Back in Selma, Bureau agents played a similarly passive role. Twenty agents were present for what became known as the Bloody Sunday march, in which police attacked protesters as they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The agents took photographs and film footage, and counted up the ensuing injuries. But they arrested only three white men, all of them accused of assaulting an FBI agent. Katzenbach objected to Johnson: “That didn’t look right, Mr. President, from the public viewpoint, you know—all the Negroes that were beat up and the people we arrested were the people who beat up the
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