At Canaan's Edge (53 page)

The President shook hands through the East Room with encouraging words for the assembled scholars, civil servants, activists, and leaders he called “the captains of peaceful armies.” Aaron Henry, board chair of the Mississippi NAACP, was one of many sober personalities turned bubbly. “We're eating barbecue at the White House!” he told friends, but working constraints clamped down on the gilded deliberations to follow. White House aides blocked votes on resolutions deemed critical of the administration. In the education workshop, Al Raby argued from his Chicago experience that class sizes in poor Northern schools must be cut in half, that government must eliminate rather than study de facto segregation, and that an essential first step was to reverse October's preemptive assurance of federal funds to Superintendent Willis. Such notions were tabled as premature. Martin Luther King, groping for a productive balance, spent two days in the jobs workshop without making quotable remarks for or against the pace of achievement. Clarence Mitchell of the NAACP urgently pressed a resolution from the justice panel that President Johnson should “speed up the lagging enforcement” of both landmark civil rights acts. “People in the South are in danger of being exterminated,” he told a plenary session. “It is a matter of life and death.”

Conference co-chair A. Philip Randolph ruled his friend's motion out of order, but White House aides worried that Bayard Rustin and Randolph himself were circulating for spring consideration a supplemental “Freedom Budget” that sought a national investment of $100 billion over ten years in schools, housing, and jobs. The proposals exposed stark gaps between racial reality and the ringing commitment to equal opportunity proclaimed by President Johnson in the War on Poverty as well as his Howard University speech. The sheer scale of accepted tasks made the administration seem overmatched, which threatened its posture of sovereign control. Johnson abhorred intimations of frailty or doubt as the first symptom of failure in national politics. By the same predilection, J. Edgar Hoover's ingrained rejection of the slightest alleged error had doomed White House entreaties for FBI observers at the exploratory, off-the-record workshops. Assistant Director DeLoach refused to supply agents to hear any anticipated “critical or unjustifiable statements concerning the FBI,” and suggested instead that if conference participants “didn't know what they were talking about, or falsely accuse the FBI, they should shut up.”

White House aides vigorously promoted three alternative workshops on community, welfare, and the family. The panels opened topics not yet digested into budget-busting agendas or daunting politics, with a social science approach that was congenial to the majority of delegates with backgrounds in academics or government. Civil rights veterans resisted these attractions as a diversion or worse that devalued the cumulative experience and purpose of the movement. Of the few delegates who spoke publicly against the shift of focus, Andrew Young defended the Negro family as perhaps unorthodox—often with extra mothers, grandmothers, cousins, “and no father”—yet strong enough to have sustained both the civil rights movement and a vibrant institutional church. “We are not being deprived of family life,” he told reporters. “We are being deprived of justice, education, and jobs.”

A joke relieved undercurrents of tension among experts trying hard to be polite. “I have been reliably informed,” announced a conference moderator, “that no such person as Daniel Patrick Moynihan exists.” Peals of laughter confirmed the target of obsessive gossip suffused with race, and Moynihan broke silence the second day to lodge “a point of personal privilege” against one comment that he had undertaken his study of the Negro family in order to explain Watts. Granting that the report had been completed weeks before the riots, Dr. Benjamin Payton of the New York Protestant Council disputed Moynihan's deeper application of cause and effect, and quoted the study's thesis that family deterioration rather than the legacy of discrimination “is the fundamental source of weakness in the Negro community.” Heated exchanges receded again into whispered caucuses. In a compounded irony, news outlets made the bow-tied new Wesleyan University professor himself a symbol of civil rights. The
Washington Star
declared Moynihan “The ‘Non-Person' at the Rights Parley,” and a headline—“Moynihan Conspicuously Ignored”—fashioned for him a white celebrity version of the invisible cage that novelist Ralph Ellison had portrayed at the heart of the black condition.

President Johnson seethed. The deadlocked racial summit annoyed him, as did the publicity about Moynihan, but he resented most the pinch from unruly civil rights leaders he found lacking in political trust for the long haul of a difficult cause. “They come right in and by God take their perch on the White House,” Johnson fumed to McGeorge Bundy, “and while they still got their hors d'oeuvres going, and whisky in one hand and a wienie sausage in the other, they're just raisin' unshirted hell and say it's got to be a hundred
billion.”
The White House staff spread rumors during the conference that an irate President might abort the event in a fury over leaflets advertising that four delegates, including Martin Luther King, were listed as sponsors of a new march against the Vietnam War. Such warning inhibited use of the White House platform to criticize military priorities, chilling optimism along with dissent, and Johnson's mood darkened with the ensuing news. On Wednesday, November 24, as he released a message of thanks to the armed forces (“A man does not inherit freedom as he inherits the land”), the Pentagon publicly confirmed 240 Americans killed and 470 wounded in the Ia Drang Valley. The understated toll tripled the previous weekly high, and hiked the number of deaths since 1961 to 1,300. Press Secretary Bill Moyers delivered what reporters called “a spontaneous and quite personal description” of Johnson's anguish over the list, which led Thanksgiving Day news along with the miracle story of a lone soldier found wandering with multiple wounds seven days after the battle at Albany clearing. The hometown paper in Coward, South Carolina, retracted its obituary for Toby Braveboy, descended from Creek Indians, who lost most of a hand to gangrene but survived.

O
N
S
ATURDAY,
November 27, the rally of thirty thousand at the Washington Monument exposed the hazardous psychology of war protest. From Vietnam, the president of the Communist National Liberation Front (NLF) sent an advance telegram wishing the demonstration “brilliant success,” which further guaranteed a lack of mainstream American politicians. Martin Luther King commended the draft of Coretta's address, but canceled plans to speak himself. (She exhorted the crowd never to forget that democratic commitment made America a historic great nation: “This is true in spite of the bombings in Alabama as well as in Vietnam.”) Organizers from the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy sought to project a moderate image with a dress code and a suggested list of seventeen cautious slogans, such as “Supervised Cease-Fire” and “Stop the Bombing.” Although a visible few defied prescription by marching under an NLF banner instead of the American flag, the
New York Times
perceived “more babies than beatniks, more family groups than folksong quartets,” and gently mocked a tameness in the mannerly crowd. Norman Thomas, nearly blind in old age, announced from the platform that he wanted to cleanse rather than burn the American flag. “I'd rather see America save her soul than her face,” he declared. Baby doctor Benjamin Spock said the war discredited the United States more than it hurt Communism.

Rally organizers vetoed speakers considered too strident or ideological, including Nobel Prize chemist Linus Pauling and Bob Moses of SNCC, which caused infighting among the nascent antiwar groups over alleged “McCarthyite” loyalty tests. Moses, still in transition from his February breakdown, and still answering only to his middle name Parris, spoke privately with movement supporters who would listen. He told one interviewer that some white Southerners justified killing “gooks” in Vietnam for the same reason they condoned the murder of civil rights workers—as a threat to their civilization—yet most Americans justified the war for the very purpose that united them
against
the segregated South, to advance patriotic freedom. He said President Johnson blamed violence on isolated extremists, Klansmen and Communists, while himself defining the Vietnamese as inhuman, robotic infiltrators in their own land, to be met with massive violence. “What do you do when the whole country has a sickness?” Moses asked, wondering whether anything could “awaken this nation as the South is beginning to be awakened.” (The Mississippi Supreme Court, in a stab at fairness, had just overturned his 1961 criminal conviction from the first nonviolent march in McComb, when Moses submitted to mob beatings and then an Orwellian trial on charges of “violent, loud, offensive” conduct.) He sifted cruel paradox with the intensity that had driven him from New York to become SNCC's solitary pioneer in Mississippi. “I want this country to be less sure of itself so that it can stop making war on other countries to export our system,” he said. “Another way of saying the same thing is that I want this country to be
more
sure of itself, so it can publicly admit it has real problems and must work to solve them.”

At the Washington Monument, one sanctioned speaker wrestled his thoughts in hypnotic self-examination like Moses, wondering how a country of consistently progressive government since 1932 could flood Asia with 200,000 young soldiers to “kill and die in the most dubious of wars,” while straining decades to deploy the first hundred voter registrars in the South. “What do you make of it?” shouted SDS president Carl Oglesby, a thirty-one-year-old father of three, normally a technical writer for Bendix appliances in Michigan. Oglesby surveyed the background commitment in Vietnam from Truman and Kennedy to the current leaders “who study the maps, give the commands, push the buttons, and tally the dead,” naming Bundy, Goldberg, McNamara, Rusk, Lodge, and President Johnson. “They are not moral monsters,” he declared. “They are all honorable men. They are all liberals. And so, I'm sure, are many of us who are here today in protest.”

Oglesby groped out loud for a vocabulary of fresh confession to indict liberalism at its zenith. He traced the fault perhaps to material corruption in a small American populace that consumed half the world's goods: “How intolerable, to be born moral, but addicted to a stolen and maybe surplus luxury.” He suggested among alternatives a global case of the stunted perception that comforted the mind of segregation. “We have become a nation of young, bright-eyed, hard-hearted, slim-waisted, bullet-headed make-out artists,” Oglesby charged. “A nation—may I say it?—of beardless liberals.” Calling himself a radical instead, he acknowledged that bitter apprehensions on the war sounded “mighty anti-American,” then cried out: “Don't blame
me
for that! Blame those who mouthed my liberal values and broke my American heart.” Oglesby soon trailed off and stepped politely from the microphone into sustained applause from a dissipating crowd. He looked surprised, then perplexed, when rally coordinator Sanford Gottlieb of SANE lifted his arm like a prizefighter's in spontaneous tribute. Although news accounts overlooked Oglesby as an unknown speaker, activists marked a birth moment for the “New Left” identity associated with young whites moving from civil rights influence to an independent stance on Vietnam.

Two days after the rally, facing a stateside VIP delegation inside a heavily restricted tent at the An Khe redoubt, Lieutenant Colonel Harold Moore bluntly recounted the battle of landing zone X-Ray against an enemy he termed disciplined to the verge of suicidal fanaticism. “Sir, that completes my presentation,” he said, and met dead silence instead of examination. Wordlessly, flanked by the Pacific Fleet commander and two of the four Joint Chiefs, Defense Secretary McNamara nodded, shook hands, and exited with confirmation of grit in the backward Vietnamese. General Westmoreland gave him a classified request for another 200,000 troops—to exploit the attrition ratio—beyond the 200,000 already committed but not yet deployed or provided for in the national budget, and McNamara took home what he called a “shattering blow.” No character dividend or surprise good fortune yet greeted the can-do American plunge. With the projected numbers now being harvested in flesh, McNamara told President Johnson that exposure to field commanders from the recent combat, “particularly the First Air Cavalry Division,” resulted in “my personal judgment that the situation is much more critical than at least I had realized.”

In Washington, where partisans of the distant war retained confidence to address collateral issues, Joe Alsop's column on the day of the An Khe briefing detected an “acute and rising anxiety about the next stage of the civil rights movement.” He reported that White House officials, shocked by the cold reception for the Moynihan report, “found themselves hardly talking the same language as the movement's leaders.” Alsop endorsed their view that Negro delegates had “no practicable program,” being mired in protest and unrealistic demands for federal initiative. “Injustice is the theme,” he observed, “not what can be done about it.” Similarly, columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak charged that “shrill cries of Negro militants” had dominated the workshops, “sweeping the problems posed by the Moynihan report under the table,” wasting months that “went into researching the Negro male's loss of manhood, the dominance of the Negro female, the breakdown of family life and the acceleration of illegitimate births.” Their column, “Civil Rights Disaster,” declared the two-day event the most dismal failure in the “glittering two-year history” of the Johnson administration. “White intellectuals who had come to Washington to discuss Negro social disorganization were stunned by the demagoguery,” they concluded. “The question is why? Some disillusioned liberals hint darkly that radical white elements are at work, prodding Negroes to seek the unattainable.”