Landslide (26 page)

Reagan understood the rage Goldwater’s supporters felt. He shared it. In his speeches before them, he articulated that rage perfectly—so perfectly that his conservative audiences couldn’t help but rise to their feet. But he knew, by instinct and by years of training, that there were other audiences that a man in politics would
have to appeal to, bigger audiences, with different wants and needs. “
There is no point in saving souls in heaven,” he wrote in
Where’s the Rest of Me?
“If my speaking is to serve any purpose then, I must appear before listeners who don’t share my viewpoint.” He knew the same thing that the new president in Washington knew: that a preacher who wanted to win converts had to do more than scare people to death.

But no one around Goldwater seemed to know this. They didn’t seem to have much interest in converting anyone. At Goldwater’s California victory party, Reagan varied his usual speech, trying out a new theme in addition to the familiar encapsulation of outrage. He spoke of unity. “
We are going to have to forget an awful lot of bitterness,” he told the crowd. “We don’t want to win a convention, we want to win an election. Let’s start making love to Democrats.” He reminded them that he had been a Democrat once, a Democrat who had worked to elect Harry Truman. This was not what the crowd wanted to hear. They booed and hissed in response.

That was the impression in Reagan’s mind as he pondered his future that summer: swooning cheers for rage, boos and hisses for “making love.”

Reagan was a true believer. He would continue to work for Goldwater, he would keep giving his red-meat speeches, he and Nancy would attend the San Francisco convention as enthusiastic supporters. He believed in the conservative movement, and he fervently hoped that its day would soon come.

But he was not ready to risk his career on it. Not yet. That same year, a new acting job came along.
Reagan’s advertising executive brother, Neil, was helping to produce a TV Western called
Death Valley Days
, sponsored by one of his clients, the Pacific Coast Borax Company, maker of 20 Mule Team Borax and Boraxo hand cleaner. The show needed a new host, someone who could introduce the short teleplays that ran in each episode. Neil knew his brother needed work, and he tried to persuade him to take the job. As always, Reagan played hard to get, he wasn’t sure it was the part for
him. But just as had happened with
Johnny North
, after a lunch and some ego stroking, he relented. He signed a contract committing himself to host
Death Valley Days
into 1966, long after the presidential election was over. What else was he supposed to do? It was “
good, steady work,” his daughter Maureen would later write. Reagan “jumped at the gig.”

As spring 1964 ended and summer approached, more than a thousand young Americans were heading toward Mississippi, hoping to change the world. These were the idealistic college-age volunteers for the Mississippi Summer Project, known as the Freedom Summer in the national press. From late June through August 1964, they would infiltrate the Deep South, educating black voters on their constitutional rights and helping them register to vote. In the process, they knew, they would provoke clashes with white segregationist law enforcement, clashes that would draw national attention and outrage. Most of the volunteers were white middle-class college students from the North. They knew Mississippi only as a ghastly idea. “
A desert state,” Martin Luther King, Jr., had called it in his 1963 March on Washington speech, “sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression.”

But for one young man working in the Freedom Summer, it had always been a very real place.
James Chaney, a native of Meridian, Mississippi, was a black man who knew what the desert state’s sun felt like. He was not a college student; he had not even finished high school. His friends and family would later say he signed up in part because he thought it would be a good way to meet girls.

When his mother asked her son if he was frightened by the work
he had taken on, Chaney answered no. “
Mama, that’s what’s the matter now,” he told her. “Everybody’s scared.”

Early in his presidency, Johnson welcomed civil rights leaders to the Oval Office: (left to right) Martin Luther King, Jr.; Johnson; Whitney Young; and James Farmer.
©
Yoichi Okamoto/LBJ Library

It was a core belief of the civil rights movement—that fear was the problem and that fear was something that could be overcome. But Chaney was also describing the nation in which he lived. In the summer of 1964, America remained as it had been—a nation enjoying unprecedented prosperity, a nation that was firmly committed to proclaiming that everything was okay. But fear remained, unspoken, a kind of background noise. Like the buzz of an old fan in a sweltering room, it would go undetected by placid minds. But in agitated ears, it would stick and smother, until it was impossible to hear anything else. All over the country that summer, people with far fewer reasons to be scared than James Chaney had summoned fear from the background and waited for catastrophe to come.

At some point on June 21, the longest day of the year, fear most likely came to Chaney. We can only speculate as to when. Perhaps it came that morning. At the Meridian office of the civil rights group Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), reports had come in that Mount Zion Methodist, a black church in Longdale, Mississippi, had been burned to the ground by a white mob. CORE had planned a freedom school at the church, and Mickey Schwerner, a young white northerner who headed the group’s Meridian office, wanted to find out what happened. With Chaney, and another white volunteer named Andy Goodman, he set out toward Longdale to investigate.

Chaney, the native Mississippian, drove the car. Perhaps fear first came as he and his colleagues crossed into neighboring Neshoba County, known for its heavy Ku Klux Klan activity. Or perhaps fear came in Longdale, where Chaney saw kerosene cans lying near the cold ashes of Mount Zion. “
The sixty-five-year-old structure had been totally consumed,” write the journalists Seth Cagin and Philip Dray in their definitive account of the events in Neshoba County on the twenty-first of June. “All that remained was the bell, some blackened hymnals and a grotesquely twisted piece of metal that had been the roof.” Perhaps fear first came when Mount Zion’s parishioners
delivered a message to Schwerner, whose activities in the county had raised the ire of its white folk:
The people who did this were looking for you
.

Or perhaps fear came on the long drive back toward Meridian when a police car appeared in Chaney’s rearview mirror. Or not long thereafter, when Chaney’s right rear tire gave out and the station wagon came to a halt. Or perhaps it came when the police car stopped behind the station wagon and the menacing figure of Neshoba County deputy sheriff Cecil Price emerged. Ordering the three men out of the car, Price told them that they were under arrest. It was unclear exactly what their crime was. They didn’t ask. Price was carrying the Southern policeman’s nightstick—the leather blackjack.

Behind bars in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the county seat, the men waited out the afternoon. Deputy Price had hauled them into the Neshoba County Jail and then disappeared. When the prisoners asked if they might make a phone call back to Meridian, the local jailers said no. Perhaps there in the quiet of the jail cell, as the bountiful daylight of the summer solstice slowly slipped away, fear came to James Chaney. It was an article of faith among civil rights workers never to let anyone release you from jail after sundown.
You never know who’s going to come find you at night
.

At ten o’clock, when full darkness had settled in, a returned Deputy Price informed his prisoners that they were free to go. The three men emerged from the jail into the thick, muddy night, free but not safe. “
Now let’s see how quick y’all can get out of Neshoba County,” Deputy Price had said as they left the jail.
As Chaney drove away, he could see the deputy’s headlights following behind.

Then, at the edge of town, the lights disappeared. There was only the dark countryside and the desolate road. Somewhere in the distance was the county line and then Meridian—out of sight, but there. The station wagon sped forward. Maybe the men inside thought they would be safe after all. Maybe, for a moment, their fear slipped away.

But then came headlights again, speeding toward the station wagon. Chaney, who knew what happened on dark roads in Mississippi, hit the gas. The safety of Meridian was too many miles away. Most likely out of desperation, he pulled off onto a narrow gravel road, perhaps hoping to lose his pursuer. But the headlights still followed close behind. Then, as the station wagon careened through the darkness, it was suddenly filled with a flashing red light. A police signal. Chaney pulled the station wagon to a stop on the side of the lonely highway, where the three men inside awaited another encounter with their pursuer, Deputy Price.

“
I thought you were going back to Meridian if we let you out of jail,” the deputy said.

“We were going there,” Chaney offered in reply.

“Well, you sure were taking the long way around,” said Price. “Get out of the car.”

This would have been an unappealing offer, for the deputy was not alone. Shortly after Price pulled the rights workers over, a car pulled up behind him. It was packed with passengers: civilians, not police. There were six of them. And they were all white.

Price ordered his three prisoners to get into the backseat of his own vehicle. The two white men obeyed. For a moment, Chaney held back. Perhaps he was thinking about what happened to black men in Mississippi on dark roads in the dead of night. Perhaps the fear had paralyzed him. Or perhaps he was trying to summon strength.

That’s what’s the matter now. Everybody’s scared
.

Then he felt Price’s leather blackjack cracking into his skull.

“
W
HAT DO THEY
think happened? Think they got killed?”

Lyndon Johnson was on edge. It was two days later. That morning’s
New York Times
bore the headline from Mississippi “
3 IN RIGHTS DRIVE REPORTED MISSING
.” All morning, frantic relatives and fellow activists had been badgering the White House for federal assistance in the search for Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman. Johnson
could see trouble coming his way. He asked an aide, Lee White, what exactly the activists’ families were suggesting. What did they think had happened to these men?

“So as far as they’re concerned,” White told him, “
they just disappeared from the face of the earth. This means murder, as they see it.”

Fear over the young men’s fate had spread quickly. In the Meridian CORE office that Sunday, their colleagues began to worry when the men did not return by 4:00
P.M
. as planned. They spent that afternoon calling around to local law enforcement authorities, asking if they had the men in custody. A call to the Neshoba County Jail yielded no information. No such persons, said the jailer, were in custody at that time. By nightfall, word was spreading throughout the affiliated groups of the civil rights movement and to contacts in the national press: three of their men were missing in the Mississippi night.

The next day, news came from Neshoba County that the men in fact had been held in custody there. But they had been released after dark the night before. That day, two journalists, Claude Sitton of
The New York Times
and Karl Fleming of
Newsweek
, arrived in Neshoba County to report on the missing men. In Philadelphia, Mississippi, the journalists were greeted by a crowd of hostile white locals. Sitton’s dispatch for the next day’s paper was coldly factual: “
Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation began arriving here in force early tonight after the Justice Department offered a full-scale search. The Mississippi Highway Patrol issued a missing-persons bulletin, but a spokesman in Jackson indicated late today that it had no plans at present for further action.”