Pillar of Fire (82 page)

Johnson and Hoover vouched for each other in crisis. Johnson needed Hoover's national authority to shield his campaign from charges of immorality mixed with spy danger; Hoover needed Johnson to overlook his failure to warn of Walter Jenkins's arrest records on file for years at the FBI. With the help of a complacent press, Hoover also managed brazenly to criticize the local police and Secret Service for laxity about Jenkins, and to advertise the FBI's sensitive distance from tawdry gossip—all while secretly bombarding officials from the White House, Justice Department, United Nations, and even embassies overseas with nasty interpretations of King's sexual habits (which the cover note to Hubert Humphrey called “His Personal Conduct”). The contrasting forbearance toward Walter Jenkins was scarcely sentimental. To protect Johnson, FBI agents unsuccessfully pressured doctors to explain Jenkins's YMCA conduct not as “voluntary” homosexuality but the result of a “mysterious disease which causes disintegration of the brain.” What guided the FBI through both cases was acute sensitivity to vanities of power at Hoover's level and above.

 

K
ING EMERGED
from St. Joseph Infirmary into a world engulfed by the news of Thursday, October 15: a coup led by Leonid Brezhnev that toppled Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, a change of British government, China's first successful nuclear bomb test—with background stories featuring South Vietnam's execution of a seventeen-year-old who had tried to assassinate Defense Secretary McNamara the previous May, plus the Game Seven victory of the St. Louis Cardinals in spite of Mickey Mantle's eighteenth and final World Series home run. Against statements by leading journals such as the
New York Times
that the Jenkins scandal was “bound to be seriously detrimental to President Johnson's campaign,” the embarrassment never registered among voters at large, but the threat erased King's qualms about campaigning nonstop for Johnson.

Louis Martin, a publisher of Negro newspapers and the Democratic National Committee's expert on minority politics since 1944, designed for King a specialized tour that created what amounted to ticker tape parades visible and audible mostly to Negroes. Martin put King on the back of a flatbed truck that attracted tumultuous crowds to more than twenty neighborhood street corners in Chicago, beginning October 21, and he sent a roaring motorcade through churches and playgrounds of Negro Cleveland. By careful prearrangement, King preached the urgency of voting without saying Johnson's name. “You know who to vote for!” cried King. “Don't you?” His aides shouted “All the way,” omitting the last two words of Johnson's slogan, “with LBJ.” The thin veneer of neutrality, which suited King's desire to avoid long-term partisan commitment, helped Louis Martin and Lawrence O'Brien harvest targeted voters behind a bland message. The tour received only sporadic external notice, usually in small stories of crossover interest—as when Chicago's Catholic Interracial Council presented King with its John F. Kennedy Award in race relations, or a convention of white evangelicals denounced him as a false Christian.

So strong was word-of-mouth excitement that when a scheduling mix-up pulled the motorcade briefly to curbside in a Negro area of Cleveland, the enterprising principal of Addison Junior High School rushed out to knock on the window and ask King to address her students. Over heated staff objections about the folly of wasting precious time on nonvoters, King followed the principal inside to stand at a hallway corner as students and teachers spilled from stairwells and classrooms to sit packed along both corridors. There he delivered a spontaneous, commencement-style homily. “All of us have the privilege of living in one of the most significant periods of human history,” King said. “You're at the age now where you will have to make some great decisions…and I want to say particularly to the Negro students here that doors of opportunity are opening now that were not opened to your mothers and fathers. The great challenge facing you is to be ready to enter those doors.” He encouraged students to look beyond their skills for worthy goals in the larger society, and recalled how children had come out of jails in Birmingham to canvass their elders with such effect that the registration of adult Negro voters doubled in three months. “The students did this,” said King. “This is what you can do.”

He told the Addison students that they would be called upon to give their own answers to the hardest questions that philosophers had asked “over and over again” on the nature of evil and the highest good. “I think I have the answer, my friends,” said King. “The highest good is love, and he who loves has somehow discovered the meaning of life and the reality.…Start now keeping love at the center of your life, and start now keeping nonviolence…. I believe firmly that America will be a better nation. I believe firmly that Negroes and white people will be able to live together as brothers…. And so I ask you to work hard, study hard, to make the right decision and join us in the movement for freedom.”

By the time King reached Los Angeles a week before the election,tour commitments piled up beyond endurance and quarrels festered over the disposition of the Nobel Prize money. Abernathy's wife, Juanita, supported Coretta King's compromise position—that $20,000 of the windfall be set aside toward the education of the King children—if only as an opening wedge for the argument that half the money belonged to the Abernathys anyway, as equal movement partners since Montgomery. Bickering so distracted King that he dropped out of several campaign stops, pleading exhaustion. At Cal State, Los Angeles, facing an impatient crowd, officials announced, “Dr. King can't come today, but here is Jack Pratt.” The embarrassed church lawyer from the stand-in advance team introduced Ralph Abernathy with glowing praise, but the crowd's disappointment yielded only slight applause for his salty speech that likened Goldwater to prison fare of bread and water. Abernathy ignored whispers and notes that it was illegal to make partisan remarks on a public campus, then stalked from the rostrum.

King wrote notes to himself on the margins of speech outlines: “Proposition 14 is sinful….” He implored California voters to reject the constitutional ballot initiative that would repeal not only a new statewide fair housing law (the 1963 Rumford Act) but all local ordinances limiting “the right of any person…to decline to sell, lease, or rent [real estate] property to such persons as he, in his absolute discretion, chooses.” All through 1964, against prevailing support for the civil rights bill, the campaign for Proposition 14 had gained spreading recognition as a worrisome countertrend. “This is a strange year in which to push for even greater segregation,” declared a perplexed
New York Times
editorial.

King's tour reached Los Angeles on the same day Ronald Reagan emerged as the Goldwater campaign's surrogate spokesman. Goldwater, although desperate for something to jolt the adverse election odds, had repudiated just before it was broadcast his own political documentary
Choice
, calling it “a racist film” and a “dirty movie” that blended scenes of drunken youth and violence with racial demonstrations. In a hurry to find a substitute for the slotted half hour on national television, some of his managers wanted to repeat Goldwater's conversation with former President Eisenhower, and others pushed to air the popular stump speech of the movie actor who was heading California Citizens for Goldwater. The candidate bridled at the tacit concession, and he would always dissemble jealously about how and why Reagan came to represent him at his defining hour in history, but Reagan did fill in for Goldwater on October 27. In his nationwide NBC speech, which
Time
called “the one bright spot in a dismal campaign,” Reagan finessed the drawbacks of the
Choice
documentary by omitting direct commentary on race. Instead, he evoked stirring themes of liberty embattled (“Should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery rather than dare the wilderness?…You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.”), and defined freedom's enemy almost interchangeably as totalitarian foreign enemies and the American government itself. “A perversion has taken place,” he said. “Our natural unalienable rights are now presumed to be a dispensation of government.” Reagan denounced the welfare state, foreign appeasement, and “the schemes of do-gooders” as a creeping threat, saying, “We are faced with the most evil enemy mankind has known in his long climb from the swamp to the stars.” Some commentators called his debut the best political oratory since William Jennings Bryan's “Cross of Gold” speech in 1896. Hundreds of local committees rushed to broadcast the film, and the Goldwater campaign bought a repeat national telecast for Saturday night, October 31.

The King tour rolled back through Chicago and Detroit to Baltimore's Faith Baptist Church, where he focused on the nominee's pinched definition of the public space among citizens. “Brother Goldwater has presented me with such a dilemma,” he said. “Never before has a presidential candidate taken a stand against the prophetic insights of the ages.” From the back of a truck, with Bayard Rustin as sideman on the bullhorn, he urged waving admirers on the streets to vote. Mayor Theodore McKeldin built unusual press interest by joining King's overflow stop at the Masonic temple on Eutaw Street. “My father followed Theodore Roosevelt into the Republican Party,” McKeldin announced, “but his son will leave that party for once at this time.” Like a candidate himself, King escaped the ensuing bedlam into an open-air motorcade that pushed through jostling, festive crowds dotted with Negro children in Halloween costumes. Bystanders leaned over the car and stretched to clasp his hand.

The next day, November 1, King reached home in Atlanta just ahead of the DNC's Louis Martin, who brought news of a campaign crisis: the sudden appearance in several cities of at least 1.4 million leaflets advocating a write-in vote for Martin Luther King as president. There were published reports (leading to one criminal indictment) that Goldwater officials were buying and distributing the material. Martin had no trouble persuading King to take action; on his way back to the Atlanta airport, Martin heard radio reports that King already had scheduled an emergency press conference at which he disavowed the leaflets and warned of a “venomous” plot to induce Negroes to waste their votes.

In New York, an “emergency committee” of religious leaders—among them Paul Tillich, the Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton, Abraham Heschel, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Gardner Taylor—issued an appeal against scandalmongering in the Walter Jenkins case, chiding those who would “cater to the prurient curiosity” about personal morals in order to “obscure fateful moral issues related to public life.”

President Johnson defended the clergy from Goldwater's charges of partisan meddling, in the midst of free-swinging oratory that propelled his campaign home to Texas. As a young boy, he told a final crowd on the Capitol steps in Austin, “I first learned that government is not an enemy of the people. It is the people.” And as a young New Dealer in the Depression, he recalled, “I learned that poverty and ignorance are the only basic weaknesses of a free society, and that both of them are only bad habits.” Secluded with Lady Bird and half a dozen friends, Johnson reacted to the first election returns of November 3 with a single outburst: “God, I hate for it to be over, because the hell starts then.” Before dawn—with a landslide victory assured but helicopters grounded by storm winds and roads closed by floods on the Pedernales River—he hazarded the short jet flight to his ranch.

Johnson overwhelmed Goldwater by nearly sixteen million votes and a popular majority unmatched in history,
*
with Goldwater carrying only five Deep South states and his home state of Arizona (by half a percentage point). The Democrats also picked up two Senate seats, including one in New York for Robert Kennedy, and forty-eight House seats in previously Republican districts. Support for civil rights was the keenest predictor of outcome: no representative who had voted for the 1964 bill was defeated from either party, while fully half the Northern members who had opposed the bill met rejection at the polls. Likewise, much to Johnson's satisfaction, anti-civil-rights Republicans fell heavily in Texas—losing the only two Republican House seats in a delegation of twenty-three, along with the challenge of George Bush to incumbent senator Ralph Yarborough.

The Republican minority fractured internally. Moderates blamed Goldwater for abandoning the Party of Lincoln, and were blamed in turn for abandoning the party nominee. Those who would survive, like Nixon, were left to pick a course through the ruins.

Based on Johnson's stunning 96 percent Negro majority, strategists from all quarters projected the presumptive Negro Democrat—an inversion of history—as a new fact of politics. “To the Negro,” said one, “Goldwater shot Lincoln in the head as surely as John Wilkes Booth.” Against a solid racial minority that accounted for Johnson's large victory margins in Virginia and elsewhere, analysts detected no countervailing shift from the Democratic base. “White Backlash Doesn't Develop,” announced the
Times
. “Backlash proved only a flick,” agreed historian Eric Goldman, and the
Washington Post
projected Southern defections to Goldwater as a “one-shot affair” like the 1948 Dixiecrat revolt, notwithstanding the election of the first ten House Republicans since Reconstruction in four Goldwater states: Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Alabama.

A warning sign was buried beneath election reviews. California voters embraced both Johnson and a constitutional right to segregated neighborhoods, as promoted by Ronald Reagan and the real estate industry. Proposition 14 carried California nearly two to one, winning fifty-seven of fifty-eight counties and nearly half a million votes more than Johnson. With its enforcement stayed, pending years of judicial review, and headed toward Supreme Court nullification in what the Justice Department called “the most important civil rights case of the decade,” the political import of Proposition 14 remained an asterisk to national election trends, as peculiar to California as the Goldwater spasm to the South.