At Canaan's Edge (61 page)

Staff effort salvaged a remarkable mass meeting at which two owners of more substantial slum investment faced grievances under King's protection, flanking him on the platform of the movement's citywide headquarters, Warren Avenue Congregational in East Garfield. One by one, tenants came forward hesitantly with church-style “testimony” about rats and rotted floors. “Don't be afraid,” the evening's pulpit mistress cajoled. “Your
landlord
wasn't afraid to come here.” John Condor, given the chance to respond, introduced himself and partner Lou Costalis as residents of the neighborhood before and since the massive white flight of the 1950s. “We're with you, believe it or not,” he announced.

“No, you ain't!” shouted a voice. Occasional catcalls escaped a generally hushed crowd as the white landlords pleaded helplessness, arguing that “the big boys” in the downtown business Loop constricted slums with “red-line” bank restrictions to favor concentrated public housing and marginal ghetto business over home ownership. “Don't fight the wrong fight,” pleaded Condor.

King closed with thanks to the landlords for putting a human face on complex injustice, then lifted the crowd from a queasy, anticlimactic mood by preaching on familiar themes. “We are somebody because we are God's children,” cried King. (“That's right!” answered voices from the pews.) “You don't need to hate anybody,” he said—violence would only meet greater force, but nonviolence could march into the hearts of opponents and bystanders alike. He exhorted them to organize by door-to-door canvass across Chicago. “We are going to change the whole Jericho road!” shouted King, and the landlords themselves joined in the applause.

Recruitment percolated beneath overt challenge to Chicago's political machine. King confided to Stanley Levison that audiences already booed mention of courtesy telegrams from Mayor Daley's black aldermen, and speculated that Al Raby might be able to topple U.S. Representative William Dawson, dean of Chicago's black politicians. King worried, however, that a partisan campaign would stigmatize the movement for shortsighted ambition, and he cultivated a series of contacts to radiate broader influence, such as Catholic archbishop John Cody.
*
Testing teams of middle-class Negroes fanned out to shop for homes in white suburbs, almost invariably to be turned away by real estate agents. King accepted limits from sympathizers who were vulnerable and conflicted in raw local politics. Adlai Stevenson III, son of the late governor and U.N. ambassador, painfully withdrew as host of a private reception in light of Mayor Daley's arbitrary power to strike him from the Democratic slate in an upcoming race for Illinois treasurer. Rev. Clay Evans convened a local chapter of SCLC's job integration program, Operation Breadbasket, as a buffered outlet for black clergy too fearful of retribution to join King at public rallies. Construction of the new sanctuary at Evans's Missionary Baptist Church was halted, its city permits abruptly canceled, and the exposed steel girders would rust over the next seven years. Evans recruited to Breadbasket an irrepressible seminary dropout he had found only the previous year in his charity line for a food basket to feed his young family. On meteoric energy, Jesse Jackson quickly had become assistant pastor at Missionary Baptist, a volunteer driver for King and James Bevel, founder of the Kenwood-Oakland organization near Hyde Park (the newest neighborhood group in the Chicago protest coalition), and finally the local staff director for Operation Breadbasket. By February,
Jet
magazine called the twenty-four-year-old Jackson a fresh “luminary” in the Chicago movement.

Stanley Levison urgently recommended program cutbacks in either Chicago or the South to reduce SCLC's burgeoning debt, but grumbled that King “mopped the floor” with his unwelcome advice at an emergency conference in Atlanta, resolving instead to intensify fund-raising between weekly circuits into Chicago. To entice potential contributors there, the SCLC movement staff carefully scheduled a promotional gala after Mayor Daley's March 10 slate-making summit at the Sherman Hotel, when the machine's ticket for the 1966 elections would be finalized. King stopped in New York on March 11 for a private dinner speech at the home of Israeli financier Meshulem Riklis, whose lawyer, King's adviser Harry Wachtel, expected a “minimum take” of $25,000 for SCLC from guests, including conductor Leonard Bernstein
*
and violinist Isaac Stern. The next night, Saturday, March 12, Harry Belafonte welcomed a sellout crowd of 12,000 to the Freedom Festival benefit at the Chicago International Amphitheater, where King described Chicago as the giant of migrant black communities stretching from Watts and Blackbottom Detroit to Harlem and Roxbury Boston. Northern ghettos had locked down bodies and hopes “even unto the third and fourth generation,” he said, and the sixty thousand chronically unemployed Negroes of Chicago would be called “a staggering depression” in white society. With a voice that conveyed anguished hope like fire from a well-sealed wood stove, he exhorted his audience to “plunge deeper into the philosophy of nonviolence” as they fought to spread the “new democracy” bursting from the South.

“Never before in the history of the civil rights movement,” King declared from the Chicago stage, “has an action campaign been launched in such splendor.” The event netted $80,000. Stanley Levison called home to pronounce his weekend visit “terribly exciting” in spite of prior misgivings about a Northern campaign: “You could see that this was an audience with spirit, a fighting audience.” He said King had to hide from a crush of visitors to his slum apartment. “When they start mass action in the spring,” Levison predicted, “that is when everyone will start paying attention.”

Mayor Daley trumped King with a volley of bigger numbers. He announced from City Hall that his progress teams had visited 96,761 poor families and exterminated 1,675,941 rats in poor neighborhoods. He set a public goal to eradicate slum conditions for all of Chicago by December 31, 1967, then led seventy thousand marchers down State Street past half a million spectators in the grand Saint Patrick's parade on March 17, and invited King to visit him the next day.

King declined but could not disclose the reason: President Johnson had summoned him on strict pledge of secrecy. Eleven national civil rights leaders agreed not to boast of their appointment on pain of suffering the President's fury. For King, the mantle of Washington remained irresistible—both tempting and essential. Ever since the bus boycott, he had extolled an alliance between national politics and the nonviolent movement, first as a patriotic dream “deeply rooted” in the democratic heritage and finally in the historic consequences from Birmingham to Selma. If the pattern held true, the best hopes for the Chicago movement required validating engagement on the larger stage, with Johnson drawn in—preferably also with Congress and the courts—to clarify principles at stake in the competitive dialogue with Mayor Daley.

Everything and nothing had changed in the nine months since President Johnson had declared a national goal at Howard University to make equal opportunity real by confronting both the cycle of poverty and the legacy of segregation. The next morning, before he could see President Johnson, King confronted another flare-up in the FBI car theft investigation. A front-page story in the
Atlanta Constitution
alleged that the Justice Department had seized control from the local U.S. attorney in order to keep Hosea Williams out of a freshly announced racketeering indictment. It also revealed the mortifying detail that Daddy King himself had surrendered a stolen car from the SCLC fleet, and quoted a charge by Georgia's lieutenant governor that favoritism for Williams proved the “glaring humbuggery of the Great Society.” FBI wiretaps intercepted King's emergency conference call with his advisers on March 18. Andrew Young wanted to decry the leak as blatantly political; others worried about the risk of pushing the administration to close ranks behind Georgia. King broke away from his hotel to the White House Cabinet Room, arriving twenty minutes late. He heard part of Johnson's downbeat preview of legislation—chances were poor of passing protection for civil rights workers, reported Katzenbach, and “particularly difficult” if not impossible on housing discrimination—then raised eyebrows still higher by excusing himself forty-five minutes early. King said he had to catch a plane, which was true, but he first rushed back to his conference call and approved a low-key statement: SCLC had bought cars only from salesmen “we felt to be reputable…and we received documents of title.” Separately, once a skeletal news release lifted secrecy about the civil rights briefing, King felt free to joke with a
Jet
reporter about Johnson's exacting specifications that he approach the White House by “irregular routes” to a secluded south gate, laughing that he had to sneak in the back door.

D
AILY HEADLINES
since the renewed bombing of January 31 heated a war climate of enemies and divisions, which submerged the reconciling platform of civil rights. From his White House bedroom, on the afternoon of the first televised Senate hearings about Vietnam, President Johnson ordered Secretary of State Rusk to yank the South Vietnamese allies to a mid-Pacific heads-of-state summit without acknowledging its sudden origin—“I don't want any other human to know this.” He roared off two days later for a Honolulu rendezvous modeled on FDR's famous sessions with Stalin and Churchill, which upstaged public examination of the war with bugle-cry coverage of military statesmanship, as Johnson plainly intended. Yet the Senate hearings continued through February. In private, Johnson called them a “very, very disastrous break…they pour the stuff out of the filth on television.” He howled against public exposure on both political flanks, from Chairman Fulbright's professorial doubt about the whole war to ferocious cries for a military showdown throughout Asia. Johnson referred to the latter danger in shorthand as [Mississippi Senator John] “Stennis bombing China.” He wondered plaintively at a congressional reception why “Americans who dissent can't do their dissenting in private.”

Parallel conflict tore at television executives by the half-hour. The competing networks sacrificed revenue programs for much of February 8 to broadcast the Senate testimony of Lieutenant General James Gavin, a Korean War hero and Vietnam critic, along with President Johnson's return from Honolulu. NBC broadcast the complete Fulbright hearings two days later, but CBS stuck with the scheduled morning reruns of
I Love Lucy
at ten o'clock, followed by
The Real McCoys
and
The Andy Griffith Show.
Leaders of the CBS News Division, humiliated by NBC's contrasting choice, pleaded with superiors to switch to the dramatic Senate testimony by Ambassador George Kennan, widely considered the father of Cold War “containment” policy. Kennan was admitting that Vietnam would unite swiftly under Communism without full-scale American military intervention, and that any such consolidation “would be exploited mercilessly by the Chinese and North Vietnamese…in world opinion, as a means of humiliating us.” Even so, he presented that sad prospect as a lesser evil than the war being launched, but no one saw Kennan's argument on CBS. Network president Frank Stanton, in communication with the White House, held firm for the daytime comedies and on February 15 forced the resignation of his protesting chief of CBS News, Fred Friendly. The departure itself generated controversy because of Friendly's reputation as a champion of journalistic duty to foster debate on great public issues. In 1954, he had produced a watershed CBS broadcast by Edward R. Murrow that helped puncture the intimidating spell of Senator Joe McCarthy. Now Friendly's own downfall marked resurgent conflict over loyalty and dissent in a war crisis.

President Johnson ventured a confidential call to
Time
founder Henry R. Luce for media support across partisan lines. Luce, born in 1898 to missionary parents at Tengchow, China, was a lifelong Republican and fierce opponent of the New Deal. He had conceived the “American Century” slogan that his magazine empire popularized into common usage for the era, and while Luce doubted that any Democrat could be a worthy steward of its leadership mission, especially in Asia, he gave Johnson a gruff blessing for the war measures thus far. “I got no bellyache,” said Luce. He expressed sympathy for Johnson's tale of command woes to the point of sharing at length a theory from childhood experience that racial prejudice worked against the call to military sacrifice across the Pacific. Luce said Americans considered Asia “a bunch of yellow men and Chinamen and God knows who, who are not any part of our Western civilization. Do you follow me?” He postulated that a contempt for Oriental people lay “psychologically at the bottom” of Johnson's troubles, driving an unspoken but pervasive reluctance to send “men and treasure” to Vietnam. Luce sensed it deep within Fulbright and other members of Congress. “I don't think they know they feel it,” he told Johnson.

The President endorsed Luce's rare view of missionary brotherhood as the test of just war and even a crusade for civil rights. “I don't see the difference,” he said, “between doing it for a white man in Europe or a brown man in Asia.”

“You made a very good point, and I think it cuts straight,” Luce replied, as though Johnson had originated the idea. “I think that's the psychological trigger.” Luce called Johnson shortly afterward to commend a special section in the forthcoming
Life
magazine as a rejoinder to the Fulbright hearings. The lead editorial, “Vietnam: The War Is Worth Winning,” presumed that the outcome would turn on whether Americans bothered to apply themselves, and Luce forewarned Johnson about one line of friendly criticism: “It is deplorable that such a courageous and far-sighted policy should be so badly explained.” What he wanted was more grand vision and less harping about the need to prevent catastrophe, he said, in line with his war advice to “really go at it instead of fiddling around.” The President grasped Luce as bosom adviser, asking how then he could send the next 50,000 or 100,000 troops without a crippling national debate. “What does a man do that doesn't want to be a dictator,” he pressed intensely, “that just wants to do what's right?” Luce sidestepped the political question, saying he would no more instruct the master of consensus than “tell my late grandmother to suck eggs.”