At Canaan's Edge (79 page)

December 1966–February 1967

P
OLITICAL
passions tested democracy's institutional core. In
Bond v. Floyd,
the Supreme Court weighed the argument by Georgia that criticisms of the Vietnam War, rather than Julian Bond's color per se, left the state representative-elect short on the sincere character required to take his oath of office. “We are not persuaded,” Chief Justice Warren wrote tartly, “by the state's attempt to distinguish between an exclusion alleged to be on racial grounds and one alleged to violate the First Amendment.” A unanimous ruling on December 5 ordered Georgia's House to admit Bond, the twenty-six-year-old former SNCC publicist who had been elected three times but not yet seated. “We're all disappointed,” said one state official, “that the Georgia legislature will apparently not be allowed to make its own decisions.” Such grumbling marked what might have seemed a remedial lesson for the South, but just then a movement erupted in Washington to expel Representative Adam Clayton Powell. “Fight in Congress to Bar Powell Planned by California Democrat,” announced the
New York Times.
“Powell's Just Too Blatant,” a
Washington Post
headline proclaimed. The powerful chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, while duly elected twelve times from Harlem, had infuriated colleagues with flamboyant displays of “the freeloading available to all and practiced more quietly by many,” reported the
Post.
“Powell's creed has been that he can do anything a white man can do.”

By uncanny coincidence, the prolonged feud over FBI surveillance emerged garishly that same week. Thurgood Marshall, Solicitor General of the United States, asked the Supreme Court to vacate the freshly upheld conviction of Joe Schipani of Brooklyn, noting with apology that prosecutors had failed to inform either defense lawyers or judges of evidence obtained from devices installed “by means of trespass,” namely microphone bugs. Because this was the third such case recently discovered, Marshall further advised, the Justice Department would examine past and present federal prosecutions for the taint of undisclosed eavesdropping. “U.S. Reviews Cases in Bugging Quest,” declared the lead front-page story in the
Times.

Publicity ruptured the fragile truce covering eighteen months of subterranean maneuver. When outsiders had unearthed FBI bugs, disputes within the government over responsibility had drawn the unusually blunt presidential order to forbid all surreptitious microphones, and compliance became what Katzenbach called “an issue of great emotion” between the FBI and Justice Department: “There was very nearly a threat on the part of the FBI to stop organized crime investigations if they couldn't have this technique.” FBI Director Hoover claimed broad but vague legal authority. Senator Robert Kennedy reacted viscerally, being vulnerable already because his signature lurked on hundreds of formal requests for less intrusive wiretap surveillances on telephone lines, which did not require break-ins to install. Kennedy insisted that he had not even known of FBI bugs when he was Attorney General, let alone approved them, and warring charges of secret misconduct culminated in a cryptic appeal to his successor and former deputy. “As you know, this is a damn important matter for me,” Kennedy wrote Katzenbach by hand-delivered courier. “I just don't want to receive a shaft—it's not deserved—and anyway I don't like them deserved or not…. I can't write you as many memos as J. Edgar Hoover. And there is no sense in our talking about it by phone. I feel strongly about it—and I write you (just that as there's) not much else to say.”

By July of 1966, Katzenbach had managed to trace and shut down not only shadowy bugs but also many wiretaps. The President demanded more restrictions than Katzenbach himself thought justified, and in particular prodded him to confirm the removal of the sensitive installations on Martin Luther King. (“You got that little situation prohibited?” Johnson asked carefully by telephone. “It's gone,” the Attorney General replied. “It better be,” said the President.) Katzenbach, having employed cajolery, including legal predictions that the King wiretap would surface ruinously if the government indicted Hosea Williams for car theft, had transferred to the State Department in part because his relations with Hoover were frayed beyond civil respect.

The FBI Director reduced his bureaucratic risk, and, over the pained objection of intelligence deputy William Sullivan, suspended parallel operations to gather data by investigative burglary. “We do not obtain authorization for ‘black bag' jobs outside the Bureau,” Sullivan acknowledged in a plea for reconsideration. “Such a technique involves trespass and is clearly illegal; therefore, it would be impossible to obtain any legal sanction for it.” Nevertheless, Sullivan defended the FBI position that burglary had proved “an invaluable technique” of “wide-range effectiveness,” gleaning information otherwise off-limits, and Hoover would be obliged to repeat his protective ban when Thurgood Marshall ignited the public controversy over bugs. “I note that requests are still being made by Bureau officials for the use of ‘black bag' techniques,” Hoover informed his top executives. “This practice, which includes also surreptitious entrance upon premises of any kind, will not meet with my approval in the future.”

After more than four decades in office, Hoover much preferred the authoritarian cloak of political spy work to accountable duty in law enforcement, but he channeled the FBI's clandestine activity away from the forbidden zone of trespass. When FBI sources learned that Martin Luther King, desperately low on SCLC funds, planned to ask Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa for a donation like the $25,000 bestowed long ago at the Liuzzo funeral, Hoover authorized Deke DeLoach to launch preemptive sabotage. Agents discreetly monitored results over the consolation wiretaps on Stanley Levison, which Katzenbach had left in place, and preserved Levison's shocked recounting to Clarence Jones of a planted
New York Daily News
story that Hoffa hoped to buy friends like King because he faced thirty-five years of federal jail sentences under appeal. (“Yike, does it really say that?” exclaimed Jones, prompting Levison's miserable retort: “What, do you think I made it up?”) Informants soon told FBI agents that an embarrassed Hoffa was calling King “a faker.” With the rendezvous aborted, and the FBI role safely concealed, Hoover scrawled “Excellent” on a report that “our counterintelligence aim to thwart King in receiving money from the Teamsters has been quite successful to date.”

The Levison wiretap alerted Hoover also to a budding association between King and former White House adviser McGeorge Bundy, who, as president of America's largest private philanthropy, had announced on consecutive days two Ford Foundation initiatives tinged with penance. First Bundy proposed to harness satellite communications technology toward what would become the first public broadcast network, in a project developed purposefully with television executive Fred Friendly. Across deep lines of dissent, Bundy the Vietnam architect shared an overriding conviction with war critic Friendly, who had been forced out of CBS over the Fulbright hearings, that commitments of national will demanded unfettered debate and straightforward constitutional decisions. Bundy next catapulted race relations high onto the Ford Foundation agenda, proclaiming that “full equality for all American Negroes is now the most urgent domestic concern in this country.” FBI agents already knew of the intended shift, being privy to surprise among King's advisers when Bundy quietly hired two of their contacts to make up for his admitted lack of prior interest in civil rights. Eavesdroppers overheard doubt that staid foundations really meant to fund SCLC citizenship programs, no matter how much they professed to admire nonviolent workshops with Chicago youth gangs, but grant negotiations progressed into meetings between Bundy and King. After the 1966 elections, Bundy allowed his two new race specialists virtually to join the SCLC staff, preparing King's forty-four-page testimony for a U.S. Senate hearing on the challenge of poverty. Levison, the skeptical idealist, vacillated between worry and giddy hope to rescue the movement's financial base. “I don't want five million dollars,” he told Andrew Young. “I want less. Five million dollars could destroy us.”

DeLoach recruited an intermediary to poison the foundation against King, but John Bugas, vice president of the parent Ford Motor Company, ran into Bundy's steely refusal to hear derogatory secrets from an anonymous source. When Bugas, a former FBI agent, said the source preferred not to be divulged, Bundy guessed FBI and offered to listen if its officials would speak openly for themselves, which set off boiling evasion at headquarters. “I personally feel that Bundy is of the pseudo-intellectual, Ivy League group that has little respect for the FBI,” DeLoach concluded. He despaired of the direct approach, and Hoover concurred: “We would get nowhere with Bundy.”

H
OOVER COULD
and did mount fierce political attacks against a rare public challenge, such as the Supreme Court's reproach for cases corrupted with bugs. To circumvent his own secrecy restrictions, he sent a scripted letter of inquiry to himself on a confidential mission with DeLoach, who induced Iowa Republican Representative H. R. Gross to sign, and Gross compliantly released Hoover's ad hominem reply for the front pages of Sunday, December 11. “Hoover Asserts Robert Kennedy Aided Buggings,” declared the
Times.
Kennedy offered a statement of rebuttal—“Apparently, Mr. Hoover has been misinformed”—together with a letter from his former FBI liaison stating that Kennedy had processed many wiretap applications but never a bug. From headquarters, the FBI sprang an overwhelming counterattack at precisely 2:25
P.M
. the same Sunday, built on a declaration from Hoover that Kennedy's position was “absolutely inconceivable.” DeLoach's aides sent copies, buttressed with sample documents from “the official records of the FBI,” to every satellite office “for the use and assistance of reliable news contacts.” They assured superiors that while they obeyed fine points of the FBI image code—declining news requests to read material on camera, for instance, lest film footage preserve self-declarations on unsavory topics—Hoover's blistering words led most Sunday evening newscasts, followed by Kennedy's besieged reaction that he had been unaware of bugs nonetheless.

Issues of democratic norms and constitutional balance gave way to sensational headlines across the country: “RFK and JEH” (Little Rock), “Bugs and Justice” (New York), “Which Do You Believe?” (Chattanooga), “Bugging Furor Bad Business” (Sacramento).
The Christian Science Monitor
called the personality clash a “donnybrook” suited to Washington, “a town which relishes a good fight between public officials almost better than anything else.” Stories from the capital—“President Aloof in Bugging Feud”—suggested accurately that President Johnson was bombarded with FBI allegations against Kennedy. (Hoover went so far as to have DeLoach brief Justice Fortas on indiscretions he said “could destroy Kennedy,” and Ramsey Clark, Katzenbach's successor at Justice, advised Johnson that Hoover had lined up affidavits from witnesses, “forty or fifty of them,” to say Kennedy was complicit in bugs.) On December 14, James Reston of the
New York Times
reported that suspicions of officials were so widespread that “nobody in Washington could be sure his telephones were private.” His column surfaced the rumor that “the Government, beginning with the Kennedy Administration, listened in on the telephone conversations of Martin Luther King, the Negro leader, during the racial disorders…. Who authorized the taps? We do not know.”

Billowing paranoia overshadowed the next day's Senate hearings on poverty, in which King cited a multibillion-dollar adjustment in the war budget to indict misguided national priorities. “The error alone is more than five times the amount committed to antipoverty programs,” he said. “The bombs in Vietnam explode at home—they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America.” Using the black quarter of the poverty population as a barometer, he charged that “the attainment of security and equality for Negroes has not yet become a serious and irrevocable national purpose.” Robert Kennedy, one of only two senators present, engaged King in a forlornly inquisitive dialogue about why nonviolence seemed to have yielded hope so far only in the South.

Afterward, reporters who pressed King about the Reston story obtained a dampening reaction: “Dr. King ‘Assumes' Phone Is Tapped / But Says He Doesn't Know Why / Embassies Calm.” FBI officials refused comment, but their New York wiretap units, in a compounded irony, monitored the chilled discussions among King's lawyers about the wiretap news. Stanley Levison said President Kennedy himself had warned King about FBI surveillance in 1963. Harry Wachtel thought King should display less forbearance and more outrage. “When you have a guy doing an illegal act,” he told Levison, “you should not be so sweet about it.”

H
OOVER ESCAPED
in melodramas over lost American innocence, including what NBC News anchor David Brinkley drolly branded “the biggest publishing story since the New Testament.” Jacqueline Kennedy, the widowed First Lady, sued on December 16 to block a forthcoming book on the Kennedy assassination because it reopened too many raw wounds. William Manchester, her chosen author, agreed to remove his opening chapter about Kennedy's earlier trip to Texas, cast as an allegory on frontier manhood, in which Lyndon Johnson inveigled an elegantly squeamish President-elect to kill a deer on his ranch. Otherwise Manchester defended his manuscript and confessed to the widow an abject failure “to suppress my bias against a certain eminent statesman [LBJ] who always reminded me of somebody in a Grade D movie on the late show.” Gossip oozed into the press about whether, why, and how hard Robert Kennedy pressed for revisions. By Christmas, President Johnson fulminated to Fortas and other confidants that leaks from the book mocked him all through the bloodstained transfer of power. “I don't think I called Mrs. Kennedy ‘honey,'” he told Bill Moyers. “I think that's their idea of ‘you all' and ‘comin”—C-O-M-I-N—and this stuff they write about Texas.” Moyers warned of press rumors that Johnson had compiled notes from his White House phone calls to rebut Manchester. “Well, that's wrong,” Moyers briskly assured the President, “because there are no verbatim transcripts.”