Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  The agenda for the headquarters conference of December 23 included a few virile options, such as recruiting inside informants or “placing a good-looking female plant in King’s office,” but Assistant Director Sullivan ruled out the Bureau’s standard technique of multiple, dragnet interviews to elicit cooperation. In fact, he strictly forbade all interviews, along with visits to “show the badge” and other actions that might disclose the FBI’s interest in King. His operational summary repeated five times a first requirement that the operation must avoid “embarrassment to the Bureau.” Practically, such secrecy constrained the FBI to gather information by surreptitious, technical methods such as wiretaps, and to use the results covertly. Wiretaps conferred a special tactical advantage: by overhearing King’s travel plans on the telephone, FBI eavesdroppers gained advance knowledge necessary to have electronic transmitters (popularly called “bugs,” known in FBI parlance as “misurs,” short for “microphone surveillance”) implanted in the walls of King’s hotel room before he arrived. The conference adopted plans to let the first step—wiretaps on telephones—facilitate the more intrusive second step of bugs placed to intercept all sounds within a private space. The resulting peek at intimate, unguarded moments promised more gossip than evidence, information better suited to personal attack than courtroom prosecution. “We are most interested in exposing him in some manner or another in order to discredit him,” declared the preconference agenda.

  For Agent Nichols and his primary King wiretap crew of fifteen recruits, it remained a disappointment that headquarters essentially restricted them to stenographic duties—long hours of tedium interrupted by disputes over how to distinguish one muffled voice from another over earphones. As consolation, they developed a kibitzer’s interest in King’s world, along with a proprietary stake in its importance. After only two months’ eavesdropping, many of the wiretap crew took it for granted that King was the most significant American orator of the century. As they monitored the running debate over the departure of Wyatt Walker, some endorsed King’s repeated assertion that money was the root of evil, while others argued for the fine distinction that not money itself but “the love of money” corrupted, which Walker used to legitimize his demand for a salary increase.

  At a deeper level, however, the wiretap squad adopted the headquarters view that a fundamental defect made King the most subtle and dangerous of Communist allies—the sort who did not believe in the immediate threat of the Communist subversion. As a field agent, Robert Nichols did not pretend to understand the intellectual nuance marshaled by Assistant Director Sullivan, the Bureau’s senior expert on Communism, but he picked up enough to stress one intercepted remark by King that he “pretty much agreed with Hegel” on dialectics in history, which Nichols knew was a tenet of German philosophy that had led to Marxism. At the December FBI conference, this was the ready explanation for King’s shocking association with Stanley Levison against the explicit personal order of the President of the United States, and it became a standard theme of the wiretap shop that King was making the racial situation more uncomfortable than necessary. Atlanta’s limited role was to funnel intelligence ammunition to headquarters under two most desirable headings: money and sex. Section Chief Baumgardner quoted the suspicion of an Alabama representative that “so-called civil rights organizations…could be a front for a full-grown racket.” On that premise, the conference resolved to enlist the quiet cooperation of the IRS to investigate King and his financial supporters for tax avoidance or unbecoming extravagance. As to sex, headquarters aimed to follow up the wiretap indications that King liked to pursue women after hours on the road. Assistant Director Sullivan closed his report on the December meeting with confident determination: “We will, at the proper time when it can be done without embarrassment to the Bureau, expose King as an immoral opportunist who is not a sincere person but is exploiting the racial situation for personal gain.”

  Like every other successful FBI executive, Sullivan accurately read Director Hoover’s moods. Less than a week later, when King appeared on the cover of Time magazine as “Man of the Year,” praised editorially for the historic Birmingham breakthrough* that made him “the unchallenged voice of the Negro people—and the disquieting conscience of the whites,” Hoover circulated at headquarters his own reaction: “They had to dig deep in the garbage for this one.” Animosity toward King gained free rein in FBI policy up to the restraining edge of “embarrassment to the Bureau,” as was evident a few days later when a crude letter of multiple assassination threats reached headquarters from St. Petersburg, Florida. “We here to get Martin Luthr King and Wilkson [Roy Wilkins] and Mayr [Ivan] Allen [of Atlanta],” said the letter. “We wont miss no. Two more in Washington to get Bob Kenedy and 2 nigers, then Johnson if he push integratin. We plege not fail or die. We not fail no.” In the midst of the standard full-scale trace alert on possible danger to President Johnson, the FBI extended notification to the lesser targets mentioned—except for King. In his newfound assertiveness after the Kennedy assassination, Director Hoover suspended official courtesies that smacked of FBI solicitude for King’s welfare, and declared him specifically unfit to receive death warnings. On these instructions, the Atlanta FBI office notified only the local police, but complications arose when Roy Wilkins asked to have a copy of the threat letter for his personal files. If “Wilkson” saw King’s name listed before his, natural conversation between them might reveal that King remained in the dark, excluded by an edict Hoover did not care to explain. To avoid such risk, Hoover’s office ordered New York officials to “diplomatically decline” the request for the copy, and suggested several pretentious excuses to mollify Wilkins.

  KNOWING NOTHING of the FBI’s extraordinary war council against King, President Johnson left Washington to spend Christmas and New Year’s at his Texas ranch. A small army of federal workers already had transformed the 1890 farmhouse and surrounding buildings into a presidential command post, complete with coding equipment for secure communications, radar saucers for air security, and perimeter searchlights for the assassination-haunted Secret Service. Johnson himself was a gadget person, but he preferred earthier uses: high-powered showerheads, special blades to cut thick steaks into the shape of Texas, an amphibious jeep that he loved to drive into his lake by “mistake” with unwitting passengers, and, mounted on his Lincoln touring convertible, a horn whose sounds stimulated the mating instincts of nearby cattle, producing sights that mortified those whom Johnson gleefully called “citified” guests.

  Never was Johnson’s domain more thoroughly overrun than these holidays, when he postponed Christmas dinner with twenty-odd relatives, including Aunt Josefa and Cousin Oriole, to take fifty of the regular beat reporters on a tour of the main house. The New York Times published on the front page a photograph of the President astride his horse, Lady B, and another of him speaking from an outdoor rostrum mounted on a bale of hay. Five Greyhound busloads of supplementary reporters covered the arrival of West German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard for the first state barbecue, with entertainment by classical pianist Van Cliburn. Erhard was followed closely by the Joint Chiefs and most of the Cabinet. Johnson handed out souvenir ashtrays and offered cigarettes from displays artfully swirled in hospitality bowls.

  Stress showed more privately. Whenever Mrs. Johnson saw the President reaching for a cigarette, she matched his actions ostentatiously to achieve a silent standoff—having learned that her own threat to take up smoking if he returned to the habit yielded more effect, and less abuse, than verbal correction. The smallest criticisms could agitate Johnson for weeks, as when he noticed that Jet magazine mistakenly said he had refused to be photographed with Martin Luther King. He retrieved prints to prove otherwise, then pleaded with the Urban League’s Whitney Young to make Jet “quit cuttin’ us up sayin’ we hate the nigras.” In his Christmas call to Roy Wilkins, Johnson protested in such unconsolable distress—“I had my picture made with every damn one of ’em!”—that his shortness of breath move
d Wilkins to interject repeatedly, “Please take care of yourself.”

  The new president also labored painfully to gain acceptance from aides who had been close to President Kennedy. Having courted Kennedy’s chief speechwriter, Theodore Sorensen—“I’ve done as much as I can and have any pride and self-respect left,” he complained to a friend—Johnson commandeered him to the ranch for the holidays. Sorensen arrived with his three young sons and a vacant look, having lost not only a president but also a wife from whom he had recently separated. He remained polite but pinched as Johnson aggressively befriended him with compliments, Stetson hats, cowboy adventures, and overly close attention so transparently misguided that the household help winced for both men.

  Poignant discomforts carried over to the marathon poverty caucus in the rustic guest house, a green frame structure set in a pasture where white-faced Hereford cattle grazed. With Bill Moyers and economist Walter Heller, among others, Sorensen brainstormed Johnson’s charge to design a dramatic but practical legislative attack. The money people argued for something “experimental,” meaning visibly new but cheap, while the political people argued for something to spread among the competing bureaucracies that claimed expertise in health, education, and job training. As paper cups and crumpled scratch sheets piled up on the table, Johnson reacted to various proposals including one to create a trial “one-stop” poverty center in Washington’s Union Station, envisioned as a synergetic beehive for experts and the needy alike. Horace Busby made the mistake of speaking up from his wall seat to ask how all the poor people would get there to seek jobs, and where would they park? This comment drew a withering look from President Johnson, who promptly summoned Busby outside for a scolding. “Why did you say that?” he demanded. “Don’t you realize these are Kennedy’s people?” Johnson’s pride in Texas gave way to fear that yokelism within his camp would drive away the Ivy League holdovers who lent a sophisticated image to his government.

  Hypersensitive and erratic, President Johnson attended a reception in part to make up with Busby. Alumni from the University of Texas were honoring Busby, the wartime editor of The Daily Texan, now a celebrity as special assistant to the President, with a party at an off-campus faculty retreat called the Forty Acres Club, a short helicopter ride from the LBJ Ranch. Like the university itself, the club had been locked in an icy, three-year standoff over segregation, with the politically connected regents maintaining an arcane fallback line since court-ordered integration. Restrictions banned some two hundred Negro students from all varsity sports and leading roles in campus theater, for instance, and a prolonged faculty boycott failed to breach strict segregation at Forty Acres. As Vice President, Johnson had hosted dinners to encourage some of the embattled professors, but these intercessions were trivial compared with the simple gesture of escorting Gerri Whittington to the Busby reception on New Year’s Eve. Throughout the formal and informal salutes due the new president, faculty members pretended not to stare at the White House secretary on his arm. No one mentioned to Johnson that Whittington shattered precedent as the first Negro ever admitted to the premises. Managers at Forty Acres soon began accepting reservations for mixed tables, saying “the President of the United States integrated us on New Year’s Eve,” and other university practices began to fall in line as though one step through the glass partition pretty much settled the entire race issue.

  ELIJAH MUHAMMAD struck on New Year’s Eve. From Phoenix, he called one by one Captain Joseph and the principal ministers whom Malcolm X had been recruiting with cryptic “parables” about sexually corrupted prophets. All of them had warned of incipient revolt by Malcolm, but Muhammad guarded forcefully against double dealing. The parables were nothing but “rotten stuff,” he said, ridiculing Malcolm’s claim to be his loyal agent preparing to defend the Nation if the devil’s propaganda should spread. “What kind of fool would I be to go out to tell him to tell people something like that on me?” Muhammad demanded. No, Malcolm was a renegade. “I saw that in him a long time ago,” said Muhammad, “and I didn’t think he would be able to stand any joy at all.” He vowed to remove Malcolm. “I’m going to strip him of everything,” he told Minister Louis X of Boston. He warned the ministers not to let Malcolm’s fame seduce them into rebellion, saying that “all of Malcolm’s speeches at the colleges did not make one convert and he did not make many where he went outside of Harlem.” Converts were the cement of the Nation; submission was its saving doctrine. Muhammad advised each of the ministers to judge very carefully between “Allah and his Messenger” on the one hand and “this person,” Malcolm X, “to see which one you would rather get along with.”

  All the ministers swore loyalty to Muhammad and pleaded with him to disregard rumors to the contrary. Minister Louis X told Muhammad that Lonnie X of Washington, the prized new Ph.D. mathematician among the ministers, was “all torn up” over Malcolm’s disclosures “and just can’t figure it out in his own mind.” When Louis volunteered to help the Messenger secure Malcolm’s territory in New York, Muhammad replied that he would take up the question of succession when Malcolm was “completely off the list.” Meanwhile, ministers should spread word that the Messenger would “not have any mercy” on those taking Malcolm’s side. “Any laborer or minister who takes any of this poison shall be removed at once,” Muhammad warned Minister Isaiah X of Baltimore. “I will not let a man like that mess me up with twenty million people.”

  Muhammad allowed his notice to reverberate for two days before calling Malcolm X. “I cannot understand why you took this poison and spread it out and told them it was poison,” he said. “…If you love Allah, you must love me as the Messenger of Allah.” Malcolm defended himself halfheartedly, then confessed that he had lost much of his drive since the previous February in Chicago, when Wallace Muhammad had confirmed rumors of extra children in his father’s household. Muhammad chastised Malcolm. “You should have put out this fire when you and Wallace found it in Chicago,” he said, “rather than to start it up in other places.” Malcolm, on a conference call joined by two of his principal enemies on the financial corruption issue—National Secretary John Ali and Supreme Captain Raymond Sharrieff—plus FBI clerks listening in over wiretaps, prayed that Allah would forgive him.

  Elijah Muhammad scrambled to contain the talk loosed already. To an assistant who reported that Muhammad’s wife, Clara, was upset that he had bought maternity clothes for his secretaries, Muhammad admitted the purchases but said they “did not prove anything.” Through intermediaries, he supervised treacherous negotiations with his secretaries Evelyn and Lucille, the latter being “in the nest” expecting her third child by Muhammad. The women, already bitter that the Nation provided only $100 per month for each child, were holding out for $8,000 in relocation expenses instead of $5,000, arguing that they would have to move all the way to Hawaii to become safely isolated. Muhammad ordered the transfer done “even if they move to the Fiji Islands.” On another front, he told Captain Joseph to assume complete control of Temple No. 7 in New York, and specifically not to allow Malcolm to select the guest ministers any longer. Muhammad also ordered his aides to tell Wallace Muhammad that Malcolm had blamed him as the instigator—“Let my son know that,” he said—and then he summoned both men to summary court in Phoenix on January 6: “I’m not through with Malcolm yet.”

  Wallace Muhammad managed to avoid the stacked hearing on the excuse that his parole officer would not let him leave Chicago. Malcolm appeared in Phoenix, and said little when Muhammad extended his ninety-day suspension indefinitely, contingent on what he called the strength of Malcolm’s faith. As a first test, Muhammad ordered Malcolm to retract in person everything he had said. Malcolm sent an emergency request that Ministers Lonnie X of Washington and Isaiah X of Baltimore meet his return flight at a layover in Washington. At the airport, he told them he had lied about the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and was undertaking a mission of penance. Pacing the floor, he struck both his colleagues as agitated to the point of incoherence. As he
rushed off to catch his next airplane, Malcolm promised to contact them soon about how this mistake had occurred, and what it meant, but he disappeared instead. Minister Lonnie X never saw him again.

  Back in New York, Malcolm X recorded a statement about the multiple allegations of corruption against Chicago—personal and financial—plus charges of religious hypocrisy and charlatanism, saying some members from the Muhammad family had not bothered to learn the most basic facts about Islam. By mail, Malcolm presented the tape as a loyal fulfillment of the instruction to submit every trouble to the Messenger, but the tone and content shocked Muhammad. Each detailed “confession” from Malcolm carried the double edge of accusation, and the very enthusiasm of his humility had an undertow of threat. At first, Muhammad fretted to an aide about the Nation’s changeling: “Sometimes he speaks nice and good, and other times he is altogether different.” Then in quick succession arrived another tape and a letter in which Malcolm charged that the other ministers were ridiculing him in hopes of usurping his job, and warned that he would do all in his power to stop them. Muhammad interpreted the lurching communications as a sign of desperation. “When a man is falling,” he said, “he reaches for everything that he thinks will support him.”

  On January 14, Malcolm escaped into an airport hotel room to spend seven secluded hours with a magazine writer named Alex Haley. The two made an oddly matched team. In 1939, Haley’s father, a stern professor, had been so disappointed with his dreamy, lackadaisical son’s failing French grade in college that he had enlisted young Alex as a U.S. Coast Guard seaman. Lonely and adrift aboard ship, the younger Haley had developed a thriving business as the ghostwriter of individually tailored personal letters for less literate white shipmates, mostly Cyrano-style love entreaties to girlfriends on shore. Twenty years later, cushioned by his Coast Guard pension, Haley had turned his literary hobby into a second career as one of the few Negro freelance magazine writers. Reader’s Digest hired him to write an article vilifying Elijah Muhammad in 1960, which positioned Haley three years later to interview Malcolm X for Playboy magazine. From that assignment slowly grew their collaboration on Malcolm’s autobiography.