What made this package all the more disturbing for King was that Coretta opened it. Yet the note with its accompanying tape--most of which was inaudible anyway--failed to produce the desired effect. If anything, it strengthened King's marriage and his resolve to carry on in the face of what he and Coretta both now realized was a full-scale FBI effort to ruin him.
"They are out to break me,"88 he said to a friend. "[But] what I do is only between me and my God." King, in his own way, was determined to fight back. "Hoover is old89 and getting senile," he said, "and should be hit from all sides."
5 DIXIE WEST
THROUGH EARLY WINTER of 1967, Martin Luther King was increasingly troubled by a new political development: an age-old nemesis was running for president--and enjoying an astonishing surge in popularity.
As a candidate for the self-styled American Independent Party, George C. Wallace had been traveling around the country almost as frenetically as King had, drumming up his blue-collar base from coast to coast. The nation's best reporters and political phrasemakers had a field day covering the Alabama demagogue's outrageous but unfailingly colorful appearances. Wallace was the Cicero of the Cabdriver,90 it was said. He was so full of bile that if he "bit himself91 he would die of blood poisoning." He was, said Marshall Frady, "the surly orphan92 of American politics ... the grim joker in the deck, whose nightrider candidacy [is] a rough approximation of the potential for an American fascism."
People loved his bumptious sense of humor, the rockabilly growl in his voice, the way he shook his fist in defiance when he really got worked up. Wallace, a former Golden Gloves boxer, was battling forces no one else seemed to have the gumption to take on. At rallies around the country, he had a litany of phrases that he used over and over, lines calculated to get a lusty guffaw out of the crowds. When he won the White House, Wallace said, he was going to take all those "bearded beatnik bureaucrats" and hurl them and their briefcases into the Potomac. He railed against "liberal sob sisters" and "bleeding-heart sociologists." Wallace liked to say that whenever disturbances like the Watts riots swept the streets of America's cities, you could count on "pointy-headed intellectuals93 to explain it away, whining that the poor rioters didn't get any watermelon to eat when they were 10 years old."
Though he was careful to moderate his most incendiary racial rhetoric, Wallace continued to preach states' rights and the separation of the races and said the recent gains of the civil rights movement should be overturned. At friendlier venues he went so far as to argue that blacks should not be able to serve on juries, noting that "the nigra would still be in Africa94 in the brush if the white people of this country had not raised their standards." He called the civil rights legislation that President Johnson had pushed through Congress "an assassin's knife stuck in the back of liberty."
"Let 'em call me a racist,"95 he told a reporter in Cleveland. "It don't make any difference. Whole heap of folks in this country feel the same way I do. Race is what's gonna win this thing for me."
FROM THE START of his governorship, George Wallace had made white supremacy--sometimes cloaked in the more respectable veil of states' rights, but usually not--the centerpiece of his platform. In his 1962 inaugural speech, delivered in Montgomery on the gold star marking the spot where Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederacy, Wallace gave a stem-winder that was written by the speechwriter Asa Carter, a well-known Klansman and anti-Semite. "In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth," Wallace said, "I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say: Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!"
If those words put Wallace on the national radar screen, his actions at the University of Alabama a few months later placed him on a historic collision course with the federal government. On June 11, 1963, flanked by state troopers, Wallace physically prevented two black students from entering an auditorium at the University of Alabama to register for classes. His "stand in the schoolhouse door" did not work, of course--two federal marshals dispatched by the Kennedy Justice Department immediately ordered him to stand down. But in the process Wallace had made himself the civil rights movement's most vocal and visible bogeyman.
Throughout the 1960s, Wallace had repeatedly focused his ire on one figure: Martin Luther King Jr.--in no small part because King had scored his sweetest victories in Wallace's home state. Wallace had called the Nobel laureate everything but the Antichrist, but in an odd way Wallace needed King, for the governor understood that great political struggles can exist in the abstract for only so long before cooking down to the personal.
Certainly Wallace's slights and epithets cannot be faulted for their lack of energy or brio. He called King "a communist agitator," "a phony," and "a fraud, marching and going to jail96 and all that, and just living high on the hog." He once said that King spent most of his time "riding around in big Cadillacs smoking expensive cigars" and competing with other black ministers to see "who could go to bed97 with the most nigra women." And yet, to Wallace's outrage and consternation, the federal government had consistently sided with King. Leaders in Washington, the governor said, "now want us to surrender the state to him and his group of pro-Communists."
On numerous occasions, King had lobbed invectives of his own. In a 1963 interview with Dan Rather, King called Wallace "perhaps the most dangerous racist in America today ... I am not sure that he believes all the poison he preaches, but he is artful enough to convince others that he does." When segregationist thugs bombed Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in September 1963, killing four girls attending Sunday school, King sent the governor a withering telegram that all but accused him of the murder, saying "the blood of our little children98 is on your hands." Two years later, when King marched from Selma to Montgomery and gave a triumphant oration outside the Alabama state capitol, he aimed his message right at the governor's office. Segregation was now on its deathbed, King pronounced; the only thing uncertain about it was "how costly Wallace99 will make the funeral."
Still, through all his entanglements with Wallace during the 1960s, King had to confess a perverse admiration for his talents on the stump. "He has just four [speeches],"100 King once said of the governor, "but he works on them and hones them, so that they are all little minor classics."
Now, incredibly, this neo-Confederate was running for president--a development that King found immensely troubling. King remarked to a television reporter that he thought Wallace's candidacy "will only strengthen the forces of reaction in the country and incite bigotry, hatred, and even violence. I think it will arouse many evil forces in our nation."
Even so, Wallace's bid was already starting to show a vitality that America had not seen in an independent candidate since Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose campaign of 1912. Pundits were projecting that even though he had no hope of winning, Wallace could potentially spoil the 1968 election, forcing the House of Representatives to decide the president for the first time since 1825. National polls indicated that his appeal was steadily climbing, from 9 to 12 to 14 percent of the American electorate. "In both the North and South,"101 declared Life magazine, "Wallace appears to be tapping a powerful underground stream of discontent."
IN THE FALL of 1967, California became the heart of Wallace's fight for the presidency. In November, he began an intense effort to get his name on the state's unusually restrictive ballot for the June primaries. California election law required a new candidate from any unregistered party to gather sixty-six thousand signatures. It was probably the most onerous ballot requirement in the country, but Wallace's advisers felt that California, as the nation's most populous and influential state, represented the first crucial test of his nascent campaign.
So Wallace moved most of his staff to Los Angeles, and hundreds of devoted volunteers from Alabama soon followed him. In newly opened American Independent Party offices across California, drawling armies of phone workers, fresh from Mobile and Tuscaloosa and Birmingham, clogged the
lines with their solicitation calls. Working in an extracurricular capacity, Alabama legislators, commissioners, clerks, and other government employees made the trek out to the West Coast to moonlight for the cause. Meanwhile, Wallace himself crisscrossed California, speaking at hundreds of rallies and fund-raisers, guarded by swaggering hosses who were usually out-of-uniform Alabama state troopers.
The Bear Flag State, it seemed, had become Dixie West. "The capital of Alabama102 is not Los Angeles," one Wall Street Journal political reporter noted, "but it might as well be."
What made the Montgomery decampment to Los Angeles all the more surreal was that "Governor" Wallace was not the duly constituted governor of Alabama. Because of a strict anti-succession statute, Wallace had been forced to step down, despite immense popularity, when his first gubernatorial term ended in 1966. He resented this brusque termination of his tenure, for he felt he needed political viability in Alabama as a base from which to pursue his national ambitions. Then, in a moment of craftiness, he realized that nothing in the Alabama statutes prevented his wife from running for governor.
So, in 1967, First Lady Lurleen Wallace, a perfectly put-together, and widely beloved, traditional Southern woman with scarcely any interest in political life, ascended to the state's highest office--on paper, at least. George Wallace became officially known as the "First Gentleman of Alabama," but few people in Montgomery labored under any misunderstandings about who was actually running the state's affairs. It was an unorthodox arrangement, to say the least, but Alabama voters had to hand it to their ever-resourceful governor for installing his own surrogate--and for pulling off what would later be called one of the most brazen acts of "political ventriloquism"103 in American history.
Lurleen Wallace occasionally ventured out to California to campaign with her husband, but she was quite ill and unable to exert herself. She had recently been diagnosed with colon cancer, had undergone an operation to remove an egg-sized malignancy, and was receiving cobalt treatments at a hospital in Texas. She was slowly, surely withering away. Her doctors believed she had only a few months to live.
George Wallace, in a fugue state of campaigning, carefully hid the seriousness of her illness from both his Alabama and his California publics--and kept to the hustings.
6 THE GRADUATE
ERIC GALT CLUTCHED his diploma and posed for the photographer. It was "commencement day" at the International School of Bartending on Sunset Boulevard. Galt, wearing a borrowed bow tie and a black tuxedo jacket, stood in a softly lit room that was a mock-up of a cocktail lounge, with minimalist modern furniture and plush wall-to-wall carpeting that muffled the steady clinking of tumblers and collins glasses behind the test bar.
It was here, under the direction of a primly mustachioed man named Tomas Reyes Lau, that Galt and his fellow pupils had learned the mixologist's trade, assaying the chemical mysteries of Rusty Nails, mai tais, Harvey Wallbangers, sloe gin fizzes, and Singapore slings. Over the six-week course, which cost Galt $220 in cash, he had mastered the recipes of more than 112 cocktails.
Mr. Lau, an unctuous, precise man with a Latin American accent, was impressed with Galt and thought he had promise in the business. "A nice fellow,104 very intelligent, quiet and reserved," Lau judged him. "He had the ability to develop this type of service." Galt told people around the school that he had worked as a "culinary" on a Mississippi River steamboat, but that now he said he wanted to settle down--and, one day, open up a tavern in Los Angeles.
Lau had already succeeded in finding him a bartending job, but to Lau's surprise Galt turned it down. He planned to go out of town soon, he told Lau. "I have to leave to see my brother," Galt said. "What good would it do for me to work only two or three weeks? I'll wait till I get back, then I can take a permanent job." He said his brother ran a tavern somewhere in Missouri.
Now the cameraman was poised to snap the picture. Galt stood next to Lau, who fairly beamed with pride at his new graduate. Galt stared anxiously at the lens and concentrated on the photographer's movements. Though he had made failing attempts at proficiency behind a camera, and had almost obsessively taken Polaroid mug shots of himself while in Puerto Vallarta, he hated being photographed by others, hated the whole tedious ritual--the pointless lingering, the sense of momentary entrapment, the knowledge that his image would reside in another's hands.
Galt's posture grew rigid. He fidgeted, tightened his lips, and cocked his head slightly. Then he did something strange: at the last possible moment, Galt closed his eyes and kept them mashed shut until he was sure the portrait was taken.
IF ERIC GALT had enjoyed an interlude of carefree freedom while slumming in Puerto Vallarta, he had known something deeper and more fulfilling these past few months in Los Angeles. He'd arrived in L.A. on November 19 and soon found himself drawn to the city's restless energy. He eventually made a home at the St. Francis Hotel105 on Hollywood Boulevard, in a drab room that cost eighty-five dollars a month. There was a bar downstairs on the ground floor of the blond brick building, a smoky little joint called the Sultan Room, where he liked to while away the nights watching prizefights on the TV set or shooting pool on an old scuffed table while nursing sixty-cent drinks. When he got bored, he'd head out on the town, nosing his Mustang through the freeway traffic, listening to country-and-western songs on his car's push-button radio--he particularly liked Johnny Cash. He took comfort in knowing that if he ran into trouble, he still had his loaded "equalizer" hidden under the seat.
Over the past few months Galt had enjoyed his share of the considerable good life that Southern California had to offer single men of appetites in the go-go days of the late 1960s--self-realization, alternative lifestyles, transcendence, casual sex, drugs. He had a fast car with a V-8 engine and a hot red interior--the windows affixed with Mexican "Turista" stickers that seemed to advertise his wide-ranging prowls. He had some money to spend, money apparently derived from various robberies and smuggling schemes, and from the sale of the marijuana he'd brought back from Mexico. He had girls on those nights when he wanted them--"exotic dancers" he met at clubs along Hollywood Boulevard. It's likely that he had amphetamines,106 which he liked to use to sharpen his thoughts as he burned through the lonely nights.
At his hotel, he would turn on his Channel Master transistor radio and burrow into books--he was a fan of detective thrillers and Ian Fleming's James Bond. There, he would read far into the night, as a fizzly neon sign107 outside his hotel window shot his room--403--with shards of tangerine light. He was intensely, almost desperately focused on improving himself, as though he were running out of time to make something stick. He wanted to do something purposeful with his life and find some kind of happiness. He still nursed dreams of getting into the porn business--while in L.A. he bought sex manuals and a set of Japanese chrome handcuffs and even corresponded with a local club for swingers--but that idea had foundered a bit since leaving Puerto Vallarta. Instead, he enrolled in a correspondence locksmithing course offered by a company in New Jersey, for he was seized with the notion of becoming a first-rate thief, a safecracker, a moonlight yegg. He took dance lessons, read self-help books, and even consulted a cosmetic surgeon to see about making a few small repairs. Now he'd "graduated" from bartending school.
It was, for Eric Galt, a time of branching out, of creative and eclectic if somewhat frantic growth. He was like an empty vessel for all the trends of the zeitgeist. He tried on different lives for himself, fresh looks and new styles. He began to think about moving permanently to a foreign country--New Zealand, perhaps, or someplace in South America or southern Africa. He talked vaguely about starting an orphanage for neglected children--child abuse being his soft spot, the one subject that consistently aroused in him noticeable stirrings of empathy. Other times he dreamed of working in the merchant marine or using his newfound bartending skills to open up a pub in Ireland. Here in the bright forgiving anonymity of L.A., in the early spring of 1968, Eric Galt thought he could do just about anything.
And what
a boomtime it was to be in L.A.--this twitchy young metropolis of starlets and jet-setters, webbed with highways, exploding with myriad fads, its multiple skylines sprouting new stalagmites of mirrored glass, its hectic airport presided over by a futuristic tower that looked like a flying saucer on four legs. Lew Alcindor was perfecting his skyhook for UCLA, while Elgin Baylor and Jerry West were riding high with the Lakers. The Doors' third studio album, Waiting for the Sun, was deep in gestation. Rosey Grier had just finished his last season with the Rams, as part of the "Fearsome Foursome," perhaps the greatest defensive line in football history. Popular TV shows coming out of Los Angeles included Laugh-In, Gunsmoke, Star Trek, and The Beverly Hillbillies. While Galt was gaining proficiency with a shaker and a shot glass, a new movie hit theaters that perfectly captured the country's restive, contrarian mood. It was called The Graduate.
ERIC STARVO GALT was forty years old, clean in his appearance, his skin smooth and clear but of an almost fish-belly wanness--whatever tan he had acquired on the beaches of Puerto Vallarta had long since faded. He lived on aspirin, and complained of headaches, insomnia, and nameless concerns. His heart raced, and he felt odd pains in his chest. Though a recent eye test revealed that he had twenty-twenty vision, he sometimes worried that he was going blind. He was constantly adjusting his medications, refining his regimes of self-maintenance. He took One A Day vitamins and various supplements. If he was a bit scrawny, he kept his muscles lean and tough with regular calisthenics and weight lifting--he'd recently bought himself a set of barbells.108
Though Galt dressed cheaply, he dressed with neatness and exactitude. He buffed his fake-alligator loafers to a fine polish. He made sure his tailored suit was crisp and sharp and took his clothes every Saturday afternoon to the Home Service Laundry on Hollywood Boulevard, just down the street from his hotel.
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