At Canaan's Edge by Taylor Branch Page A

primacy or subordination of states? King’s swift appeal that Sunday night pushed the focus toward gathering drama rather than a finite sensation that was likely to fade. “He Reveals Plans to Lead a New March Tomorrow,” declared the front page of Monday’s New York Times, beneath headlines and a graphic picture from Selma. “King Calls for Another Try,” announced the Washington Post.
    Surrounded by newspapers in his bed, President Johnson made his first call Monday morning for a briefing on hospital casualties and King’s intentions. Attorney General Katzenbach volunteered the awkward news of the FBI’s only active intervention during the charge of troopers and possemen: jailing three white men, including the serial attacker James Robinson, for assaulting an FBI agent. “I didn’t give the arrests any publicity last night,” said Katzenbach. “That didn’t look right, Mr. President, from a public viewpoint, you know—all the Negroes that were beat up and the people we arrested were the people who beat up the FBI agent.” Worse, the circumstances recalled FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s public accusation in November that Martin Luther King was “the most notorious liar in the country.” To justify his impulsive outburst, Hoover oddly had cited a complaint by King two years earlier that FBI agents too often were native Southerners who stood aloof while Negro demonstrators were brutalized. Now the three white attackers in Selma had mistaken FBI agent Dan Doyle of Little Rock for a reporter taking notes and pictures from the sidewalk—and had stolen his camera. The federal prosecution would be scuttled quietly to avoid attention to the FBI’s selective perception of duty, as Katzenbach, who considered Hoover to be actively senile, knew better than to suggest fault in the FBI’s hypersensitive founding Director. If public discussion of race was stilted, Hoover was taboo.
    President Johnson simply tuned out FBI controversy as unproductive. “Do you know Wallace very well?” he asked, and the Attorney General said no one did. “The senators say they can’t get to Wallace at all,” he reported.
    Johnson proposed former Tennessee governor Buford Ellington as a possible go-between with Wallace, based on personal history and chemistry. The President vowed to send Ellington, the newly installed head of federal disaster relief, over to Katzenbach’s office within the hour to begin figuring out how to prevent repeated violence against the next King march. “Just have to be mighty quiet,” he instructed.
    Quiet was difficult to achieve. Picket lines sprang up outside the Justice Department before Ellington could get there. Katzenbach received a small delegation of preachers from the local chapter of King’s SCLC, and by the time their leader emerged to tell reporters that he deflected their request for protection by U.S. marshals, three SNCC students darted into Katzenbach’s office to sit in for the same objective. “It did not take the Attorney General long to get us policemen up here to throw us out,” shouted Frank Smith as he was being dragged down a corridor. “Why can’t he give us some protection in Alabama?” Katzenbach broke away to salvage one piece of the day’s regular schedule—his formal introduction to the U.S. Supreme Court, hurried and sheepish in a rented morning coat—and returned to find twenty SNCC students encamped outside his fifth-floor office at the Justice Department.
    â€œOur basic difficulty is we have no communication with Wallace at all,” President Johnson complained that afternoon to Senator Lister Hill of Alabama. He confided that Buford Ellington had found Wallace to be vaguely interested in “a way out” but close-mouthed and opaque, determined not to appear weak before Negro protest. Discreetly, Johnson did not tell Senator Hill that