Pillar of Fire (40 page)

For Martin Luther King, the Johnson transition sent a misleading message about FBI attitudes. Relieved of the persistent pressures and veiled warnings of the past three years, he had reason to hope that he was escaping Cold War suspicion, but it was Hoover instead who was getting free of political constraint. Almost daily, an FBI blow landed somewhere in the country against the oblivious King, who searched for a revised movement strategy. On March 4, as he flew to Alabama for a statewide SCLC meeting, the Bureau's top officials learned to their horror that Marquette University had offered him an honorary doctorate. This was “shocking indeed,” recorded an FBI supervisor, especially coming from “the same institution which honored the Director with such a Degree in 1950.” Headquarters instructed Milwaukee agents to approach reliable contacts at Marquette with a confidential sample of the Bureau's worst allegations about King's private life and “communistic connections.”

King, who knew of the proposed honor from Marquette, addressed conflicting pressures in Montgomery. “We have not lost sight of the fact that nonviolence was born in Alabama,” he told two hundred SCLC associates. He pictured a bold new campaign variously as statewide or concentrated, run from Montgomery if not from Birmingham, directed against stubborn segregation or possibly for the right to vote. Drawbacks plagued each option. A return to the “unfinished business” of Birmingham would advertise the trauma still there six months after the unsolved church bombing,
*
not to mention white backsliding from the terms of King's landmark settlement. Against the impassioned advocacy of James and Diane Bevel, on the other hand, critics objected that it was foolish to launch a drive for voting rights while Congress was debating segregation.

Undecided, King broke away for the Freedom March in Frankfort and then speech travels to Atlanta, Connecticut, New York, and back to Kentucky. He learned on the run that Marquette had dropped its honorary degree because of commencement conflicts with his June schedule—but not that FBI headquarters bestowed a special commendation upon the agent who engineered the Marquette “impasse,” or that the Bureau was blocking another honorary degree at Springfield College. Massachusetts Senator Leverett Saltonstall, DeLoach reported to headquarters, was deeply shaken by the derogatory briefing on King he received in strictest confidence, and “said if it were not for the integrity of the FBI he would disbelieve such facts.”

On March 6, DeLoach reluctantly met with Robert Kennedy's press secretary, Edwin Guthman, who blurted out grievances accumulated over the past four months. He charged that President Kennedy's body had not yet cooled before Hoover and the FBI began circumventing the Justice Department to deal directly with the Johnson White House. Not only were Bureau people shunning the Department, Guthman said, but Kennedy was picking up stories of political collusion between Hoover and Johnson against him. He said the Kennedy people deserved better, especially in light of the Attorney General's public record of defending Director Hoover. “I made no comment to this obvious lie,” DeLoach told headquarters in a report that stressed scorn for Guthman's “entire line of chatter.”

On DeLoach's recommendation, Hoover took the Guthman peace feeler straight to the White House as fresh evidence of conspiratorial leaks from presidential holdovers loyal to Robert Kennedy. After lunch on the following Monday, March 9, Hoover and DeLoach accepted President Johnson's invitation to paddle around with him and Walter Jenkins in the White House pool. The President asked Hoover for a confidential evaluation of actress Janet Leigh, a possible nominee as ambassador to Finland. (Three days later, the Director called Johnson to report that Leigh was “absolutely clean…one of the finest, cleanest persons out in Hollywood…a fine mother.”) Johnson showed no distaste for the recent batch of weekly reports on Martin Luther King's sex life and phone calls, including the latest, rather mundane bulletin about King's second thoughts on hiring Bayard Rustin, and he pushed Hoover to report on Paul Corbin and other connections to Robert Kennedy that might pose political danger. Like Hoover, Johnson worried obsessively about press criticism, which gave the Director an opening to present his Bureau as politically loyal detective agency. That afternoon, hours after hearing Johnson decry as slander a current news report that he planned to lower the military draft age to seventeen, Hoover called Johnson from headquarters to identify Sargent Shriver as the Bureau's chief suspect in the leak.

Still, Hoover the master bureaucrat was more than shrewd enough to read signals about Johnson's limits. From the President's expressed hopes for passage of the civil rights bill in the Senate, where debate opened that same Monday, Hoover knew to refuse Rep. Howard Smith and other Southern committee chairmen permission to attack Martin Luther King with FBI material circulating on Capitol Hill. “I do
not
want anything on King given to Smith or anyone else at this time,” Hoover instructed DeLoach,
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knowing that any controversy would mark the Bureau as the source. Similarly, Hoover recognized a test when Johnson interrupted their pool conversation with a monologue on his forthcoming poverty program. The President asked the Director to read and review the advance recommendations of the new Shriver task force, a request so foreign to Hoover's taste that he was unsure whether Johnson intended it as an idle remark or a hint to temper his criticism of Shriver. DeLoach treated the unpleasant chore as a straightforward test of loyalty, and drafted for Hoover an enthusiastic appraisal of the anti-poverty blueprint. On his own, DeLoach thanked President Johnson for social courtesies with the flattery that served well in Hoover's FBI: “The informality, yet quiet dignity you possess, never ceases to inspire me.”

 

M
ARTIN
L
UTHER
K
ING
spent the Monday of Hoover's White House luncheon at home in Atlanta, reflecting on recent history. He did his best to shut out dramatic news—the Supreme Court's announcement that morning of its historic reversal in
New York Times v. Sullivan
, and published reports that U.S. District Judge Harold Cox referred in court to would-be Mississippi voters as “a bunch of niggers…acting like a bunch of chimpanzees”—and withdrew for hours to record one of the first oral histories for the contemplated Kennedy presidential library. On assurance of confidentiality until his death, King surprised the interviewer by stating that he had not found much difference between Kennedy and Richard Nixon during the 1960 campaign. Senator Kennedy, said King, struck him as “so concerned about being President of the United States that he would compromise basic principles.” Abandoning his customary detachment, King lapsed into a reminiscence on his surprise night ride to state prison before the election. “They had me chained all the way down there, and, you know, the chains about my legs,” he said. “They kind of tied my legs to, they had something in the floor where the chains were attached, and I guess it's a method they use when they transport real criminals, so it would be no way for me to escape. And I was handcuffed.”

He recalled from the standpoint of a helpless prisoner an event that analysts had identified as a turning point of national politics. “I had known Nixon longer,” he said. “He had been supposedly close to me, and he would call me frequently about things, getting, seeking my advice. And yet when this moment came, it was like he had never heard of me, you see.” Of the contrasting phone call by John Kennedy, King tried to talk himself into a generous reading. “And I would like to feel, I really feel this, that he made the call because he was concerned,” he told the recorder. “He had come to know me as a person then. He had come to know more about this problem. Harris [Wofford] and others had really been talking with him about it.” Those briefings must have opened Kennedy to King's personal and racial burdens, he reasoned, and yet he realized that candidate Kennedy had pondered the risk of a friendly gesture toward a Negro leader. “And there's nothing wrong with it,” he said of political calculation. From his habitual effort to project himself into the mind-set of a white leader, King managed to find clues of genuine sympathy in Senator Kennedy's phone call to Coretta. “That's the other thing,” he said. “He didn't
know
it was politically sound.”

Throughout his interview, King generally admitted that political frictions remained far stronger than personal bonds or shared conviction. He recalled the Kennedys' stinging rebukes over his conduct during the Freedom Rides, his Albany jail marches (“They were very, very upset about that”), and the Birmingham campaign. He said events changed President Kennedy rather than vice versa. If made public, his account would have been received both as a slur on President Kennedy's reputation and a confession of King's wounded self. By ingrained training, King normally adjusted his sharp inner divisions—a sturdy dignity at war with enraging exclusion, which the scholar Du Bois had called the “twoness” of race—toward a middle ground that he could present to whites and Negroes alike. “I really think we saw two Kennedys, a Kennedy the first two years and another Kennedy emerging in 1963,” he told the interviewer more than once. The Kennedy who had vacillated over his “razor-thin edge” from the 1960 election changed after Birmingham into one who addressed race as a moral issue of national survival. “At this point,” said King, “he went through what Lincoln went through.”

King never mentioned the FBI, even in his confidential oral history. The Bureau was remote to his awareness, and neither King nor Hoover realized that Robert Kennedy just then was discarding his own conditioned advice that the hypersensitive Hoover must be coddled and assuaged, or at least let alone. In the second installment of
his
oral history, Kennedy described the Director as a creature of delusion and excess. “He's rather a psycho,” said Kennedy, who told stories of FBI bureaucrats so attuned to Hoover's whims that they tied store-bought grapes to a bare arbor outside his vacation villa rather than tell the Director that the crop was not in season. What made the FBI “a very dangerous organization,” Kennedy told the tape recorder, was not active blackmail so much as artfully managed intelligence—“so much information on so many people that doesn't leak out.” Kennedy let slip that Hoover had paid no attention to him since his brother's assassination, but then, as though to salvage even a negative respect for himself as Attorney General, he allowed that the FBI Director was engaged “in every way that he can think of to cause difficulty for me.”

King did not yet perceive FBI animosity so near, but Hoover's agents kept the SCLC office under physical surveillance throughout the day of his oral history interview. Forewarned by New York wiretaps, agents had spotted Stanley Levison among arriving train passengers in Atlanta and followed him to King. From an intercept on King's home phone, headquarters learned that Levison slept over there that night. Assorted wiretaps outlined for FBI officials the range of troubles that made King send for Levison—among them SCLC's crippling debt, King's indecision over staff replacements, and prolonged frustration over choice of a renewed public campaign. King was toying with the notion of a personal hunger strike to support the civil rights bill, but Levison warned that senators would let him starve to death rather than curtail their filibuster.

As usual, Levison was most indispensable as a crisis manager among New York publishers. He labored over publishing conflicts and marketing plans for King's much-revised book about Birmingham, scheduled for publication in May. In the text, they carefully omitted the FBI's name from suggested improvements in the fight against Klan violence, having learned that the Director resented even positive encouragements that associated the Bureau with imperfections. This precautionary silence only goaded headquarters into deeper suspicion. “It, of course, cannot be positively determined what he has in mind,” wrote an intelligence supervisor, “but this could be a backhanded way of taking a slap at the Bureau.”

King and Hoover looked at each other through opposite ends of a powerful telescope. To King, Hoover was a distant speck of white authority, hostile and yet necessary to hopes for justice in the South, whereas Hoover closely examined King's magnified pores. Two weekends earlier, when King had returned from Hawaii by way of the Hyatt House motel in Los Angeles, FBI technicians had obtained a second bonanza of microphone surveillance recordings: twenty-one reels of tape. From a Western trip that had receded already for King into a blur of speeches, dinners, airports, road parties, and assorted details—plans to open a West Coast SCLC office, notes from his secretary that she had not cried this time during his absence, and that the incoming president of Union Theological Seminary in New York was holding open the offer of a professorship for King—FBI technicians boiled down what the bugs had picked up while King was watching television in his motel room. Hoover fastened upon one sentence of lewd political blasphemy.

On Tuesday, March 10, the day after King's oral history in Atlanta and Hoover's White House luncheon, New Hampshire voters went to the polls in the first presidential primary. Hoover, freshly secure in his position, and confident that Robert Kennedy could not and would not make effective protest to Johnson, ordered Assistant Director Courtney Evans to take a top secret report that morning to the Attorney General. Since the assassination, Hoover had reduced Evans—Kennedy's chosen FBI liaison—to the status of cipher without duties, marked in the Bureau for dismissal. The delivery itself was a reminder of the bustling glory days when Kennedy labored to control Hoover by voluminous two-way communication strictly through Evans, and the content carried a crueler, gratuitous sting. After the usual warnings that disclosure would jeopardize vital national security secrets—the motel room bugs—Kennedy read that Martin Luther King, while watching a televised rerun of the Kennedy funeral, had sneered obscenely at the famous moment of mourning when Jacqueline Kennedy knelt prayerfully with her children against the late President's coffin. “Look at her,” the agents heard King say. “Sucking him off one last time.”