At Canaan's Edge (44 page)

Public schools opened across the South on Monday, August 30. The U.S. Office of Education announced that nearly two-thirds of the school districts had submitted satisfactory desegregation plans, many admitting Negro students for the first time, and that the extensive breach of segregation was more significant than the small numbers of pioneer students. Nine Negroes safely entered formerly white schools in Philadelphia, Mississippi, near the jail from which Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner had been lynched in 1964. Peggy Williams, the first Negro admitted to the Gainsboro, Tennessee, elementary school, was elected president of her eighth-grade home room by thirty white classmates. In Atlanta, three Abernathy children joined Yolanda King, nine, and Martin III, seven, to integrate Spring Street School under a “freedom of choice” plan. “Several parents welcomed us and said how happy they were to see us,” said Coretta King.

King missed the family drama. Arthur Goldberg had invited him to the United Nations for the promised meeting on Vietnam diplomacy, which fell through. Minor news reached him that four former SCOPE volunteers had been arrested for stealing SCLC's office safe during the Birmingham convention earlier in August, and he learned in New York also on Tuesday that Adam Clayton Powell fired Wyatt Walker, “effective as of this day,” sending King a saucy note: “Martin—for your info—Sincerest regards, Adam.” In Hayneville, the first four Negro students arrived at the county high school. Hulda Coleman had asked them to stay home Monday so that last-minute security concerns could be resolved. Forty special deputies, a flock of reporters, and assorted adults watched John Hulett's tenth-grade son nervously shine his black shoes with a handkerchief before he went inside. “No one spoke to me the whole day,” he said with relief that afternoon. “Some of the white children in the lower grades at Hayneville School wore no shoes at all,” reported the
New York Times.

September 1965

K
ING
prepared diligently to see Ambassador Goldberg at the United Nations on Friday, September 10. His advisers boasted that their New York–based research committee functioned smoothly at last to compile material about Vietnam policy for an important discussion they knew was initiated by President Johnson. Bayard Rustin prepared reports based on sources as diverse as the Buddhist exile Thich Nhat Hanh and the French military scholar Bernard Fall. To broaden perspective, Andrew Young arranged for briefings from foreign reporters who had covered both Vietnam and the American civil rights movement—Sven Oste, a Swede, and the Italian correspondent Furio Colombo. Young also secured research papers from King's neighbor and friend Vincent Harding, a Spelman College professor who had become a Mennonite peace pastor since being drafted into the Korean War. Background themes in Vietnamese history were familiar to King from his absorption with anti-colonial movements in Africa. French rule in Asia, like segregation in America, dated to the late nineteenth century. It made a lasting impression on King that “native” freedom struggles developed similar messages through common sufferings on three continents, and he found an American thread worth sketching to Goldberg.

As a teenage student in 1908, the year of Lyndon Johnson's birth, a Vietnamese of destiny volunteered to translate into French for peasants protesting the colonial
corvée,
or conscription to forced labor, only to be beaten when militia charged the protest with truncheons. He was expelled from his Mandarin academy at the old imperial capital of Hue, then tracked for subversion by the French intelligence service. He fled Vietnam for thirty years, first stowing away on freighters to foreign ports, gaining fluency in seven languages while surviving variously as a cook's helper at the Parker House Hotel in Boston, houseboy in Brooklyn, and assistant pastry chef in Paris. In 1919, under the pseudonym Nguyen Ai Quoc (“Nguyen the Patriot”), the fugitive rented a proper suit and bowler hat to deliver a petition to the assembled peacemakers after World War I on behalf of the Vietnamese people. Though he invoked the right national self-determination from Woodrow Wilson's world-famous Fourteen Points, Nguyen Ai Quoc stopped short of demanding Vietnamese independence and sought merely protection for traditional democratic freedoms such as assembly and speech, plus an end to the despised monopoly sales of alcohol and opium. He received neither satisfaction, reply, nor bare acknowledgment from the Great Powers, but did attract renewed notice from police agents who chased him from France into nomadic years between revolutionary agitation and jail, supported intermittently by the anti-colonial bureaus of the Communist International. Nguyen Ai Quoc's ex-wife was among hundreds executed in a disastrously premature uprising in 1940, when the Japanese invaders swiftly subdued the ruling French. (“Imagine,” a Vietnamese peasant later recalled. “France became a colony just like us!”) From caves along Vietnam's border with China, Nguyen Ai Quoc built the Vietminh independence party and a small guerrilla army that harassed Japanese occupation forces so effectively as to gain the respectful wartime cooperation of American OSS officers working behind the lines. On the capitulation of Japan after the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Quoc entered the capital of Hanoi for the first time in his life, under yet another new name, Ho Chi Minh (“He Who Enlightens”), to proclaim independence on the American model.

It was this historical moment that King emphasized to Goldberg twenty years later. Huge crowds had gathered outside the governor's residence and Hanoi's colonial security garrison on August 19, 1945, ten days after Nagasaki. They carried motives for vengeance far beyond civilian casualties from guns of the occupying armies, as Japanese commanders and Vichy French administrators had requisitioned so much scarce rice, and forced rice farmers to grow so much jute for war matériel, that some 1.5 million Vietnamese had died of starvation within the previous six months in the northern provinces alone—fully 10 percent of the population—with terrible famine of less mortality in the south. The foreign authorities, for their part, still commanded troops and heavy weapons but suffered confusion about the import of the surrender news from distant Tokyo. In the tense standoff, Vietminh leaders persuaded the massed units of both foreign countries to stack arms and withdraw under promise of safety. New Vietminh flags went up. Crowds repeated the transfer of public symbols, buildings, and meager utilities across the country in ten days of nearly bloodless revolution before Ho Chi Minh invited the American OSS commander, Major Archimedes “Al” Patti, to dinner for a last review of his public proclamation. “All men are created equal,” Ho began the next day, September 2, speaking in Vietnamese from a wooden platform above a sea of banners, faces, lanterns, and flags. “The Creator has given us certain inviolable Rights.” He explained that “these immortal words” came from the American Declaration of 1776, then transposed its bill of grievance against British tyranny to indict the French colonial record. “They have built more prisons than schools,” he said. “They have mercilessly slain our patriots. They have…fleeced us to the marrow of our bones, reduced our people to darkest misery, and devastated our land.” At one point, Ho looked up from his text. “Do you hear me distinctly, fellow countrymen?” he asked, and voices from Ba Dinh Square—some said a million, others 400,000, with like numbers listening by radio hookups in Saigon and elsewhere—cried yes in unison. “For these reasons,” Ho concluded, “we…solemnly declare to the world that Viet Nam has the right to be a free and independent country, and in fact it is so already.”

King summarized the American thread of Vietnamese history with commanding detail. His advisers present—Bayard Rustin, Andrew Young, Bernard Lee, and Harry Wachtel—noted with approval that much of the information seemed new to Goldberg, who broke unaccustomed silence to ask questions. King did not argue, as did some of the former OSS officers recorded in World War II files, that Ho Chi Minh was a Jeffersonian at heart rather than a Communist. He tried to convince Goldberg that Ho was above all a nationalist—potentially a maverick Communist like Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, amenable to pragmatic reform. Ho had appealed to Wilson's Fourteen Points, FDR's Atlantic Charter, and to America's long anti-colonial heritage because he needed a balance of allies to survive the harsh geopolitics of Asia. China had subjugated Vietnam for a millennium, and Joseph Stalin, Ho's Soviet Communist sponsor, did not bother even to recognize his 1945 government for more than four years. Chinese generals, who marched armies into Vietnam ostensibly to process the Japanese surrender, plundered the feeble new country at leisure—Ho called them “locusts”—and characteristically ordered every clock in Vietnam set back to reflect the hour in Beijing.

Most urgently, Ho Chi Minh had wanted American support to forestall postwar reimposition of colonial rule. In the independence speech of September 2, 1945, he vowed that his people would rise above fear, weakness, and ingrained subservience to former masters: “If the French should invade our country once more, we swear that we will neither serve in their army, work for them, sell them food, nor act as guides for them!” British forces entered southern Vietnam only ten days later, bolstering and rearming French holdovers to assert European control. President Charles de Gaulle, stung that rival allies once again were redressing his nation's military weakness, curtly hastened the expedition of General Jacques-Philippe Leclerc: “Your mission is to reestablish French sovereignty in Hanoi, and I am astonished that you have not yet done so.” For more than a year, Ho Chi Minh negotiated defensively for compromise status within the French Union, vainly seeking an agreement that would promise or even mention independence. (“If I listened to such nonsense,” de Gaulle cabled Leclerc, “soon France would have no more empire.”) Leclerc's successor, General Jean-Etienne Valluy, shelled the port city of Haiphong on the morning of November 23, 1946, causing “no more” than six thousand Vietnamese deaths by the count of a French admiral who went ashore, and the year-old Vietnamese government soon retreated again to jungle caves.

King told Goldberg that the United States wound up financing three-quarters of France's subsequent eight-year war, which killed 74,000 soldiers under the French flag among roughly a million casualties on all sides, including 250,000 civilians, before the underdog Vietnamese won a decisive military victory at the 1954 siege of Dien Bien Phu. Since then, three American Presidents had struggled in place of France to preserve the fallback partition of South Vietnam from what they called Cold War Communist takeover, while Ho's followers struggled to complete what they called a revolutionary war for independence.

King recommended talks to resolve the sharp conflict by negotiation rather than force. Goldberg embraced talks as his specialized talent, and hinted confidentially that he agreed with King's call for a bombing pause to facilitate them. Heartened, King faulted Ho Chi Minh for refusing talks until the United States withdrew its troops. He suggested that Goldberg could encourage Ho to negotiate by ending America's own refusal to talk with Communist organizations, including the Chinese regime of Mao Zedong. Goldberg, seconded by assistants, replied that direct talks were impossible because the United States did not recognize Mao's government, and had blocked China's admission to the United Nations since 1949. King doubted the wisdom of shunning Asia's dominant power, especially since American officials argued that Vietnam took orders from Beijing. “Well, you know,” he said, “eight hundred million Chinese won't disappear just because we refuse to admit their existence.”

Lawyer Harry Wachtel argued from his research into the 1954 Geneva Accords that the ongoing war to unify the country seemed driven much more by the Vietnamese themselves than by Communist sponsors. For all their vituperation against the capitalist United States, both the Soviet Union and China had pressured Ho to accept far less at Geneva than his armies had won from the disintegrating French colonials. The “temporary” division of Vietnam into a Communist North and non-Communist South had defused confrontation between the nuclear superpowers, said Wachtel, but Cold War arrangements did not explain the allegiance to Ho Chi Minh among peasant farmers. Even Senator Richard Russell, President Johnson's staunch supporter on military issues, had just conceded on national television that Ho was “a very dangerous enemy” because he would win a fair election across both halves of Vietnam. Therefore, Wachtel thought Ho's supporters within South Vietnam should be included in negotiations to protect American interests. “Why can't you talk to the Viet Cong?” he asked.

Goldberg fudged on the delicate issue. “We don't say we won't talk with them,” he replied, “but we don't say we will, either.” The session lasted seventy minutes before Goldberg withdrew to focus on a crisis over Kashmir, where the Indian and Pakistani armies were clashing. He thanked King for his leadership in the shared cause of civil rights, expressing full confidence in his own capacity for dialogue, and left the visitors with such a positive reception that, after spirited debate among advisers, King decided to outline his “unthinkable” suggestions candidly for the U.N. press corps waiting outside. He mentioned a bombing pause, talks with the Vietcong, and U.N. recognition of China. “In short,” he told them, “my plea was that we have a negotiated settlement of this very difficult and agonizing and terrible conflict.”

The first sign of seismic reaction was that Goldberg soon rushed out of his Kashmir meeting to address the same television reporters. “We will not be forced out of South Vietnam,” he declared. “On the other hand, we do not covet any bases there. We do not seek any territory.” He said King's settlement ideas had been received without response. King heard within hours that civil rights colleagues were rebuking his dangerous “intrusion” into foreign affairs, then that Senator Thomas Dodd used similar phrases in Washington to denounce King's “intemperate alignment with the forces of appeasement.” Dodd's haste matched his fury. With the Senate already adjourned Friday afternoon, he did not wait for Monday to speak from the floor and instead issued a public statement. Assuming the mantle of racial champion himself—“I was fighting civil rights cases in the South in the 1930s, when Dr. King was still a boy”—Dodd professed an extra measure of sorrow that the Vietnam overture “will make it impossible for me hereafter to regard Dr. Martin Luther King with quite the same respect.” King possessed “absolutely no competence to speak about complex matters of foreign policy,” Dodd charged. “And it is nothing short of arrogance when Dr. King takes it upon himself to thus undermine the policies of the President.”

King convened an emergency conference call that Sunday, September 12. “I want a little advice from all you distinguished wise Americans,” he teased, to lighten his introduction.

“Flattery will get you nowhere,” quipped Stanley Levison, among the half-dozen scattered advisers coming onto wiretapped phone lines.

King promptly confessed surprise at the spasm of political signals. “I am convinced that Lyndon Johnson got Dodd to say this,” he said, beginning painful reinterpretation of his direct presidential conversations that summer. What faded was his wishful hope that Johnson's private anguish about Vietnam meant he was open to settlement ideas. Vividly in its place rose the import of Johnson's sidelong comments that King was perceived to be a public opponent of his war. King now read the U.N. meeting as a trap to draw out his dissent over Vietnam; alternatively, he saw Goldberg as a poor messenger to lay down a blunt demand for political loyalty. Dodd, by contrast, would be a shrewdly effective choice. Many people might read his statement as reasonable, and “say yes, Martin has gone too far,” King observed. “Some Negroes would say this.” Yet King saw in Dodd the Senate's “strongest supporter of the FBI,” which revived the clandestine threat of enforcement by personal attack. Once more, as with J. Edgar Hoover's “notorious liar” outburst before the Nobel Prize, King discussed the chance that the FBI may have acted independently, but this time he sensed politics orchestrated from the White House.