At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  Johnson thanked Hoover—“As usual, you’re right on top of it”—and asked about the difference between an infiltrator and an informant. “You hire someone? And they join the Klan and keep—”

  “We only go to someone who’s is, who is in the Klan,” Hoover replied, “and persuade him to work for the government. Uh, we pay him for it. Sometimes they demand a pretty high price, and sometimes they don’t. Now, for instance, in those three bodies we found in Mississippi, we had to pay thirty thousand dollars for that.” In Alabama, the informant was “not a regular agent of the Bureau,” but “fortunately he happened to be in on this thing last night,” said Hoover. “Otherwise, we’d be looking for a needle in a haystack.”

  President Johnson hung up the telephone and looked blankly at his aides. “Do you know Hoover had a guy, an informer, in that car that shot her?” he asked.

  Johnson immediately called Katzenbach to test his knowledge: “Looks like we’ll be pretty much on top of this one, doesn’t it?”

  “I say, I haven’t heard a lot,” Katzenbach confessed. The entire Justice Department knew nothing of Hoover’s secret, like Inspector Sullivan himself, and would remain sealed from its background.

  “They had an informant in the car,” the President announced. He said the FBI was waiting to pick up the killers.

  “Oh, that’s good,” said Katzenbach. Asked whether the President should speak directly with Liuzzo’s widower, Anthony Liuzzo, in Detroit, he advised a careful test of the FBI’s negative recommendation. Johnson agreed. He tasked White House lawyer Lee White to make a preliminary call, with instructions loaded toward FBI warnings that Liuzzo was dangerously bitter. Minutes later, White reported with surprise that he found Liuzzo to be “much in control of himself, very relaxed, and sounded like a pretty fine fellow.” Liuzzo was grieving with five children, and “had a few unkind things to say about Wallace,” White told Johnson, but “he was in sort of a reflective mood and wanted to know where do we go from here now…. My judgment, sir, is that if you did call him, that he’s gonna be reasonable and not in any sense uncontrollable or wild.”

  Hoover, meanwhile, called Attorney General Katzenbach to say “we have to move very rapidly” to break the Liuzzo case, and that Justice Department lawyers needed to draw up charges to hold the suspects. He accepted Katzenbach’s suggestion that only Doar was near enough to be mobilized instantly. Hoover tersely disclosed that there was an FBI informant. He explained with some exaggeration that President Johnson knew the substance ahead of the Attorney General only because he had called Hoover personally three or four times since midnight. For Katzenbach, the FBI Director added shocking arguments why the President should avoid the Liuzzo family, which Hoover promptly dictated to his top executives in a memo headed “9:32 A.M.”: “I stated the man himself doesn’t have too good a background and the woman had indications of needle marks in her arms where she had been taking dope; that she was sitting very, very close to the Negro in the car; that it had the appearance of a necking party.” Katzenbach did not react to Hoover’s slanderous Klan fantasy dressed as evidence,* but neither did he ask a single question about the FBI’s surprise informant in the murder car. Naively, or protectively, he formed an impression that Rowe had only a casual relationship with the FBI until turning state’s evidence after the crime. Like President Johnson, Katzenbach wanted to believe that the FBI discovered a miraculous star witness, and Hoover zealously aimed suspicion at the victim Liuzzo instead.

  President Johnson reached Hoover again minutes later, at 9:36, to say he was under heavy pressure to return Mr. Liuzzo’s phone call. The delay was making adverse news with an army of reporters camped in the Detroit home, waiting for reaction from the White House. Johnson wanted to know if Hoover knew “any reason why I shouldn’t, because in your file he’s a Teamster man.”

  “Yes, he’s a Teamster man,” said Hoover. His voice tumbled through stops and starts: “I wouldn’t say bad character, but he’s uh, uh, well known out there as being one of the Teamsters’ strong arm there, and uh, this woman his wife, uh we found on they, on her body, uh numerous uh needle points indicating that she may have been taking dope.” Hoover said Johnson should delegate the call to an aide.

  “White’s already talked to him,” said the President.

  “Oh, he has?” said Hoover, taken aback. He promised quickly to send word on arrests in Alabama.

  “Please do,” urged Johnson, “because they’re runnin’ me crazy over here.”

  “All right, I’ll, I’ll get word down there right away,” said Hoover. He offered the President hurried images of the dragnet—multiple stakeouts, the killers’ red Impala under surveillance in a yard—along with jumbled observations about motive. The Klan conspiracy was “pretty well planned out” since the Reeb murder, Hoover told Johnson, but he mitigated the ambush as a product of circumstance: “They accidentally ran onto this car by reason of the fact that this colored man was, was snugglin’ up uh, uh, pretty close to the white woman who was driving.” He thought it would be safe to make a statement from the White House within the next hour.

  The President instructed Hoover to grab the Attorney General when he was ready and “the two of you ride over and let the television cover you as you come in.” This, he added with understatement, “might be a little dramatic.”

  “Well, I’ll, I’ll speed this thing up right away,” replied Hoover as Johnson signed off. The Director scrambled the FBI, but first he called Katzenbach to lobby one last time against Liuzzo. The President should “hold off until after the case is broken,” Hoover told Katzenbach, “and then he could consider whether he wants to call the man and extend condolences.”

  Many years later, when documents and tape recordings of these transactions became available to scholars, Johnson would not be alive to say how consciously he was goading Hoover toward decisive commitment. The President had a recognized gift for subtle manipulation. He never acknowledged Hoover’s clear sensitivity about the Liuzzo call, nor his vulgarity. Among Hoover biographers, Richard Gid Powers would cite the Liuzzo comments in 1987 as evidence of Hoover’s core beliefs about civil rights: “paternalistic at best, mean-spiritedly racist at worst.” From a more complete record in 1998, Liuzzo biographer Mary Stanton would conclude that Hoover’s disparagement came also from a desperate need to minimize disclosure about his informant. If the first nationwide image of Liuzzo were a White House phone call with sympathetic relatives, stamping her as a martyred heroine, pressure to explain her death might unearth potentially ruinous secrets—beginning with the fact that the informant Gary Thomas Rowe had asked for and received prior FBI approval to ride with Thursday’s action squad, as he had been doing for nearly five years of unsolved crimes by the Birmingham Klan.

  “Hoover panicked,” wrote Stanton. He clawed against Liuzzo to seize the hero’s mantle for his Bureau. Most certainly he did not disclose that Liuzzo, in unmailed letters recovered from her car, said she had been inspired to Selma by Johnson’s March 15 address to Congress. Johnson, for his part, recognized how hard it was for Hoover to expose FBI performance to outside accountability. The Director had not surrendered the informant’s name even to him, let alone the public, as would be required for any criminal trial. Johnson pushed Hoover to guarantee at least that much.

  THE PRESIDENT initiated a record White House news day that preempted nationwide television three times before lunch. First, Johnson brought top congressional leaders from the Oval Office to thank them on camera for nearing passage of Medicare. He ambushed the bill’s chief remaining obstacle, Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia, by asking whether such momentous legislation deserved at least a vote in committee. When Byrd conceded that nothing urgent stood in the way of consideration, Johnson pressed in a televised display of his full-bodied lobbying style: “So when the House acts and it is referred to the Senate Finance Committee, you will arrange for prompt hearings and thorough hearings?” Byrd lamely committed himself, and the President soon led the way outsid
e to welcome a helicopter bearing Gemini 3 astronauts Virgil Grissom and John Young for a medal ceremony in the East Room.

  Only NBC of the three networks stayed afterward to broadcast the astronauts’ parade down Pennsylvania Avenue. CBS executives were congratulating themselves for the choice not to bump Search for Tomorrow, their popular and lucrative regular show, when the White House issued yet another presidential news standby. White House press secretary George Reedy refused to confirm whether the alert involved the Liuzzo case. Reporters frantically gathered clues. Word came from Detroit that Johnson called the Liuzzo house at 12:30, unsuccessfully—Liuzzo had collapsed after a sleepless night and the family decided not to wake him—and from Washington that the Director’s limousine was sighted on White House grounds. Television screens were yanked back to the presidential seal just before the announced entrance at 12:40, and network executives knew they had guessed correctly when President Johnson emerged flanked by Katzenbach and Director Hoover himself. The President announced the four arrested suspects by name. He called for a national campaign against “the terrorists of the Ku Klux Klan,” and congratulated the FBI for breaking the case within twenty-four hours. “I cannot express myself too strongly in praising Mr. Hoover,” he said. These actions dwarfed other news, generating triple-tiered headlines and five separate photographs on the front page of the New York Times.

  Inside the FBI, triumph gave way to renewed crisis when reporters questioned why Gary Thomas (Tommy) Rowe did not appear with the other three suspects Friday afternoon for arraignment. Rowe, the informant, had returned secretly to the crime scene with trusted FBI handlers, and was trying to remember where along Highway 80 they had thrown shell casings out the car windows. Terrified, Rowe procrastinated on a razor’s edge. The longer he remained separate from fellow Klansmen in jail, the more suspicion he invited upon himself as the government agent among them, but he did not want to leave his FBI protection. Finally, at 5:25 P.M., Rowe arrived handcuffed for arraignment in full Klan character, snarling at reporters and his FBI handlers alike. Attorney Matt Murphy, who identified himself by title as Klonsel for the Alabama Klan, secured the defendants’ immediate release on $50,000 bond and withdrew with a Grand Titan and an Exalted Cyclops to grill Rowe, who survived on his wits. Rowe said the FBI must have traced the action team through the warning ticket from the state trooper. He said with some truth that FBI agents had isolated him in custody all day, mixing threats and inducements to make him turn state’s evidence. Rowe claimed to be resisting gallantly. Klonsel Murphy said they could impeach any prosecution with evidence of tampering and “bribes.” Klan leaders reserved suspicion of Rowe, but let him go home.

  The FBI’s secret survived also in news coverage, with only one remote item questioning “an unexplained four-hour delay” in Rowe’s arraignment. Teams of agents diligently collected forensic evidence, and actually did find the spent shell casings along Highway 80. Edicts from FBI headquarters spurred them on, balanced by internal warnings to suppress all hints of an informant. One memo from Hoover’s office bluntly instructed that “all agents must keep their mouths shut.” A top official told supervisors that the Bureau had “no need or reason to explain what we are doing and the less said the better.” Hoover added a handwritten order: “I want no comments nor amplifications made in Ala. or here, as President has made his statement & it ends there.”

  Political work continued behind the bulwark of Johnson’s announcement. Granting an audience to a newly elected congressman from Oregon, who volunteered loyalty by denouncing all criticism of the FBI from either King or the Warren Commission, Hoover reviewed at length his decision to call King the nation’s most notorious liar. Also, on the Friday of the Liuzzo arrests, FBI intelligence agents secretly delivered to federal mediator LeRoy Collins a poisonously targeted report. From mountains of telephone intercepts, supervisors isolated one remark by Coretta King to her husband. She thought Collins, while marching briefly with them on Monday, had revealed himself to be “blinded by prejudice” in pushing King to accommodate white Montgomery’s desired limits on the final rally. FBI supervisors highlighted her comment as an insult to Collins, obtained from an unspecified reliable source. With Hoover’s approval, on assurance that Collins was “a long-time admirer of the Director and the Bureau,” they attached a compendium of the FBI’s top secret allegations against King as a philandering subversive. The package, in the guise of friendly caution against false allies, served notice to Collins that national security authorities intercepted his private communications with people branded unfit. This sour message complemented rude adjustments for the ex-governor back home in Florida, where a barber of long service refused to cut his hair because he was consorting with Negroes.

  A final alarm rattled over the UPI national ticker at 2:26 P.M. on Saturday with a quotation from Sheriff Clark. “The FBI had that car under surveillance,” he said of the Birmingham Klan squad. To reporters badgering him about the latest Alabama civil rights murder, Clark guessed about how federal agents solved the case so quickly, then shifted blame to the FBI for failure to share information that might have averted the murder. This UPI item rocketed upward through FBI headquarters, and by 9:45 P.M. a public statement dismissed the Clark statement as “a malicious lie.” Accurately, the FBI official denied that agents had the Klan car under active surveillance on the day of the murder. The rebuttal, like Hoover’s subsequent report to Katzenbach—“I had to blast the story of the Sheriff down there as a lie…”—seized upon an error in Clark’s guesswork to obfuscate the FBI’s inside knowledge of the plot. Omitting prior communications, including the approval for Rowe to join the Klan mission, which would have raised thorny issues about why the car was not under surveillance, the headquarters spokesperson declared that the Bureau “promptly disseminated all information which came to its knowledge,” then solved the crime overnight. Only a “totalitarian” FBI could have done more, he said, and Director Hoover modestly refused such power.

  The single FBI statement sufficed. DeLoach wisely advised colleagues to ignore any future attacks from Clark, who was at best a discredited segregationist, lest Hoover’s prestige kindle a “feud” story. The ever-vigilant Hoover took advantage of respite in the Liuzzo case to burnish the fabled discipline of his headquarters bureaucracy. He tasked inspectors to explain why it took seven hours to react on Saturday, which nearly had pushed the vital press reaction into another day’s news cycle. From time stamps on every document, inspectors made sure that intake scanners had met rigorous deadlines for culling out sensitive material, and that routers and messengers had met their deadlines for delivering flagged items to top officials—every seven minutes on workdays, every hour on weekends. Hoover’s own secretary insisted that she had pouched the Clark story to Hoover “immediately,” as her intake stamp of 4:16 P.M., less than two hours after it moved on the UPI wire, demonstrated. Executives defended every detail of their conduct, but the inspectors inevitably discovered correctable lapses. There were missing time stamps in DeLoach’s political shop, for instance, and one unfortunate assistant admitted leaving for home late Saturday without noticing Clark documents on his desk.

  The FBI enjoyed a feast of glory in the news, which one of DeLoach’s assistants called “another vindication of the propriety of the Bureau’s press release procedures.” The New York Times saluted Hoover with a crowning profile as “an authentic American folk hero…the incorruptible idol of generations of American youngsters and the symbol of the ‘honest cop’ to millions of their elders.” The “spectacular feat” of the Liuzzo arrests was especially sweet for Hoover, said the Times, because it repaired “a few cracks…in the previously impenetrable armor of his public esteem.” Reviewing Hoover’s forty-eight continuous years at the Justice Department, the profile found that Hoover had demanded only two things since 1924 as the FBI’s first and only Director: absolute control, and freedom from politics. With no hint that these conditions might be incompatible, especially over time, or that they vio
lated the most basic principles of constitutional self-government, the Times concluded that Hoover had used his iron hand to build “an impressive monument to efficiency and integrity.”

  Martin Luther King sent Hoover a telegram of thanks. “Let me congratulate you and the FBI for this speedy arrest of the accused assassins of Mrs. Liuzzo,” he wrote. “The agents assigned to Alabama have done an outstanding job of containing the tremendous violence and savagery which runs rampant under this surface of Alabama life. There is still much work to be done.” The explicit reference to Alabama agents was a signal of conscious apology, as Hoover had justified his “notorious liar” outburst by King’s one publicized criticism of FBI performance in Alabama. Nevertheless, Hoover refused any reply to King—gloating, gracious, or pro forma. Even acknowledgment “would only help build up this character…tie us in with him, and put us under obligation to him,” wrote DeLoach for the executives. They decided not to confirm to reporters that the King telegram existed.

  KING FLEW west to preach on Sunday, March 28, at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, then drove to a local television station. Producers had agreed to film him from there in a special edition of Meet the Press if he promised to withhold from NBC’s competitors any newsworthy comments about a post-Selma boycott of Alabama products. King acceded. Experience taught him that the national news shows tended to provoke controversy from perspectives at odds with the movement, toward the extreme of treating him as a houseboy, and he knew better than to expect a discussion of Selma’s place in history. Still, the opening question sprang from deep ambush.