At Canaan's Edge (55 page)

By the time his repression alert generated a tiny blip on page seventy-three of the morning
New York Times
—“Dr. King Sees Move Against Pacifists”—King was headed to Alabama by way of Atlanta. Documentary filmmaker Arnold Michaelis, in an interview arranged by Stanley Levison, seized a rare opportunity in the cabin of the airplane to film questions on informal background topics. King called plans for professional sports teams in the desegregated South “another very good step forward,” but confessed that the move of the baseball Braves from Milwaukee to his hometown would complicate a personal allegiance he traced to 1947, when Branch Rickey had integrated the old Brooklyn Dodgers with King's teenage idol and subsequent friend Jackie Robinson. “And so I have been a Dodger fan,” he said, “but I'm gonna get with the Braves now.”

Leaving Michaelis temporarily, King disappeared to embattled SCLC projects in rural Alabama, where a mob of nearly two hundred had blocked a Greene County march for school integration led by Hosea Williams. At a mass meeting on Monday, December 6, King and Andrew Young recruited 375 people to continue marches seeking the dispatch of federal registrars into Butler County, adjacent to Lowndes. “This was a heart-melting demonstration,” wrote grizzled staff leader Rev. Samuel Wells of Albany, Georgia, who reported that men and women sang in tearful prayer as they “stood toe to toe with the policemen…. On Tuesday we marched again…. I, for one, was knocked over the head.” King by then had hurried toward another rally commitment but was stalled by Alabama state troopers who arrested Young and his passengers alike for speeding, then held them until each paid a fine of $50.

Back at home, King sat on December 9 for a rare filmed interview as his eight-year-old son Marty darted in front of the cameras. Producer Michaelis asked why he had departed from the philosophical acceptance of war expressed on page ninety-five of his first book,
Stride Toward Freedom.
“There was a time when I felt that war was, or could be, a negative good,” King replied. “I never felt that war could be a positive good, but…I felt that war could block the spread of some negative evil force like a Hitler, for instance.” Subsequent experience in the nonviolent movement had combined with apprehensions about the shrinking world, he explained, to convert him from the Christian pragmatism he once accepted from theologian Reinhold Niebuhr's anguished defense of World War II. “I came to the conclusion that war could no longer serve as a negative good,” said King, “because of the potential destructiveness and the actual destructiveness of modern weapons of warfare.”

When Michaelis pressed doubts that anyone could claim to oppose Communism in Vietnam without violence, King argued from colonial history that a long struggle for independence was blended into the identity of the Vietnamese Communist Party, while complicity in foreign rule there tainted American definitions of freedom. “There can be no gainsaying of the fact that we have taken a stand against a people seeking self-determination,” he said. “If one looks back over the history of this war, there are many things that turn out to be very ugly, and I am absolutely convinced that there is wrong on both sides.” King admitted personal indecision. “I don't think President Johnson is a warmonger,” he said. “I think he is caught in a very difficult dilemma.” He surprised Michaelis by volunteering that he had received this impression in private talks with President Johnson since criticizing the war, “I would say on two different occasions,” and that he felt a heavy burden to “do something creative to create the atmosphere for negotiations.” King said he approved the dictum
*
of Mohandas Gandhi that seemingly impossible, saintly missions must be grounded in politics. “I certainly can't claim to be a saint in any sense of the word,” he told Michaelis. “I try to emulate all the saints of history…and I think it is necessary for anyone who is working in these areas to have a keen sense of political timing.”

The atmosphere of war confronted peacemakers with “a very practical problem that runs the gamut of history,” said King, “and that is face-saving…. If we could get rid of our pride, and this is the word that I think America must hear more and more, that we have got to get rid of our pride. It won't hurt us morally. It isn't going to hurt us from a military point of view to pull out of Vietnam.”

Michaelis raised another awkward subject—“this is a very difficult thing”—about whether King could “see any advantage accruing to the civil rights movement by virtue of your death,” and King replied straightforwardly that any impact would depend on the circumstances. He pondered the example of recent suicides by immolation in both Vietnam and the United States. “I must say that I don't think, personally, that this is the highest expression of creative sacrifice,” he said, and repeated instead the nonviolent standard of active readiness to die for a cause while refusing to kill. “I wouldn't take my own life, but I would willingly give my life for that which I think is right,” King concluded. “And I am convinced that when one does this honestly, that death can have redemptive value.”

December 1965–January 1966

T
HE
Watts report posed an alarm starkly in its title,
Violence in the City—An End or a Beginning?,
and responded with words normally shunned as political suicide. “McCone Commission Urges a ‘Costly and Extreme' Treatment of Causes,” declared the
New York Times
on December 7. Newspaper stories highlighted the call for massive improvements in education, transportation, and employment. The commissioners found that nearly all the 114 Los Angeles elementary schools without cafeterias were located in minority areas, which they correlated with “shockingly lower” test scores. They detected an enormous but immeasurable job shortage for Watts residents—quoting the resigned scoff of a teenage witness, “Go to school for
what?”
—which they associated with a tiny (14 percent) neighborhood ownership of cars to reach jobs elsewhere in the only major American city that did not subsidize public transportation. Their report warned that the August riots would be a mere “curtain-raiser” unless the American public adopted a “revolutionary attitude.”

Bayard Rustin pronounced the McCone report a clever but specious bit of fireworks above the color line, in a detailed analysis that began with the commission's baseline characterization of the Watts upheaval: “an insensate rage of destruction…not a race riot in the usual sense. What happened was an explosion—a formless, quite senseless, all but hopeless protest—engaged in by a few but bringing great distress to all.” Rustin cited McCone's own investigators to counter that the violence had been anything but random. Rioters consistently attacked five types of stores, primarily pawnshops and food markets, made no attempt to steal narcotics from pharmacies, and were more likely to destroy than consume the stocks of liquor stores. He quoted acknowledgment in the report's fine print that “no residences were deliberately burned, that damage to schools, libraries, and public buildings was minimal, and that certain types of business establishments, notably service stations and automobile dealers were for the most part unharmed.” For Rustin, steeped in Gandhian discipline, the Watts violence was wrong, mostly self-damaging, and it excused the commissioners to polarize identification with victims by race. The report lumped together thirty-two Negro riot deaths under “justifiable homicide,” identified three white deaths (obscuring evidence that two were from friendly fire), and broke down white injuries by occupation or branch of service. “To find out that about 85 per cent of the [1,032 people] injured were Negroes,” he observed, “we have to do our own arithmetic.”

Violence in Rustin's view gave the McCone Commission cover to finesse the central complaint against a Los Angeles police department personified by Chief William Parker. “Many Negroes feel that he carried a deep hatred of the Negro community,” stated the report. “However, Chief Parker's statements to us and collateral evidence such as his record of fairness to Negro officers are inconsistent with his having such an attitude.” With that, the commissioners dismissed calls for external checks or civilian review in brutality investigations as a risk to police morale, and Rustin ascribed the brusque evasion to a battlefield mentality that dehumanized Negroes while lionizing the aggressive officer. “Every Negro knows this,” he wrote. “There is scarcely any black man, woman or child in the land who at some point or another has not been mistreated by a policeman.”

No Negro ranked above sergeant in the Los Angeles police force of roughly eight thousand, although nearly twenty black officers over the past decade managed to attend law school after hours and pass the bar exam while stymied for promotion. Two who once briefly made lieutenant had departed also for law practice—Earl Broady and Tom Bradley, a future mayor of Los Angeles. Broady served with McCone as one of the eight Watts commissioners. He had been elevated to the California bench since being cajoled by Malcolm X to represent those shot and beaten, then jailed, in the sensational 1962 police altercation around and inside the local Muslim temple, and the McCone report bore signs of a truce. There was no mention of the fusillade storming of the same temple toward the end of the Watts violence in a vain search for weapons or riot plans. Judge Broady withheld experienced readings on raw blackjack solidarity in the precincts, perhaps to dampen Chief Parker's countervailing charge that “pagan” conspirators had engineered revolt by contented Negro citizens. Parker, sticking mostly to the compromise thesis of mindless violence, reduced Watts to an image of copycat antics by caged animals: “One person threw a rock and then, like monkeys in a zoo, others started throwing rocks.”

Rustin warned of the treacherous ambiguity common to the McCone Commission and the Moynihan study of Negro families. Each document opened freelance controversy “on both sides of the Negro question,” he wrote, with a view fixed handily beyond the presumed end of segregated conditions on a ringing but abstract call for wholesale reform. Each mixed encouragement for civil rights with “more sophisticated and compassionate…shibboleths about Negroes.” Well before Rustin's interpretation reached the small intellectual journal
Commentary,
Moynihan had become an established national oracle on Watts. “Remember that American slavery was the worst slavery the world has ever known,” he told a CBS News special about the new McCone report. He sketched the historical pressures on families that “break up when they leave the countrysides, rural peasant life, and sort of dump into slums,” where he said Negro women headed a quarter of modern households. The
New York Times
published a December 12 profile, “Moynihan Hopeful U.S. Will Adopt a Policy of Promoting Family Stability,” citing his figures that 44 percent of births in parts of Harlem were illegitimate. “I grew up in Hell's Kitchen,” he told the
Times.
“My father was a drunk. I know what this life is like.”

The same day on NBC's
Meet the Press,
moderator Lawrence Spivak asked how new middle-class Negroes climbed above the report's statistical trend toward family deterioration, and why others could not use the same ladder. “Some people are lucky and some aren't,” replied Moynihan. “The world is that way. Some people got out of the South in time, some didn't.”
Jet
reporter Simeon Booker protested that Moynihan could have focused on growing divorce in white families “to make it appear that they are the threat to the nation's health.” He suggested that racial redress must fall to whites, whereas panelist Robert Novak wondered if Negroes would escape their own responsibility. Moynihan gamely grasped both thorns. “It is an
American
problem,” he told NBC viewers, “and any American must commit himself to it.” Lightning gathered from his resonant theories already made Moynihan the rarest of public figures—a sociology professor and former civil servant, specializing in urban race relations, with a bright future in national politics.
*

R
ONALD
R
EAGAN'S
public career neared the end of its incubation period. The previous March, on the popularity of his nationally televised speech for the losing presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, the Hollywood actor had begun an active exploration toward a run for governor of California just as students at Berkeley lifted ritual chants of “Fuck” to storm the far ramparts of permitted speech. The wildcat demonstrations, which veered notoriously from a campus movement built to support Mississippi Negroes, gave Reagan cause to join attacks on “filthy” rather than free debate, to disregard the disciplined youth then braving violence at the “Berlin Wall” of Selma, and to sidestep their cresting drive for the whole nation to secure voting rights for the powerless. In an address to California Republicans, Reagan combined spanking disdain for the rowdy Berkeley students with his caustic view of an omnivorous federal government. They were like a newborn baby, he quipped, with “an alimentary canal at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”

Reagan continued to defend the Goldwater positions against Medicare (“socialized medicine”) and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. “I would have voted against it if I had been in Congress,” he said, and denounced the 1965 Voting Rights Act by extension as an encroachment on local control, “humiliating to the South.” Significantly, however, Reagan hired political advisers to make his test speeches palatable to voters beyond the Goldwater base. Political consultants Stuart Spencer and William Roberts, having managed the California primary campaign against Goldwater by liberal Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller, counseled him to advocate decency and restraint rather than outmoded defiance. Reagan said unruly students could be reclaimed with firm discipline. He avoided talk of civil rights with the nimble evasion of Southern moderates then calling the entire race issue “somewhat passé.” He described domestic freedom as a natural possession that was constantly threatened—but never enhanced—by national politics, and therefore he credited no net progress in liberty from the Founding Fathers down through the daunting new commitments to fulfill their national creed. “The original government of this country was set up by conservatives, [and] defined years later by Lincoln,” Reagan declared, “as a preference for the old and tried over the new and untried.”

By overlooking patriotic wonders in stir from the modern civil rights era, which he recognized as liberal and certainly troublesome, Reagan invited listeners to shed defensive anxiety about racial barriers. He lodged timely charges to degrade the movement's reputation for selfless witness by association with rioters and external enemies, denouncing antiwar demonstrations at Berkeley as “the fruit of appeasement.” Reagan called for “a political decision to achieve victory” in Vietnam, and waved off “silly” fears of protracted war. “Why, with our power,” he said in October, “we could pave the whole country, put parking strips on it, and be home for Christmas.”

Early stories made sport of his film roles and campaign biography—
Where's the Rest of Me?
—but Reagan captured audiences through 150 trial speeches. He called himself a “hemophiliac liberal” converted to citizen-politician, innocent of professional experience or government terminology. Even so, the unannounced candidate distanced himself from the John Birch Society with a strategy fixed on the decisive middle voter. Reagan rebuked founder Robert Welch for “utterly reprehensible” statements that former President Dwight Eisenhower himself was a Communist, but carefully spared the organization and its sympathizers, citing assurance from J. Edgar Hoover that “the FBI has not investigated the Birch Society, because it only investigates subversive organizations.” Reagan's pinpoint attack on Welch signaled his refusal to be lumped with “a bunch of kooks,” according to his staff, and gained him stature to run on mainstream morality. A
New York Times Magazine
article in November warily recognized his genial appeal: “Tom Sawyer Enters Politics.”

S
HORTLY BEFORE
Reagan's formal entry into the California governor's race for 1966, Director Hoover confronted a potential scandal from the FBI's unilateral use of spy methods in nearby Las Vegas. A December story in the
Los Angeles Times
disclosed the first public hints of intrigue stewing since the owner of the Fremont Casino Hotel had discovered a microphone bug at his office in 1963. Security technicians traced intercept signals to a dummy business called the Henderson Novelty Company, and officials from the Sands and the Desert Inn soon joined in a lawsuit against eleven FBI employees found monitoring numerous bugs from the Henderson storefront. Publicity spread novel allegations of criminal trespass by law enforcement officers—“FBI Red-Faced on Use of ‘Bugs'”—with growing pressure on FBI headquarters either to disown the agents as renegades or show proof of legal authorization for the surveillance. Hoover swiftly dispatched Assistant Director DeLoach to see the Attorney General. “I told Katzenbach that obviously this was no time for feuding in the family,” DeLoach reported to FBI headquarters, “and that I wanted to make certain that he fully understood the approval that former Attorney General Kennedy had given with respect to microphones.”

Katzenbach tried to calm DeLoach. He predicted that the well-known Washington lawyer Edward Bennett Williams would settle the Las Vegas lawsuit before it generated publicity that his clients were conspiring with organized crime partners to skim profits from their casinos. The greater lesson for Katzenbach was a reminder that surreptitious eavesdropping allowed a shrewd defense attorney like Williams to thwart prosecution by ferreting out government misconduct. (For his track record of stinging discovery motions, Hoover already disparaged Williams as a “shyster.”) DeLoach refused to be mollified, and described the threat as more political than legal. Unlike Katzenbach, he knew that Williams was likely to obtain records in a separate criminal appeal that another client, Washington lobbyist Fred Black, had been overheard by coincidence in the bugged executive suite at the Desert Inn. Worse, Black was a business partner of former Senate aide Bobby Baker, the most visible corruption name of the Johnson era, and had been the Johnson family's next-door neighbor until the new President moved into the White House. Still worse, collateral discovery could reveal to Williams that the FBI had bugged Black deliberately in his Washington hotel suite, which was far too political to be excused as a well-intended crusade against gangster influence in Las Vegas casinos.