without a twitch of embarrassment. But Janet must be used to this by now. Before Micah and Isaiah get started, there are the Announcements, which amount, in effect, to First Baptist's order of business: a prayer intercession for Rhonda and Mark, who together have to deal with another round of chemo; support for the mission in Argentina (evangelical Protestantism a hit with the gauchos); volunteers signing up for Church on the Street, which goes into the tougher neighborhoods of Atlanta looking to help the homeless and the addicted. I ask Johnny about the strings attached to that help. “None,” he says flatly and without any defensiveness. “If they want to accept the Lord, as I did, they are most welcome, but we give what we can anyway.” And you believe him because, even though every fiber of your agnostic-skeptical brain is screaming NO, the rest of you is recognizing that this is one decent (and snappily dressed) vicar.

The signs on the seats of the vast amphitheatrical “chapel” were marked “SAVED,” which was nice for a Jew like me, but not, I thought, guaranteed. As the faithful trooped in there was a hubbub of rumor. Mike Huckabee, Baptist preacher, ex-governor of Arkansas, local saint to Bill Clinton (the other famous Arkansan of unsaintly fame), a victorious veteran of a hundred-pound battle with girth, a perfect emblem of the Republican commitment to shrinking government, was coming to First Baptist. If you were a committed Christian and couldn't quite get over your anxieties about the Book of Mormon, then Huckabee was your man for the White House, and since Iowa he was running strong. On the strength of the rumor the lady next to me had driven sixty miles that morning for a Huckabee sighting. From the front of the chapel, gently graduated steps, as if rising to paradise, ascended to a stage, flanked by two huge video screens on which slides smoothly scrolled, rather like local commercials at the movie theater. But instead of Country Joe's Barb-B-Cue and Tom's Tune-Up 'n' Lube, they were: “MUSLIM BIBLE DAY; PREMARITAL COUNSELING;
ADDICTION RECOVERY; OBEDIENCE THROUGH BAPTISM; PRE-BIBLE CLASS.” Between the screens were, on each side, two electronic portals, glowing cerise or celadon, and at the center, a pale skin-tone shimmer in which was set a single glowing, silver cross. It was fabulous.

On came the choir, overwhelmingly white, a mere 150 of them, greeted by a wave of happy sound from the 400-piece orchestra: Andrew Lloyd Webber does the hymnal. “He CAME, he DIED, he ROSE again on HIGH…,” they sang, the colossally amplified sound crashing over the flock, which nonetheless did not rise from their seats but stayed put, oddly passive like children in a classroom, uncertain of their allotted quotient of eagerness. As if in supplication, one of the cassocked choir would every so often slowly lift both arms, palms upward, trembling, like a marionette worked by a celestial puppeteer. But there was no general joining in, for the choir was just too far away, across the vast wooden prairie of the stage. To the front of that space on each side of the niftily kitted choirmaster strode four women in their twenties and thirties. They were glossily shampooed and dressed just barely the respectable side of enticing: calf-high boots, cowgirl pleats, shredded buckskin blousons. Spotlit, they belted out the delight.

It was a hell of a warm-up for Governor Huckabee, whose amiably gangling form now loped on to the stage. Arriving a little while before the service, he had been surrounded by believers, eager to shake the preacher's hand, pledge allegiance, touch the raiment, which in this case was a dark gray suit that flattered the newly trim lines of the ex-chubby. “I
have
come to campaign,” he winsomely confessed (the disingenuous official line at Woodstock being that he was just another worshipper who happened by in his helicopter), “I have come to campaign for
Jesus
.” Applause, for the faithful did not for a minute think the as yet unannounced candidacy of Jesus for president was a bar to his apostle Huckabee somehow making it onto the ticket. The preacher went on in his trademark lightly self-deprecating manner, a million miles from the sanctimonious rants expected of evangelicals in politics, to claim that politics and power weren't all they were cracked up to be, and yes, his heart was in this campaign, but whatever happened, it was always going to be more important to bring souls to the Lord. Sure. But such was the disarming charm, the mellifluousness of the voice, that for a moment
you actually began to believe this, even while the Huckachopper was parked not far off by a golf course waiting to spring Slim to his next date with the voters.

When it came to Pastor Johnny's turn, you could see why he was such a hit with the suburbans. Dapper, he moved lightly on his handsomely shod feet, a bobbing flash of pugilistic energy, like a sparring partner who was just teasing. For the denunciations against iniquity, Johnny could summon up the preacher's roar, a nod to the great Baptist yore, for he divined the craving for castigation among the BMW classes. But Woodstock is a sinner-friendly church, and the fulmination was carefully rationed, sharing sermon time with scenes from Johnny's personal odyssey, lost soul to glorious rebirth, that date being 17 January 1973. There were down-home stories of early benefactors. Praise be to Otis Scruggs, apostle in denim overalls, who bought him his first suit. “Johnny,” said Otis, “I never missed anything I ever gave away.” Lord be thanked for Jowls Watner, “a heavy man with a fist like a ham” who had written Johnny a letter every day for thirteen years just to make sure he knew he had a friend who would see he stayed on the straight and narrow. And rising to the climax of all Baptist services, little Johnny, big-time showman for the Lord, opened his arms wide to all those strangers to the Word who wanted, wanted NOW to come and be received…And, from the host in the stalls there arose just such men and women (but mostly men), who stepped or stumbled forward into the embrace of Pastor Johnny (or one of his numerous deacons stationed along the many aisles), some of them ending prostrate at the front, heads bowed on the lowest step, gently raised by the pastor, and on came the choir of multitudes and the strings and woodwinds, fortissimo, and out came that anthem again like a dollop of molasses on morning corn mush: “He CAME, he DIED, he ROSE again on HIGH…”