At Canaan's Edge (41 page)

With both President Johnson and John Doar engaged among featured speakers at the first White House Conference on Equal Employment Opportunity, operators from the SNCC telephone bank left desperate messages for Doar—that Hayneville jailers insisted Peter Hall's clients were still in their cells but refused to let him speak to any as of late Friday, that none of the surrounding hospitals or mortuaries acknowledged arrivals who matched the vanished Hayneville prisoners. Doar broke the wall of silence when an employee of the White Chapel Funeral Home acknowledged to him possession of a fresh arrival fitting the description for Daniels. He notified the FBI at 6:15
P.M
. A Catholic priest, called separately to administer last rites at Baptist Hospital, found a surgeon of war experience he knew to look at the victim without identity papers still breathing on a hallway gurney, and Dr. Charles Cox assembled trauma teams that worked eleven hours to remove his spleen, part of a punctured lung, and buckshot fragments embedded from a shoulder blade to the small intestine. An FBI agent waited outside on promise of immediate word, he assured headquarters, “if Morrisroe should die.” Morrisroe would survive.

From the Los Angeles airport, meanwhile, Andrew Young had been trying to arrange an afternoon call with the President, but White House aides notified FBI headquarters that Johnson spurned King's information on Watts. If they meant to placate Hoover with their hostile speculation that King meant only to puff himself up or lay a political trap, they did not go far enough. “The White House makes a great mistake,” Hoover wrote on his rush memo, “in even allowing King et al. to get access to it.”

P
RESIDENT
J
OHNSON
in fact gathered his advisers for a cross-country telephone summit just before King's homeward flight. Unaware of new trouble—they spoke through the very hour of Doar's inquiries into Alabama—the two principals addressed a history-making civil rights alliance that was menaced already on larger fronts, marked by skewed public attitudes about violence as sickness or cure. Each looked to the other for unlikely rescue, and neither betrayed hostility over rupture near at hand. Their skittish, intimate consultation left few clues that it would seal the last words on record between King and Lyndon Johnson. Unwittingly, they were saying goodbye.

Johnson put Lee White and Harry McPherson on extension telephones to hear him complain to King that he had been swarmed all week by hostile votes in Congress. The Senate had just cut his second-year poverty budget by 13 percent, he said—from $1.89 billion to $1.65 billion—“and now my bill has got to go back to the House, and go through Judge Smith again, go to conference.” That setback already stunted the package of new job and education programs, such as Head Start, that Johnson hoped to grow into the range of $10 billion per year. More ominously, the administration had to fight for a 43–43 deadlock on a separate vote to delete another $800 million. The amendment would have “just cut me in half,” the President told King, but failed on a tie. “That's how close it was.

“They're determined to destroy it, to scandalize it,” Johnson charged. He put King abreast of thorny, nonpartisan obstacles to change within his own government—that Mayor Yorty opposed even limited poverty funds unless he controlled them, for instance, and chairman Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., had taken a long yachting holiday rather than testify before a congressional committee that in his absence halved the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's first budget. When the President asked about Watts, King spoke frankly about the risk of “full scale race war.”

Johnson accepted his prognosis but soon cut it off. “So now what should we
do
about it?” he asked impatiently. “What is your recommendation?”

King hesitated. He had advised already to expect no help from “absolutely insensitive” local politicians such as Chief Parker (“a very rude man, we couldn't get anywhere with him”), which left federal hopes that Johnson had just portrayed under relentless siege. “Well, the problem is, I think,” King stammered. “If they can get in the next few days, this poverty program going in Los Angeles,” he suggested, “I believe that it would help a great deal.”

“We'll get at it,” Johnson promised crisply. His aides and his Cabinet would keep working on the mechanics of “crash action,” but he prescribed an urgent message for King to shore up the national mandate. “And just say that uh, we, uh, the clock is ticking,” the President exhorted, “that, that, uh, that the, the hands are moving, and uh we we just, uh, the good Lord is going to allow us some time, and he's trying to give us some warnings, but the country has just got to stand up and support what I'm doing. And I can't have these poverty things hitting me 43 to 43.”

“Yeah, that's right,” said King.

Johnson said that King's statements, while already reasonable and just, should reflect more explicitly the language of the Howard University presidential address on poverty. Treating King as a fellow expert on the treachery of speech in a divided society, he warned that the press “might misunderstand” his own attempt that day to discourage racial hatred from any quarter. “I said a man has no more right to destroy property with a Molotov cocktail in Los Angeles than the Ku Klux Klan has to go out and destroy life,” Johnson told him, saying he had made that point “to the Equal Employment people today and made it pretty strong.” Although the President said he only paraphrased King on the subject, he knew—and he knew King knew—that the filter of race would implicate Negroes broadly while sparing whites except for Klan extremists. Johnson hastened to recall his offsetting plea for understanding. “There's no use giving lectures on the law as long as you've got rats eating on people's uh, uh, children,” he told King, quoting himself, “and unemployed, and no roof over their head, no job to go to, and maybe with a dope needle in one side and a cancer in the other.”

“Yeah, that's it,” said King.

“Because they don't have very good judgment. People don't—that got that kind of condition.”

“That's right,” said King.

“And we're not doing enough to relieve it,” said Johnson, “and we're not doing it quick enough.”

“Yes.”

The President twice reprised his riot-and-rats refrain, going so far as to preach in rhythm that the neglected of Watts “are all God's children, and we better get at it.”

“Yes, yes,” King intoned, giving the sort of church response he usually received.

“I want you to know I said that,” added Johnson. “Pardon me for interrupting.” He used language nearly identical to an earlier, confidential encouragement for John McCone, the former CIA Director, to accept appointment from Governor Brown to lead the Watts riot commission. If anything, the President understated both to King and McCone his lyrical commitment to make civil rights “the most important cause of our time,” as proclaimed earlier Friday on the White House lawn. “For our cause is the liberation—the liberation of all of our citizens in all of our sections in all of our nation, through peaceful, nonviolent change,” he had declared. “And we shall overcome. And I am enlisted for the duration.”

Still, the President anticipated that his once shocking embrace of movement purpose would be lost beneath harsh front-page headlines tomorrow: “Johnson Rebukes Rioters As Destroyers of Rights.” He coached King into the bully pulpit as his counterbalance and substitute. “Refer to that Howard University speech,” he repeated. “Nobody ever publicized that.”

King replied that he had done so already “in almost every speech I've made.”

Johnson detected no such message in media coverage and pushed King to shift the focus of the news. “You, you're on television, and you ought to
make
'em,” he pressed. “Hell, have, tell 'em to
read
it, write, and get it, and let's get busy.” Flustered, the President longed for him to plow forward ground for another Selma spring. “We've got to keep ahead of it,” said Johnson, “and we're not now.” He decried instead a landslide slipping away. “They think that I'm getting far away from the election, and that I haven't got the crowds supporting me anymore,” he told King, then struck a glancing blow: “They all got the impression too that you're against me in Vietnam.”

Johnson pulled back at once. “You don't leave that impression,” he assured King, only to writhe for and against violence. “I want peace as much as you do, and
more
so, because I'm the fellow that had to wake up this morning with fifty Marines killed,” he groaned, referring to temporarily secret casualty figures from the first American pitched battle, at Chu Lai. “But these folks will
not
come to the conference table, and I'm—”

“I've said that, Mr. President, I
am
concerned about peace,” King interjected. “And I have made it very clear, I think, my position is often misinterpreted,” he said defensively, alert to Johnson's volatile passion. “Because I've made it very clear that at the present time, two things, first that it is just unreasonable to talk about the United States having a unilateral withdrawal. On the other hand, you have called fourteen or fifteen times for unconditional talks, and it's Hanoi—”

“That's right, that's—”

“—that hasn't responded.”

“That's the
perfect
position!” Johnson pounced. “Just exactly the position.” He said King should coordinate with Ambassador Goldberg, which prompted King to recall a phone message lost in the chaos of Watts—“I guess two days ago”—about an invitation to visit Goldberg at the United Nations.

“I told him last week to talk to you,” the President disclosed. With a burst of restored energy, he said he would have Lee White call King in Atlanta to facilitate not only a Goldberg conference but emergency programs for Los Angeles and plans for the White House conference on race. Johnson thanked King for leadership in Watts—“You did a good job going out there”—and invited suggestions anytime King had money to pay for the phone call. “If you haven't,” he said wryly, “why, call collect.”

“All right,” said King, chuckling.

After Johnson signed off, he and his aides switched briefly to derisive laughter about King's reluctance to salute the battle flag in Vietnam. They mocked him for wobbly judgment and dubious political loyalty, which, together with the fresh ambush from Watts, raised for them a specter of inexplicable, concerted betrayal by Negro allies. Angrily protective of his boss, Harry McPherson had drafted the day's stern language aimed at ingrates who rewarded the administration's historic partnership with riots in California, of all places, and was disappointed that Johnson undercut the message with so many extemporaneous remarks on racial justice. White House aides leaked exaggerated stories about how sharply the President admonished King on Vietnam.

The President squelched the sarcasm with peremptory orders for his staff to mobilize poverty initiatives for Los Angeles by the next morning, Saturday, at ten o'clock. “Let's get up a program,” he concluded in a pep talk. “Get everybody that's possible. Let's move in—money, marbles, and chalk.” Johnson's manic enthusiasm covered a truce that was inherently unstable. King's oratory could not offset political drift against minority rioters any more than Johnson could maintain the Goldberg initiative as a peaceful approach to Vietnam. Since the President privately entertained faint hope for any Vietnam settlement short of defeat, he seized upon Goldberg as a fig leaf to cover the inescapable hard choice between full-scale war and withdrawal. King, like most leading war opponents then and later, shied from adopting forthright withdrawal as his recommended solution. It is highly doubtful, of course, that he could have preached nonviolence for Vietnam effectively to Johnson on this one chance, even had he known that he would complement informed misgivings shared secretly from George Ball and Richard Russell to the President himself.

President Johnson spoke no more boldly for military force in Vietnam than King did against it. Part of him strongly resisted—even feared—the destructive psychology of war. He still worried that national wrath would steal the remaining energy of his Great Society, and he knew it was far easier to make new enemies than to transcend old ones. George Wallace among many others would rise ardently to cheer combat in Asia. For all Johnson's personal discomfort with King, who to him was no congenial horse trader like Roy Wilkins, he was loath to break from the nonviolent phenomenon that King represented. Johnson's presidential distress sprang from experience that inverted the conventional perspective on violence in politics. He needed military success ahead to govern, but already he knew better than to presume the triumph of superpower might even in obscure Vietnam. Looking back a decade, he appreciated more than anyone the marvel uniquely without arms that had broken the smug, snug world of his U.S. Senate under segregation. “Who of you could have predicted ten years ago,” he cried out to five hundred civil rights experts on the White House lawn, “that in this last, sweltering August week, thousands upon thousands of Negro men and women would suddenly take part in self-government? And that thousands more in the same week would strike out in an unparalleled act of violence in this nation?”