Parting the Waters (64 page)

“All right, all right,” Shriver said hurriedly. “You've got to give me some good numbers.” After money and publicity, accurate phone numbers were the most precious commodity in a campaign.

Wofford quickly rattled off numbers for Hartsfield, Morris Abram, and others, assuming Shriver would want to lay the groundwork for a call. “No, no,” said Shriver. There wasn't time for all that. “Where is she? Give me
her
number.” He took down the King home number in Atlanta, put it in his pocket, and rejoined the huddle around Kennedy.

Shriver waited, hoping that Sorensen, O'Donnell, Salinger, Lawrence O'Brien, and the other members of Kennedy's kitchen cabinet would rush off to telephones and typewriters. He did not want to mention Wofford's idea in their presence. If they did not strangle the idea on sight, the aides, who liked to speculate about how contemplated moves might play in
The New York Times
, would object that Kennedy could not possibly do anything quiet in the King case, which was on that morning's front page. Finally, Senator Kennedy said he was not feeling well and went into the bedroom to lie down. Shriver alone followed him. Gently but urgently, he repeated Wofford's proposition, stressing what he called King's “lousy treatment” in jail and Mrs. King's emotional breakdown. “I think you ought to give her a call, Jack,” he concluded.

Kennedy sat up wearily on the bed. “What the hell,” he said. “That's a decent thing to do. Why not? Get her on the phone.”

Shriver quickly pulled the paper from his pocket and dialed the number. The phone rang in the King bedroom, where Coretta was dressing to keep an appointment with Morris Abram. Daddy King, who had decided that this situation was grave enough to require the influence of a white lawyer like Abram, instead of Hollowell, was on his way to take her with him. When Coretta identified herself, Shriver said, “Just a minute, Mrs. King, for Senator Kennedy,” and handed the phone to the candidate on the bed.

After greeting her, Kennedy said, “I know this must be very hard for you. I understand you are expecting a baby, and I just wanted you to know that I was thinking about you and Dr. King. If there is anything I can do to help, please feel free to call on me.”

“I certainly appreciate your concern,” said Coretta. “I would appreciate anything you could do to help.”

It was over within two minutes. Coretta called Mother King fairly bursting with the news, and Shriver sneaked out the back door of the suite before the aides arrived to whisk Senator Kennedy to the plane.

 

At Reidsville state prison, clad in striped prison garb, King was being held in solitary confinement until the custodians finished processing him into prison duties. His presence already had attracted the special attention of the inmates. Some Negro prisoners sent messages reminding him that they had written him for advice about how to appeal convictions for various heinous crimes; other messages informed him that there was a movement to stage a hunger strike in his honor. King discouraged the idea.

That afternoon, he wrote his first letter from prison, to Coretta. “Hello Darling,” it began.

On the campaign flight to Detroit, Senator Kennedy mentioned casually to Pierre Salinger that he had made a personal call from Chicago to Mrs. Martin Luther King. It was not quite a confession and not quite a warning, but Salinger and the others had no trouble figuring out that Shriver had slipped something past them, probably on the urging of the pesky Wofford. Salinger was concerned enough to call Robert Kennedy on the radiophone.

In general, Kennedy aides were admired for just what Salinger now feared of Wofford: daring, unorthodox maneuvers to unearth political treasure. The biggest hero inside the campaign was the lawyer who had pried out of the Eisenhower State Department a secret poll showing U.S. prestige to be in decline around the world because of the U-2 incident and the crises in Cuba and the Congo. In order to protect Kennedy from charges that he was using classified information for partisan purposes, the lawyer helped leak the poll to
The New York Times
with assurances that the campaign would not be identified as its source. Then, citing the
Times
story, Senator Kennedy was free to demand release of the poll and to hammer away on what he called “a threat to survival.” In the last month of the campaign, Kennedy made more headlines with the prestige issue than with any other. What Salinger and his colleagues feared was that Wofford was just enough of a Kennedy man to apply these hard-headed tactics to a softheaded issue.

This was precisely what Wofford and Louis Martin had in mind. To protect himself inside the campaign, Wofford first called Coretta King and told her that it was vitally important for her not to tell any reporters about Senator Kennedy's call without Wofford's consent. Then he and Martin began to guide reporters toward a story in Atlanta, moving delicately and indirectly, mentioning Abram and others who knew of the call while trying to keep themselves hidden as sources. The game ended abruptly when a
New York Times
reporter called Wofford wanting to know why Coretta King was saying that she would not talk to reporters without clearance from Wofford. (Wofford had neglected to tell her that she must not only follow his instructions but keep the instructions themselves confidential.) Shrugging, he called her back and told her it was all right to talk now.

At the Kennedy campaign headquarters in Washington, Robert Kennedy's first move after hearing that reporters were onto the story was to call Sargent Shriver in a quiet fury. When Shriver disclosed the facts of the phone call from the Chicago airport, Kennedy tongue-lashed and belittled him in a tirade that permanently strained the family relationship between them. “You bomb-throwers have lost the whole campaign,” he said. When he hung up on Shriver, he sent orders for Wofford and Martin to report to his office at once.

The summons was received in the civil rights office as a calling card from the executioner. “Well, I think you're the best one to tell Bobby what happened,” Wofford said to Martin.

“He said both of us,” Martin protested, trying to laugh. He agreed, however, that Wofford was much more exposed as the culprit, and finally went to Kennedy's office a few minutes ahead of Wofford, hoping to soften the blow.

Robert Kennedy picked up with Martin where he had left off with Shriver, in a stream of curses delivered in an ominously quiet manner. As Martin waited for an opening to defend himself, it seemed to him that Kennedy's outburst was strangely disconnected from the facts—that his ranting was the nervous frustration of a campaign manager only thirteen days from the election, burdened by a million problems. “Well, one reason we did it,” Martin interjected at first chance, “was that they took Dr. King out of Atlanta on an old traffic charge of driving without a license. Then they sentenced him to four months on the chain gang, denied bail, and took him off in the middle of the night to the state prison. All in one day.”

“How could they do that?” Kennedy asked doubtfully. “Who's the judge? You can't deny bail on a misdemeanor.”

Martin decided that Kennedy may have lost sight of the essential fact that King was a Negro—a detail Southern politicians carefully avoided in their protests against interference in the King case. “Well, they just did it,” said Martin. “They wanted to make an example of him as an uppity Negro. That's why it's so dangerous to us in the campaign. I've heard that Jackie Robinson is trying to get Nixon to hold a press conference and blame the whole thing on the Democrats. Those are all Democrats running things down there.” Martin stopped. For all he knew, the Jackie Robinson story, which he had invented on the way to Kennedy's office, might be true.

Kennedy paused for a number of seconds and then said, “Uh, goddammit,” in a weary expletive that could have cut in many directions.

When Wofford joined them, Kennedy chewed him out for insubordination, for pushing Senator Kennedy into a politically explosive controversy. He commanded the civil rights office to do nothing else controversial for the duration of the campaign—no literature, no press conferences, no little schemes, nothing that might get into the newspapers—and then dismissed them curtly. After they left, Kennedy asked his aide John Seigenthaler to drive him to the airport to catch a plane to New York for a speech. On the way, he wondered out loud if there was something he could do to draw fire away from his brother in the King case. His anger darted furtively toward all those involved, except for Senator Kennedy. Seigenthaler advised him to do nothing.

Later that night, the Kennedy campaign plane also landed in New York. As the candidate stepped off the plane, a reporter asked him if it was true that he had called Mrs. King earlier that day. “She is a friend of mine,” said Kennedy, who had never met Coretta and never would, “and I was concerned about the situation.” As he brushed past the reporter, he said something softly about having a traitor in his camp.

Still, the reporter had a confirmation. The next morning's
New York Times
contained a two-inch item on page 22 noting that Senator Kennedy had made a sympathy call to Mrs. King, and that a Republican spokesman said Vice President Nixon would have no comment on the King case. The
Times
played it as a minor story, and most of the nation's major news outlets gave it even less attention. Politically, this was just what Wofford and Martin had wished. They would have had an opening to publicize among Negro voters an event that went practically unnoticed among whites. But now, under Robert Kennedy's explicit gag order, they ruefully let the opportunity pass.

 

In Atlanta, Donald Hollowell dispelled a far more intense gloom that morning when he trumpeted the news that Judge Mitchell had changed his mind and signed an order to release King on $2,000 bond. In a mad scramble of joy, Wyatt Tee Walker raided the SCLC treasury to charter a private plane, grabbed Ralph Abernathy, and took off for Reidsville ahead of three other private planes filled with lawyers and reporters. It was soon recorded that King emerged from the prison at 3:46
P.M.
, free after eight days and nights in three different prisons. The rest of the King family met the caravan of planes outside Atlanta at 5:57
P.M.
A reporter who was seeing King for the first time as he tumbled out of the plane and hugged Coretta wrote that he “had a look of vulnerability about him—not softness, naivete, but somehow hurtable.”

Daddy King escorted his son into a Cadillac limousine big enough to hold the entire family, including the children and Christine's husband, and the caravan of planes turned into a triumphal procession of automobiles. A hundred sit-in veterans were waiting in cars at the Fulton County line, on the way into Atlanta. King's caravan pulled over to the side of the road on sight of them. People spilled joyfully out of the cars into the road, where they sang “We Shall Overcome.” Then the combined line of cars made its way to Ebenezer for a spontaneous mass meeting. King was the object of thanksgiving, but Daddy King was the master of the overflow crowd. He spoke of God and courage and fear, and then chose that moment to make the announcement he had promised Harris Wofford earlier that day. “I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion,” he declared. “But now he can be my President, Catholic or whatever he is. It took courage to call my daughter-in-law at a time like this. He has the moral courage to stand up for what he knows is right. I've got all my votes and I've got a suitcase, and I'm going to take them up there and dump them in his lap.”

The crowd roared approval, and roared again when Ralph Abernathy said it was time to “take off your Nixon buttons.” But King himself, almost visibly compressed by the sudden shift from prison to politics, spoke more personally about jail as a test of faith. “We must master the art of creative suffering,” he said. All he said about the presidential election was that he would never let a candidate's religion determine his vote.