These two incidents amounted to a public relations disaster for the NAACP. To make matters worse, James Meredith set off an embarrassing quarrel the next day when he addressed the convention’s Youth Freedom Fund banquet. The hero of Ole Miss, still smarting from Gloster Current’s dismissive remarks after the Medgar Evers funeral, gave a deliberately provocative speech in which he dressed down the NAACP Youth Council members for lack of discipline. He also denounced the proposed march on Washington as a lay intrusion in political matters that should be left strictly to the five Negro congressmen. An already frosty audience booed Meredith for this iconoclastic suggestion, whereupon Meredith lost his temper and scolded them as immature “burr-heads.” This fiasco left Wilkins with few things to be thankful for in Chicago, but the same convention delegates who three times had turned into a mob cheered heartily when Wilkins summoned them all to Washington, saying, “We propose to use the capital as a parade ground for human rights.”
A public alliance seasoned the personal relationship between Wilkins and King. They began to appear jointly on television to promote the march, and neither knowledgeable nor hostile interviewers could break down their harmony on the air. King praised Wilkins as the senior statesman and legislative strategist; Wilkins told viewers that King had “triggered” the national crisis that had forced President Kennedy to introduce the civil rights bill. “What Martin Luther King and his associates did in Birmingham made the nation realize that at last the crisis had arrived,” said Wilkins. In private, the eight-year rivalry did not disappear so quickly. From the low point of the Medgar Evers dispute, the two men improved to a kind of barbed repartee, approximating the preacher banter by which King’s closest friends vented their tensions and petty jealousies. Wilkins still reminded King that he owed his early fame to the NAACP lawsuit that had settled the Montgomery bus boycott, and he still taunted King for being young, naïve, and ineffectual, saying that King’s methods had not integrated a single classroom in Albany or Birmingham. Wilkins tended to smile slyly for such remarks. “In fact, Martin, if you have desegregated anything by your efforts, kindly enlighten me.”
“Well,” King replied, “I guess about the only thing I’ve desegregated so far is a few human hearts.”
King smiled too, and Wilkins nodded in a tribute to the nimble, Socratic reply. “Yes, I’m sure you have done that, and that’s important. So, keep on doing it. I’m sure it will help the cause in the long run.”
In Harlem, Bayard Rustin moved into a battered stucco building owned by the Friendship Baptist Church of the Rev. Thomas Kilgore—Ella Baker’s pastor, a King family friend almost from the time of King’s birth. Rustin hung a giant banner from the third-story window on West 130th Street: “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom—August 28.” There was no elevator. A hand-lettered sign directed visitors to walk upstairs to the office, where Rustin, in a cloud of cigarette smoke, raced incessantly between telephones and borrowed typewriters. He had less than sixty days to mobilize, transport, service, and control some 100,000 human bodies, but within two weeks he had distributed his Organizing Manual No. 1 to two thousand interested leaders. Still affecting the screechy, pompous West Indian accent he had acquired in his youth, he insisted that a great redemption lay within reach.
Four days after his Rose Garden meeting of June 22, King sent word to O’Dell that he should begin looking for another job. He saw the purge as the price of alliance with the Administration, and he felt less capable of resisting demands for O’Dell’s head than Levison’s, because O’Dell was on the SCLC payroll. This was a miserably painful accommodation for King, who was notoriously slow to fire people for the best of reasons. Had he not suffered another sharp-spurred kick from the Administration, O’Dell likely would have enjoyed a protracted severance period from a regretful employer.
On June 30, the Birmingham News for the first time used King’s name in a front-page headline: “King’s SCLC Pays O’Dell Despite Denial.” The article, which was a direct feed from FBI files, included surveillance and wiretap information on events such as O’Dell’s trip to Dorchester the previous January to plan the Birmingham movement. King could scarcely believe it. The public attack came only eight days after his meeting with President Kennedy in the Rose Garden, a week after his triumphant march in Detroit, six days after his solemn meeting with advisers on the Kennedy ultimatum, and four days after he had given O’Dell his notice.
King thought he had been moving at lightning speed through ugly and unprincipled business, but he soon learned from Burke Marshall that the Administration saw it differently. The message essentially was that you do not trifle with the President of the United States. When President Kennedy told King that the national interest required him to get rid of O’Dell, he meant now, immediately, without second thoughts or tender farewells. On other occasions, the FBI might have initiated this sort of press whipping, perhaps even in disagreement with the Administration, but this story was written by James Free, one of Robert Kennedy’s most favored reporters, who had been given almost free run of his office in the Justice Department and had sat in on several of the critical meetings during the Birmingham crisis.
King absorbed a cruel fact: once he agreed to fire O’Dell as a poisonous subversive, he lacked the standing even to set his own timetable for the deed. On July 3, as soon as he returned from the Wilkins-Rustin summit meeting on the Washington march, he sent Marshall a copy of a letter of dismissal to O’Dell. This accomplished King’s formal submission, but he still refused to accept the Administration’s tone or rationale. His “Dear Jack” letter blamed O’Dell’s plight on the lingering power of the McCarthyite blacklist, and the wording of his conclusion left no doubt that he saw O’Dell as a noble witness against injustice. “Certainly, yours is a significant sacrifice commensurate with the sufferings in jail and through loss of jobs under racist intimidation,” he wrote O’Dell. “We all pray for the day when our nation may be truly the land of the free. May God bless you and continue to inspire you in the service of your fellowman.” O’Dell vanished from the SCLC office to join the staff of Freedomways, a New York journal recently founded by followers of W. E. B. Du Bois, including several prominent Negro Communists.
With O’Dell gone, the pressure shifted to Levison, who was still down in Ecuador on his annual sojourn. Ostensibly he was looking after Secomatico, his dry-cleaning investment in Quito, but he used this tax-deductible purpose to subsidize vacation treks through the Andes. This year he had taken his teenaged son Andy with him for a trip that featured the added excitement of a revolution. President Carlos Arosemena had become so intoxicated during a reception for the American ambassador that he had urinated in the punch bowl—or so it was told in Quito, with such effect that Army tanks soon rumbled through the streets to rescue the national honor by military coup. While witnessing these peculiarly Ecuadorian events, Levison was the star in absentia of a drama at home that was similarly fantastic. In many respects it was an American echo of the Alfred Dreyfus scandal in France, with the crucial distinction that the hysteria played out behind a wall of government secrecy.
King was determined to resist President Kennedy’s personal order to banish Levison. Clearly, since he could not fire someone who did not work for him, Kennedy’s demand meant that the Administration laid claim to govern not only King’s hiring practices but also his friendships and contacts—even the advice he could seek and the words he could hear. This amounted to thought control, managed by the obsessively narrow-minded J. Edgar Hoover. For King, who labored to maintain a receptive spirit of agape toward his bitterest enemies in civil rights, few prospects were more repugnant than shunning a dear friend as unfit for human contact.
His first line of defense was the proof. In July, King sent word that he would take no action until the Administration delivered the evidence promised by President Kennedy in the Rose Garden. This notice put Robert Kennedy and Burke Marshall into a stall, as they could not fulfill the promise to King without violating their dut
y to protect Hoover’s secrets. Paralyzed, having to accept Hoover’s word themselves, they expected King to accept it too, but finally, after several postponements, Burke Marshall agreed to meet Andrew Young at the Federal Courthouse in New Orleans. When Young arrived, Marshall guided him into a hallway for security against unseen spies, then delivered an earnest question in place of the long-awaited evidence. “Do you know who Colonel Rudolf Abel is?” asked Marshall. He explained that Abel was the highest-ranking KGB officer ever convicted of espionage.* If Young knew who Abel was, Marshall added significantly, then he knew Stanley Levison. Marshall said he could divulge no more, but that the message to Dr. King was clear: Levison was a man like Colonel Abel.
King and his advisers were not sure how to interpret this communication. Could Marshall really be saying that Stanley Levison was a Russian, insinuated into the United States years ago by Stalin or Beria? If so, why was the government negotiating his “punishment” with Martin Luther King? Could Marshall really believe such a thing himself? For King, who had received an escalating series of excuses and hair-raising new charges for more than two years, this round cracked any lingering faith in the oracles of national security. If Stalin had invented a puppet named Stanley Levison, joked King and his aides, the monstrous dictator should be credited with a service to humanity. Later, Harry Wachtel and others gave Levison the private nickname “Colonel,” in mock tribute to the superspy Colonel Abel.
This was hardly the first time that something ridiculous from the white world had caused pain or obliged King to devise a soberly respectful strategy in opposition. What the “Colonel Abel” message meant, it seemed, was that the Kennedys either believed J. Edgar Hoover or felt they had no choice but to submit to him. King preferred to concentrate on the latter interpretation, recalling President Kennedy’s talk of omniscient surveillance and his hints of political blackmail. On this theory, he fashioned a tactical compromise that he hoped the Kennedys could use to mollify the FBI Director.
King sent Clarence Jones to present his plan to the Administration on July 16. Privately, in Burke Marshall’s office, Jones gave a lawyerly cast to what was essentially a groping response. He said he was assuming that the root of the problem was political, because otherwise the government’s criminal prosecutors and espionage experts could take care of it themselves. Therefore, said Jones, King was willing to take steps to reduce the Administration’s political vulnerability to segregationists and others who might distort the Communist issue. Specifically, King would stop communicating directly with Stanley Levison. That way, whoever was eavesdropping on the movement would not pick up the conversations which, by President Kennedy’s account to Dr. King, were triggering the accusations of subversion. While he was willing to impose this sacrifice upon Levison and himself, Jones continued, King wanted the Administration to understand that he had received no legitimate reason to stop communicating altogether with Levison, toward whom he maintained full confidence and affection. King reserved the right to exchange ideas with Levison indirectly, through intermediaries such as Jones.
Jones intimated to Marshall that the plan would work better if the government could suggest which indirect channels might be used safely. Specifically, Jones said he had reservations about talking on the telephone with Levison. Marshall, correctly interpreting this as an effort to find out which telephones were wiretapped, ignored the hints and merely stressed that all parties “had no choice” but to make sure that King broke off contact with Levison. Jones took Marshall’s enigmatic pronouncements as a grudging acceptance of the compromise, but this reading proved to be woefully optimistic. When Marshall told Robert Kennedy that Jones expected him to conspire with King to circumvent the FBI, Kennedy responded with calculated fury. That very afternoon, Kennedy told the FBI he wanted to supplement the Levison surveillance with wiretaps on Martin Luther King and Clarence Jones.
Kennedy’s resentments overflowed for at least three reasons. First, Jones’s timing could not have been worse. Over the past four days, Governors Barnett and Wallace had attracted national headlines by attacking the Administration on the subversion issue: “Barnett Charges Kennedys Assist Red Racial Plot,” announced The New York Times. In Senate testimony against the new civil rights bill, both governors had displayed a poster-sized photograph of King addressing the 1957 convention at Highlander Folk School, which they identified as a “Communist training school.” Barnett said he knew that the FBI had information on “the real motivation” of civil rights leaders, and he challenged the senators to ask the FBI about the photograph. Wallace introduced for the Senate record a news article quoting Karl Prussion, a self-described “FBI counterspy of 22 years’ experience,” to the effect that King belonged to more Communist organizations than any man in the United States.
Just that morning, Kennedy and Burke Marshall had made an emergency call to their FBI liaison, Courtney Evans, giving him less than an hour to identify Myles Horton and several others who appeared with King in the Highlander picture. Senators were asking whether the Highlander photograph really proved that King had been trained as a Communist, and the Attorney General urgently needed the information in time for a scheduled appearance on Capitol Hill. The Bureau had met the deadline with a factually truthful report. Highlander was not a Communist training school, Evans told Kennedy, but it advocated racial brotherhood and at times had allowed individual Communists on the premises. King had not been “trained” at Highlander—he had visited there only once, to make a speech. As to the photograph, Evans reported that none of those shown with King was a Communist except for Abner Berry, a Negro correspondent for the old Daily Worker. Evans left to Kennedy the unenviable task of explaining to senators and reporters whether all this meant that King was mixed up with Communists or not. This siege put Kennedy in no mood to hear from Marshall that King wanted his permission to keep associating indirectly with Stanley Levison, a man Hoover flatly described as a top-echelon Communist agent.
A second negative factor was the intermediary. Kennedy remembered Clarence Jones as the one who, though he could have come to his defense, had sat silently through his verbal stoning at the James Baldwin meeting in May. That experience, plus the FBI report he had since received, fixed Jones in Kennedy’s mind as a suspicious character—elegant, manipulative, married to a wealthy white woman. In his subsequent oral history, Kennedy stressed the mixed marriage as a sign of instability, describing both Jones and Harry Belafonte as questionable types animated by guilt and beguiled by celebrity glitter and wealth. Having marked Jones as a clan enemy, Kennedy rewarded his overture with a wiretap instead of a favor.
A third inflammatory reality lay coiled in Marshall’s report: Clarence Jones was letting it be known that President Kennedy had warned King of FBI surveillance. The spread of such information could endanger the President himself. Already Jones knew, and had told Marshall. If Jones talked to Levison over the FBI wiretap, then reports of President Kennedy’s warning to King would circle back into the FBI’s files. No doubt the Attorney General realized that his brother had mentioned the surveillance for good reason on that Saturday in the Rose Garden, meaning to intimidate King with the powers of an omniscient FBI. Still, the President’s disclosure might be construed as a serious breach of security that compromised the FBI’s effort to control subversion. This was the last thing Robert Kennedy wanted, now that leaks and innuendo from FBI files already were tilting the unstable center of public opinion on civil rights. The Attorney General did not seriously worry that Hoover would accuse a sitting President of treachery, as he once had accused ex-president Truman, but it was not farfetched to imagine a defter, less confrontational leak (“President Told King to Ditch Reds”) that would undermine the Administration.
Kennedy did not advertise this political danger even to Marshall, in whom he placed full trust. In this Machiavellian intrigue, the Attorney General saw his core function as the protection of his brother, and this was best done alone. He waited until Marshall left to call Courtney E
vans, and never afterward did he tell Marshall of his fateful step. By ordering wiretaps on Jones and King, Kennedy signaled Hoover that he was standing with the FBI’s interpretation of the Levison matter rather than King’s. He told Evans that the new surveillance would help ensure that King had no contact whatsoever with Levison, direct or indirect.
The order stunned Evans. Normally wiretap requests were initiated within the Bureau and forwarded to the Attorney General for disposition. This one came suddenly the other way. “I told the AG,” Evans reported back to the Bureau,
that I was not at all acquainted with Jones, but that, in so far as King was concerned, it was obvious from the reports that he was in a travel status practically all the time, and it was, therefore, doubtful that a technical surveillance [wiretap] on his office or home would be very productive. I also raised the question as to the repercussions if it should ever become known that such a surveillance had been put on King.
The AG said this did not concern him at all; that in view of the racial situation, he thought it advisable to have as complete coverage as possible.
Hoover’s formal requests for the two wiretap authorizations went to Attorney General Kennedy within a week. This was fast, eager work by the Bureau. Upon completion of security checks and a small mound of paperwork, Hoover notified Kennedy on July 22 that the FBI could wiretap Clarence Jones at his law firm, his home, and at the Gandhi Society. Early the next morning, FBI couriers rushed the wiretap request on King to the Attorney General, although headquarters had received only preliminary assurance from the Atlanta office that the taps were technically feasible. What required the extra day after the Jones request, most likely, was deliberation over a unique loophole phrase. Hoover asked for written authority to wiretap King “at his current residence or at any future address to which he may move.” The key word here was “address.” An “address” was not necessarily a residence, nor a “move” more permanent than an overnight stay. If the Attorney General truly wanted “complete coverage” on a moving target such as King, then perhaps he would authorize the FBI to install short-order surveillances in hotel rooms and guest houses—wherever King went.
Parting the Waters Page 121
