At Canaan's Edge (24 page)

K
ING FLEW
west to preach on Sunday, March 28, at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, then drove to a local television station. Producers had agreed to film him from there in a special edition of
Meet the Press
if he promised to withhold from NBC's competitors any newsworthy comments about a post-Selma boycott of Alabama products. King acceded. Experience taught him that the national news shows tended to provoke controversy from perspectives at odds with the movement, toward the extreme of treating him as a houseboy, and he knew better than to expect a discussion of Selma's place in history. Still, the opening question sprang from deep ambush.

“First,” King replied on the air, “I would say that the march was not silly at all.”

Panelist Lawrence Spivak insisted that the evaluation—“this was his word”—came from Harry Truman, who believed the “silly” march could not accomplish “a darn thing” except make a big scene. The same former President who lionized President Johnson for his speech about Selma scorned the movement itself, personified by King.

Spivak next suggested that the Selma marches were superfluous to any voting rights bill. “Wouldn't you have gotten it whether or not you marched?” he asked.

“The demonstration was certainly for the voting rights bill,” King carefully replied. He could not cite the engine force of the movement without risking losing the votes of those in Congress who needed to claim untainted judgment, free of pressure by minority groups. So he tied the Selma campaign to multiple goals. “There have been untold bombings of homes and churches,” he said. “Again, nothing has been done about this on the whole. We were marching there to protest these brutalities, these murders and all of the things that go along with them, as much as to gain the right to vote.”

Panelists doubted King's personal commitment to nonviolence, and worried about disorders beyond his control: “How deeply do you fear the eruption of Negro violence?” One described the Highlander photograph “being plastered all over Alabama billboards,” and asked him to explain “whether that was a Communist training school and what you were doing there?” A question put suspicions bluntly, “Have Communists infiltrated the movement?” Others pressed for an end to demonstrations.

King held his own. He said that because people of goodwill had “abdicated responsibility,” the movement felt a “moral obligation to keep these issues before the public, before the American conscience, before the mainstream of our nation, that somebody will do something about it. And demonstrations have proved to be the best way to do this.”

Organs of mainstream culture divided over Selma. Even as the panelists on national television labored to diminish its unsettling impact, reporters gathered Sunday morning in Selma on advance word that Bishop Carpenter of Alabama had brokered a new policy to comply with Canon 16, Section 4 of Episcopal rules, governing admission for worship. Wilson Baker arrested an armed member of Sheriff Clark's posse who shouted obscenities from the street, as the ushers at St. Paul's Church dutifully seated on the front row a group of sixteen newcomers from Brown Chapel—mostly white clergy from Los Angeles, plus four Negroes, three of them from Selma. Rector Frank Mathews, having urged acceptance in two anguished pastoral letters that week, preached on reconciliation without mentioning the racial conflict. (“That was as bad as my senior sermon in seminary,” he said afterward, admitting frayed nerves.) Mathews and several parishioners warmly greeted the visitors, most of whom had been excluded at least once previously in March. Among them, Rev. John Morris hailed “the first breakthrough in Selma not induced by a court order,” and seminarian Jonathan Daniels felt a welcome epiphany from the transforming power of church doctrine. “Glory to God in the highest!” he wrote a friend. The
New York Times
covered the service on its front page, headlined “Selma Protestant Church Integrated for First Time,” predicting that change would spread from the example.

Morris complained that movement leaders had evacuated too swiftly, leaving hundreds of holdover clergy without direction in Selma. They joined daily demonstrations out of Brown Chapel. Some rallied to James Bevel's call for follow-up action
“now,
while people are still in motion and before fear sets in.” SNCC staff members proposed to march again to Montgomery and lay siege this time to Wallace's capital. Others followed new boldness along the march route to Mt. Gillard Church, where Jesse “Note” Favors spent Sunday afternoon stringing power cords to makeshift spotlights he hung around the perimeter. Sentries used them to keep watch that night over the first mass meeting in Lowndes County. Storekeeper William Cosby presided. Four Sundays after a Klan posse chased a preacher permanently out of the county for mentioning the vote, 170 people showed up to prepare for the legally prescribed odd-Monday registration day on the site opened specially for Negroes, next to the gallows. “Now I hope that tomorrow morning at eight o'clock we'll have the same number at the Lowndes County jailhouse,” said Cosby.

The featured speaker at Mt. Gillard, Bernard Lafayette of SNCC, preached on miracles from small beginnings. Though only twenty-six, Lafayette already had served nearly seven years in the vanguard nonviolent movement out of Nashville, acquiring the nickname “Little Gandhi.” After incarceration in Mississippi as a Freedom Rider, Lafayette had ventured into Selma to establish the first movement outpost in 1962, when Selma had been nearly as forbidding as Lowndes County. It had required more than six months' patient agitation before the first Negro church dared to host a mass meeting, and Lafayette's work in Selma later informed his young colleagues from Nashville. John Lewis of SNCC scheduled early demonstrations for voting rights there; Bevel and Nash lobbied Martin Luther King to make Selma the base of their massive nonviolent plan to answer the Birmingham church bombing. At Bevel's invitation, Lafayette often had visited the 1965 campaign from Chicago, where he was conducting nonviolent experiments to address de facto segregation. Privately, he warned of “too much leadership concentrated in one place.” Publicly, he exhorted the Mt. Gillard crowd to capture the lightning from Selma, which was spreading hope worldwide. Volunteers rose up for Tuesday. Exactly a week after the wondrous host of marchers appeared on Highway 80 with white friends and an armed escort of soldiers, local citizens would dare to gather unprotected where Viola Liuzzo's death car came to rest. Preparations for the leap already made news. “An immediate result of Mrs. Liuzzo's death,” reported one story, “will be to move the Alabama Negro movement publicly into Lowndes County.”

P
RESIDENT
J
OHNSON
startled his Attorney General by telephone on Monday, March 29. “Nick,” he said, “have I ever asked you or suggested to you that you tap a line?”

“No, Mr. President, you never have,” said Katzenbach.

“Don't you have to authorize every one to be tapped?” Johnson demanded.

“I authorize every one that the FBI taps,” Katzenbach replied. He added that the Pentagon and IRS occasionally tapped phone lines on their own.

“Well, I want them brought to an irreducible minimum, and only in the gravest cases,” Johnson thundered. “And I want you to authorize them, and then, by God, I want to know about them. I'm against wiretapping, period.”

The catalyst for his outburst was another visit to the White House by syndicated columnist Joe Alsop, this time on Saturday with
New York Times
bureau chief James Reston. Both complained of government harassment by wiretap. Alsop in particular had ranted on the verge of delirium, charging that government agents were shutting off his news sources by spreading scurrilous information about his private life. Johnson told Katzenbach that Alsop was unstable—“just short of the asylum now”—to the point of embarrassing longtime friends in the Washington establishment.

Katzenbach agreed. “I've seen him a couple of times recently, Mr. President,” he said. “He is in bad shape. There's no question about it.”

The President spoke obliquely of sensitive matters. “Now, I saw the Alsop file,” he said. “I don't know how it got over here. I don't know why it got over here. Uh, I saw Alsop's file…” He said he had locked it under care of his most trusted secretary, Mildred Stegall—“been with me since '37 or '8”—along with material “in one of our, uh, friend's cases, from what I have seen, that that must be where the evidence comes from, I mean, on Hawaii jaunts and some of those things, California, and uh, uh, with some of the women and that kind of stuff involved. You know who I'm talking about?”

“Yes,” said Katzenbach. This was the FBI dossier on King.

“But Joe Alsop's having a change of life,” said Johnson. The secret heart of the file was that Soviet KGB agents had entrapped and recorded Alsop in a homosexual tryst in Moscow, after which Alsop, to avoid national security blackmail, had confessed his homosexual life to the CIA and FBI. This happened in 1957, near the Cold War's peak fear of Communist conspiracy. Custom then inhibited reference even to conventional sex within marriage, banning the word “pregnant” through comedy actress Lucille Ball's gestation on her hit television show, and homosexuality still remained taboo beyond mention. Newspapers found euphemisms to report the “lewd conduct” scandal that had banished chief of staff Walter Jenkins from Johnson's White House late in 1964.

Katzenbach gingerly educated the President on the difference between wiretaps, which picked up only phone conversations, and microphone bugs, planted by burglary, which picked up all sounds in a targeted room. He was confident that he controlled the wiretaps, which the FBI called “technical surveillance,” or “tesur” for short, and that he had approved only legitimate targets—not including Alsop. “The furthest out one is the one that you referred to,” he said, meaning the King wiretap, “which my predecessor [Robert Kennedy] authorized, which I've been ambivalent about taking off.”

The Attorney General did not explain the tactical advantage of wiretaps for more intrusive spying—that by telephone interception of travel arrangements, for instance, FBI agents gained advance notice to plant bugs in hotel rooms before King arrived. Uncomfortably, Katzenbach did say he was far less confident of legal accountability for bugs, which the FBI called “microphone surveillance,” or “misur.” This illicit technique provided the most graphic pay dirt of undercover work. Katzenbach told Johnson that the FBI claimed independent authority “which neither I nor, or my predecessor knew until, oh, in the last couple or three months, there was authority for them occasionally to make a trespass and bug.” He said he wanted approval rights for bugs, too, even though gaining such control was a tall order for an Attorney General who had been confirmed only a month. “I'm going to work that out with Mr. Hoover, in writing,” vowed Katzenbach, “same as the wiretaps.”

President Johnson passed over the distinctions to rail against the secret pressures. “I don't know what legislation you can ask for in that field,” he told Katzenbach, “but I've been against it all my life. And I'm a red hot, one million two percent civil liberties man.” He mentioned practical motives for respecting the fourth estate. “I don't think we can afford to just let it go unnoticed,” said Johnson, “when, when Scotty [James] Reston comes in to plead with the White House.” Reston had heard vaguely at the Gridiron Club dinner of agents shadowing his son Richard to keep him off a story. Alsop, ironically, was both the conduit and the victim of much rougher tactics. Based on clandestine FBI allegations, he publicly attacked Martin Luther King as the dangerous, naive tool of Communist spies, in a national column entitled “An Unhappy Secret.” At the same time, Alsop blamed both the FBI and KGB for allowing his own secret to fester just beneath public notice. Thirty years later, Alsop biographer Edwin Yoder would unearth documents showing that Hoover periodically “spread the word” of Alsop's homosexuality among high officials—especially those who resented Alsop's journalism, Yoder concluded, as they were likely to appreciate the FBI for the top secret tip.

President Johnson kept telling Katzenbach that Alsop may be crazy, “but I like him, and I'm his friend” of thirty years. Now Alsop seemed deeply disturbed, with “the same look in his eye and the same attitude…that Phil Graham had the last time I saw him,” said the President. (Philip Graham, publisher of the
Washington Post,
committed suicide.) He deplored the personal toll: “I resent this so deeply.” As much as he loved power, Johnson decried surveillance as underhanded intimidation—“We've had a revolution, I just don't want it”—and repeatedly denounced secret police methods. “I guess you've got to have them in treason [cases] or something,” he told Katzenbach. “But I sure, I don't trust anybody on that field. And if I've got to trust somebody in this government, I want to trust you.”

Johnson plotted in detail how to rein in domestic spies. The next day, March 30, Katzenbach formally ordered Director Hoover to stop existing microphone surveillance and submit future bugging requests for approval by the established legal practice on wiretaps. Only the President's surprise initiative and clear mandate allowed him to act decisively. Even so, the order met resistance deep within a subterranean government devoted to secrecy and arbitrary authority, which helped generate disillusioning spy scandals for years to come.