At Canaan's Edge (93 page)

H
E VOWED
to lead a “camp-in” of poor people to Washington. “I'm on fire about the thing,” King told seventy SCLC staff members at the Penn Conference Center in Frogmore, South Carolina. He said reflection and prayer made him wish they had extended their 1966 anti-slum campaign into Cicero, so that, by enduring the brutality that loomed there, they could have raised a hopeful standard of urban witness before the riots of 1967. King said they must rise above violent symptoms spreading from foreign war and domestic despair. At the week-long retreat, beginning on November 26, he warned that only hysteria looked for rage to sustain idealism. “Violence has been the inseparable twin of materialism, the hallmark of its grandeur,” he said. “This is the one thing about modern civilization that I do not want to imitate.” He confided that he had just met with Olympic athletes trying to craft a protest of racism for the Mexico City Summer Games, only to find them disillusioned and abused by a black power conference at which delegates threatened to beat each other. Their ordeal underscored a lesson for King that “hate has no limits.” He said, “I refuse to hate. Many of our inner conflicts are rooted in hate.” King declared a moral imperative to dispel national hostility now clouding miracles from the civil rights movement. If resistance in Washington exceeded the travail of Birmingham or Selma, he pledged to intensify sacrifice accordingly. “So I say to you tonight that I have taken a vow,” he announced at the retreat. “I, Martin Luther King, take thee, nonviolence, to be my wedded wife.”

Bevel objected that no dramatic plunge could rescue a misguided strategy. Predicting that Americans would ignore the “camp-in,” he argued that Vietnam rightly demanded the focused energy of a movement devoted to democratic values. Bevel disputed King's constitutional basis for a campaign to raise the standard of living, and preached so vigorously that FBI intelligence reports of leadership friction reached President Johnson within days: “[Bevel] addressed the retreat at great length opposing King's plans…. King was visibly angry at Bevel for opposing him in this regard.” Jesse Jackson criticized King more subtly. He said the plan rested too narrowly on demonstrations and support from the poor, then broke away to meet top investment bankers in New York. An Episcopal bishop had interceded by telephone and letter for King to excuse Jackson from South Carolina in light of his precocious skill with important donors—“his ability to confront without repelling.” Hosea Williams, meanwhile, opened a third line of attack. While reserving judgment on the Washington campaign itself, he alone rebelled when King went around the room for endorsement of the new SCLC executive director, William Rutherford, lately of Zurich, Switzerland. “I can't support you,” said Williams. He exploded against every credential King cited for Rutherford as the proven administrator SCLC grievously had lacked—his management companies, his roots in Southside Chicago, his doctorate from the Sorbonne. Williams bridled against supervision by a big shot virtual foreigner without a day's experience in civil rights. Privately, he answered King's wounded appeals with a raw howl against Rutherford: “That nigger don't know nothin' about niggers!”

Andrew Young settled the retreat with an analysis of civil disobedience that might arise in Washington. More than Birmingham's blatant color line, or Selma's biased voting standards, Young said the staff should prepare for actions to explain and carry out “noncooperation” with otherwise just laws—targeted demonstrations to dramatize smothered rights and misplaced priorities, general ones to impede normal life in the capital. When staff members examined Young about philosophical distinctions, or questioned the value of blocking access to the Agriculture Department, King urged them to work through their misgivings. “The great burden of this will be on you,” he said. “I can't do it by myself. Andy can't do it by himself.” He said he would try to neutralize rivals and doubters in advance by letting them “curse me out about the ineffectiveness of this.” No one yet could show that nonviolence was unsuited to intractable economic issues, he argued, any more than a single bucket on a burning house proved water could not quench fire. King pictured starting with one delegation of unemployed people to present demands for jobs or income at the Labor Department, then spread out to lobby Congress while other poor groups made their way to Washington from ghettoes and Indian reservations and white Appalachia and rural plantations, some walking or riding mules “through the tough areas, that's drama right there.” They could invite allies to join nonviolent witness in the capital—clergy, college students, President Johnson's poverty experts,
Newsweek
readers, the peace movement. “Now they may not respond,” said King. “I can't promise that, but I do think we've got to go for broke this time.” The alternative was surrender or riots. “I figure our riots last about four days,” he said forlornly, “and then you see these helpless mothers standing in line trying to get some milk for their children.”

King and Young stepped aside beneath the Penn Center pine trees to check for culture shock in Rutherford, who had expatriated to Europe in 1949 with a steamer trunk and a one-way boat ticket, pulled apart by race. (His sister worked as a maid; his parents rebuffed white friends he brought home as one of only seven black students at the University of Chicago.) Eighteen years later in Geneva, when Rutherford translated spontaneously for French and German reporters who surrounded King at the
Pacem in Terris
convention, the chance introduction turned into a swift agreement for him to sell or license his businesses, resign the publicity chairmanship of the Swiss-American Chamber of Commerce, and leap home into the revolution he had missed. The new partners exchanged confidences. King brushed aside Rutherford's cautionary disclosure of car theft buried in his childhood past as a Chicago gang apprentice called “Wild Bill.” When Rutherford confessed discomfort to see his revered chief executive sit through blistering criticism from subordinates, King replied that movements ran on tempered lunacy, which demanded respect for anyone who inspired others to risk nonviolence. Bevel should be accepted as a free spirit, King advised, but he greeted Rutherford with two secret assignments steeped in suspicion. First, he asked how Hosea Williams and SCLC comptroller James Harrison managed to keep an extra apartment on their meager salaries, and whether Williams was involved in any embezzlement to pay the rent. “I want you to find out,” King said. Second, he charged Rutherford to determine whether Jesse Jackson's vexing independence sprang from breakaway ambition. “I either want him in SCLC or out,” he ordered bluntly. “You go whichever way you want.” Rutherford promised to hone SCLC for King's purpose so long as he kept the one chisel he had demanded: the unfettered authority to fire staff. “Even Lillian?” asked King, of the indispensable office manager Lillian Hunter, then numbly confirmed his assent.

The poverty campaign stagnated all week in the Frogmore workshops. Only Bernard Lafayette, SCLC's new program director, pitched himself into the operational plans for his mandate, and Rutherford, the enthusiastic technician, found the mood of his native country distinctly unfavorable. (“Public preoccupation with Vietnam is stunning,” he told Young.) King worked from a blackboard, batting down objections. “The day of the demonstration isn't over,” he said. “And I say to you that many of our confusions are dissolved—they are distilled in demonstrations.” He denied that the campaign slogan, “Jobs or Income,” was indecisive or inadequate. Their public goals had been simple in Birmingham and Selma, King insisted, and the program of Jesus himself boiled down to the word repent. “You see, I don't care if we don't name the demand,” King declared. “Just
go
to Washington!” He said more than once that this might be the last campaign, because poverty was bigger than race. One of King's remarks—“the victory we seek, we'll never win”—provoked an eruption from Hosea Williams that it was wrong to stir up vulnerable people for a losing battle. (“I got really upset,” Williams recalled. “I just get cooking.”) King pleaded with the staff not to shrink from lost causes or association with outcasts—“I would hope that we in SCLC are the custodians of hope”—in exhortations that rambled at times into distracted theology. “I'm not talking about some kind of superficial optimism which is little more than magic,” said King. “I'm talking about that kind of hope that has an ‘in spite of' quality.” A distinctive rendition of one Bible verse bubbled up: “There is something in the book of Revelation which says, ‘Make an end on what you have left, even if it's near nothing.'”

King overrode doubt and dissent. He went straight home to a press conference on Monday, December 4—exactly eight months since taking on the furors of Vietnam at Riverside Church, one day before the twelfth anniversary of his debut speech for the bus boycott. Unlike the reluctant spokesman whose thunderclap oratory first caught up with Montgomery's local protest, now he conjured up a resurgence by sheer force of will. “The Southern Christian Leadership Conference will lead waves of the nation's poor and disinherited to Washington, DC next spring,” King announced. The campaign would begin with three thousand pilgrims “trained in the discipline of nonviolence,” and last until the country responded. “We don't know what will happen,” he declared. “They may try to run us out. They did it with the Bonus Marches years ago, you remember.” Fielding questions about potential clashes, he vowed to desist only if the protesters themselves indulged in violence. “The Negro leader's mood seemed deeply pessimistic,” reported the
New York Times,
and the front page heralded trouble: “Dr. King Planning to Disrupt Capital in Drive for Jobs.”

December 1967–January 1968

L
EADERSHIP
conflict seized the country while King labored to galvanize his small staff. On November 26, far from the obscure retreat at Frogmore, Senator Robert Kennedy vacillated openly between apology and disgust. “We're killing innocent people because we don't want to have the war fought on American soil,” he told television viewers, “or because they're 12,000 miles away and they might get 11,000 miles away. Do we have that right?” When journalists pressed him to reconcile his scathing reproach over Vietnam with his public support for President Johnson's reelection, Kennedy shrugged. “I don't know what I can do to prevent that, or what I should do that is anything different,” he said, “other than try to get off the earth in some way.” His morbid candor silenced the CBS broadcast of
Face the Nation
until its moderator found a soothing comment: “Senator, nobody wants you to get off the earth, obviously.”

Kennedy said personal history made him reject overtures to run in 1968 against his late brother's successor. “It would immediately become a personality struggle,” he declared, and paint him “an overly ambitious figure trying to take the nomination away from President Johnson, who deserves it.” He welcomed a potential quest by Senator Eugene McCarthy, however, to provide a healthy political choice for millions of people who opposed the war, and “Dump Johnson” activist Allard Lowenstein celebrated McCarthy's agreement to run on
Meet the Press
the following Sunday, December 3. “Aren't you still waiting for Bobby?” a panelist objected, alluding to Lowenstein's chronic solicitation of Kennedy. “In fact, isn't Senator McCarthy still waiting for Bobby?” Lowenstein gamely insisted that no citizens' challenge to an incumbent wartime President could afford hesitation. The previous night, before the insurgent Conference of Concerned Democrats at Chicago's Sheraton-Blackstone Hotel, Lowenstein had lifted 12,000 delegates repeatedly to their feet with his firebrand eloquence on bedrock democracy—blasting Vietnam as stealthy moral corruption by executive tyranny—while the candidate-in-waiting seethed offstage. Senator McCarthy, unhappy to be eclipsed by his own introduction, followed with learned but meandering remarks on the folly of war and the peril of dissent. His announcement projected a whimsical reserve, suggesting that Johnson's hunger for power was itself a root cause of woe in Vietnam. Intense public scrutiny generated both admirers and detractors for McCarthy's poetic detachment, which seemed either a fresh virtue or quixotic flaw. Circumstance sparked friction between him and Kennedy as reluctant, rival puritans—one barely in the race, the other still out.

Quite apart from electoral revolt, Lady Bird Johnson bemoaned a pall of loss that descended with the final month of strain for Robert McNamara. On two successive days, he came alone to Johnson with appeals for reduced military action in Vietnam. The President withheld McNamara's stark shift from all national security officials, including the Wise Men consultants who ratified the escalation strategy unaware. For McNamara, the suppression of his views breached confidence and raised tension “to the breaking point.” For Johnson, signs of emotional distress in McNamara led to whispers that “we could even have another Forrestal on our hands,” in an ominous reference to the breakdown and suicide of the first Defense Secretary, James Forrestal. Johnson ordered National Security Adviser Walt Rostow to collect evaluations of McNamara's written dissent without disclosing his authorship, and the Wise Men rejected it almost uniformly. “I can think of nothing
worse
than the suggested program—stating that we are going to ‘stabilize' our level of military effort and halting the bombing,” wrote Justice Abe Fortas. “This is an invitation to slaughter.
It will, indeed, produce demands in this country to withdraw
—and in fact, it must be appraised for what it is:
a step in the process of withdrawal.”
President Johnson, buttressed anew with secret consensus, let slip to reporters that the Defense Secretary was off to head the World Bank. This amounted to deft political euthanasia for Vietnam's chief architect, and McNamara's puzzlement would survive in a stricken memoir nearly three decades later: “I do not know to this day whether I quit or was fired.”

The President retained the haunted skepticism he had expressed privately for years, especially about the recurrent promise of victory by more and bigger bombs. “I am beginning to agree with Bob McNamara,” he told military commanders, “that it does not appear the targets are worth the loss in planes.” Having ruled out both withdrawal and stalemate, Johnson simply demanded what McNamara no longer could sustain: public faith that battle was securing control of Vietnam. Officials followed the prime recommendation of his Wise Men to “show some progress.” They emphasized themes to supplant what McGeorge Bundy called a negative drone of “deaths and dangers to the sons of mothers and fathers with no picture of a result in sight.” General Westmoreland publicly predicted troops could start home within two years. Ellsworth Bunker, the new U.S. ambassador in South Vietnam, announced momentum to “accelerate the rate of progress,” and seldom did military judgment strike a clanging note. Colonel John Paul Vann, a legendary warrior who had spent five years developing counterguerrilla strategy in Vietnam, was feted during home leave until the National Security Adviser asked for private assurance that the worst fighting could be over in six months. “Oh, hell no, Mister Rostow,” Vann replied on December 8. “I'm a born optimist. I think we can hold out longer than that.” His plucky gloom stung Walt Rostow, who remarked curtly that such an iconoclast did not belong in government service. (Vann returned to Vietnam duty, and would be killed there in 1972.)

President Johnson restrained an impulse to brand the war critics unpatriotic, but he did prod his government to harass them in private. He reacted viscerally to King's first fund-raising appeal for the anti-poverty drive on Washington, for instance, which framed SCLC's campaign in language drafted by Stanley Levison: “Nonviolence can be adapted to militant forms of protest that embody creative disruption while avoiding physical or moral destruction…. The riots and the cancer of war can destroy the democratic core of American life. However, there are constructive forces that can be organized.” On this letter, the President himself scrawled specific instructions to investigate retaliation through the tax code. Sheldon Cohen, Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, replied on blank stationery that his agents had audited King and his SCLC foundation “for the last three or four years” but found no legal leverage. Justice Fortas and his wife, tax lawyer Carol Agger, secretly concurred that King's conduct would not sustain fraud charges or revocation of the tax-exempt status they helped secure in happier times. Almost simultaneously, Johnson received a classified FBI report that the Ford Foundation soon would announce a grant of $230,000 to King for leadership training of minority preachers in scattered cities. When the President asked Hoover for an explanation, being unwilling to inquire directly, Hoover concealed the painful truth that McGeorge Bundy at Ford had rebuffed FBI maneuvers to scuttle the grant. Instead, DeLoach fed Johnson a bald tale that the softhearted Bundy had earmarked no less than $4 million for King until the FBI silently intervened.

A recompense to Hoover was the signal of the President's controlled fury, despite King's vital support for his Great Society agenda, which added a margin of safety for the FBI's intensified clandestine attacks. Hoover listed King and SCLC prominently among targets in a formal directive for all FBI offices “to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist hate-type organizations.” This was the third full-scale COINTELPRO (Hoover's acronym for “counterintelligence program”) in FBI history. Already agents were leaking propaganda to favored journalists—“FBI's Report on King Ready”—and supplying grist for a lengthy congressional speech by Representative John Ashbrook that portrayed King as a “power-hungry tyrant.” In December, Hoover explored ways to revive the King wiretaps shut down on Johnson's orders.

O
N
S
UNDAY,
December 10, King drew an overflow crowd in Montgomery for a ninetieth anniversary service at his first church. “Even some of the members are here for the first time,” joked the current pastor, Murray Branch. From the pulpit, King introduced his diagnosis of a nation sick with racism, “obsessive materialism,” and militarism—“headed toward its spiritual doom”—then preached on the meaning of hope. Focusing on the middle word from Paul's biblical litany of faith, hope, and love, he distinguished hope from desire along a social dimension, and argued that real hope could not be selfish. “You may desire a new beautiful house, but you hope for freedom,” said King. “That has a ‘we' quality. You may desire sex, but you hope for peace.” He parsed hope from optimism and magical expectation by invoking internal commitment. “Genuine hope involves the recognition that what is hoped for is in some sense already present,” said King. He tried several illustrations and quoted Jesus: “The kingdom of God is in you.” He recalled discussions with “some of my nationalist friends” in which King claimed to pinpoint at hope's swinging gate the fateful divide between doctrines of violence and nonviolence. Finally, he appealed to history's foremost specialists in hope. “They were our slave fore-parents,” he said. “Think about it.” He contrasted the brutal slave centuries with the miraculous vitality born in spirituals. “Every now and then, I feel discouraged living every day under the threat of death,” said King, opening his peroration on a balm of hope in Gilead. After the somber address, he followed the congregation from Dexter Avenue Baptist into close view of a Ku Klux Klan rally just outside at the foot of Alabama's capitol. Grand Dragon James Spears denounced draft dodgers, gun control laws, and “Martin Lucifer King,” plus Dean Rusk for permitting an interracial marriage. A wiry Klansman in hooded regalia paraded grimly with a misspelled placard: “Our Forefathers Got Us the Rights to Bare Arms.”

King rushed to Chicago for another speech that evening, then made his way back home. At a Wednesday press conference in Atlanta, he introduced SCLC program director Bernard Lafayette with the mandate to coordinate a spring “Poor People's Campaign for Jobs or Income.” News stories emphasized that Lafayette, twenty-seven, was a SNCC founder and Freedom Rider who had “left the student committee before it embraced the black power doctrine.” King also presented William Rutherford, his new executive director for internal administration, and an FBI wiretap in New York picked up ripples of impact. “He's done in a week what hasn't been done in two or three years,” King told Stanley Levison that afternoon. “He's really working hard.” Staff workers went through mail stacked away randomly in boxes, finding contributions unopened for months and a yellowed letter of introduction from Rutherford himself. Tracers discovered stray rental cars in Virginia and Kentucky. Rutherford dismissed the daughter of an SCLC board member for running up huge entertainment bills during the Belafonte concert tour. He confronted Atlanta's only black financial broker over his discretionary investment of SCLC funds in gold Krugerrands from apartheid South Africa, and when the broker contrarily observed that no one ever questioned the dividend checks, fired him, too.

“Hosea offered his resignation again,” King told Levison. Williams hotly defended his stance with an uncharacteristic flurry of memos, including three long ones on December 15 alone. “I would also like to register my indignation and displeasure at your attempt to evaluate my character,” he advised Rutherford. That same week, when Jesse Jackson skipped the first executive staff meeting on the poverty campaign, Rutherford imposed a system of fines for unexcused absence and tardiness. “You promised me your full cooperation,” he complained in a letter of notice, which, while conceding that fines “appear a bit juvenile,” asked how they could organize all America if SCLC could not assemble its own staff. With Andrew Young, Rutherford flew to parley with Jackson in Chicago, leaving behind a positive report on his second confidential assignment from King. Locks now secured James Harrison's finance office, and a new transaction window allowed SCLC employees to conduct business without wandering among desks stacked with money. Discreet audits balanced the daily cash flow, satisfying Rutherford that no movement funds were being siphoned into the hideaway apartment for Harrison and Hosea Williams. Thus reassured, King lost interest in the mysterious luxury. Neither he nor anyone else at SCLC suspected that Harrison had been a government spy for two years—meeting agents furtively with tips and purloined reports, more than doubling his salary from King with FBI payments to his informant account coded AT-1387-R.

O
N
F
RIDAY
night, December 15, core issues of violence and power attracted unusual press interest to a forum of one hundred intellectuals in New York's Greenwich Village. “Generally speaking, violence always arises out of impotence,” declared Hannah Arendt, author of
The Human Condition
and
Eichmann in Jerusalem.
She disputed the close association of power with violence, as in the common definition of government itself as a monopoly of legitimate physical force. (“All politics is a struggle for power; the ultimate kind of power is violence,” wrote sociologist C. Wright Mills.) She also doubted classical doctrines that put violence at the heart of natural processes, such as Karl Marx's vital birth pangs of history and Georges Sorel's essential shock for social innovation. “And now we hear from Sartre that not labor but violence creates man,” Arendt caustically observed. She argued against “mirages of violence,” and invoked a surprise warning from Frantz Fanon, the African voice for anti-colonial warfare, that brutality most often churned into cycles of revenge. Fellow panelists praised Arendt but qualified her sensibility with slivers of justification for the sword. Author Conor Cruise O'Brien wryly quoted an Irish agitator that “violence is the best way of insuring a hearing for moderation.” Linguist Noam Chomsky said he could point easily to circumstances “in which violence does eliminate a greater evil.”