Taylor Branch's Pillar of Fire

...In retrospect, Johnson's concerns about the MFDP can be dismissed as paranoia—his nomination was never really in question...

...They discovered, however, that the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson weighed their commitment to civil 108 DISSENT / Summer 1998 rights reform against their desire to retain southern white support and to combat communist subversion at home and abroad...

...For a brief period in the middle of the 1960s, he recounts, brave and determined civil rights activists made the issue impossible for white political leaders to ignore...

...Johnson's private conversations reveal him to be a larger-than-life figure: both a determined racial reformer and a boorish leader given to bigoted language...

...Malcolm's posthumous influence far exceeded that which he achieved during his lifetime...

...Johnson doubtless also took seriously Russell's response: "Mr...

...Kennedy saw civil rights legislation as an impediment to his reform agenda...

...Johnson believed that Humphrey would allay the lingering suspicions of civil rights and labor leaders that the new president was not a reliable ally...

...His literary collaborator, Alex Haley, is as responsible as Malcolm himself for the black nationalist leader's accession to icon status comparable to King's...

...He also expected that Humphrey and other liberals would prove their loyalty by resolving the single controversy that seemed capable of disrupting the convention: the attempt of the racially integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to take the seats- of the state's all-white regular delegation...

...BRANCH ENDS his account in the winter of 1965, soon after Malcolm X's assassination and on the eve of King's march from Selma to Montgomery...

...Kennedy's famous speech in June 1963 announcing the introduction of omnibus civil rights legislation was spurred less by his professed belief that civil rights was a "moral issue as old as the scriptures" and "as clear as the American Constitution" than by the need to respond to the Birmingham demonstrations and George Wallace's challenge to his authority...

...As Branch pointed out in his first volume, Kennedy's highly publicized intervention in 1960 to gain King's release from jail—an action that attracted the black votes that made possible his razor-thin election victory—resulted from the initiative of his staff rather than from deeply felt convictions of his own...

...His Great Society was a hodgepodge of programs that lacked ideological coherence or consistent class implications...

...Johnson saw his landslide as a mandate, but the reform coalition that brought him to office had already begun to disintegrate...

...Branch notes, for example, that "California voters embraced both Johnson and a constitutional right to segregated neighborhoods, as promoted by Ronald Reagan and the real estate industry...

...Branch's title places Martin Luther King, Jr., at the center of an American political era, but it does not reflect a Great Man theory of history...

...President, you may be right, but if you do run over me, it will not only cost you the South, it will cost you the election...

...Both sides of the racially divided electorate increasingly distrusted government and doubted its ability to improve the lives of ordinary citizens...

...Underfunded and burdened with the enormous inefficiencies caused by payoffs for local Democratic leaders as well as salaries for antipoverty bureaucrats, Johnson's War on Poverty became a minor skirmish followed by quick retreat...

...I IGHLIGHTED BY Fannie Lou Hamer's emotional testimony before the credentials committee, the MFDP effort embarrassed Johnson by demonstrating that the challengers, rather than the regular Democrats, best reflected the president's own principles (most of Mississippi's regular Democrats went on to support Barry Goldwater in the election...

...both a fervent admirer of Franklin Roosevelt and a crony of southern segregationist politicians...

...He saw the alliance of southern racism and southern conservatism as an obstacle that had to be overcome in order to make possible the New Deal–type social-welfare programs that he favored...

...On the other side, millions of white voters adopted their own form of racial identity politics...

...King and other civil rights activists called upon liberal Democratic leaders to live up to their egalitarian ideals rather than continue to compromise with the party's Dixiecrat wing...

...How could they enact major social reform programs that would ameliorate racial discord without making themselves vulnerable to the charge of being too pro-black or socialistic...

...Whereas Kennedy came of age politically during World War II and the cold war, Johnson was the offspring of the New Deal...

...Saying he did not want to be "panicky or desperate," he told Roy Wilkins that "the cause you fought for all your life is likely to be reversed and go right down the drain if you don't . . . find some possible solution...

...Johnson came to see it as a necessary precondition for his...

...CLAYBORNE CARSON is a professor of history at Stanford University and editor of the forthcoming Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr...

...On one side, Malcolm-inspired black militancy moved away from King's coalition politics toward psychologically rewarding yet often politically inert identity politics...

...He accomplished the daunting task of working cooperatively with strong-minded grassroots leaders such as Robert Hayling and Fred Shuttlesworth, who welcomed King's support but had their own notions regarding how the struggle could be won...

...Johnson's objective on the eve of the convention was to outflank a feared challenge from Robert Kennedy by selecting a vice presidential nominee, Hubert Humphrey, who would be even more closely tied than Kennedy to New Deal liberalism...

...Fearing that the MFDP challenge could stimulate a southern white walkout and a Kennedy putsch, Johnson combated the MFDP supporters with a degree of desperation and viciousness that seems, at least in retrospect, totally out of proportion to the danger...

...Branch demonstrates that King's unique contribution was not as a grassroots organizer but as a source of inspiration and moral guidance for local civil rights campaigns initiated and sustained by others...

...To guard against schemes to set loose floods of mourning that might sweep away normal arrangements, including his nomination, Johnson tasked Deke DeLoach and his undercover FBI squad to mount surveillance of Robert Kennedy, their nominal boss, in tandem with King and the Negro challengers...

...Johnson was willing to take on the Jim Crow system, but he was not willing to chal110 DISSENT / Summer 1998 lenge the underlying assumptions of Democratic Party liberalism...

...He secured passage of major civil rights legislation but would not abandon the racial paternalism that assumed that white liberals would determine the pace and direction of racial reform...

...He adopted Kennedy's civil rights proposals and pushed for their passage with greater tenacity and effectiveness than his predecessor, even while recognizing that this course involved political risks...

...He offered the nation moral prescriptions that his own administration had never followed...

...Indeed, after the Montgomery bus boycott ended in 1956, his involvement in local movements was only sporadic...

...Indeed, it was Malcolm's marginality from the mainstream of American politics that spurred his disenchantment with Elijah Muhammad's apolitical version of Islam...

...He also worked with prickly and often envious national civil rights leaders, such as NAACP head Roy Wilkins...

...In depicting Johnson, Branch makes good use of the recently released tape recordings of Johnson's meetings and phone calls that have been compiled in Michael R. Beschloss's fascinating book and audiobook, Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963- 1964...

...Though there is much in the recordings that confirms Johnson's negative image as a politician with crude habits, few scruples, and residual racial prejudices, he took a forceful stand in favor of civil rights reform...

...King was also a bridge between local activism and national politics...

...In addition to heavy-handed attempts to dissuade Democratic delegates from supporting the challenge, he accepted the help of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI in securing information about the plans not only of the MFDP but also of his own attorney general, Robert Kennedy...

...He was elected by a landslide over the hapless Goldwater, but his untrustworthy leadership provided a ready target for Black Power advocates and for Republican conservatives who combined Goldwater's ideology with the political acumen of Nixon and Reagan...

...Finally, and most important, King understood better than any other leader of his generation the unfulfilled potential of the nation's broad, interracial liberal reform coalition, which, since its beginnings in the 1930s, had avoided confronting the potentially divisive issues of segregation and racial discrimination...

...Johnson, for his part, came to the presidency with a sincere commitment to civil rights reform...

...Such a strategy would have required Johnson to give at least as much attention to the cause of racial equality as he gave to the primary concern of his presidency: the war in Vietnam...

...It would also be the last in which a majority of white voters and black voters supported the same presidential candidate...

...According to Branch, Johnson restrained his advocacy of civil rights while serving as Kennedy's vice president, but his emerging views were expressed in a May 1963 address at Gettsyburg: "While not as cogent or nearly as poetic as Lincoln, Johnson stuck single-mindedly to his theme that American democracy must rise above the divisions of race to survive," Branch reports...

...America was leaving behind the King years and entering the Reagan years...

...I just want you to know that, because I care about you...

...The highlight of Branch's volume is his account of the August 1964 Democratic convention...

...After the Goldwater debacle, Republican politicians exploited the Democratic Party's festering racial, gender, and ethnic divisions by promising to maintain New Deal and Great Society programs that benefited middle-class whites while condemning "big government" efforts to deal with racial and class inequality...

...This is a somewhat odd narrative choice, apparently driven by the author's decision to devote considerable attention to the last year of Malcolm X's life...

...His oratory convinced protesters that they were making history and that their unmerited suffering was not only redemptive but politically potent...

...He had already arranged to postpone until safely past the close of major convention business two much anticipated events a film tribute to the slain president and Jacqueline Kennedy's appearance at a marathon reception to shake the hand of each Democratic delegate...

...Pillar of Fire recounts the end of one era of American politics and the beginning of another...

...Branch observes that soon after taking office Johnson bluntly informed his close friend, Georgia senator Richard Russell, of his determination to enact the civil rights bill: "I'm going to pass it just as it is, Dick, and if you get in my way I'm going to run you down...

...He told Senator Humphrey that "if we mess with the group of Negroes . . . we will lose fifteen states without even campaigning...

...Since the late 1940s, the party had faced the danger of fracture along racial lines...

...These activists won the battle for historic civil rights legislation, but their victory, achieved at great cost, was not decisive in the long-term war for control of the American state...

...I have tried to make biography and history reinforce each other by knitting together a number of personal stories along the main seam of the American epoch," he explains...

...Branch recognizes that the issue of black-white relations has always shaped American political life, even when national leaders wanted to believe otherwise...

...Kennedy's primary identity as a cold warrior was far more significant than his belated conversion to the civil rights cause...

...Few historians can equal his narrative skills—especially his ability to dramatize events and delineate personalities...

...Although Branch draws attention to King's unique role, he is too knowledgeable about the African-American struggle to depict him as a general ordering obedient foot soldiers into battle...

...Proposition 14 carried California nearly two to one, winning fifty-seven of fight-eight counties and nearly half a million votes more than Johnson...

...Branch's depiction of how the two presidents confronted (or failed to confront) the nation's racial problems is hardly flattering...

...Johnson's Great Society foundered on the dilemmas that had troubled Democratic liberals since the New Deal: how could liberal Democrats attract black support without alienating white voters unwilling to abandon southern Jim Crow and northern de facto segregation...

...Johnson succeeded in scaring off support for the MFDP, but at the terrible cost of fostering distrust that would poison the racial reform coalition for the next generation...

...No words could cure Johnson's fears of racial emotion in combination with the Kennedy myth...

...DISSENT / Summer 1998 111...

...Nevertheless, the attention given to Malcolm may make sense in the overall design of Branch's trilogy, for the resurgence of African-American racial consciousness during the mid-1960s was among the many indications that, despite Johnson's landslide victory, a historic rightward drift of American politics had begun...

...Malcolm's fateful break with the Nation of Islam is a fascinating story, but his effort to build an independent Pan-African movement actually attracted negligible support before his assassination in February 1965...

...Nevertheless, the MFDP challenge to the credentials of the regular delegates suggested the larger difficulties he faced in trying to hold together a Democratic Party that included both civil rights activists and southern segregationists...

...Instead, it is a rebuke against the tendency of some historians—not to mention most white political leaders—to relegate modern African-American leaders and freedom struggles to the margins of the nation's political life...

...The 1964 election would be the last presidential election of the century in which a majority of white voters supported a Democratic candidate...

...RUSSELL' S DIRE PREDICTION proved only slightly premature: the Democratic Party survived the white backlash of 1964 but was harmed by the racial divisions that followed...

...More important, the response of the Johnson forces to the MFDP also exposed the habitual willingness of the liberal wing of the Democratic party to compromise on the issue of black civil rights in order to gain and retain political office...

...Despite the fact that he was initially less concerned with foreign affairs than Kennedy, Johnson was tragically willing to risk his domestic agenda in order to combat communism in Vietnam...

...Johnson was unable or unwilling to follow through on a strategy of building sufficient black electoral support to counteract white desertions...

...Moreover, although he was prepared to take political risks on behalf of black advancement, Johnson was caught between two inexorable forces: on one side, impatient and embittered black militants, who had become increasingly skeptical about Democratic liberalism, and on the other side, DISSENT / Summer 1998 109 conservative Republicans eager to capitalize on the white backlash against black militancy...

...Many northern Democratic liberals lost enthusiasm for racial reform once the target of black militance shifted from the southern Jim Crow system to de facto segregation in northern schools, housing, and employment...

...Taken together with his earlier Pulitzer Prize–winning Parting the Waters and his projected third volume, At Canaan's Edge, Branch's attempt to write "a narrative history of the civil rights movement" promises to be the most lucid and comprehensive account of the modern African-American freedom struggle that we will have for many years...