Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  On September 27, King closed the convention with an address of abject confession. “I was naive enough to believe that proof of good faith would emerge,” he said of his support for the Kennedy emissaries to Birmingham. “Today we are faced with the midnight of oppression which we had believed to be the dawn of redemption,” he told the convention. “We must deal with today…. We are faced with an extreme situation, and therefore our remedies must be extreme.” Yet King found himself helpless to propose remedies. He found a way to make everyone an accomplice to the church bombing—from Governor Wallace to his own movement followers—but still he renounced no one. Instead, he exhorted listeners to bridge rather than exploit gulfs of separation. He retold the story of Lazarus and Dives, and preached from his blend of sources: Jesus on loving one’s enemies, Reinhold Niebuhr on justice, Abraham Lincoln on the ideal of common citizenship. King quoted Lincoln’s reply to a vengeance-starved Unionist who resented his stubborn refusal to call the Confederates enemies: “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?” He wobbled on a sensitive spot, desperate to move but stuck in melancholy, confessing that his leadership was “standing still, doing nothing, going nowhere.”

  11

  Against All Enemies

  KING’S AVERSION to “enemy-ism” isolated him in politics, especially crisis politics. Leaders routinely molded support against a villain, and for most politicians a skillfully cultivated foe could become a source of advantage, energy, idealism, even comfort. Enemies of many kinds dominated the Kennedy presidency: foreign and domestic, mythological and real, racial and military, overt and clandestine. The partisan question—whether a Democratic President could reduce the historic estrangement of Negroes without making fatal enemies of Southern whites—remained secondary to the national passions of the Cold War, but by the fall of 1963 the two were closely intertwined.

  Kennedy had won his office as a modern champion against Cold War enemies, pledging to redress a “missile gap” created by Republican laxity in the face of ominous Soviet advances. During the 1950s, the United States and Soviet Union had magnified their mutual hostility through telescopes of fear. American intelligence agencies had predicted that the Soviet Union would possess one hundred operational nuclear missiles by 1958, but they found zero instead. By then, however, the first Sputnik space launch in 1957 frightened Americans into believing that the Soviets were leaping ahead in military science, and nationwide alarm carried the estimated threat upward rather than down. President Eisenhower remarked that it was militarily “fantastic,” “crazy,” and “unconscionable” for the United States to have built some five thousand weapons averaging a hundred times the power of the Hiroshima bomb, be cranking out two more thermonuclear bombs every calendar day, and still push for more. Yet the respected commander of D-Day resigned himself as “only one person,” helpless against the tide of arms.

  At his first press briefing as President Kennedy’s incoming Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara had disclosed that the celebrated missile gap did not exist after all. He retracted the statement under sharp public attack, and privately offered Kennedy his resignation. Remarkably, McNamara survived to swiftly remove Eisenhower’s internal brakes on the development of strategic weapons—expanding the sea-based nuclear fleet from six to forty-one Polaris submarines, raising the land-based missile program from forty to more than a thousand. Drastic buildup suited an era in which President Kennedy, shaken by a contentious Vienna summit meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1961, addressed the nation frankly on the risks of general war. “Those families which are not hit in a nuclear blast can still be saved,” he told American viewers.

  Invisible within the gargantuan labors of the arms race grew future realities as diverse as the computer revolution and the scourge of plutonium,* but President Kennedy already perceived a few unintended consequences. When the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 suspended the posturing for a fortnight of common dread, decision-makers shared white knuckles with the least political of citizens. (Etched into the memory of Vice President Johnson’s secretary were normally demure college students who openly wailed along dormitory hallways that the end of the world was about to leave them forever virgins.) Khrushchev’s sudden retreat gave them a second breath, and White House crisis managers drew contradictory lessons: that weakness “invites Soviet transgression” while strength risks panic. They retained a blurry psychological legacy of power and helplessness, righteousness and guilt. A new breed of war theorist factored miscue and mistrust into enemy-proof doctrines such as the “balance of terror,” but terror did not lend itself easily to balance. Spurred on by the Missile Crisis, the United States committed in 1963 to a “triad” standard of deterrence by which each of three strategic arms—bombers, land missiles, and submarine missiles—must be able to answer nuclear attack with an independent retaliation more than sufficient to obliterate the Soviet Union, calculated at the equivalent of twenty thousand Hiroshima explosions apiece.

  All that year, while feeding the tiger, President Kennedy tried to step gingerly off its back. Over the objections of critics who saw folly and danger in communication between doomsday enemies, he arranged for the first direct phone lines between Washington and the Kremlin. Technicians were installing the new “hot line” during the March on Washington. More ambitiously, Kennedy negotiated with Khrushchev the first Limited Test Ban Treaty against nuclear tests in the earth’s atmosphere, and urged Americans “to use whatever time remains” to reduce the chance of a nuclear exchange that “could wipe out more than 300 million Americans, Europeans, and Russians….” Seeking treaty ratification in the Senate, where early mail ran overwhelmingly against it, the President courted the endorsement of former President Eisenhower. Although the general favored the treaty and far broader ones, he also resented the ongoing Kennedy arms buildup as a slur against his defense record, his military judgment, even his patriotism. Eisenhower generally remained neutral, and in fact expressed mild reservations about the treaty, which obliged the Kennedy administration to bargain for support with promises of extra weapons and underground bomb tests.

  It complicated vexations between the two presidents that Kennedy simultaneously sought a kind word from Eisenhower about the pending civil rights bill. He sent a mutual friend, Rev. Eugene Carson Blake, to visit Ike at his Gettysburg farm in hopes that the eminent churchman might appeal to Eisenhower’s religious side. The Birmingham church bombing intervened, and when Blake reported Eisenhower’s noncommittal response back to the White House, it was Kennedy’s turn to tack grumpily against his own private views. He said the Republicans stood to gain no matter what they did on civil rights, and would behave just sincerely enough to push Kennedy over the cliff of his exposure. “The Republicans have a great temptation to think they’re never gonna get very far with the Negroes anyway,” Kennedy told a nonplussed Blake, “so they might as well play the white game in the South.”

  BENEATH PUBLIC OPINION, which teetered over fault lines of race and nuclear terror, rare tremors shook the national security agencies. These secret arms of government had extended dramatically against Cold War threats deemed too ruthless to be checked by democratic methods. Because they actively specialized in enemies, assimilating layers of intrigue that would be unseemly or inconsistent in public, the security agencies contained the rawest passions within the government.

  In the Justice Department, for instance, Attorney General Kennedy and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover feuded over the basic agenda for nearly three years. Kennedy argued that the real domestic enemy should be organized crime rather than Communist infiltration, which he said “couldn’t be more feeble or less of a threat.” Hoover argued that criminal syndicates were a myth—“baloney,” he called talk of a Mafia—whereas American Communists remained dangerous far beyond their numbers, as “rigidly disciplined fanatics unalterably committed to bring this free nation under the yoke of international communism.” Like Hoover, Kennedy was an ardent anti-Communist, but it galled
him that for every FBI agent targeted against organized crime, Hoover maintained nearly one hundred agents on various “Red Squad” details against alleged and potential subversives. In September of 1963, Kennedy arranged televised hearings at which a contract killer named Joseph Valachi took a stunned national audience inside the unknown realm of godfathers and underbosses. Because of Valachi, Kennedy claimed, “the FBI changed their whole concept of crime in the United States.”

  An irritated J. Edgar Hoover minimized the Valachi hearings. His Bureau skillfully wielded the intelligence mission in its own defense, and by accepted folk rumor, high officials all over Washington were paralyzed by what Hoover held against them in his files. Such fear was strength in itself, but Hoover bound presidents to the FBI with a more complex entanglement of respect, complicity, gratitude, and dependence. When FBI agents discovered that Kennedy’s CIA had enlisted three prominent gangsters in plots to assassinate Fidel Castro, Hoover presented the information confidentially to President Kennedy and the Attorney General, as a warning that this bizarre national secret might be compromised by leaks or incompetence. He did not need to say that the bungled scheme made fools of his rivals in the CIA, or point out that this classified government partnership with Mafia bosses humiliated the very argument Robert Kennedy pressed on his FBI about the priority of underworld prosecutions.

  Similarly, Hoover advised President Kennedy to break from a mistress he shared with one of three gangster leaders of the official plots against Castro, Chicago godfather Sam Giancana, in order to curtail multiple avenues for blackmail against the White House. Shortly before the March on Washington, a private warning from Hoover enabled Robert Kennedy to spirit out of the country another of President Kennedy’s mistresses, an East German woman named Ellen Rometsch. Political threat lingered after Rometsch, who offered Republicans the only politically and socially acceptable path toward a White House sex scandal: tracking a fugitive seductress from behind the Iron Curtain, then demanding to know what national secrets might have been compromised. Averting such disaster fell to Robert Kennedy, who carried a heavy load for his brother’s illicit pursuits, and by October the Attorney General was obliged to beg assistance from Hoover. He asked the FBI Director to warn the Senate leaders that if they opened the Rometsch matter to hurt the administration, related smut from FBI intelligence files about Rometsch and her friends inevitably would discredit the entire U.S. government, including senators of both parties.

  This was sordid business—gangster-spy assassination plots, molls and Mata Haris in the President’s bed, blackmail between branches of government—all beyond the era’s capacity for cynical imagination. Hoover was a patient, gifted bureaucrat—knowing everything, appearing to initiate nothing. When FBI intelligence lines picked up these and other reflections of seaminess in government, Hoover cleaned up the language into neutral “Bureau-speak” and passed it along as a dutiful public servant. Moreover, in spite of his active scorn for Robert Kennedy, Hoover would keep these secrets until his death, leaving behind corrosive revelations for later years. The Attorney General had reason to be grateful. For all his griping about Hoover’s senile fits of “good days and bad days,” his old-fashioned, segregationist ways, and his penchant for surrounding harmless old Marxists with legions of informants, Kennedy could hardly argue that Hoover’s FBI dragged down ethical standards in the secret parts of the government. Hoover absorbed power mostly from the lapses of others, and the FBI’s compulsion to know everything was useful to Kennedy as well as the Bureau. By wary accommodation, Kennedy and Hoover moved in September toward installing wiretaps on Martin Luther King.

  FROM SAIGON, on the same day late in August that the FBI marked King internally as “the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation,” U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge declared war on an American ally overseas. “We are launched on a course from which there is no respectable turning back: the overthrow of the Diem government,” Lodge cabled Washington. Spearheading a dominant faction within the Kennedy administration, Lodge considered President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam too despotic to mobilize effective warfare against insurgents favorable to North Vietnam. All through September and October, Lodge plotted intimately against Diem along a tightrope of coup and betrayal, often exchanging multiple cables with Washington on a single day. Deadly intrigue consumed top foreign policy officials far more than their visible duties, while Hoover maneuvered against King on a parallel track.

  In the first week of September, Hoover ordered his technicians to scout the ground ahead by making sure that wiretaps could be operated without detection on King’s home and his SCLC offices in Atlanta and New York. While they were working, Ambassador Lodge worried that the South Vietnamese leader might become more resentful of his foreign allies than of his North Vietnamese enemies, in which case Diem might strike a unification deal with the Communists and ask the Americans to vacate his country. “This is obviously the only trump card he has got and it is obviously of the highest importance,” Lodge cabled Washington. “It is also obvious to me that we must not leave. But the question of finding a proper basis for remaining is at first blush not simple.” On September 16, the day after the Birmingham church bombing, the FBI’s intelligence division recommended not only an expanded program of wiretaps but also a campaign of covert, extralegal FBI warfare against the civil rights movement. Assistant Director William Sullivan urged the plan upon Hoover as a justifiable war measure for a nation “engaged in a form of social revolution.”

  Pangs of faith and treachery crossed at many levels on Monday, October 7. Most publicly, President Kennedy assembled dignitaries at the White House to witness the formal signing of the newly ratified nuclear test ban treaty. “If this treaty fails, it will not be our doing,” Kennedy declared, “and even if it fails, we shall not regret that we have made this clear and honorable national commitment.” From the ceremony, Kennedy withdrew to intensive consultations over the Nhu family (President Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, who ran the South Vietnamese secret police). The latest cable from Ambassador Lodge warned that “we cannot remove the Nhus by non-violent means against their will.” Over the weekend, American secret agents had met with Vietnamese generals planning a coup, and four of the crisscrossing reports mentioned assassination of the Nhus among the contingent details. These contacts were all the more sensitive because a number of administration officials still believed that fidelity to the ten-year alliance with President Diem offered the only chance of victory in the war. White House instructions required explorations for a successful coup to be “totally secure and fully deniable.” A few blocks away at the Justice Department, an emissary hand-delivered Hoover’s written request for authorization to wiretap King at his Atlanta home and office. Attorney General Kennedy hesitated before a decision of such gravity.

  King himself was speaking at a mass meeting in Birmingham, where he once again disguised the movement’s paralysis with high-spirited rallies. “If the conditions that brought on the dynamiting and the death of four beautiful little girls are not changed,” King cried, “we will put on our walking shoes and demonstrate all over town.” In Selma, October 7 was Freedom Day, modeled on the upcoming Freedom Vote in Mississippi. SNCC leaders invited celebrities and national reporters to witness what might happen on one of the two days each month when citizens were permitted to register. All through the morning, writer James Baldwin, comedian Dick Gregory, two Justice Department lawyers, four FBI agents, SNCC leader James Forman, a dozen reporters, and several photographers observed a line of 350 Negro applicants stretching backward through the doors, down the exterior steps of the green stone courthouse and along the sidewalk, closely monitored by a parallel line of nearly a hundred state police, sheriff’s deputies, and hastily recruited armed civilians known as the posse.

  About five minutes before noon in Selma, a stir among the deputies interrupted what amounted to a motionless vigil, and Sheriff Jim Clark sent officers across the street to arrest two young Negroes who appe
ared on the steps of the Federal Building behind the observers, holding cardboard placards: “Register to Vote” and “Register Now for Freedom Now.” The mutual siege resumed almost silently until two o’clock, when a SNCC volunteer handed his wallet to Forman in a traditional act of jail readiness, and with a friend crossed the street toward the lines. At the curb, the volunteer tried to tell the applicants that no law prevented them from leaving for water or bathroom relief, but he realized from the frozen responses—and especially from a fearful woman who whispered desperately, “You can’t talk to us”—that it was taking all the applicants’ concentrated strength just to stand all day under the glare of the officers. When volunteers tried to step around the police line to offer sandwiches, converging officers clubbed them to the ground and dragged them along the street toward jail.

  Only a handful of Negroes was permitted to apply for registration by the close of courthouse business. James Baldwin publicly called Selma “one of the worst places I ever saw.” Justice Department lawyer Thelton Henderson muttered, “I’ve become jaded.” Henderson was upset that after more than two years of federal litigation over Selma, which had resulted only the previous week in another injunction requiring fair treatment, Sheriff Clark could so brazenly turn the protective order on its head by forbidding rest, food, and friendly human contact as “interference” with would-be Negro voters. Henderson’s partner, a senior white attorney, talked of resigning after Washington disallowed the lawsuits to enjoin police violence in the voting line and illegal arrests on federal property.