At Canaan's Edge (50 page)

Within five days, a composition by North Vietnamese poet laureate To Huu circulated by combat radio among Communist soldiers, mingling shrill propaganda against American leaders—“Johnson! Your crimes multiply…McNamara/ Where will you hide?”—with intimate verse imagining Morrison's last thoughts:

More than thirty years later, at her first visit to a Peace Park created by war veterans from both sides, retired soldiers in Hanoi would recall for the married and pregnant Emily Morrison their indelible memories of hearing “Emily, My Child” in a particular jungle bunker or tunnel, and Vietnamese half her age recited the poem from school lessons. Her mother, having braced herself for acute discomfort in a strange land, lost protective artifice daily as “many, many Vietnamese men cried in front of us” over a healing image of Americans that survived prolonged slaughter. Robert McNamara, in his eighties, called Anne Morrison Welsh about the disclosure in his troubled memoir that sporadic antiwar protest never “compelled attention” until Norman Morrison “burned himself to death within forty feet of my Pentagon window.”
*
McNamara said he bottled up emotions about Vietnam from that day forward out of “a grave weakness,” and she replied that the suicide likewise had been unmentionable in her home. The two discovered in family paralysis a peculiar bonded leeway within the larger trauma of a war then scarcely begun.

The aborted New York draft protest reconvened on Saturday, November 6, this time in Union Square behind police barricades and a cordon of 1,500 supporters wearing “Practice Nonviolence” buttons. Hecklers strained against the perimeter with assorted signs such as “THANKS, PINKOS” and “COWARDS.” They shouted down Dorothy Day, quieted through some of A. J. Muste's prayer for illumination of the haunting deed four days earlier at the Pentagon—“Do not weep for Norman Morrison or his family. Let us weep instead for the lethargy of this nation”—then raised a countervailing rhythmic cry of “Give us joy! Bomb Hanoi!” Five pacifists in coats and ties, pelted by missiles and doused by water, managed to ignite their draft cards and sing the “We Shall Overcome” benediction in the midst of another hostile, contagious chant: “Burn yourselves! Not your cards!” Police units escorted the pacifist leaders away for their own protection, but roving bands attacked button-wearing supporters as they dispersed.

Roger LaPorte, clean-cut son of an upstate New York lumberjack, sent off a letter renouncing his divinity school draft deferment. Obsessed by the intensity of the hatred he witnessed at Union Square, he wandered the streets for three nights until the predawn hours of Tuesday, November 9, when he knelt before the United Nations building soaked in gasoline. A Ghanian U.N. guard who tried to beat out the blue flames soon toppled retching, overcome by fumes. “I'm a Catholic Worker,” LaPorte gasped to paramedics. “I'm against war, all wars. I did this as a religious action.” Horrified, U.N. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg called the immolation “terribly unfortunate and terribly unnecessary,” reiterating his government's “complete commitment to the idea that peace is the only way.” Friends of LaPorte said he meant to absorb evil from the world by personal sacrifice, like Jesus, but many pacifists including Muste feared that suicide protest would alienate most Americans instead, and make war seem comparatively normal. The Trappist writer Thomas Merton sensed “something radically wrong somewhere, something that is un-Christian…the whole thing gives off a different smell from the Gandhian movement.” That afternoon, LaPorte hovered near death at Bellevue Hospital as a massive electric failure paralyzed cities from New York to Boston. He lingered with 25 million people mesmerized through the Great Blackout night of flashlights and candles, then expired after power was restored.

“The people of New York City have never experienced such fellowship, such awareness of being one, as they did last night in the midst of darkness,” Rabbi Heschel told his class at Union Seminary. “Indeed, there is a light in the midst of the darkness of this hour. But, alas, most of us have no eyes.”

November–December 1965

O
N
the day before the Northeast blackout, King sent a letter of “personal encouragement” to Senator William Fulbright, with whom he had no acquaintance, and also sent a mortified emissary—his father—to fend off a car theft investigation by the FBI. Although Fulbright had not yet broken publicly with the administration on Vietnam, King extrapolated early hints according to his own private readings of President Johnson, and he knew that raging public vitriol against dissent, while the birthright and daily burden of the nonviolent race movement, was a disorienting shock for many newcomers. “I trust that you will not let any pressure silence you,” King wrote Fulbright in a guarded note. (Fulbright thanked King with a candid reply that “my influence is not sufficiently strong…to do much about the policy which is now being followed.”) Daddy King, for his part, walked bravely into Atlanta police headquarters to surrender the purchase documents for a 1965 Chevrolet in SCLC's SCOPE fleet, volunteering that there might be something wrong with the documents. This preemptive move set a tone of forthright cooperation, and covered panic over sudden rumors that Hosea Williams had bought at least four stolen cars from South Carolina thieves cooperating with FBI agents. Williams, sputtering with indignation, avoided contact with King. He stalled surrender of the cars themselves because several had disappeared to scattered projects, and he was determined first to wring a refund out of the suppliers.

On Saturday, November 6, Andrew Young called Levison from Atlanta with cryptic news that “Hosea has a problem” best not discussed on the telephone. Half an hour later, word circulated through Stanley Levison that the SCLC treasury was short $190,000, and that “Martin acted as if the bottom had fallen out of the world.” King sent Young that same afternoon to New York. Advisers there tied the treasury crisis to a bookkeeping “goof”—unnoticed checks gone from the theft of SCLC's safe during the August convention, many of which could be replaced—but discovered an alarming long-term drop in contributions to a level roughly one-third of expenditures, so that the current monthly deficit of $70,000 would bankrupt SCLC by early 1966. Levison, Clarence Jones, and the others called for drastic spending cuts and fund-raising reforms, grumbling as usual that King would forgive chronic laxity on the part of “pompous and ineffective” SCLC treasurer Ralph Abernathy. They knew that Abernathy recently inveigled Young himself to write an appeal for major SCLC donors to buy Abernathy a new automobile, and that a chagrined King worked to cover and repay the mistake rather than openly rebuke his best friend. Even now, out of abiding sympathy for Abernathy's deep wounds and insecurities, King wrote a detailed letter to American Express headquarters appealing the recent rejection of Abernathy's application for credit privileges. (The handy plastic card, introduced by American Express in 1959, was transforming not only business travel but much of retail commerce.)

Young and the New York advisers accepted that Hosea Williams might be in possession of stolen cars, doubted that he had ordered them stolen, questioned what he knew at the time of sale, and fully expected his exclamations that he would defy this persecution like all the others. Combustible, loose with rules, Williams had gone to jail more than anyone on the SCLC staff, and had just committed permanently to the movement by resigning his vested career as a chemist in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. With Bevel away in Chicago, he was the available choice to mount a protest in remote Alabama, against travesties of justice in the Liuzzo and Daniels murder trials. Harry Wachtel, the Wall Street lawyer who had represented King in high-level negotiations on the Voting Rights Act, discreetly sounded out his contacts at the Justice Department about the likelihood of prosecution. Insiders at SCLC held their breath and hoped the scandal would fail to explode.

Far from King's sight, the Hosea Williams case boiled in a continuing dispute that would spill from the secret chambers of government into the next presidential election. Officials at FBI headquarters ached to announce an ITSP (Interstate Transportation of Stolen Property) “rackets” case that touched King. “Hosea Williams is the Director of Voter Registration, SCLC,” wrote Assistant Director Al Rosen, “and in view of his high position, any prosecutive action taken against him would result in considerable publicity and would focus attention on the activities of the SCLC.” However, when FBI agents arrested the first middleman in late October, skeptical federal prosecutors in Atlanta and Washington made sure that the charging documents did not implicate Williams or King on the uncorroborated word of the South Carolina suspect. They asked why a convicted white thief from South Carolina would rent cars under his own name, sell them traceably to Negro middlemen in Atlanta, then confess the whole scheme to an FBI contact from previous arrests. Nevertheless, the neutral arrest statement infuriated Deke DeLoach as a muzzling. By his report he told the Justice Department that “the FBI did not make ‘secret arrests'…and that we simply would not sit still for this kind of treatment.” Alan Belmont, the FBI's third-ranking official, hinted to counterparts at Justice that the Bureau might have corroboration of SCLC's conscious guilt from surveillance intercepts, but this disclosure only ratcheted the matter up to Attorney General Katzenbach. A federal judge quickly sealed the record of the middleman's arrest, which was publicly ignored without a salacious civil rights context. “The Dept Attys may have gotten to the judge,” Hoover groused to his inner circle.

FBI officials pushed for broader prosecution while the Justice Department held back for supporting facts, and their standoff intensified because King was the nerve point in a larger struggle over surveillance policy. The FBI scrambled in November to assure Justice that intelligence information would be “compartmentalized” from criminal agents, and therefore would not contaminate the evidence in an active prosecution, but Katzenbach stressed that skilled defense lawyers might win court-ordered discovery of all material about Hosea Williams in the government's possession. Legally, he warned, such discovery could spoil any slim chance of a sustainable conviction, because judges would frown especially upon wiretapped conversations about Hosea's “problem” among at least three SCLC lawyers, Wachtel, Jones, and Levison, as unconstitutional infringements of the right to counsel. Politically, any prosecution of Williams would risk the first public disclosure of the telephone wiretaps on King and his associates, which would bring down seismic repercussions.

For Katzenbach, still more danger lurked in the likely revelation of intercepts also by nonauthorized FBI microphone surveillance—bugs planted in rooms by trespass—at the worst moment. It had taken months of cajolery for him to secure from his nominal subordinates even a bare acknowledgment that the FBI used bugs, then finally a pledge to abandon them, both on the strength of President Johnson's emphatic secret order. “As a consequence, and at your request,” Hoover had informed Katzenbach on September 14, “we have discontinued completely the use of microphones.” The memo of formal compliance bristled ominously with resentment. Hoover blamed official qualms about bugs on the “unrestrained and injudicious use of special investigative techniques by other agencies.” He objected that traditional, accountable FBI methods such as interviews and forensics fell short “in dealing with clandestine operations,” and that bugs were vital for the FBI “to assist our makers of international policy” as well as to combat subversion. “To the extent that our knowledge is reduced,” Hoover concluded with a royal flourish, “to that extent our productiveness is reduced.”

Reluctant submission lasted hardly a month before Hoover rebelled. He chose tactical ground shrewdly, aware that a federal government divided privately over bugs also tottered recently in attitude toward Martin Luther King. When wiretaps next alerted the FBI that King would meet his New York advisers, Hoover knew better than to ask special permission to bug the event. Instead, implying that Katzenbach would have approved if there had been time, he sent notice afterward in an unprecedented sort of post-facto request: “Because of the importance of the meeting, and the urgency of the situation, a microphone surveillance was effected October 14, 1965, on King in Room 345, Astor Hotel…. This surveillance involved trespass.” Hoover sent Katzenbach two nearly identical notices after King's New York visits in late October and November, which put the Attorney General in a bind. He could ask President Johnson to confront the shaded disobedience, admitting that he could not handle Hoover himself, or he could overlook it. Choosing the latter, Katzenbach entangled himself in a bugging policy contrary to the one Johnson demanded. He became the first Attorney General ever to grant tacit written approval for a specific bug, as opposed to telephone wiretap. The unchallenged memos became leverage for Hoover, and gave Katzenbach still more reason to be wary of a Hosea Williams prosecution. Now he could be implicated as the highest authority for any bugs unearthed by court discovery.

For Hoover, these maneuvers breached the odious prohibition on bugs, and his top officials moved aggressively behind signs of official displeasure toward King. Agents recruited bookkeeper James Harrison as the Bureau's first “penetration” informant inside SCLC. Hoover commended his Atlanta branch on November 10 for “thought and imagination…looking toward the possible exploitation of highly sensitive information recently obtained concerning the personal life of subject [King].” DeLoach gave House Speaker John McCormack his acrid confidential version of King's Vietnam dissent, alleged Communist control, and personal faults, reporting afterward that the Speaker “was quite calm…. stated that he now recognized the gravity of the situation and that something must be done about it.” DeLoach also briefed Fred Buzhardt and Harry Dent, aides to the newly converted Republican Senator Strom Thurmond, but resisted as too dangerous their eagerness to let Thurmond “expose” King publicly with FBI information. Ever careful, Hoover favored confidential weapons that could not embarrass the Bureau, while pushing doggedly for the protected publicity of an authorized indictment against Hosea Williams. “It is disgraceful that we are kept ‘under raps' in this case,” he scrawled on a memo, and speculated on another memo that even “air tight” evidence for SCLC's complicity would not matter, “as that outfit is above the law in the eyes of the Dept.”

King sensed ephemeral new tides against the movement. His friend Morris Abram, a former Atlantan now on temporary Washington assignment away from the American Jewish Committee, solicited his participation in President Johnson's proposed national conference on race, then awkwardly signaled that most of the colleagues King nominated for a November 16 planning session would not be allowed through the White House gates. Inside the administration, Abram and Johnson's civil rights staff remonstrated with security officials not to bar Bayard Rustin on the FBI's renewed allegation that he was a “confirmed Marxist.” Lee White reminded the President that Rustin had proved a responsible and insightful ally since the March on Washington, and warned that the proposed FBI blacklist, which extended to Wall Street lawyer Harry Wachtel, among others, would undercut the presidential mandate to insure that civil rights leaders did not “either take away control of the conference from your designated co-chairmen or withdraw their support from it.” The blocked invitations vexed King. Andrew Young, while dispatched to lead a march in Selma seeking courtesy titles for Negroes, appealed to Abram and Lee White by telegram on November 13 for reconsideration of “the other names which were submitted by Dr. King.” Such consternation within SCLC brought contrasting joy to FBI headquarters when intercepted over the wiretaps and bugs. “We may be overly optimistic, but perhaps this is a favorable trend,” wrote a supervisor. “We will continue, as in the past, to furnish the White House derogatory information concerning King's people who indicate possible association with the White House.” Hoover approved: “Right.”

W
ITHIN THE
broad community of civil rights activists, the November 16 planning session was considered so pivotal that religious leaders in New York convened a conference to prepare for it on November 9, hours before the Northeast blackout. King arrived two days later into the concentrated hum of crosscurrents in the media. Not a single speaker at the religious conference lasted long on the broad promise of Johnson's historic Howard University speech before veering into an electric fixation on the structure of Negro families. Robert Spike, head of the National Council of Churches' Commission on Religion and Race, apologized typically for his extemporaneous remarks on “the damage that is flowing from the Moynihan report.” An entire book soon would chronicle the ongoing tar-baby furor over the report's central theory that a “tangle of pathology” infected Negro families, as measured by government statistics. Intellectual arguments cloaked in scientific language resonated through political culture, like Louis Agassiz's theory of the Negro as a separate species. “Because of the newspaper coverage,” the book concluded, “the Moynihan Report was taken as the government's explanation for the [Watts] riots.”

Nowhere did an author's name appear on the Labor Department report printed in June, but Assistant Secretary Daniel Patrick Moynihan distributed copies avidly to friends and reporters, one of whom, Robert Novak, had surfaced him to fame during the Watts riots of August in a nationally syndicated column—“The Moynihan Report”—calling it a “political atomic bomb” that “exposes the ugly truth about the big city Negro's plight.” Novak promoted a forbidden aura about the “much suppressed, much leaked” document, which in fact sold openly in government stores for 45 cents, and diverse commentators helped loose an avalanche of controversy. The
New York Times
reported within ten days that the Johnson administration was studying the report for clues about how to “replace matriarchy,” female-headed families, among Negroes. By September, Richard Rovere observed in
The New Yorker
that the upcoming White House conference “aimed at developing a national policy to strengthen the ego of the Negro male in the United States.” The
Washington Star
claimed to discern an obstacle looming from the “still secret” Moynihan report: “Negro life is another world as little known to middle class Negroes as middle class whites[,] and not understood at all by leaders such as Martin Luther King.”