Means of Ascent (3 page)

Inside the fourth in the line of long, black vehicles that headed for the South gates, away from the pickets, a long double line of motorcycle outriders moving out ahead, Lyndon Johnson sat in the back seat, facing three of his assistants, his huge ears, outsized nose and jutting jaw accentuated by the light from the reading lamp behind him as he bent over a black looseleaf notebook containing the speech he was about to give to Congress. His massive bulk—he was
more than six feet three inches tall, and weighed about 230 pounds—and the fierceness of the concentration with which he bent over the notebook and of the way his big hands snatched for the next page while he was still reading the one before it seemed to fill the car. He had entered the limousine without a word of greeting, and had immediately opened the notebook for a last-minute study of the speech. He said not a word during the ride to the Capitol. His eyes didn’t
look up from the notebook as the limousine passed the White House gates—with the pickets singing “We Shall Overcome” as if to tell him to his face, If you won’t help us, we’ll win without you. But one of the assistants riding with him had worked for him for almost twenty years, and saw his expression, and knew what it meant. “
He heard,”
Horace Busby recalls.

W
ITH ALMOST
the first words of his speech, the audience—the congressmen and Senators with whom he had served, the Cabinet members he had appointed, the black-robed Justices of the Supreme Court, the Ambassadors of other nations, a few in robes of far-off countries as if to dramatize that the world as well as America was listening, the packed galleries rimming him above—knew that Lyndon Johnson intended to take the ca
use of civil rights further than it had ever gone before. “At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom,” the President said. “So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.”

He would submit a new civil rights bill, Johnson said—the Congress would have it before them that week—and it would be far stronger than the bills of the past. The strength of those bills had been diluted by compromise, he said, by compromise and delay; in the case of the last bill, just a year before, by a Southern filibuster which it took liberal forces eight months to overcome. In the minds of many in his audience as he spoke was the fact that he
himself, on the previous bills, had often led the forces of compromise. “This time, on this issue,” he said now, “there
must be no delay, no hesitation and no compromise.” But still no one among those Senators, congressmen, Justices, Ambassadors, not even the most perceptive, knew how far he was really going to go—for none of them could have predicted the words to come.

By submitting the bill, Johnson said, he was fulfilling the formal purpose of his appearance before them, but it was not merely a bill that he wanted to talk about. “Even if we pass this bill,” the President said, “the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American
life.”

There was the briefest pause, as if he were gathering himself, and over his face came a look that the public, thus far in his presidency, had seldom seen, so careful had he been to wear a mask he considered statesmanlike and dignified. The eyes narrowed a little, and the jaw jutted, and the mouth, barely keeping itself from a snarl, hinted at it, and the tens of millions of people watching on television were looking into a face that many of those in the audience in the
Capitol knew already—the face of a Lyndon Johnson determined to win.

“Their cause must be our cause, too,” Lyndon Johnson said. “Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.”

Briefly, he paused again. He always had so much trouble in his speeches with the emphasis on the words, but he got it right this time. The next four words fell like sledgehammers.

“And we shall overcome.”

There was a moment of silence, as if, one observer was to say, it took a moment for the audience to realize that the President had adopted the rallying cry of black protest as his own, had joined his voice to the voices of the men and women who had sung that mighty hymn. And then the applause rolled across the Chamber.

And there were testimonies to the power of that speech even more eloquent than that applause. One took place in the living room of a local family in Selma, Alabama, where Martin Luther King and several of his aides were watching the speech on television. During all the years of struggle, none of his aides had ever seen Dr. King cry. When Johnson said “We shall overcome,” they looked over to their leader to see his reaction. So they were looking when Martin
Luther King began to cry.

Another testimony took place on the motorcade’s return to the White House. As the limousines slowed to turn into the White House gates, the turn was made in silence.

The pickets were gone.

A
FTER HE HAD STEPPED DOWN
from the dais and was making his way out through the crowded center aisle of the House, accepting congratulations on his speech from Senators and congressmen who pressed forward to shake his hand, Lyndon Johnson had a few more words to say, to an audience of one: Emanuel Celler, the seventy-six-year-old chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

While he was shaking Celler’s hand, Johnson told him, with a friendly, boyish grin which he had found effective with the older man, that the formal draft of the voting-rights
legislation would be ready in no more than two days, but that it would not be necessary for Celler’s committee to wait even that long to begin its work on the measure. “Manny,” he said, “I want you to start hearings tonight.”

“Mr. President,” Celler protested, “I can’t push that committee or it might get out of hand. I’m scheduling hearings for next week.”

In the midst of the crowd, Johnson’s eyes narrowed, and his face turned harder. His right hand was still shaking Celler’s, but the left hand was up, and a finger was out, pointing, jabbing. “Start them
this
week, Manny,” he said. “And hold night sessions, too.”

Celler did. In the Senate, the South staged an angry filibuster, but with Johnson using pressure and persuasion (civil rights leader
James Farmer, seated in the Oval Office, heard the President “
cajoling, threatening, everything else, whatever was necessary”), the bill was passed—its key provisions intact—with remarkable speed. And even before it was passed, the march from Selma to Montgomery had taken
place. Segregationists lined the route again, but this time no one dared rush forward to strike a marcher. Standing between the hostile onlookers and the long line of black men and women and children were the FBI agents, and the federal marshals, and the National Guard troops and the regular-Army troops that Lyndon Johnson had sent, to make sure that no one would.

A
BRAHAM
L
INCOLN
struck off the chains of black Americans, but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy’s sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life. He was to call the passage of the
Voting Rights Act of
1965 his “
greatest accomplishment,” and the speech in which he presented that Act to Congress with the ringing words that touched a nation’s conscience was indeed the high-water mark of the tides
of social justice in his Administration. And there remain other legislative monuments to the accomplishments of the President who figuratively linked his arms with the arms of civil rights crusaders and clasped their hands in his;
during the five years of the Johnson Presidency, great strides were made toward ending discrimination in public accommodations, and strides, if not great at least the first, toward ending discrimination in education, employment, even in private housing.
Thurgood Marshall, a black face at last above the black robes of the High Court, through appointment by Lyndon Johnson, was speaking not of his own advancement but of that of his people when he said: “
Thank you, Mr. President. You didn’t wait for the times. You made them.” In other areas of domestic social welfare as well, Johnson rammed to passage laws of which liberals had dreamed for decades: sixty separate education laws for the young and the poor; legislation that provided medical care for the aged and the poor. His “War on Poverty” was not crowned with triumph like his war on prejudice. Many of the laws he rushed through
Congress in such unprecedented numbers—in a frenzy of legislation—as if, it sometimes seemed, he equated speed and quantity with accomplishment, were inadequately thought through, flawed, contradictory, not infrequently exacerbating, at immense cost, the evils they were intended to correct. But his very declaration of that war was a reminder—as was his overall concept of a “Great Society”—of government’s responsibility to do more than
stand idly by without at least attempting to strike blows against ignorance and disease and want. The presidency of Lyndon Johnson marked the legislative realization of many of the liberal aspirations of the twentieth century: in storming, on behalf of those laws, long-held bastions of congressional hostility to social-welfare programs, he used the power of the presidency for purposes as noble as any in American history.

But the fight for social justice was only one aspect of the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. In April, 1965, not a month after his Voting Rights speech, protesters were back outside the White House again. And this time, when they sang “We Shall Overcome,” there was a new verse: “We shall live in peace.”

Protesters outside the White House—every day, it seemed, month after month, year after year, for all the remaining forty-five months of his Administration. Flags outside the White House, and across Pennsylvania Avenue in Lafayette Park—not American flags but the flags of the enemy. Chants outside the
White House: “Ho ho ho, Ho Chi Minh—the NLF is gonna win.” Clenched fists against the Washington sky. Little
flickers of flame as darkness fell—not the candles of earlier “vigils” for civil rights and peace, but burning draft cards. When civil rights protesters had sung “We Shall Overcome” outside the White House in 1965, they had sung it in defiance and demand, but when the hymn was sung now by protesters
against the Vietnam War—sometimes the protesters were the same, so closely intertwined were the civil rights and anti-war
movements—there was a new overtone to it, and the overtone was hatred. Before Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights speech of March, 1965, the singers had in effect been saying to the President, we’ll win even without your help; by 1966 and 1967 and 1968, they were saying, we’ll win even though you oppose us. In 1965 Lyndon Johnson had been, in their eyes, a reluctant ally; by the end of his presidency he was the enemy to be overcome—a difference shown more
clearly by other songs the protesters sang (“Waist deep in the Big Muddy / And the big fool says to push on. / Waist deep! Neck deep! / And the big fool says to push on”) and by the signs they carried (“Hitler Is Alive—in the White House”) and by the chants they chanted: “War criminal! War criminal! War criminal!”—and by one chant in particular, a chant that had become the battle cry of the anti-war movement: “Hey! Hey!
LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?” New police regulations had recently limited the number of pickets allowed to parade on Pennsylvania Avenue, but there were still enough so that their chant could be heard inside the White House, and Lyndon Johnson heard it—and, of course, since it was being chanted constantly in anti-war rallies and parades across the country, he also heard it as he watched the television newscasts, night after night: “Hey! Hey! LBJ! How
many kids did you kill today?” He would never forget it. In his retirement, at his ranch, during the silence of the nights in the lonely Hill Country of Texas, it still rang in his mind. He would sit and talk at the ranch of “young people by the thousands … chanting … about how many kids I had killed that day.” He would talk of them chanting “
that horrible song.”

The protesters had returned in April, 1965, because that was the month in which the President sent American troops into offensive ground operations against an Asian foe.

When Lyndon Johnson became President, the number of American troops—advisers, not combatants—in Vietnam was 16,000; press coverage was relatively meager and muted; public interest small. And during his campaign, in 1964, for election to the presidency in his own right, Lyndon Johnson had pledged not to widen the war. “Some … are eager to enlarge the conflict,” he had said during the campaign. There are even “
those who say that you ought to go north and drop bombs,” he said. But not him, he said. Or, he said, “
they call upon us to supply American boys to do the job that Asian boys should do.” But, he promised, over and over, “
we are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” Not a month after he took the oath of
office following that campaign, the bombers were going north—in a program, “Operation Rolling Thunder,” that would be enlarged and enlarged, and enlarged again, with
Johnson personally selecting many of the bombing targets. And in April, 1965, the President sent American boys—40,000 of them—ten thousand miles away, into a land war in the jungles of Asia.