Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  From the FBI, the Kennedy Justice Department received a similar mixture of outward respect and private derision. Even lowly field agents often referred to Robert Kennedy’s office as the “playpen” or “rumpus room,” making sport of the Attorney General’s stocking-footed work style, his touch-football parties, and the splashes of children’s art on his office walls. Such informalities offended the punctilious Hoover, who resented all the more Kennedy’s efforts to function as his boss in substance as well as title. When Kennedy broke the cherished FBI tie to the White House by getting his brother’s aides to refuse Hoover’s calls, Hoover retaliated by becoming unavailable to receive the Attorney General’s calls. Kennedy countered by installing a direct telephone line into Hoover’s office. Down the line at the Bureau, agents resented the effrontery to Hoover but also laughed at the war of manners. The Old Man still could make Kennedy jump through hoops, they said, as in the matter of the Negro agents. When Kennedy gently urged the Director to integrate his elite work force, Hoover first claimed it was an internal FBI matter, then that the Bureau already was integrated. Over nearly two years, Hoover strung out the Attorney General’s suspicious and increasingly annoyed campaign to learn the specifics of the integrated Bureau. Hoover’s masterly bureaucratic retreat was a source of proud merriment within the FBI, where it was widely known that the “Negro agents” consisted of Hoover’s Washington driver, his white-coated doorman, his all-purpose messenger, plus chauffeurs attached to the Miami and La Jolla FBI offices to be available for the Director’s vacations. All five Negro retainers had been made Special Agents to exempt them from civil service protections as well as military service, making them personally dependent on Hoover.

  J. Edgar Hoover’s top officials at the FBI first took personal notice of King only two weeks after the Kennedy inauguration, when The Nation magazine published an article by King titled “Equality Now.” Deep within a long list of recommendations for the incoming Administration was a parenthetical reference to the FBI: “If, for instance, the law-enforcement personnel in the FBI were integrated, many persons who now defy federal law might come under restraints from which they are presently free.” This one sentence rocketed up through that portion of the FBI bureaucracy keeping watch for the appearance of criticism in the public domain. Internal defenders branded King “in error,” apparently on the theory that even one “Negro agent” technically invalidated charges of segregation. A memo to Assistant Director Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, Hoover’s political guardian, recommended that the Bureau not “call his hand on this matter as he [King] obviously would only welcome any controversy or resulting publicity that might ensue.”

  By any reasonable measure, the substance of King’s article was a much greater threat to the incoming Kennedy Administration than to Hoover. Its publication served notice that King was not disposed to trim his expectations in the face of harsh political realities, nor even to hold his peace during the “honeymoon” normally allotted a new President. Beginning simply with the assertion that “the principle is no longer in doubt,” King brushed aside all qualifiers to the moral imperative of racial integration, along with the claims of segregation laws in more than a dozen states. For all that, King substituted a single question—how can the new President most rapidly and effectively bring about integration? “We must face the tragic fact that the federal government is the nation’s highest investor in segregation,” wrote King. His tone was unfailingly positive, as usual, and he presented his agenda as an “opportunity” for the Administration. Still, for fresh Kennedy officials, the article could be perceived only as a warning shot across the Administration’s bow, or, more accurately, across its stern.

  King was not invited to the first large meeting of civil rights leaders in the Attorney General’s office on March 6, at which the petitioners suggested the appointment of a roving federal prosecutor for the South, and Kennedy in turn stressed the importance of voting. King, threatened with exclusion, responded by seeking access at a higher level. Ten days later, after the “clarification mass meeting” in Atlanta, he wrote the White House to seek a private appointment with President Kennedy himself. Appointments secretary Kenneth O’Donnell turned him down on March 25, citing the squeeze of the “present international situation” on the President’s time. Communist guerrillas were overrunning Laos; Portuguese troops were suppressing a revolt in Angola; the Congo remained in turmoil following the assassination of the new country’s deposed premier, Patrice Lumumba; new Soviet demands imperiled the nuclear test ban talks in Geneva.

  The King problem became a running subtopic of conversation among the half-dozen top Kennedy officials most concerned with civil rights. At Harris Wofford’s weekly interagency meeting at the Civil Rights Division, hesitations and calculations were swapped at some length, with the more conservative men worrying generally about the dangers of establishing a political relationship with someone like King. Louis Martin, installed after the inauguration as assistant chairman of the Democratic National Committee, finally suggested a way out of the impasse: they should invite King to Washington for a secret, “off the record” meeting. If King agreed to come under such conditions, and fulfilled his pledge to keep the event out of the newspapers, that in itself would be a reassuring sign of how he operated. If the scheme worked, Martin argued, the Kennedy people would get a chance to take their measure of King in a political setting, and to make the case to him for their civil rights plans, without publicity. If it did not work, they needed to find out sooner rather than later, and it would be easier to limit the political damage from a secret meeting than from a public one.

  Not until after the Bay of Pigs invasion were the arrangements completed, with secrecy permeating every detail. King was permitted to bring only one aide. The setting was a private dining room of the Mayflower Hotel rather than a government office building, and the luncheon was laid out on a buffet table rather than served by waiters, who had been known to pass on tidbits of conversation to reporters. One by one the parties arrived—Wofford and Kenneth O’Donnell from the White House, Louis Martin from the DNC, Attorney General Kennedy, John Seigenthaler, Burke Marshall and two or three others from Justice, plus King and his aide—no more than a dozen people in all. There were no formal introductions. When the Attorney General arrived, the men served themselves and sat down for a Kennedy-style meeting over lunch.

  By prior designation, Burke Marshall did most of the talking for the Kennedy side. He explained to King his view of the severe constraints on the federal government imposed by constitutional federalism, as applied more rigidly in federal laws governing civil rights than in other fields. The Justice Department had little power to intervene in school desegregation cases or even police brutality cases except in very narrowly defined circumstances, Marshall explained, and its widest latitude by far lay in the protection of voting rights. There the Justice Department was, in the watchword of the Administration, “moving” by both conventional and unconventional methods. Attorneys from the Civil Rights Division were filing suits to enjoin Southern counties from harassing or discouraging Negro registrants. John Doar, for example, had just come back from an undercover assignment in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, on such a case, and he was working to develop another in Selma, Alabama. By Marshall’s presentation, all roads in civil rights led to voter registration, where the federal government’s most explicit legal authority could protect the most significant political opportunity for Southern Negroes. Attorney General Kennedy and others chimed in on this central theme.

  When Kennedy made a second trip to the buffet table, Harris Wofford made a point of falling in behind him, smiling in the warmth of a minor satisfaction. “You remember that fellow you were worried about my having associations with, that I didn’t remember?” he whispered.

  “Who’s that?” Kennedy replied.

  “Stanley Levison,” said Wofford. To Kennedy’s noncommittal look, he added, “Well, you better remember him now, too, because that’s him you’re sitting next
to.”

  “Oh, really,” Kennedy said drily. “That’s interesting.” Without another word he returned to his seat next to Levison, the companion King had chosen to bring to this highly unusual introductory meeting with the Kennedy people. Wofford, for his part, was pleased that the Attorney General seemed to have appreciated the irony of the situation as well as Wofford’s implied message that the mild-mannered white man with King did not seem so dangerous in the flesh.

  Levison did not say very much during the meeting, nor did King. To the Kennedy people, in fact, the most noticeable aspect of King’s private behavior was his quietness. He did not preach, bargain, or strike postures. When called upon for response, he heartily endorsed all the Administration’s plans in the field of voting rights, promised to step up the SCLC’s registration work in tandem with the lawsuits, and indicated his full understanding of the need to conceal the Administration’s facilitating role in the registration work itself. Although King did say that voting was not the only avenue of progress toward Negro rights—and that sit-ins, mass meetings, legislation, boycotts, and a host of other tactics could make contributions—he stressed no point of difference. With his slow cadences of speech, his lofty expressions, and his amiable demeanor, King struck the Kennedy people as a saint or a pushover, or both. He was not the type they would think of asking out for a beer, but he was reasonable. Louis Martin, who had known King only slightly, would never waver from the opinion formed that day that King was “the most self-effacing national leader I have ever known.” In later years, Burke Marshall revised his opinion of King’s political abilities upward, saying that he was “easy to underestimate.”

  King noticed that Louis Martin grabbed the bill for the lunch, and as the meeting began to break up he made his way to Martin’s side. Nodding toward the papers Martin was handling for the payment, he dropped his formality just long enough to ask, “Whose tab?”

  Martin hesitated for an instant, taken aback to hear King ask so directly about such housekeeping. “Mine,” he replied. “My account at the DNC.”

  “Thank you,” said King, shaking his head in approval and giving Martin a quick smile that was almost a wink. Martin took it to mean that King was pleased to see him handling the money himself, rather than performing the usual retainer role for one of the white bosses. Martin said simply, “You’re welcome,” together with a quick nod of recognition, which he hoped would say that he was equally pleased to learn that King paid attention to such small but significant details. This passing moment marked the first germ of friendship between the only two Negroes in the room.

  King’s overall performance so relieved and reassured the Kennedy officials that they moved almost by group instinct to cultivate him politically rather than to disengage. Attorney General Kennedy set the tone with his response to King’s remark that harassed and endangered voter registration workers often had trouble reaching the FBI for assistance. Kennedy wrote down the telephone numbers of John Seigenthaler and Burke Marshall and handed them to King. “Any hour of the day or night,” he said, “you call.” From the Mayflower, Wofford found a reason to take King back to the White House for a chat and a tour, during which the President “discovered” that King was there—almost certainly upon the report of Ken O’Donnell, who had been much more skeptical of King before the meeting—and popped out to pay his respects. “It’s good to see you,” said President Kennedy, shaking King’s hand for the first time since their campaign meeting seven months earlier. Kennedy said he had been keeping up with King’s work through the Attorney General. He alluded briefly to the confidential plans to promote Negro registration in the South and promised his support. To King’s polite inquiries about how he was doing, Kennedy replied that everything was fine except that the world had fallen in on him since the disaster in Cuba.

  In honor of his pledge to keep the Mayflower meeting secret, King made no public reference to it then or later, and he did not even acknowledge his chance meeting with President Kennedy until after the assassination in Dallas. The only news King generated was a small item in a Negro gossip column, stating accurately that he planned to “join the colony at Oak Bluff” on Martha’s Vineyard for a month that summer, to relax among exclusive company on the grounds of a nineteenth-century Methodist camp meeting. King still had a powerful appetite for prestige and for luxuries, but competing against it was an ego strong enough that he did not need to chatter about his attentions from the Kennedys. That ego, in the crucible of the Freedom Rides, would blow apart the Administration’s hopes for a cozy, private partnership.

  John Doar faced new competition inside the Justice Department. On the political recommendation of Southern Democrats, Burke Marshall hired an Arkansas lawyer named Jerome Heilbron, who came into the Civil Rights Division representing the thesis that persuasion was more effective than lawsuits. Heilbron argued that Southerners had never been approached correctly, by people who knew their language and habits. They could be won over with honeyed threats, he said, whereas lawsuits would backfire.

  Doar knew better than to scoff. He was the outsider, the Republican in a Democratic Justice Department. The Attorney General already had begun to tease him, saying, “You’re the best weapon the Republicans have,” by which he meant that Doar’s civil rights suits alienated Democratic Southern voters. Doar knew that there were substantial legal reasons to take Heilbron seriously. Even the most ardent civil rights liberals conceded that the Justice Department faced crippling handicaps in litigation, of which the most vexing was the Screws precedent. Over countless cups of coffee, the Doar school of lawyers agreed with Heilbron’s on one legal point: there was no easy way around Screws. Aptly named, the case was a monster on their shoulders.

  Fortified with alcohol, Sheriff Claude Screws went one night with two retainers to the home of a Negro named Robert Hall, arrested him, and took him in handcuffs to the courthouse yard in Baker County, Georgia. There, in public view, Screws beat Hall with fist and blackjack for at least fifteen minutes, then dragged his lifeless corpse feet-first into a jail cell. Although no state murder charges were brought, federal prosecutors presented evidence of such egregious brutality that an all-white jury convicted the sheriff under a Reconstruction statute designed to protect the civil rights of Negroes. After that, Screws pursued an appeal in which, conceding that he had intended to kill Hall, he argued that the Constitution protected him from any charge except the appropriate one of murder, under Georgia law. (“The defense is not pretty,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Rutledge.) The Supreme Court reversed Screws’s conviction by a twist of reasoning that even the defense lawyers had not offered. The government had failed to prove that Screws had attacked Hall with the specific intent to deprive him of his civil rights, the Court ruled. Prosecutors had shown merely that Screws intended to kill him. This was the Court’s strict interpretation of the word “willfully” in the statute. Incredibly, it meant that henceforth federal prosecutors in such cases had to prove that the defendants were thinking about constitutional violations while they committed heinous, primordial crimes. This was the Screws precedent, from a decision written by liberal Justice William O. Douglas in 1944. Within the tiny fraternity of civil rights prosecutors, the decision was an unpleasant echo of Dred Scott. And no matter how badly they wished to discard the case as a wartime aberration, like the Japanese internment cases, it was controlling law still.

  The same standards of specific intent applied to civil actions on the intimidation of voters under Section (b) of the 1957 Civil Rights Act. Civil rights prosecutors called them “b-suits” for short, and Doar knew better than most that the Screws case made b-suits nearly impossible. They were nightmares that required objective proof of a subjective intent. For the protection of voting rights, this left prosecutors with “a-suits,” which were nightmares of tedium. Under Section (a) of the 1957 act, federal prosecutors could obtain injunctions against local officials if they could prove that racial discrimination existed. Practically speaking, this meant that th
ey had to obtain and present to the court the actual voter registration applications, then prove to the court that individual Negroes were denied registration whereas whites of equal or lower competency were not, and that no factor other than race explained the discrepancy, and then prove that such discrepancies occurred in sufficient numbers to constitute a “pattern” of discrimination. This had to be done slowly through the courts, against obstruction and delay by the opponents, on a county-by-county basis. There were 159 counties in Georgia alone.

  Doar saw no alternative to this laborious scheme. He fully understood why a newcomer to the field such as Burke Marshall would welcome Heilbron’s alternative, or any other. Certainly Heilbron’s plan would be quicker if it worked, and Doar could not quarrel with the severity of the chosen test, as Heilbron volunteered to try out the honeyed-threat idea in the remote and forsaken home county of the Screws case itself. He negotiated for Negro voting rights in “Bad” Baker County, where the retired Sheriff Screws had been succeeded in recent years by Sheriff L. Warren “Gator” Johnson. Negroes did not vote in Baker County.

  Doar continued along the path he already had chosen: the relentless production of a-suits. Having learned that the local federal prosecutors would not help at all in the South, and that the FBI was a blunt instrument, Doar and his colleagues invented their own system to expedite the process in spite of the handicaps. The first principle was that they had to meet the Negroes personally. They had to establish trust. They had to learn how to tell a reliable witness from one who would crumble under the fear. They had to learn which counties to choose first and how to go about looking for supporting witnesses. They had to do these things and many others without the slightest assistance from the established local institutions. In fact, they had to avoid local whites altogether. By the spring of 1961, Doar had seen enough to know that he could not do his job from behind a desk in Washington. To be a regular legal bureaucrat was to be blind and helpless.