Pillar of Fire by Taylor Branch

Author:Taylor Branch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 1998-09-02T04:00:00+00:00

OF THE MANY Army Reserve officers who completed two-week summer training about midnight Friday at Fort Benning, three friends—all Negroes unsure of finding safe overnight lodging—decided to drive straight through to homes in Washington. They made it as far as Highway 172 near Colbert, Georgia, when a car pulled alongside their 1959 Chevrolet. From a range of three to four feet, two. 12-gauge shotgun blasts obliterated both windows on the driver’s side. One missed Lieutenant Colonel John Howard as it tore through a suitcase into Army uniforms on hangers at the far side of the rear seat. In the front, Major Charles Brown snapped awake to find his friend Lieutenant Colonel Lemuel Penn slumped over the steering wheel beside him, dead of massive wounds to the neck and head. When Brown managed to bring the careening Chevrolet to a stop, and noticed through heavy fog that the attack vehicle ahead seemed to be doubling back, he and Howard moved Penn’s body aside to retreat at such high speeds that they ran off the road down an embankment, turning the Chevrolet on its side.

Bulletins greeted Hoover at an afternoon flight layover in New York. His orders summoned Assistant Director Joseph Casper from vacation in Myrtle Beach, and Casper commandeered reinforcements from Newark, New York, and Washington into Georgia for instant Saturday travel and all-night interviews, which boiled down to a day-after report for the White House about five “good suspects” from the Athens, Georgia, Klan. Agents had already spread word that “a substantial payment will be made by the Bureau for good information,” and were dragging the Broad River with a magnet in hopes of recovering shotguns. “Press vigorously,” instructed Hoover on Penn case memos.

Hoover called President Johnson on Sunday, by which time superseding alarms were sounding out of Natchez, Mississippi. In the Old River, a bayou formed by the shifting Mississippi, fisherman James Bowles had discovered the badly decomposed lower body of a young Negro male, his legs tied together. Armies of reporters converged there and also upon Meridian a hundred miles east, on the chance that this might be James Chaney. “FIND HEADLESS BODY IN MISS.,” screamed the Chicago Defender.

On Monday, when President Johnson called Robert Kennedy for suggestions on the Penn investigation in Georgia (saying, “That was a dastardly thing, wasn’t it?”), the Attorney General deflated his hopes for a breakthrough in Mississippi. “Evidently it’s not any of the three,” said Kennedy, but he confessed that his information did not come from the FBI. In fact, Kennedy asked the President to “give us a hand with the Bureau…because most of the stuff now we get we read in the papers. For instance, the body, we just, hell, we don’t know.” Within minutes, before Johnson could check with Hoover, White House aides rushed in with television reports that search teams had found a second floating torso in the Pearl River, tentatively identified as Chaney.

“No, that’s not correct,” Hoover told the President. “The second body has just been found, within the last hour….

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