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Overview
They were the unlikeliest of partners: a white Texan politician and an African American minister who led a revolution. But together, President Lyndon Johnson and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. managed to achieve a common goal.
In Judgment Days, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Nick Kotz provides a behind-the-scenes look at the complicated working relationship that yielded the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—some of the most substantial civil rights legislation in American history.
Drawing on previously unavailable sources, including telephone conversations, FBI wiretaps, and communications between Johnson and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Kotz examines the events that brought the two influential men together—and the forces that ultimately drove them apart.
“[A] finely honed portrait of the civil rights partnership President Johnson and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. forged. . . . A fresh and vivid account.” —TheWashington Post Book World
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780547884585 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2017 |
| Series: | . |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 544 |
| Sales rank: | 373,981 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Cataclysm
The day began in triumph for John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Riding through the sunny streets of downtown Dallas in an open convertible, his young wife, Jacqueline, beside him, the president of the United States beamed at the cheering crowds. Two cars back in the motorcade, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who knew he had been Kennedy's choice for vice president principally to keep the South in the Democratic fold, felt vindicated by the warm reception in his home state. Both men had been apprehensive about open hostility from angry southerners in the wake of Kennedy's call for a new civil rights law.
Instead, thousands of ebullient Texans applauded and waved at their handsome young president and at their own Lyndon Johnson. In the front car, Nellie Connally, wife of Texas governor John Connally, turned back toward John Kennedy. "You can't say Dallas doesn't love you," she beamed.
An instant later, Nellie Connally heard a loud noise, followed rapidly by several more explosions. She saw President Kennedy grip his throat with both hands and heard her husband moan, "Oh, no, no, no," and then, "My God, they are going to kill us all!" Kennedy was slumped over, bleeding, as was Governor Connally, whom she cradled in her arms as the convertible sped away.
Two cars behind them, Secret Service agent Rufus Youngblood yelled, "Get down!" and shoved Lyndon Johnson to the floorboard. The agent threw his own two hundred-pound body across Johnson to protect the vice president. Pinned down and unable to see, Johnson heard tires screeching as he felt the car accelerate. He heard the radioed voice of agent Roy Kellerman from Kennedy's car shouting, "Let's get the heck out of here!" Then he heard still another agent's voice: "The President has been shot. We don't know who else they are after."
Moments later, Secret Service men rushed Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, into Parkland Memorial Hospital, where they huddled silently together in an examining room with the shades drawn. In an adjoining room, Secret Service agent Henry Roberts spoke into his radio to headquarters in Washington. "We don't know what the full scope of this thing is," he said. "It could be a conspiracy to try to kill the president, vice president — try to kill everybody."
Less than an hour after the shots were fired, at 1:22 P.M.Central Standard Time, November 22, 1963, White House aide Kenneth O'Donnell came into the Johnsons' room. "He's gone," he told them. At that moment, fifty-five-year-old Lyndon Baines Johnson became the thirty-sixth president of the United States.
In his two-story frame home on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. struggled awake late that November morning, physically and mentally exhausted from too much travel and too little sleep. During the previous seven days, King had been constantly on the road, first for a rally at Danville, Virginia, where the sparse turnout of supporters suggested that the civil rights leader would have trouble launching a planned major campaign there. The young minister was deeply worried that the civil rights movement was losing momentum and perplexed about where he should now direct the energies of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to pressure Congress into approving civil rights legislation. If not Danville, where should King go next? With conflicting advice coming from his aides, King did not know what to do.
After Danville, he had flown to New York to meet privately at Idlewild Airport with two key advisers, attorneys Clarence Jones and Stanley David Levison, who both urged him to launch a new campaign, lest the mantle of civil rights leadership pass to younger, more radical men. He then stopped off at a resort in New York's Catskill Mountains at the national convention of United Synagogues of America to receive its annual leadership award. Next, he flew to Chicago to speak to the annual convention of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, representing Reform Jews. Such speeches, more than 150 a year, left him constantly tired. They were necessary to build support and raise the funds needed to keep the SCLC afloat, yet aides constantly reminded King that those activities were no substitute for the kinds of direct-action demonstrations that had catapulted him to prominence. It had been just such an action in Birmingham, Alabama, six months earlier that had prompted President Kennedy to introduce a civil rights bill, after two years of urging from movement leaders. His proposed bill would outlaw segregation in public accommodations, forbid discrimination in employment, and withdraw federal aid from state and local governments that discriminated against anyone because of race, national origin, or religion. But now the legislation faced poor prospects in Congress, and King feared that Kennedy's enthusiasm for the bill had waned as his 1964 reelection campaign drew nearer.
A television set flickered in the background as King tried to rest in his upstairs bedroom. At the first news bulletin, he shouted downstairs to his wife, "Corrie, I just heard that Kennedy has been shot, maybe killed!" Coretta Scott King, who had been writing notes at her desk, rushed upstairs to her husband's side. Horrified, the couple stared at scenes of the Dallas motorcade and the vigil at Parkland Memorial Hospital.
"This is just terrible," cried King. Death threats had become a constant in the King home. "I hope he will live. ... I think if he lives — if he pulls through this, it will help him to understand better what we go through." Moments later, the television news anchor announced that the president was dead.
"This is what's going to happen to me," an agonized King told his wife. "This is such a sick society."
Lyndon Johnson's first fear was that the Soviet Union might have unleashed an attack against the United States. If the Soviets had shot the president, he thought, who would they shoot next? And what was going on in Washington? And when were the missiles coming? With these thoughts racing through his mind, Johnson ordered the Secret Service to delay public announcement of Kennedy's death until he and Lady Bird had left Parkland Hospital.
As they prepared to leave, Johnson urged his wife to go see "Jackie and Nellie." In a narrow hallway outside the main operating room, Mrs. Johnson found Jacqueline Kennedy standing alone, her face frozen in horror, her pink suit spattered with her husband's blood. "God help us all!" Lady Bird said, embracing John F. Kennedy's young widow. Lady Bird next went to her old friend Nellie Connally, who was being reassured by doctors that her husband would live.
The Johnsons then were rushed out a side door of the hospital and into separate unmarked police cars. Eight minutes later they arrived at Love Field. Scrambling up the ramp into Air Force One, Lyndon Johnson faced his first decisions as president. General Godfrey McHugh and other White House aides had been urging that the president's official plane take off for Washington the moment the Johnsons came on board, but Lyndon Johnson countermanded the general's order.
He would not leave Dallas without Jacqueline Kennedy and the body of her husband — then en route to Love Field — nor without first taking the oath of office as president. With that ceremony, he meant to show the world that the government of the United States was still functioning in an orderly manner. U.S. district judge Sarah Hughes, an old Johnson friend and supporter, was summoned from her office in Dallas. Hughes boarded the Boeing 707, and as Lyndon Baines Johnson placed his hand on a Catholic prayer book, she administered the oath of office. Lady Bird Johnson and Jacqueline Kennedy stood at his side. After kissing each woman on the cheek, President Johnson commanded Colonel James Swindall, the pilot of Air Force One, "Let's be airborne!"
As the plane sped toward Washington, Johnson telephoned Rose Kennedy, mother of the murdered president. "I wish to God there was something I could do," he said. "I wanted to tell you that we were grieving with you." Choked with emotion, Johnson handed the telephone to Lady Bird to try to console Mrs. Kennedy.
Over the jet's sophisticated communications system, Johnson then arranged for congressional leaders and national security advisers to meet at the White House upon his arrival in Washington. And he instructed six members of the Cabinet aboard an airplane bound for Japan to change course and return to the capital. A few minutes earlier, Secretary of State Dean Rusk had informed that planeload of Cabinet members, reporters, and their party that President Kennedy had been shot, but they had not been told his condition. The delegation sat in stunned silence. When the airplane began to make a slow U-turn over the Pacific and head back toward the United States, they knew that their president was dead.
Two hours and ten minutes after leaving Dallas, Johnson stood in darkness on the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington. His craggy face illuminated by klieg lights, the new president spoke to the nation: "This is a sad time for all people. We have suffered a loss that cannot be weighed. For me it is a deep personal tragedy. I know the world shares the sorrow that Mrs. Kennedy and her family bear. I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help and God's."
Touching down on the South Lawn of the White House after a ten-minute helicopter ride from Andrews, Johnson strode deliberately toward the entrance of the Oval Office. Then, abruptly changing his mind, he walked through the White House basement to his vice presidential suite in the Executive Office Building. There he asked the assembled congressional leaders for their support. He approached each member of Kennedy's Cabinet and staff and asked them all to stay on. "I need you more than the President needed you," Johnson told them. He called Keith Funston, chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, to thank him for shutting down the market as soon as news broke of the assassination. He phoned Richard Maguire, treasurer of the Democratic National Committee and chief fundraiser for the expected 1964 Kennedy presidential campaign, and asked him to continue his work. He contacted former presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower to request their advice. He arranged to meet Eisenhower in Washington the following morning.
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called the new president with disquieting information about Lee Harvey Oswald, who had just been arrested and charged with Kennedy's murder, a story that hinted at Cold War conspiracy. A former U.S. Marine, Oswald had lived for several years in the Soviet Union, where he had married a Russian woman and tried to become a Soviet citizen. Oswald had worked for a group supporting Cuban Communist leader Fidel Castro and recently had visited the Soviet consulate in Mexico City.
The news could hardly have been more ominous. The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was raging across the world — from the divided city of Berlin to Vietnam. Only thirteen months had passed since the United States and the Soviet Union had come within an eyelash of nuclear war over the presence of Soviet missiles on the island of Cuba, ninety-two miles from the American shore. After a nerve-wracking thirteenday standoff, the crisis had ended when the Soviets agreed to remove the missiles.
Despite his own fears about Soviet involvement in the assassination, Johnson knew that the nation needed his reassurance. Concerned that Dallas district attorney Henry Wade might rush to a public judgment involving Oswald in a Communist plot, the new president asked his longtime adviser Horace Busby to assign Texas attorney general Waggoner Carr to take command of the assassination investigation.
For most of his life, Lyndon Johnson had dreamed of becoming president. Now, under nightmarish circumstances, his wish had been fulfilled, and he faced a nation stunned by sorrow, fear, and troubling questions: Who had killed Jack Kennedy and why? And who was this hulking Texan with the deep southwestern twang who had suddenly taken Kennedy's place as president of the United States?
Congressman Hale Boggs of Louisiana, the deputy majority leader of the House of Representatives, raced toward the Capitol from his office across the street in the Cannon House Office Building as soon as he heard the news, nearly crashing into Representative William Colmer, a Mississippi Democrat and diehard segregationist. "Your people killed that man!" Boggs shouted at a startled Colmer. "Your Ross Barnetts!"
The grief-stricken Boggs was not the only person to leap to the conclusion that Kennedy's murder was related in some way to racial strife in the South. In late September 1962, Governor Ross Barnett of Mississippi had fueled a deadly riot by defying President Kennedy's order making James Meredith the first African American admitted to the University of Mississippi.Barnett's Mississippi had produced more civil rights-related violence than any other state. Civil rights activists had been beaten and murdered, black churches had been burned, and Ku Klux Klansmen had waged a campaign of terror with virtual immunity from state and local law enforcement.
Senator Richard Russell, a Georgia Democrat and leader of the southern segregationist forces in the Senate, stood in his usual spot in the Senate Marble Room reading the news wires as they came out of a ticker tape machine. Russell's eyes welled with tears as he read of the "dastardly crime ... which had stricken a brilliant, dedicated statesman at the very height of his powers." Russell took solace in knowing that his friend and protégé Lyndon Johnson would be taking over the reins — a man he had long believed had "all the talents and abilities to be a strong president."
Senator Hubert Humphrey, a Minnesota Democrat and deputy majority leader of the Senate, heard the news as he was attending a luncheon at the Chilean embassy in Washington. Overcome by emotion, Humphrey wept openly, then steadied himself to announce the sad news to the assembled guests. As he left the embassy, Humphrey worried about the health of his friend Lyndon Johnson — about his earlier heart attack and how he might have been shaken emotionally by the trauma of the day. But that evening Humphrey felt reassured by Johnson's measured calm when he saw Johnson in his office. Putting his arm around Humphrey, Johnson told him that he desperately needed the help of his friend from Minnesota — who had been the Democrats' point man on civil rights since 1948.
Most Americans, regardless of their political beliefs, reacted to the assassination with a profound sense of shock and grief. The attractive young president and his glamorous wife had charmed the nation, and indeed people throughout the world, with their vitality, graciousness, and style. But race had become a dominant, divisive issue in American public life. In disturbing ways, feelings about race influenced immediate reactions to Kennedy's murder. Some hard-core racists, bitter about the president's proposals to outlaw segregation and forbid discrimination against Negroes, actually cheered the news of his death. In a dormitory at Mississippi State College, cowbells rang in celebration. A young man from Alabama proclaimed on an Atlanta radio call-in show that night that "Kennedy got exactly what he deserved — that any white man who did what he did for niggers should be shot!"
A large majority of America's 22 million African Americans admired John F. Kennedy and considered him a sympathetic friend. Many assumed at first that his assassin had been motivated by racial hatred. That assumption proved unfounded, but it reflected the highly charged political and social climate of the times. After four years of increasingly potent civil rights protests, the White House and Congress finally had begun to respond to black citizens' demands for legislation forbidding segregation and discrimination in public accommodations, voting, employment, and schools. As the civil rights forces led by Martin Luther King and other black leaders increased pressure for change, southern vigilantes from the Ku Klux Klan and White Citizens Councils retaliated with increased violence. Only two months earlier, four young black girls, wearing their white Sunday dresses, had died in a fiery blast when Klan members dynamited their Birmingham, Alabama, church as parishioners gathered for morning worship.
In a Cleveland, Ohio, hotel ballroom, Leslie Dunbar, director of the Southern Regional Council, a moderate voice for improved race relations, was preparing to address a luncheon meeting of civil rights leaders. When he heard about the president's assassination, he tore his prepared speech into pieces and dropped it into a wastebasket just before his scheduled presentation. Dunbar had intended to excoriate President Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, for moving too slowly on civil rights. Instead, the meeting abruptly broke up as the attendees raced to the telephones and television set in the hotel lobby.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Judgment Days"
by .
Copyright © 2005 Nick Kotz.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents Introduction: Second Emancipation 1: The Cataclysm 2: Let Us Continue 3: “A Fellow Southerner in the White House” 4: Hoover, King, and Two Presidents 5: A Fire That No Water Could Put Out 6: An Idea Whose Time Has Come 7: Lyndon Johnson and the Ku Klux Klan 8: A Political Revolution 9: Hoover Attacks 10: The LBJ–MLK Alliance 11: Shining Moment: We Shall Overcome 12: The Better Angels of Their Nature 13: This Time the Fire 14: Another Martyr Epilogue: The Legacy Acknowledgments Author’s Note on Sources Abbreviations Notes Interview List Bibliography IndexRelated Subjects
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