Hellhound on His Trail

by Hampton Sides

  Afterward, King, Abernathy, and their wives had a somber dinner at the Abernathy house.262 Juanita Abernathy cooked fish and a special casserole she prepared only once a year--a concoction made from pig's ears, pig's feet, and pig's tail. Following the heavy meal, they lounged around the house. Coretta and the Abernathys tried to cheer King up, to little effect. He was still licking his wounds.

  He talked about going on a fast, as Gandhi had done, to purify the movement. He talked about the old times in Montgomery, dredging up names long forgotten and reliving youthful triumphs from the halcyon days of the struggle. He tried to snooze on a love seat in the Abernathy family room, gently grousing that the chair was too small.

  IN BIRMINGHAM the next morning, Eric Galt returned to Aeromarine263 Supply Company as the doors opened at 9:00. Don Wood waited on him. Something about this customer didn't seem right, and Wood wanted to oversee every aspect of the transaction. He quickly deduced, as John DeShazo had, that Galt knew little about rifles--and even less about deer hunting.

  Galt told Wood he'd like to look at the Remington Gamemaster 760 .30-06-caliber rifle. Wood took it down from the rack, and Galt immediately liked the look and feel of it. It was a pump-action rifle, "the fastest hand-operated big game rifle made," according to the Remington literature.

  As Galt handled the Gamemaster, Wood asked him, "What you need that one for? That .243 there will kill anything in Alabama."

  "Well, see, I'm going to hunt in Wisconsin," Galt replied.

  The implication was that the bucks were bigger up that way, so he needed a rifle that could fire bigger ammo. Certainly the .30-06 version of the Gamemaster 760 fit the bill. It had prodigious amounts of "knockdown power," enough to kill anything in Alabama and Wisconsin, too. The ammunition the Gamemaster fired had real heft--it weighed twice as much as the .243-caliber round Galt had purchased the day before.

  Galt asked some technical questions about the velocities and trajectories of various rounds. Wood recommended the Remington-Peters .30-06 soft-pointed Springfield High Velocity Core-Lokt cartridge--150 grain--which he noted would travel 2,670 feet per second. Mushrooming on impact, the bullet would bring down the biggest buck on earth at three hundred yards. At one hundred yards, it was said to be capable of stopping a charging rhinoceros. And it was astonishingly accurate, Wood said: for a target standing a hundred yards away, the bullet would drop only one-hundredth of an inch.

  The rifle's pump-action feature especially appealed to Galt. It would allow him to keep his finger poised on the trigger and his eye fixed on the sight while smoothly pumping the rifle's slide mechanism to reload. As the Remington brochure put it, "The pump-action aids264 the shooter in staying on-target during second- and third-shot situations ... helping you to put that buck in the freezer."

  Galt said he'd take it, even though the Gamemaster .30-06 cost a little more than the .243. For a scope, Galt decided on a Redfield 2x7. Wood asked Galt to give him a few hours to mount the scope, and Galt took off. Wood mounted it himself, setting it to 7x, the maximum magnification--so a deer viewed through the Redfield's crosshairs would appear seven times closer than it was. The Redfield company boasted that its 2x7 offered a "wide enough field of view265 for tracking moving animals [but] good compromise power for varminting." Another nice feature was the magnesium fluoride film coating on the scope's lens, which enabled a shooter to see his target in low-light situations--even at late dusk.

  The only problem with the scope was that, once mounted, its high profile prevented the Gamemaster from fitting into its original box. At three o'clock, when Galt returned, Wood suggested that he might want to buy a nice leather gun case, but Galt didn't want to spend any more money. So Wood improvised a solution: he rummaged around in the back of the store and found an old box for a Browning rifle, which was slightly bigger than the Gamemaster box. Wood stuffed the scope-mounted rifle into the carton--it just fit--and secured the slightly cumbersome assemblage with Scotch tape.

  Pleased enough with the jury-rigged packaging, Galt selected a twenty-round box of the Remington-Peters .30-06 cartridges and told Wood he was ready to settle up. He took out his wallet and completed the exchange, paying the difference from the previous day's purchase in cash.

  Again, Galt gave his name as "Harvey Lowmeyer" with a Birmingham address. Wood did not ask his customers to show identification--nor was he required by any law to do so. Galt smiled awkwardly, picked up the package, and turned toward the door.

  17 TO LIVE OR DIE IN MEMPHIS

  THAT SAME MORNING, in Atlanta, King held an emergency meeting of his SCLC executive staff to discuss what to do about Memphis. The all-day conclave was held in a paneled conference room on the third floor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church on Auburn Avenue. Key advisers had flown in from all over the country: Chauncey Eskridge, one of King's legal counselors, came in from Chicago; Stanley Levison, from New York; Walter Fauntroy, from Washington; a labor delegation from Memphis. All King's regular staff was there, too: Andrew Young, James Bevel, Dorothy Cotton, Hosea Williams, James Orange, Jesse Jackson, and, of course, Abernathy.

  All through the morning, King sat at a cramped Sunday-school desk, a creaky affair with a tiny wooden writing surface attached by a slender arm. He listened quietly to his staffers as they deconstructed the disaster in Memphis. They bickered and hurled accusations and named names. They agreed on little--except that Memphis was a catastrophe, and that under no circumstances should King go back to that troubled river town. The situation in Memphis, said one adviser, "was a set up,"266 possibly orchestrated by the FBI to ruin King once and for all. It was a detour, a dangerous left turn. And it was a drain on resources that the SCLC did not have.

  King listened to the dissension with growing agitation and distress. More painful to him was that many members of his staff clearly were not on board with the Poor People's Campaign. The Washington project, they said, was too ambitious, too logistically complicated, too diffuse in its goals. King held his tongue as staff members put forward their own ideas about what they should be doing. Jim Bevel wanted to concentrate on the Vietnam War. Jesse Jackson thought grassroots economic initiatives like the one he headed up in Chicago--called Operation Breadbasket--were the most promising use of the SCLC's time and energy. Hosea Williams said the real secret to gaining power was voter registration drives to elect leaders sympathetic to their cause.

  After a while the discussion became a blur to King. His young staffers were headstrong. They were growing restless and wanted to take the movement in their own directions. Some of them thought they were smarter than King--and that he'd lost his touch.

  Slowly, King rose from his Sunday-school desk and vented his feelings. "We are in serious trouble,"267 he said. "The whole movement is doomed." Couldn't they see? It wasn't about Memphis anymore, or even Washington. It wasn't about the fine points of protest strategy. It was about the very foundation of nonviolence itself. Their flame was in danger of flickering out. Everything they'd worked for since Montgomery was on the line. Forget Washington. They couldn't even think about going there until they had proved to the nation that they could bring off a nonviolent march and redeem their mistakes and reestablish the primacy of their central creed.

  "Memphis," he said, "is the Washington campaign in miniature."268 They had no choice. They had to go back there before they could go anywhere else. "The Movement lives or dies in Memphis," he said.

  The staff would not relent. As far as most of his advisers were concerned, both Memphis and Washington were mistakes.

  King finally lost patience with his staff. They were too impressed with themselves, too full of private ambition. He was especially angry with Jesse Jackson, who seemed to be trying to create his own fiefdom in Chicago. "You guys come up269 with your projects," King said, "and you always pull me in. If I sensed that this was important to the movement and to you, it always had my full support. Now, I'm not getting your full support. Now that I want you to come back to Memphis to help me, everyone is too busy."
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  Finally he turned to Abernathy. "Ralph, give me my car keys.270 I'm getting out of here."

  Abernathy looked puzzled. During the conversation, he'd been playing with King's keys on the table, and he'd absentmindedly stuffed them in his pocket. Now he handed them over, and King stormed down the hall toward the stairs.

  Abernathy followed him. "Martin," Ralph said. "What's bugging you?"

  "Ralph, I'll snap out of it. Didn't I snap out of it yesterday?"

  "Will you let me know where you'll be?"

  King didn't answer.

  Then Jesse Jackson tried to follow King down the stairs. "Doc, don't worry," he said. "Everything's going to be all right."

  King paused on the landing and wheeled on Jackson. "Jesse," he said. "Everything's not going to be all right.271 If things keep going the way they're going now, it's not just the SCLC but the whole country that's in trouble. If you're so interested in doing your own thing that you can't do what this organization's structured to do, if you want to carve out your own niche in society, go ahead. But for God's sake, don't bother me!"

  Jackson stood speechless as King climbed in his car and took off, leaving the staff flummoxed and heartsick. Abernathy tried to pick up the pieces. "The leader is confused,"272 he said somberly. "He's under great stress. We need to rally around him in this difficult time." What happened in Memphis had shaken him to the core. He was experiencing a spiritual crisis. They had no choice now--they all had to go back to Memphis and make things right.

  Everyone in the room agreed. "We had never seen Martin273 explode that way, not with us," recalled Andrew Young. "After he left, people were so stunned they finally began to listen. Finally, the team of wild horses was one."

  They talked about Memphis. They would send some of their best people ahead of King to work with the Invaders and plan every aspect of the march. They would give King everything he wanted.

  The transformation was so complete that some board members thought the Holy Spirit had been in the room. There were war whoops and hallelujahs.274 Andrew Young danced a little jig. Out of dissension, a consensus had formed.

  Yet for several long hours they couldn't locate King to tell him the good news. What he did during his absence remains a mystery. Some said he met one of his mistresses275 in an apartment hideaway. Others said he conferred with his father, Martin Luther King Sr.--Daddy King, as he was known. Still others said he experienced a kind of Gethsemane moment, a period of private doubt and soul-searching in some favorite place of seclusion.

  When he showed up late that afternoon, King was immensely relieved to hear the staff had come together. He now had to pack for a quick trip to Washington--he was giving an important sermon the next day. When he returned, his time and energies would be focused on one place: Memphis.

  AT SHORTLY AFTER eleven o'clock the following morning, King stepped into the grand white pulpit of the Washington National Cathedral. Cloaked in black clerical robes, he seemed to have emerged from the depths of the previous day's despair. He addressed an integrated crowd of more than three thousand worshippers packed inside the vast Gothic hall. A thousand more were gathered on the grounds outside, listening to a public address system. It would be King's last formal sermon.

  King spoke in fulminous tones about Vietnam, calling it "one of the most unjust wars276 in the history of the world." The conflict has "strengthened the military-industrial complex, it has strengthened the forces of reaction in our nation, it has played havoc with our domestic destinies, and it has put us in a position of appearing to the world as an arrogant nation."

  The central theme of the sermon was poverty in America--and the moral imperative to address it. "Ultimately," he said, "a great nation is a compassionate nation. But America has not met her obligations to the poor." He likened poverty in America to "a monstrous octopus, spreading its nagging, prehensile tentacles." In recent months, he'd been to Appalachia, he said, and to the ghettos of Newark and Harlem, and to many other impoverished places in America where he'd seen conditions so squalid that "I must confess I have literally found myself crying." He told the crowd that in Marks, Mississippi, in the nation's poorest county, he'd seen so much hunger on the faces of sharecroppers there that he concluded something radical had to be done to acquaint the nation's leaders with the ravages of systemic, multigenerational poverty.

  "We are coming to Washington in a Poor People's Campaign," he vowed. He would bring an army of people from all races and backgrounds, people "who have come to feel that life is a long and desolate corridor with no exit signs, people who have never seen a doctor or a dentist in their lives." Although King said that the members of his Poor People's Army "do not seek to tear up Washington," they will nevertheless engage in what he called "traumatic nonviolent action." Fighting would accomplish nothing--not in Memphis, not in Washington, not in Vietnam. "We must learn to live together as brothers," he said, "or we will perish together as fools." Nothing will ever be done about poverty in America "until people of goodwill put their hearts and souls in motion."

  Afterward, King held a brief press conference in which he said outright that he could not support President Johnson for reelection. "I see an alternative277 in Senator McCarthy and Senator Kennedy," he said, and though he had already privately concluded that Kennedy was the better choice, he stopped short of making an endorsement. As in Memphis, reporters pressed him to make a pronouncement on the prospect for riots over the summer. "I don't like to predict violence," King replied, "but if nothing is done between now and June to raise ghetto hope, I feel this summer will be not only as bad, but worse, than last year." This would be terrible, not only for the ghettos, but for the very health of American democracy. "We cannot stand two more summers like last summer without leading inevitably to a rightwing takeover and a fascist state."

  What would it take for you to call off your Poor People's Campaign? one journalist asked. What would Congress or the president have to do?

  King said he would gladly cancel the whole demonstration if Congress would adopt the recommendations recently proposed by the Kerner Commission, a bipartisan body that had made a thorough study of the riots in Watts, Newark, Detroit, and other cities. But King saw little cause for optimism. "I would be glad278 to talk to President Johnson or anyone else," King said. "We're always willing to negotiate."

  AT THAT MOMENT, President Johnson was decidedly not in the mood to negotiate with Martin Luther King. Johnson was only a few miles away at the White House, planning an important speech he would give that night on national television. The address was primarily about Vietnam, but Johnson was toying with the idea of tacking on a bombshell at the end. He was thinking about announcing to the nation that he was withdrawing from the 1968 presidential race.

  For months, Johnson had been secretly thinking of leaving office at term's end. There were many reasons for this, but the truth was he'd become miserable in the White House. He'd been having nightmares about his health. His Gallup approval rating had plummeted to 36 percent. He had enemies on all sides. Trying to describe the White House mood, Lady Bird Johnson paraphrased Yeats: "A miasma of trouble hangs over everything."

  Vietnam, the war that King so stridently criticized, lay at the center of Johnson's woes. The quagmire in Southeast Asia had become the president's obsession. It occupied most of his time and energy, and it hogged so much national treasure that he could no longer pursue the Great Society programs he had once doted on. Besieged by war critics, Johnson had become paranoid, distrustful of old friends, imprisoned in the office he once loved.

  He wanted out.

  "I felt that I was being chased279 on all sides by a giant stampede coming at me from all directions," he later told the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. "Rioting blacks, demonstrating students, marching welfare mothers, squawking professors, and hysterical reporters. And then the final straw. The thing I feared from the first day of my Presidency was actually coming true. Robert Kennedy had openly announced his intention to reclaim the throne in
the memory of his brother. And the American people, swayed by the magic of the name, were dancing in the streets."

  Relinquishing power went against every grain of Johnson's being. Yet he had a hunch that by stepping down now, he could regain political capital and close out his term with a measure of grace, perhaps devoting his final months to extricating the country from Vietnam. It would be a retreat with honor, a magnanimous exit. His speechwriters composed two endings for that night's speech, and it was up to Johnson to decide which one to use.

  The president spent the afternoon and early evening fretting over what to do. By dinnertime, no one, not even Johnson, was certain which ending he would pick. At 9:00, he went on the air. For twenty-five minutes, Johnson spoke of Vietnam and his desire for peace. He was halting the bombing over most of North Vietnam, he said, and was now proposing serious talks with Ho Chi Minh.

  Then, with a change in tone that caught millions of viewers off guard, the president stared straight into the teleprompter. "With the world's hopes280 for peace in the balance every day," he said, "I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President."

  When the address was over, a euphoric Johnson leaped from his chair and bounded from the Oval Office to be with his family. "His air was that of a prisoner let free,"281 the First Lady wrote. "We were all fifty pounds lighter and ever so much more lookin' forward to the future."

  The president described his mood this way: "I never felt so right282 about any decision in my life."