Legacy of Secrecy (111 page)

potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercise their

potential for violence.” Taylor Branch pointed out that many agents

chafed at the request, while others wondered, “What did Hoover’s

nobly dramatic words really mean?” To “neutralize” someone?24

The number of FBI officials and agents involved in these efforts in

some capacity surely ran into the hundreds, and Hoover’s pressure

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created a situation in which Milteer or Marcello could have used a racist

FBI agent or supervisor, either knowingly or unknowingly. For example,

on February 15, 1968, Dr. King was followed in Mississippi by both the

FBI, ostensibly to protect him, and by agents of the state’s racist Sov-

ereignty Commission. It’s not clear whether the two agencies were in

competition or if they were cooperating and sharing intelligence on Dr.

King, but they could have been doing both, depending on the agents

involved. Another way in which Milteer could have compromised an

FBI agent or supervisor was if the man had friends or family in one of

the White Citizens’ Council chapters. While most FBI agents at the time

simply tried to do a good job, the example their own director set created

the potential for problems.25

The FBI also had excellent contacts with most city and state police

forces, which furthered the Bureau’s reach. Because Hoover’s request for

federal wiretaps had been refused, Hoover would need those local con-

tacts, as well as Army Intelligence and the CIA, to help monitor Dr. King.

The total number of local and federal officials involved in all aspects of

the surveillance and operations against Dr. King and his movements

would number in the thousands, given the extensive paperwork that

was generated in those pre–desktop computer days.

For the murder of Dr. King in the South, Milteer and Marcello could

have utilized one or more law enforcement officials in some way.

Milteer’s involvement in the plot to kill Dr. King yielded access to law

enforcement officials and officers who would not have helped the Mafia,

but who were so racist they would have willingly accepted a bribe to

assist somehow with Dr. King’s elimination.

Marcello and Milteer could also take advantage of others in law

enforcement and domestic surveillance without making them knowing

players in the plot to kill Dr. King. As in the JFK hit, they could glean and

feed information and disinformation to the right people, who could be

expected to react predictably based on their past behavior. These factors

are important to keep in mind as the story of Dr. King’s assassination

unfolds.

Chapter Forty-six

Martin Luther King was encouraged to develop his last great initiative,

the Poor People’s Campaign, by several key people—including Bobby

Kennedy. The idea of bringing people to Washington not just for one

demonstration, but for a longer stay, was not new. One of Dr. King’s

advisors had in mind the “Bonus Army” from the Great Depression, the

desperate World War I veterans who camped near the Capitol—until,

on the orders of President Hoover, General Douglas MacArthur ordered

his troops to forcibly disperse them. A few years later, under President

Roosevelt, the veterans finally got what they wanted. Nick Kotz writes

that “an encampment of the poor also had been suggested by [Bobby

Kennedy], who passed the idea on to Dr. King via Marian Wright, an

NAACP lawyer.”1 Kotz, who covered Bobby’s transformative trip to

Mississippi, writes that the Senator “was becoming more involved in

poverty issues as he considered challenging Johnson for the presidency.”

While Bobby’s concerns for the poor were genuine, he told Wright that

in addition to being a way to “dramatize the issues of poverty [it would]

give President Johnson trouble, a possibility Kennedy viewed with some

relish.”1

Bobby still wrestled privately with the contradiction of wanting to

run for president while being constrained by whatever implicit under-

standing had been reached with LBJ the previous spring—when Bobby

began publicly supporting LBJ after the Jack Anderson articles stopped.

While the evidence shows that LBJ did not instigate the articles, he may

well have prevailed upon Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson to stop

them, to avoid embarrassment to his own administration. LBJ likely

conveyed to Bobby, through any of several intermediaries on good terms

with both men, that Bobby’s public support of LBJ would ensure that the

articles didn’t resume. The two adversaries probably struck no formal

deal, but Bobby’s public remarks since the spring of 1967 demonstrated

clearly that Bobby knew what he had to say, at least in public. Even

when Bobby increased his rhetoric involving poverty and maintained

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

his antiwar stance, his comments to the press stopped short of attacking

LBJ, for whom he publicly expressed nothing but support.

Many people, from some of Bobby’s advisors to the crowds who

greeted the Senator, wanted him to run for president, and the news

media constantly brought up the subject. Finally, on the morning of

January 30, 1968, Bobby Kennedy told a group of journalists that he

would not seek the Democratic nomination for president “under any

conceivable circumstances.” According to Evan Thomas, Bobby’s press

secretary, Frank Mankiewicz, almost immediately “softened the state-

ment to read ‘any foreseeable circumstances.’ But the damage had been

done. [Bobby] was brutally ridiculed on two prime-time comedy shows,

Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In
[America’s most popular TV show] and the

[overtly liberal]
Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
, for, in effect, chickening

out.” An advisor told Bobby “the columnists and [political] cartoonists”

were also hitting him hard. Bobby was being attacked because his pub-

lic statements in late 1967 and early 1968 were so divergent from LBJ’s

position that the press and public expected him to join the race. They

couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t—unless he was afraid.2

LBJ was still far ahead of the only other declared Democrat in the race,

Senator Eugene McCarthy, running on a peace platform. But all that

started to change on the afternoon of Bobby’s January 30 statement, when

the White House began receiving word that Saigon was under heavy

mortar attack, even though it was the start of Tet, the three-day Buddhist

holiday period. Within hours, it was clear that a major offensive by the

Viet Cong had begun, as the US embassy and diplomatic compound in

Saigon became a battleground. According to Taylor Branch, “Seventy

thousand guerrillas [some estimates place the number of enemy forces

far higher] launched similar attacks of coordinated surprise in” most of

Vietnam’s provinces. These would drag on for weeks, “killing nearly

four thousand American and six thousand South Vietnamese soldiers,

plus an estimated 58,000 Communist soldiers and 14,000 civilians.”3

Richard Helms’s earlier capitulation to US military demands to

reduce by half the CIA’s estimates of Viet Cong forces played a role in

the debacle. Those lower estimates may have led LBJ, and the press and

public, to underestimate the Viet Cong’s ability to mount a country-

wide, coordinated attack on such a large scale. Even after the US even-

tually triumphed in what has come to be known as the Tet Offensive,

Helms’s artificially low estimates would continue to affect US planning

for the war, since it appeared that American forces had killed a much

larger percentage of the enemy than they really had.

By 1968, the American public had been hearing from officials and the

press for years that US forces had nearly prevailed and troops would

start coming home soon. In the week before Tet, the White House and the

US military had issued especially optimistic assessments of the war that

were carried by outlets from the Associated Press to the
New York Times
.

But the Tet Offensive shattered the rosy image LBJ and his generals tried

to depict. One infamous incident and image from Tet galvanized the

transition of American feeling about the war: a starkly disturbing pho-

tograph, taken near a Buddhist temple, in which the South Vietnamese

national police chief fired a pistol point-blank into the head of a suspect.

After that, Branch says, US polls “recorded the most decisive single drop

in American support for the Vietnam War.” Conversely, McCarthy’s sup-

port increased to 40 percent in New Hampshire, site of the first primary

race, giving him a real chance of beating the incumbent president.4

As Bobby Kennedy said, “Tet changed everything.” He was finally

ready to make his move, though carefully. Just nine days after saying

he wouldn’t challenge LBJ for the nomination, Bobby finally broke the

mold of the preceding months—he gave an antiwar speech on Febru-

ary 8, 1968, that criticized, directly, LBJ’s handling of the war. Bobby’s

advisors noted the change immediately, and talk about his challeng-

ing Johnson increased. However, the most recent historian to chronicle

Bobby’s last campaign, Thurston Clarke, pointed out that “Ted Kennedy,

Ted Sorensen, and other former JFK White House aides . . . were strongly

opposed to his running.”5

But the tide of American opinion seemed designed to force Bobby’s

hand. In the wake of JFK’s assassination, Walter Cronkite had become

America’s must admired newscaster and on February 27, 1968, he

broadcast from Vietnam and pronounced it a “quagmire.” On March 6,

Cronkite took the then unprecedented step of announcing his opposition

to the war during his broadcast, using terms like “futile” and “immoral.”

This was a courageous act at the time, as other news anchors remained

neutral or, like ABC’s Howard K. Smith, encouraged an expansion of

the war.6

By March 10, 1968, Bobby Kennedy had begun to tell aides and associ-

ates, like Ed Guthman and Cesar Chavez, that he was going to run for

the nomination. On the advice of Senator George McGovern, he decided

to hold his announcement until after the March 12 New Hampshire pri-

mary, to avoid splitting the antiwar vote with Eugene McCarthy, which

would have guaranteed a decisive victory for LBJ. Meanwhile, Bobby

had worked hard in the Senate on a bill to protect civil rights workers;

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it had finally passed on March 11, 1968. Also supporting the bill was

LBJ—so, at least at a distance, they had finally found some common

ground. Martin Luther King also backed the bill, marking one of the last

times all three men publicly shared the same objective.7

On March 12, 1968, the political landscape shifted dramatically when

LBJ mustered less than half the vote in the New Hampshire primary.

Though he still won, with 49 percent to Eugene McCarthy’s 42 percent,

LBJ, like much of America, was stunned. The next day, Bobby announced

for the first time that he was “reassessing” whether to run. But Bobby

still had several matters to consider before actually announcing his

candidacy—including whether there was still time to stop Dr. King from

endorsing McCarthy before Bobby was even in the race.

Martin Luther King’s latest problem with President Johnson had been

over the report of the Kerner Commission, appointed by LBJ following

the previous summer’s race riots. Headed by Illinois Governor Otto

Kerner, the commission found that racism and poverty had caused the

riots, and recommended a wide range of programs to address the issues.

When news of the report broke on March 1, 1968, Dr. King had embraced

its findings, even saying he might call off his Poor People’s March on

Washington—then scheduled for April 22—if its recommendations were

implemented.8

In contrast, LBJ tried to ignore his own commission, viewing its report

as a slap in the face to his own civil rights efforts. LBJ was having prob-

lems enough trying to fund the Vietnam War, and thought the country

couldn’t afford the antipoverty programs the Kerner Report called for.

By 1968, LBJ had reduced much of his originally ambitious funding

for his Great Society programs in order to fund the war and balance

the budget. But Dr. King saw clearly what had happened: Vietnam

was siphoning needed funds away from America’s inner cities, and

he was determined to support another candidate for the Democratic

nomination.9

On March 14, one of Bobby Kennedy’s aides began trying frantically

to reach Dr. King, who was going to Los Angeles to address the Cali-

fornia Democratic Council. Though the council was endorsing Eugene

McCarthy, Bobby hoped that Dr. King could be persuaded to delay

announcing his endorsement until after Bobby had officially entered

the race. On March 15, Bobby’s aide finally reached King, who agreed

to Bobby’s request.10

Bobby also had to deal with Lyndon Johnson. There was no point in