Pillar of Fire (77 page)

 

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EPTEMBER
11, when the Belafonte group had embarked for Africa, Martin Luther King departed for Germany shortly after a press conference at Boston University on the deposit of his personal papers. He offered only hints of disappointment over the ambivalence of his mentor Benjamin Mays at Morehouse, explaining that he had favored Boston because his postgraduate alma mater was “desirous enough of having these papers to give them the kind of attention that I think they will need….” News-hungry Boston reporters quickly baffled King by asking to hear the fabled recordings of his phone conversations with the Kennedy brothers. These questions were based on the erroneous inference that King—not the Kennedys—had controlled the eavesdropping vaguely suggested in news accounts of the Freedom Rides and the Meredith crisis at Ole Miss, and King could only say he recalled no such Kennedy intercepts in his collection. “Now there are certainly letters,” he added, to a noticeable deflation of interest. The reporters asked repeatedly about the extent of the white backlash, Communist or Black Muslim influence in riots, and whether King favored a “change of tactics on the part of the Negro perhaps to be less aggressive.” His replies were diplomatic—“Well, I don't think we can afford to be less aggressive…. Now it may be necessary to change tactics here and there…. I still feel that nonviolence is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people…”—but King did startle those who wondered why “Southern Negroes were actually brought to Boston because of allegations about our school system.” He predicted expansion of the nonviolent movement because “racial injustice does exist in the North in a serious way.”

With Ralph Abernathy, King flew to a German cultural festival at the invitation of West Berlin mayor Willy Brandt. On Sunday, September 13, again having mislaid his passport, he passed through the Berlin Wall on celebrity recognition to preach at Marienkirche in Communist East Berlin. From this austere city, from which Adolf Hitler had ruled Nazi Germany less than twenty years before, he sketched a biblical analogy about Israel's quest. Americans were climbing from “Egypt” at long last through the “wilderness” of segregation, King said—“For the first time we stand on the mountain”—and he surveyed historic choice from an imaginary perch. “As we look back into the wilderness, we see our brethren who have borne the burdens of slavery and segregation much too long,” he said. “Many have not had the opportunity to get an education…. Many are hungry and physically undernourished…. Many bear on their souls the scars of bitterness and hatred, seared there by the crowded slum conditions, police brutality, and the exploitation they experienced on the rural southern plantations. Still others lack self-confidence and courage to compete in this new land, and they wallow in drunkenness and despair.”

Looking ahead, King pictured intimidations in the “promised land” of interracial freedom, just as biblical spies once told Moses they felt “like grasshoppers” among the natives of Canaan. “We see the giants,” he said. “We see massive urban societies, dominated by well-entrenched political machines that see new voters as a threat to their power. We see automation…slum landlords…and poverty far worse than the wilderness conditions we have just left behind.” Then, quoting to the East German audience the movement hymn “Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” he preached. “We will learn to confront these demons just as we have those in the past,” he concluded, “and we shall overcome.”

King stayed on to receive an honorary degree from the Theological Seminary of Berlin, unaware of the fury stirred within the FBI over his pending request to visit the Pope in Rome. “It would be shocking indeed for such an unscrupulous character as King to receive an audience with the Pope,” wrote an intelligence officer, warned two weeks earlier by the wiretaps on King's telephones. FBI officials remixed the sabotage formula “we previously used in preventing King's receiving an honorary degree from Marquette University”—and piped it this time into the Vatican. At Hoover's instruction, Assistant Director John Malone visited Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York with the FBI's dossier on “the unsavory nature of King's character, both from a subversive and moral standpoint,” warning that the slightest sign of papal favor might even boost King toward a Nobel Prize.

Malone followed two orders: to “stress of course the confidential nature of our briefing so that the Bureau would not be drawn into the picture,” and to make sure Spellman reached the Vatican directly, so that if he did not, the Bureau could use “other channels.” Afterward, reporting success, Malone notified headquarters that “the Cardinal was most pleased and gratified that the Director thought enough of him to take him into his confidence and to rely upon him to handle such a delicate matter.” Not only did Spellman telephone the Pontiff's Secretary of State, Cardinal Cicognani, but he assured Malone that he would be in Rome personally to “further insure that the Pope is not placed in an embarrassing position through any contact with King.”

Spellman did proceed to Rome among two thousand bishops who gathered for the third plenary session of the Vatican Council, and by coincidence, Rabbi Abraham Heschel slipped into Rome also to seek the Pope's ear on a mission as secret as Malone's but of mirror purpose, parallel to King's, to rally ecumenical hope against divisions of faith and tribe. Since the second-year conclave had recessed the previous November, putting off a proposed statement of fraternal reconciliation with Judaism, traditional elements within the Church had “drastically watered down” Augustin Cardinal Bea's historic text, according to information leaked to the
New York Times
. Behind closed doors, by scriptural exegesis and political maneuver, they first omitted the retraction of pre-Holocaust Church teachings that Jews were accursed as a “deicide people,” and by September they inserted a “conversion clause” that three times expressed “with immovable faith” an expected “reunion of the Jewish people with the Church….”

Heschel reacted to the rumored alterations with vivid dismay: “I am ready to go to Auschwitz any time, if faced with the alternative of conversion or death.” Simultaneously, he upheld the lasting promise of the Vatican Council designed by the late Pope John XXIII: “We ardently pray that this great blessing may not vanish.” Only with trepidation did Heschel seek to lobby Pope Paul VI on Church doctrine, as few ranking Catholics and practically no Protestants ever did. For an Orthodox Jew the idea invited backfire on all sides—with conspiracists charging already that Zionist moles were bribing the Vatican for pardon in the death of Jesus, and Jewish leaders
*
of all three branches sealing themselves off from “Christian concerns.” Against entreaties that he not go, Heschel arranged a small measure of protection from Rabbi Louis Finkelstein of his seminary, then ventured alone on September 14 to plead face-to-face with Pope Paul VI, who ceremoniously scratched what he said was the conversion clause from the parchment before him.

The third plenary session resumed titanic struggle “
mostly
with words,” a council participant recorded, “nevertheless, it was a war with all its wickedness.” Bishops from Muslim countries predicted pogroms against their Christian minorities if the Church moderated traditional antipathy toward Jews. Scandal sheets circulated in Rome. When Cardinal Cicognani stunned the council by announcing—ostensibly for the Pope—that the draft was withdrawn again from consideration, Bea's European allies fought back with a heart-wrenching letter of appeal to Paul VI, beginning “
Magno cum dolore
” [With great sorrow], and eventually substituted for the conversion clause a balanced prayer that “all peoples will address the Lord in a single voice and ‘serve Him shoulder to shoulder.'” While falling short of final passage, Bea's signal revision of Church teaching on Judaism survived on the voting schedule for the concluding plenary in 1965. Anti-reform headlines bitterly lamented its escape from the brink of extinction: “Who Crucified Christ? The Vatican in the Year 1964.”

Rabbi Heschel had hastened back to New York in time for Yom Kippur observance through sundown of September 16, the same day the Atlanta SCLC office announced that Pope Paul would receive Martin Luther King before King left Europe. The news struck hard at FBI headquarters, where supervisors ordered an emergency review “to determine if there possibly could have been a slip-up.” Aides to Cardinal Spellman retransmitted the FBI's warning to the aged Cicognani, whose career in the Vatican labyrinth matched Hoover's longevity at the FBI, but Paul VI greeted King in the library of the Apostolic Palace for twenty-five minutes on Friday evening, September 18, during the Vatican Council deliberations. King happily emerged to brush aside press suggestions that his overwhelmingly Protestant followers back home might disapprove of his contact with a pope. He described the Pontiff as well informed on the American civil rights movement and optimistic about peaceful compliance with the new law. Surely it meant “new days ahead,” King joked, when a pope met “a fellow with the name of Martin Luther.” Reports of the harmonious occasion moved Hoover to write his galled reaction to a news clip in Washington: “I am amazed that the Pope gave an audience to such a degenerate.”

 

E
XTRALEGAL SURVEILLANCE
against King became so securely routine that Bureau supervisors took license with the required internal paperwork. To bug the eighth annual SCLC convention at the end of September, they first cited a need to monitor the subversive influence of Harry Wachtel, on what historian David Garrow later called “a new and transparently disingenuous concern” about two unverified informant reports that Wachtel and his wife had been leftists in the 1940s. Wachtel offered convenient symmetry as the substitute Stanley Levison: in reality, as King's New York adviser, and on paper, as the all-purpose justification for FBI surveillance. When Wachtel dropped plans to attend the convention, clerks rushed to fill the gap with an old comment in the files that King's father might be a Communist. Atlanta agents who knew Daddy King winced at using such casual nonsense, which came from an antagonistic Bureau source, but it sufficed as bureaucratic cover for the bug order.

King returned from Rome by way of stops in Spain and England, jotting down scores of staff reminders and “executive orders” for the upcoming convention of some five hundred SCLC delegates. C. T. Vivian was to notify Aaron Henry that he would receive the Rosa Parks Award, make sure Parks attended as an honored guest, and “get program printed.” Andrew Young was to “send letter in my name” reminding all SCLC board members to bring the expected contribution of $50 as the price of their often pontifical remarks. King himself issued the usual crackdown restrictions against runaway travel expenses and staff telephone calls, saying costs had swelled even beyond the year's receipts of $626,000. He departed in haste from a Research Committee meeting in New York, leaving behind a suit jacket in his room at the Ritz Hotel, preached for Fred Shuttlesworth in Cincinnati, begged off one engagement with a plea of exhaustion, and on September 28 arrived for his convention in Savannah, Georgia. King checked into one of fifty rooms reserved at the Manger Hotel, where, only a year earlier, Hosea Williams had recruited bellboy Willie Bolden to full-time movement work during demonstrations against the city's rigid color line.

While participants celebrated their generally cordial reception through Savannah's debut in mass integration, FBI cables praised the “extremely cooperative and reliable” hotel management for confidential favors, including the assignment of King to Room 902, directly beneath the rented monitoring station from which Bureau technicians had just dropped three bugging devices in the walls. Neither these intercepts nor the well-placed physical surveillance agents yielded any derogatory information on King through the week-long convention, and the only positive moment for the Bureau was a security relief that a segregationist bomb threat targeted not the Manger Hotel but an SCLC banquet being addressed by King and Jackie Robinson at the nearby DeSoto, sparing the microphone clerks in Room 1002 from being flushed out during bomb search evacuation.

Closer to convention business, Chauncey Eskridge established a trust agreement for the new Southern Christian Leadership Foundation, which created essentially a Chicago-based alternative to New York's nearly defunct Gandhi Society in the competition among King's lawyers to obtain a permanent tax exemption for charitable fund-raising. Also, lionizers of Wyatt Walker joked that it took King no fewer than four promoted assistants to replace him: James Bevel, Andrew Young, Randolph Blackwell, and Hosea Williams. Daddy King, on hearing an oral report to the SCLC board that his son might be a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, jumped up to propose that the remarks be printed for public distribution.

To five hundred delegates on October 1, King explored what he called “profound and revolutionary changes” since SCLC's shell-shocked 1963 convention in the wake of the Birmingham church bombing. He tried to describe a trembling center, from which legal segregation was being vanquished and new meanings of freedom were spilling abroad. His formal address reprised sweeping Exodus themes: “It is true that, by and large, we have left the dusty soils of Egypt….” Pairing Jeffersonian foundations with prophetic ones, as usual, he reached for high-flown images of the American Revolution: “We will have our Valley Forges and summer soldiers, and even Benedict Arnolds….”

On finding that state powers were making “surprisingly reasonable plans to comply with the civil rights bill,” for instance, King said he had pulled back from systematic demonstrations to test public accommodations in Alabama. With the South in orderly retreat from public laws on race, King foresaw that the signature tactic of nonviolent witness would become less effective there for lack of resistance, and told his Savannah audience that the movement must learn to adapt. “When we are idle,” he observed, “the white majority very quickly forgets the injustices which started our movement,” but poorly designed initiatives such as the World's Fair stall-in only backfire politically. He reviewed the traumatic experience in St. Augustine as a transitional campaign “to again remind the nation” of the need for the civil rights bill, and admitted little success beyond that purpose: “We were able to proclaim a relative victory….”