Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

“Yes,” replied Seigenthaler. “But don’t worry. I…put out a denial.”

  After another long pause, Kennedy said, “Well, you better…retract it.” To Seigenthaler’s astonishment, he admitted rather sheepishly that he had made the call to the judge from New York. Kennedy explained that he had gotten steamed up on reflecting that the act of a lynch-law judge was “screwing up my brother’s campaign and making the country look ridiculous before the world.”

  Very shortly, Seigenthaler summoned Harris Wofford to help him draft a press statement about why Kennedy had called the judge. The stunning news made a number of powerful emotions collide within Wofford. Personally and politically, he was overjoyed that Kennedy’s radical about-face may have contributed to King’s release, but as a corporate lawyer and former law professor he disapproved strongly of Kennedy’s call to a sitting judge as a clear violation of the legal canon of ethics. Over the phone, Kennedy groped with him for an alibi. “Can’t we just say I was inquiring about Dr. King’s constitutional rights to bail?” he asked. Wofford stayed on into the night writing a statement that vacillated between pride and apology.

  Still later that night, a phone call awakened Louis Martin at his home in Washington: “This is Bob Kennedy. Louis, I wanted you especially to know that I called that judge in Georgia today, to try to get Dr. King out.”

  Martin was jolted out of bed, instantly awake. “What’s that again?” he said. Kennedy repeated himself. He had called Judge Mitchell from a phone booth in New York to register his opinion that any decent American judge would release King on bond by sundown.

  Martin decided not to ask what had made Kennedy change so from his tirade of the previous day. “You have just become an honorary brother,” he laughed.

  The next morning, Martin walked into a briefing at campaign head quarters and heard Kennedy press spokesmen still denying the story of Robert Kennedy’s call to Judge Mitchell. They were doing so in spite of the fact that The New York Times featured the call in that morning’s story on the King release, mercifully omitting any mention of the Kennedy campaign’s denials. To Martin, such confusion was all in a day’s work. Eventually, the press office caught up with the statement Wofford had helped draft for Kennedy. With King no longer in jail, the entire matter quickly dropped out of the nation’s white newspapers for lack of a compelling focus. The aftermath ran strong in the Negro press, however. The Pittsburgh Courier cited as a “universal consensus” the opinion of an observer who said, “These white folks have now made Dr. Martin King, Jr. the biggest Negro in the United States.”

  Inside the Kennedy campaign’s civil rights office, Martin and Wofford reported to Shriver that the acute sensitivity to the King case was causing a phenomenal “sea change” within the Negro electorate. Now that Robert Kennedy had broken his own ban against campaign involvement with the case, they were seeking permission to exploit the change. Their scheme—designed explicitly to flood Negro voters with the Kennedy side of the King case in a way that minimized the danger of a backlash among white voters—was to print a pamphlet for mass distribution within the Negro churches of the nation on the last Sunday before the presidential election. They would run no newspaper ads, even in Negro papers, nor do anything else likely to filter into the white press. They would establish a “dummy committee” of preachers to protect the Kennedy campaign against being identified as the sponsor of the pamphlet. They would include no statement from a Kennedy spokesman. In fact, the pamphlet would consist of nothing more than statements by the King family and Negro preachers about Senator Kennedy’s phone call to Coretta. It would not mention Robert Kennedy’s call to the judge. The proposed pamphlet would be titled “No Comment” Nixon Versus a Candidate with a Heart, Senator Kennedy.

  The pamphlet loomed as an enormous gamble. To compose, print, ship, and distribute it in such a short time would certainly preclude all the civil rights office’s scheduled efforts for the balance of the campaign, but Martin gave assurances that it could be done. Shriver, facing the choice between the pamphlet and everything else, instantly chose the pamphlet. Moreover, he ordered Wofford and Martin to say nothing of it to Robert Kennedy. Shriver promised to take the responsibility and to find the money without going through the campaign manager. His decision flung Wofford and Martin pell-mell into the production of a logistical miracle. Their first decision was not to seek an explicit endorsement of Kennedy from King. They used King’s published statement that he was “deeply indebted to Senator Kennedy, who served as a great force in making my release possible.” That was good enough in the emergency.

  Most of the political pressure on King was coming not from the Kennedy or Nixon campaign but from his own father. Having broken with the old guard of Republican Negro leaders, he was under severe criticism for confusing politics with personal emotion. Daddy King defended his change of allegiance like a battlefield commander, calling it the only honorable path. Kennedy’s gestures to his son demanded repayment, he argued, by the preacher’s time-honored code that one kindness deserves another. Having taken this exposed ground, Daddy King was vexed by the fact that his own son, who was the recipient of the kindness and a man much more favorably disposed toward Kennedy than he was, declined to join ranks with him. And he was nettled beyond endurance that some of his son’s advisers who were working for Kennedy nevertheless urged King to remain officially neutral in the presidential campaign. Daddy King did not like neutrality. He intercepted one of Harry Belafonte’s many calls on the weekend after the release and refused to let his son hear any more daffy New York thinking. “You just don’t understand,” Daddy King told Belafonte. “You can’t have a man do what Kennedy did and not pay your debt.”

  “I agree,” said Belafonte. “My point is about how the debt is paid. I don’t think Martin should ever be put in the position of becoming an advocate for any candidate. He shouldn’t play the game like a politician, on a lesser level.”

  “You are too young for these things,” Daddy King replied, and abruptly said good-bye.

  King himself escaped the brunt of these family pressures by flying to Chicago that weekend to resume his speaking schedule. He tried to resolve them when he returned by issuing a formal statement in which he explained that he could not endorse a candidate because “the role that is mine in the emerging social order of the South and America demands that I remain non-partisan…. But for fear of being considered an ingrate, I want to make it palpably clear that I am deeply grateful to Senator Kennedy for the genuine concern he expressed in my arrest.” King’s official neutrality displeased his father as too weak, while his pro-Kennedy messages struck the city’s Republican establishment as heresy. Almost simultaneously with King’s statement, William Holmes Borders and the leading Baptist ministers except for Daddy King joined in “firmly re-endorsing” Nixon. The preachers explained that this second extraordinary gathering was necessary in light of “recent political developments in Georgia, and in Atlanta in particular.”

  That Sunday, Harris Wofford met Senator Kennedy at Washington’s National Airport for a quick bit of business before the candidate embarked on his final week of campaigning. Kennedy had promised to sign for release to the press the final document of resolutions passed in Harlem three weeks earlier, but now he asked Wofford directly if he really needed to sign the document to get elected. Wofford admitted that the resolutions were probably superfluous, without saying that a prime reason for his confidence was the new pamphlet on the King case, the first 50,000 copies of which were rolling off the presses that day. The “blue bomb,” as the pamphlet was known because of its cheap blue paper, was still secret from the Kennedys.

  Kennedy decided not to release the civil rights promises until after the election. Handing the unsigned paper back to Wofford, he said, “You can consider me on record—with you.” Then he put his three-year-old daughter Caroline on his back and headed toward the campaign plane. On the way, he spoke the only words Wofford ever heard him say publicly or privately about the King case. Referri
ng to Daddy King’s “suitcase of votes” declaration that he would vote for Kennedy in spite of his Catholicism, Kennedy mused to Wofford, “That was a hell of a bigoted statement, wasn’t it? Imagine Martin Luther King having a bigot for a father.” He grinned and added, “Well, we all have fathers, don’t we?”

  Not entirely by coincidence, Police Commissioner L. B. Sullivan’s libel suit against The New York Times and King’s four SCLC associates came to trial that week in Montgomery. Abernathy, Shuttlesworth, Joseph Lowery, and S. S. Seay sat at the defense table near Harding Bancroft and other Times executives. Defense lawyers had forbidden King to be in the courtroom, or even in Montgomery, fearing that his presence would serve only to inflame the jurors against the defense, but King was very much there in absentia. The suit, which had grown out of the Alabama perjury indictment just after the outbreak of the sit-in movement, was coming to trial nine months later in the wake of a similar effort to make an example of King in the Reidsville prison sentence.

  The trial began inauspiciously for the defense when an all-white jury was selected. There followed an unceremonious argument over courtroom use of the word “nigger,” which was won in the end by a plaintiff’s lawyer who told the judge that he was merely following the customary pronunciation of a lifetime. Montgomery Advertiser editor Grover Hall, taking the stand as the plaintiff’s first witness, testified that although he did not particularly like Commissioner Sullivan, he did conclude as an expert observer that most Montgomery citizens would consider the “Gestapo” charges in the Times ad to be defamatory of Sullivan had they believed the charges. On this point, the Times lawyers tried to get Hall to admit that the ad, far from injuring Sullivan, had made him a hero throughout the state of Alabama.

  It was a bizarre trial. Neither side bothered to address the substantive truth or falsity of the ad’s statements. Both sides agreed that Bayard Rustin was the chief culprit—the defense disclaiming responsibility for what he had written, the plaintiff saying the defendants should have questioned Rustin’s assertions that Alabama authorities were persecuting King. Fred Gray and the Times lawyers portrayed their clients as innocent bystanders to a dispute between Rustin and Alabama, while Sullivan’s lawyers portrayed Sullivan as the victim of powerful corporate interests in the North. On the third day, the jury brought in a verdict of guilty and an award to Sullivan of $500,000 in damages. Sullivan and his lawyers posed triumphantly for photographs that appeared on front pages across the South. The defense lawyers appealed to the Alabama Supreme Court.

  The Montgomery trial, like the King cases in Atlanta, played out along a hidden geological fault within Democratic politics. The paradoxes of race made it possible for controlled racial conflict between the South and the national party to benefit both sides. At the Democratic Convention of 1940, the national Democrats helped gain Franklin Roosevelt’s first heavy Negro vote simply by inviting a Negro minister to deliver a prayer. During this invocation, Senator “Cotton Ed” Smith stalked out of the convention to a hero’s welcome at home in South Carolina, where he delighted crowds with lightheartedly hateful speeches denouncing the Northerners for inviting a “thick-lipped, blue-gummed, nappy-headed Senegambian” to pray before the party of John C. Calhoun. Now, twenty years later, national Democrats could hope that two Kennedy phone calls about the King case might deliver the Negro vote in the North. At the same time, governors Vandiver and Patterson, by acting resolutely on the anti-Negro side, not only enhanced their own political popularity but also, paradoxically, helped convince white Southerners that it was still safe to vote the traditional Democratic ticket for President.

  These were fatefully unstable combinations, as everyone knew. Neither Nixon nor Kennedy mentioned the King arrests, the Sullivan trial, or related matters in public. In fact, during the closing days of the closest presidential race in the twentieth century, they moved farther and farther away from sensitive issues such as race. Instead, Nixon asked his secret weapon, President Eisenhower, to go on the road for him, and Ike defended the Republican record of the 1950s—his record—before enormous crowds around the country. Nine million new homes had been built, he declared. College enrollment was up by 75 percent, the economy by 45 percent. There was peace. Along with Nixon, Eisenhower attacked Kennedy for “bewailing America’s strength,” for “talking loosely about relative military strength,” and for “wringing his hands” about the nation’s prestige in the world. Nixon flew more than 7,000 miles on the last day of the campaign before collapsing, utterly exhausted, in the Royal Suite of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

  Kennedy was making his way eastward from California, where he unveiled his plan to establish a Peace Corps of unarmed American volunteers in the poor nations of the world, warning that “the enemy advances now by non-military means.” On reaching Connecticut, he said, “I run as a candidate for the Presidency with a view that this is a great country but it must be greater.” He repeated a quotation from Lincoln about the coming storm—“I know there is a God, and I know he hates injustice”—then flew on to Boston and finally, exhausted, arrived at the family compound at Hyannis Port.

  Far removed from these twin storms of political attention, beneath the notice of campaign professionals, the Kennedy campaign’s “blue bomb” was spreading through the Negro culture by means of the most effective private communications medium since the Underground Railroad—the church. Nearly two million copies were being shipped by bus, train, and airplane—duplicated and bundled, picked up and unbundled, praised from ten thousand pulpits and handed out. The confines of race made it easy for the civil rights office to keep the operation secret within their own organization, but even the secret-keepers did not know all the secrets that made their logistical miracle possible. Neither Wofford nor Shriver knew—and Louis Martin was only dimly aware at first—that their main distribution network was drawn almost entirely from the Gardner Taylor faction of the National Baptist Convention, which was still in a death struggle with J. H. Jackson for control of the national church. The Kennedy “dummy committee” was located in Philadelphia, site of the riotous church schism in September. Its co-chairman was one of the preachers J. H. Jackson had expelled from the Convention and sent off to jail three years earlier,* and the cover endorsement on the “blue bomb” was a quotation from Gardner Taylor himself. Taylor’s nationwide telephone apparatus was reactivated for the Kennedy-King emergency.

  Not all the Taylor preachers had been Kennedy supporters, nor had all the Jackson preachers been inclined to Nixon. But all had taken special notice when J. H. Jackson publicly denounced the sit-ins shortly after King’s arrest at Rich’s, saying that some Negroes “talk too much about racial integration and not enough about racial elevation.”* Then, in quick succession, came news of a manacled King being hauled off to Reidsville and of Kennedy’s expression of sympathy. The force of the sudden blows sheared off not just Daddy King’s Republicanism but a host of cross-cutting affiliations within the Negro Baptist clergy. A fissure within the Negro Baptist church shifted into line with the racial fault underlying American politics, producing a seismic rumble.

  Sargent Shriver and Louis Martin felt it on Sunday, November 6, the mass-distribution day for the “blue bomb.” Both were home in Chicago, working frantically for the last two days of the campaign, and by now Martin had told Shriver something of the Negro church battles affecting their work. They ventured that morning to Olivet Baptist Church—J. H. Jackson’s pulpit, the largest congregation in the city—curious to see what the worshippers were doing. Shriver stood with his children across the street from the entrance, transfixed by the sight of all the churchgoers carrying the blue pamphlets. They were not bringing them out of the church, as expected; somehow they had gotten hold of them in advance and were taking them into church, along with their Bibles. They were taking pamphlets praising J. H. Jackson’s mortal enemies into his own church. Given the current level of ecclesiastical hostility, this was something like taking the Bill of Rights into the Kremlin or Lu
theran tracts into the College of Cardinals.

  Nearly all those who passed by seemed to be talking about what King had suffered and what Kennedy had done. Shriver realized in a rush that the pamphlet touched something transcendent, beyond campaign machinations and the most bitter preacher politics. It put him in awe to witness such a silent tremor among the common people of a culture different from his own, and to feel it shaking something as close to him as the Kennedy campaign.

  King took no active part in the campaign. On Monday, snugly within his own world, he addressed fifteen hundred beauticians at the Bronner Brothers Fall Beauty Clinic on Auburn Avenue. On Election Day, the Atlanta Daily World urged Negroes one last time to vote Republican. Vernon Johns’s old friend John Wesley Dobbs declared on the front page that Kennedy’s Boston had fewer Negro policemen than segregated Atlanta—a deficiency he blamed on the Catholic Church. Dobbs said he could not understand how any self-respecting Negro could vote Democratic in view of the state party’s refusal to allow a single Negro to become a member, “not even Mr. Walden or M. L. King.”

  King himself was not permitted to vote that day. Georgia officials ruled that he had not established residency long enough to vote in Atlanta, and Alabama officials said that it was too late for him to pay the $1.50 poll tax required to vote by absentee ballot in Montgomery. Like the two candidates and millions of groggy TV viewers, he went to bed not knowing who would be the next President. Toward dawn the next morning, electoral votes were still shifting from one column to the other. In fully one-third of the states, the Kennedy and Nixon totals were hovering between 48 and 52 percent. When Senator Kennedy emerged from his bedroom at nine o’clock, his aide Ted Sorensen greeted him with the news that he had won California and therefore the presidency. As it turned out, Sorensen was wrong about California but right about the election. Nationally, Kennedy had received 34,221,463 votes to Nixon’s 34,108,582, for a popular margin of two-tenths of one percent. The tiniest of changes—5,000 votes in Illinois and 28,000 in Texas—would have opened the White House to Nixon instead of Kennedy.