Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [52]
Back in town, as the temperature hit 100, tempers flared. Enraged men, arms waving, mouths like open scars, confronted reporters outside the courthouse. Didn’t they know they were being duped? It was all a hoax! Those three boys just took off! And if agents knew what was good for them, they’d damn sure do likewise. Going house to house, agents met stone walls. No one would talk. No one would even listen. A hoax. Then toward 3:30 p.m., bulletins broke into radio and TV nationwide. The blue Ford had been found, not south of Philadelphia, where Deputy Price said he had watched its taillights vanish, but near the Choctaw Reservation, fifteen miles north of town.
Choctaw Indians fishing in a creek had spotted the smoldering wreckage. The head of the reservation called the FBI, whose agents waded in to find the car, sizzling hot, protruding from a blackberry thicket at the edge of the Bogue Chitto swamp. The car’s interior was as black as an oven. A rear wheel was missing, but the license—H25 503—checked out. Towed from the swamp, its muffler dangling, its windshield blown out, the charred vehicle was hauled into town. Within minutes, word reached the White House.
Lyndon Johnson had learned of the summer project back in April. “They’re sending them in by buses in the hundreds from all over the country to help ’em register,” Johnson told Georgia senator Richard Russell. “And they’re gonna try to get ’em all registered in Mississippi. And there’re gonna be a bunch of killings.” Yet heeding his aide’s advice, the president had ignored all pleas for protection. Johnson had other pressing problems that Tuesday. He had to replace his ambassador to Vietnam, screen vice presidential candidates, and plan the ceremony to sign the Civil Rights Act. But all morning and into the afternoon, Mississippi kept coming up—in his press conference, in phone calls, in bulletins. Johnson was outraged by suggestions that he was not doing enough to find the missing men. “I asked Hoover two weeks ago, after talking to the Attorney General, to fill up Mississippi with FBI men and infiltrate everything he could,” the president said. “I’ve asked him to put more men after these three kids. . . . I’m shoving in as much as I know how.” At 3:00 p.m., Johnson’s archrival Robert Kennedy met with the Goodmans and Nathan Schwerner, but the president did not want to follow suit. “I’m afraid that if I start house mothering each kid that’s gone down there and that doesn’t show up, that we’ll have this White House full of people every day asking for sympathy.” Finally, Johnson asked Nicholas Katzenbach, deputy assistant attorney general, what he thought had happened to the three.
“I think they got picked up by some of these Klan people, would be my guess.”
“And murdered?”
“Yeah, probably. Or else they’re just being hidden on one of those barns or something . . . and having the hell scared out of them. But I would not be surprised if they’d been murdered, Mr. President. Pretty rough characters.” Katzenbach agreed the president should not see the parents. “I think you’d have a problem of every future one. . . . This is not going to be the only time this sort of thing will occur, I’m afraid.” Toward 4:00 p.m., Johnson was on the phone with Senator James Eastland, who was calling from his plantation in Ruleville.
“I don’t believe there’s three missing,” Eastland told LBJ. “I believe