At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  ANDREW YOUNG returned on November 30 from his twelve-day mission to Jordan and Israel. The foreign ministries of both countries eagerly sought an ecumenical pilgrimage, he reported, and were making arrangements for King to preach to as many as five thousand travelers from a boat just offshore on the Sea of Galilee. Young hoped to create a peace headquarters at either Hadassah Hospital or the old Hebrew University, which still sat vacant in Jordanian territory, but cooperating officials were “scared to death” that hostilities would shut off desperately needed foreign revenue. The Young visit coincided with riots over Operation Shredder, a quick predawn raid on Palestinian militia near Hebron that turned into a pitched battle with the unexpected arrival of a Jordanian army patrol. The Israeli commander and fifteen Jordanian legionnaires were killed, with many soldiers wounded and more than a hundred homes destroyed. Undersecretary of State Katzenbach scolded Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban for a bungled cross-border provocation against the most moderate Arab head of state, King Hussein, who had kept his Patton tanks east of the Jordan River to assuage Israeli security concerns but now felt compelled by military leaders to move some of them toward Jerusalem.

  King said regretfully that the threat of general war might force him to cancel his visit to the region in 1967. One host government or both would react viscerally to any statement approaching peace politics, and Young’s fallback idea to emphasize religious reconciliation seemed lamely unpromising. (Hardly anyone noticed King’s public appeals for the relief of Jews persecuted in the Soviet Union.) Stanley Levison thought it would take genius for any outsider to find a constructive position in the cauldron of Middle East politics. He agreed with Young that any trip should be confined to sightseeing, which would put King in the untenable position of ducking urgent problems at home to lead tourists through a war zone.

  Levison fretted separately about newly transcribed copies of King’s rambling self-examination at Penn Center. King himself worried from hard experience about the passages of internal criticism, and restricted distribution to avoid another round of negative news stories “hammering at black power” on his authority. That would only discredit the civil rights movement again, he figured, advertising divisions against his purpose to shape a positive alternative and let the weaknesses of black power run their natural course. Levison, the chief SCLC fund-raiser and FBI target, highlighted reservations about the transcript’s pulpit style and its colloquial reference to the father of Communism. “Martin disagrees with Marx but calls him ‘brother Marx,’” Levison said on his wiretapped phone line. “I don’t think that would be good for the contributors.”

  IN AN early appraisal of the 1966 Chicago civil rights movement. Bernard Lafayette told veterans they already had met key goals. Their campaign disproved theories that racial grievance in northern cities was “too subtle to dramatize,” he said, and refuted the widespread doubt that fragmented city people could be “mobilized for nonviolent direct action in the face of mass violence.” Scholars who specialized in Chicago history concluded accurately that the open housing settlement, though it put only a small dent in residential segregation, “was certainly far stronger than the settlements that had brought SCLC’s Birmingham and St. Augustine campaigns to a close.” The Metropolitan Chicago Leadership Council for Open Housing, created by the agreement, remained over decades a respected coalition for stable neighborhood integration, carrying two of its many lawsuits into the U.S. Supreme Court. Chicago politicians renounced local commitments, just as Birmingham leaders had reneged on promises to integrate department store bathrooms and the police force. What sharply distinguished the movements was the disparity in their wider impact. The weaknesses of the Birmingham settlement disappeared in a rippling tide that dissolved formal segregation by comprehensive national law. The Selma campaign itself never defeated or converted Sheriff Jim Clark, but the nation democratized voting rights to make segregationists such as him relics of the past. No corresponding shift enhanced the Chicago settlement in outcome or reputation, and all its shortcomings remained an eyesore.

  To cushion their loss, some movement leaders adopted the conceit that they had once bowled over opposing forces by themselves. “We should have known better,” wrote Ralph Abernathy, “than to believe that we could come to Chicago and right its wrongs with the same tactics we had used in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma.” Bayard Rustin, narrowing his framework to excuse himself along with the rest of the country, turned a jaundiced eye on his bosom friend. “I knew he had to fall on his face,” said Rustin. “Daley cut Martin Luther King’s ass off.”

  By the cycles of history, a period of letdown and division was perhaps inevitable to let the country absorb enormous changes mandated by the letter and spirit of equal citizenship. Cruel flukes compounded this letdown. The quest for interracial justice came of age just as the national climate turned hostile over the Vietnam War, and the movement’s most distinctive tenet—nonviolent witness for democracy—nearly vanished simultaneously from public discourse. Nonviolence became passé across the spectrum. Black people discarded it like training wheels to claim the full belligerent status of regular Americans. Even stalwart practitioners like Diane Nash yearned for something stronger, doubting its reward. White people were eager to dismiss nonviolence as a church notion misplaced in national politics. Hippies made it look selfish. Many thinkers ignored what they considered an outmoded handicap suited to a phase of the race problem. Almost no one honored or analyzed the broader legacy of nonviolent citizens, and King would grow ever more lonely in his conviction that the movement offered superior leadership discipline for the whole country. To him, the decline of nonviolence magnified compound dangers inherited from “enemy thinking”—the tendency to wall off groups of people by category. In religion, enemy psychology could invert the entire moral code to make violence a holy cause. In politics, enemy psychology could subvert the promise of democracy with a hierarchy of fear, secrecy, and arbitrary command for war.

  The realignment of 1966 was at once blatant and subliminal, symbolic and momentous. Its backlash feature first appeared to be no more than a balancing correction for the near extinction since 1964 of the Goldwater Republicans, the last defenders of legal segregation outside the South, but observers in subsequent decades looked on the normally obscure midterm year as a fulcrum of more lasting change toward political dominance by the heirs of Goldwater. Political scientists Earl and Merle Black traced a “Great White Switch” in partisan voting patterns across the South. Nicholas Lemann, a student of the black exodus from the South into Chicago, identified a larger reaction of potent, cumulative effect. “The beginning of the modern rise of conservatism coincided exactly with the country’s beginning to realize the true magnitude and consequences of the black migration,” he wrote in 1991, adding that the influential neo-conservative movement was founded then “by former liberals who lost faith in large part over the issue of race in the North; in Irving Kristol’s famous apothegm, ‘a neo-conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality,’ it’s not difficult to guess what color the mugger was.” In a mirror thesis, Matthew Dallek concluded his book about the rise of Ronald Reagan with a terse review of his opponent’s “one crippling defect” in the 1966 election: “He was a liberal. And when Pat Brown went down, so did the philosophy that he had clung to throughout his adult life. It has never really recovered.”

  IV

  Passion

  CHAPTER 33

  Spy Visions

  December 1966–February 1967

  POLITICAL passions tested democracy’s institutional core. In Bond v. Floyd, the Supreme Court weighed the argument by Georgia that criticisms of the Vietnam War, rather than Julian Bond’s color per se, left the state representative-elect short on the sincere character required to take his oath of office. “We are not persuaded,” Chief Justice Warren wrote tartly, “by the state’s attempt to distinguish between an exclusion alleged to be on racial grounds and one alleged to violate the First Amendment.” A unani
mous ruling on December 5 ordered Georgia’s House to admit Bond, the twenty-six-year-old former SNCC publicist who had been elected three times but not yet seated. “We’re all disappointed,” said one state official, “that the Georgia legislature will apparently not be allowed to make its own decisions.” Such grumbling marked what might have seemed a remedial lesson for the South, but just then a movement erupted in Washington to expel Representative Adam Clayton Powell. “Fight in Congress to Bar Powell Planned by California Democrat,” announced the New York Times. “Powell’s Just Too Blatant,” a Washington Post headline proclaimed. The powerful chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, while duly elected twelve times from Harlem, had infuriated colleagues with flamboyant displays of “the freeloading available to all and practiced more quietly by many,” reported the Post. “Powell’s creed has been that he can do anything a white man can do.”

  By uncanny coincidence, the prolonged feud over FBI surveillance emerged garishly that same week. Thurgood Marshall, Solicitor General of the United States, asked the Supreme Court to vacate the freshly upheld conviction of Joe Schipani of Brooklyn, noting with apology that prosecutors had failed to inform either defense lawyers or judges of evidence obtained from devices installed “by means of trespass,” namely microphone bugs. Because this was the third such case recently discovered, Marshall further advised, the Justice Department would examine past and present federal prosecutions for the taint of undisclosed eavesdropping. “U.S. Reviews Cases in Bugging Quest,” declared the lead front-page story in the Times.

  Publicity ruptured the fragile truce covering eighteen months of subterranean maneuver. When outsiders had unearthed FBI bugs, disputes within the government over responsibility had drawn the unusually blunt presidential order to forbid all surreptitious microphones, and compliance became what Katzenbach called “an issue of great emotion” between the FBI and Justice Department: “There was very nearly a threat on the part of the FBI to stop organized crime investigations if they couldn’t have this technique.” FBI Director Hoover claimed broad but vague legal authority. Senator Robert Kennedy reacted viscerally, being vulnerable already because his signature lurked on hundreds of formal requests for less intrusive wiretap surveillances on telephone lines, which did not require break-ins to install. Kennedy insisted that he had not even known of FBI bugs when he was Attorney General, let alone approved them, and warring charges of secret misconduct culminated in a cryptic appeal to his successor and former deputy. “As you know, this is a damn important matter for me,” Kennedy wrote Katzenbach by hand-delivered courier. “I just don’t want to receive a shaft—it’s not deserved—and anyway I don’t like them deserved or not…. I can’t write you as many memos as J. Edgar Hoover. And there is no sense in our talking about it by phone. I feel strongly about it—and I write you (just that as there’s) not much else to say.”

  By July of 1966, Katzenbach had managed to trace and shut down not only shadowy bugs but also many wiretaps. The President demanded more restrictions than Katzenbach himself thought justified, and in particular prodded him to confirm the removal of the sensitive installations on Martin Luther King. (“You got that little situation prohibited?” Johnson asked carefully by telephone. “It’s gone,” the Attorney General replied. “It better be,” said the President.) Katzenbach, having employed cajolery, including legal predictions that the King wiretap would surface ruinously if the government indicted Hosea Williams for car theft, had transferred to the State Department in part because his relations with Hoover were frayed beyond civil respect.

  The FBI Director reduced his bureaucratic risk, and, over the pained objection of intelligence deputy William Sullivan, suspended parallel operations to gather data by investigative burglary. “We do not obtain authorization for ‘black bag’ jobs outside the Bureau,” Sullivan acknowledged in a plea for reconsideration. “Such a technique involves trespass and is clearly illegal; therefore, it would be impossible to obtain any legal sanction for it.” Nevertheless, Sullivan defended the FBI position that burglary had proved “an invaluable technique” of “wide-range effectiveness,” gleaning information otherwise off-limits, and Hoover would be obliged to repeat his protective ban when Thurgood Marshall ignited the public controversy over bugs. “I note that requests are still being made by Bureau officials for the use of ‘black bag’ techniques,” Hoover informed his top executives. “This practice, which includes also surreptitious entrance upon premises of any kind, will not meet with my approval in the future.”

  After more than four decades in office, Hoover much preferred the authoritarian cloak of political spy work to accountable duty in law enforcement, but he channeled the FBI’s clandestine activity away from the forbidden zone of trespass. When FBI sources learned that Martin Luther King, desperately low on SCLC funds, planned to ask Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa for a donation like the $25,000 bestowed long ago at the Liuzzo funeral, Hoover authorized Deke DeLoach to launch preemptive sabotage. Agents discreetly monitored results over the consolation wiretaps on Stanley Levison, which Katzenbach had left in place, and preserved Levison’s shocked recounting to Clarence Jones of a planted New York Daily News story that Hoffa hoped to buy friends like King because he faced thirty-five years of federal jail sentences under appeal. (“Yike, does it really say that?” exclaimed Jones, prompting Levison’s miserable retort: “What, do you think I made it up?”) Informants soon told FBI agents that an embarrassed Hoffa was calling King “a faker.” With the rendezvous aborted, and the FBI role safely concealed, Hoover scrawled “Excellent” on a report that “our counterintelligence aim to thwart King in receiving money from the Teamsters has been quite successful to date.”

  The Levison wiretap alerted Hoover also to a budding association between King and former White House adviser McGeorge Bundy, who, as president of America’s largest private philanthropy, had announced on consecutive days two Ford Foundation initiatives tinged with penance. First Bundy proposed to harness satellite communications technology toward what would become the first public broadcast network, in a project developed purposefully with television executive Fred Friendly. Across deep lines of dissent, Bundy the Vietnam architect shared an overriding conviction with war critic Friendly, who had been forced out of CBS over the Fulbright hearings, that commitments of national will demanded unfettered debate and straightforward constitutional decisions. Bundy next catapulted race relations high onto the Ford Foundation agenda, proclaiming that “full equality for all American Negroes is now the most urgent domestic concern in this country.” FBI agents already knew of the intended shift, being privy to surprise among King’s advisers when Bundy quietly hired two of their contacts to make up for his admitted lack of prior interest in civil rights. Eavesdroppers overheard doubt that staid foundations really meant to fund SCLC citizenship programs, no matter how much they professed to admire nonviolent workshops with Chicago youth gangs, but grant negotiations progressed into meetings between Bundy and King. After the 1966 elections, Bundy allowed his two new race specialists virtually to join the SCLC staff, preparing King’s forty-four-page testimony for a U.S. Senate hearing on the challenge of poverty. Levison, the skeptical idealist, vacillated between worry and giddy hope to rescue the movement’s financial base. “I don’t want five million dollars,” he told Andrew Young. “I want less. Five million dollars could destroy us.”

  DeLoach recruited an intermediary to poison the foundation against King, but John Bugas, vice president of the parent Ford Motor Company, ran into Bundy’s steely refusal to hear derogatory secrets from an anonymous source. When Bugas, a former FBI agent, said the source preferred not to be divulged, Bundy guessed FBI and offered to listen if its officials would speak openly for themselves, which set off boiling evasion at headquarters. “I personally feel that Bundy is of the pseudo-intellectual, Ivy League group that has little respect for the FBI,” DeLoach concluded. He despaired of the direct approach, and Hoover concurred: “We would get nowhere with Bundy.” />
  HOOVER COULD and did mount fierce political attacks against a rare public challenge, such as the Supreme Court’s reproach for cases corrupted with bugs. To circumvent his own secrecy restrictions, he sent a scripted letter of inquiry to himself on a confidential mission with DeLoach, who induced Iowa Republican Representative H. R. Gross to sign, and Gross compliantly released Hoover’s ad hominem reply for the front pages of Sunday, December 11. “Hoover Asserts Robert Kennedy Aided Buggings,” declared the Times. Kennedy offered a statement of rebuttal—“Apparently, Mr. Hoover has been misinformed”—together with a letter from his former FBI liaison stating that Kennedy had processed many wiretap applications but never a bug. From headquarters, the FBI sprang an overwhelming counterattack at precisely 2:25 P.M. the same Sunday, built on a declaration from Hoover that Kennedy’s position was “absolutely inconceivable.” DeLoach’s aides sent copies, buttressed with sample documents from “the official records of the FBI,” to every satellite office “for the use and assistance of reliable news contacts.” They assured superiors that while they obeyed fine points of the FBI image code—declining news requests to read material on camera, for instance, lest film footage preserve self-declarations on unsavory topics—Hoover’s blistering words led most Sunday evening newscasts, followed by Kennedy’s besieged reaction that he had been unaware of bugs nonetheless.