Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  All this was only the beginning. Further investigation, plus the wiretaps themselves, had revealed that Phyllis McGuire nursed her own complaints about the relationship, including the fact that Giancana maintained a second mistress, in California, named Judith Campbell. Singer Frank Sinatra had introduced Campbell to Giancana and to other gangsters with whom he socialized. Sinatra also had introduced Judith Campbell to John Kennedy, it turned out, and both John and Robert Kennedy to Marilyn Monroe, among others, in a serial exchange of lovers. In fact, it seemed that Sinatra did as much introducing as singing, and that his libertine social network included glittering figures of many kinds—from politics, gangsterdom, and show business. Giancana, for his part, was an old-school gangster, not merely in the assumption of his prerogative to wiretap one lady friend while carrying on himself with another, but also in his practical view of social matters. His affair with Campbell was strictly business, bestowing enormous hidden power upon him because he shared a mistress with the President of the United States.

  It required all of J. Edgar Hoover’s genius to boil down such steaming pulp into the dignified drone of policy: phone records confirmed that Judith Campbell had placed some seventy calls to the White House in the year since Kennedy moved in; CIA officials opposed criminal prosecution of Giancana or Maheu, for fear of compromising the national security operations against Castro. The ramifications of this one Las Vegas arrest could spell disaster for the Administration. It meant that the CIA and the Kennedy brothers had poisoned the U.S. government’s chances of prosecuting Giancana and associated gangsters for any of their crimes. They had exposed the U.S. government to disgrace as one that pursued murder in partnership with gangsters, and exposed the President to blackmail as a consort of gangster women. Hoover summarized the whole package with professional detachment, but private satisfactions converged from many directions. This was the CIA that had driven his Bureau out of foreign intelligence work since World War II? These were the Kennedys who were pressuring him to declare war on gangsters such as Giancana? These were the people who belittled his far-flung vigilance against domestic subversion?

  With little fear of rebuke, Hoover continued to rebuild his direct White House channel by sending an identical copy of his February 27 memo to Kenneth O’Donnell. That same day he ordered the New York and Atlanta FBI offices to search their files thoroughly for information on Martin Luther King. A week later, Hoover formally requested Attorney General Kennedy’s authorization to place wiretaps in the office of Stanley Levison. Kennedy approved. By an odd custom that Justice Department executives preferred not to discuss, Hoover himself assumed the authority to place room listening devices—bugs, as opposed to wiretaps—and he moved swiftly on bugs even before Kennedy authorized the wiretap.* On the night of March 15, New York FBI agents broke into Levison’s office to plant the bugs, which were called “misurs” in the bureau’s standard abbreviation for “microphone surveillances.” Technicians hooked up the telephone wiretaps on the afternoon of March 20.

  The complete Levison coverage was in place just before Director Hoover’s private luncheon at the White House on March 22, when he reported to President Kennedy on the FBI’s discovery of the Sinatra-Mafia-Castro-mistress tangle. Personally, Hoover was not a man who enjoyed personal confrontation. He leaned heavily on the soothing theme that he was the President’s loyal servant, doing his duty by bringing private warning of possible dangers ahead. Also, in confronting the President about his sexual escapades, Hoover was fortified by the experience of having done so twenty years earlier. During World War II, FBI agents watching a Danish reporter named Inga Arvad (who was suspected as a spy because she had known Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, and other top Nazis) had discovered that she was having an affair with Kennedy, then a Navy lieutenant. Acting on FBI accusations, the Navy had punished Kennedy with a transfer, and Hoover had denied Kennedy a written absolution from suspicions of disloyalty, refusing even personal appeals from his friend Ambassador Joseph Kennedy. Afterward, when Lieutenant Kennedy continued the affair, FBI agents had bugged their trysts to obtain tape recordings of Navy talk mixed with pillow talk. Hoover did not forget the episode. Upon Kennedy’s election to the presidency in 1960, he asked his assistant Cartha “Deke” DeLoach to retrieve the Kennedy-Arvad tape recordings from the FBI files for review. DeLoach, who had heard only rumors about the tapes, recalled them as involving Joseph Kennedy, not his son, but the Director said firmly, “No, it was the boy.”

  Now the boy was President. A conversation between President Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover touching the topic of sex was a remarkable event, as Hoover came from a different galaxy. In 1941, the same year that Kennedy began squiring Inga Arvad, Hoover warned America that if motels were allowed to proliferate along the highways, citizens would sleep unwittingly on mattresses still warm from “illicit relations.” A generation later, motels having sprung up everywhere, this same Hoover went to the White House for a discussion that would have made a Borgia or Medici feel at home. When it was over, President Kennedy buzzed Kenneth O’Donnell. “Get rid of that bastard,” he commanded. “He’s the biggest bore.”

  There is no record of what Hoover actually told Kennedy, but the results suggest strongly that he emphasized the dangers of the Sinatra connection. Hoover’s agents had overheard Giancana and other “hoodlums” plotting to ask the government for favors through Sinatra, and Sinatra was a point of contact not only for some of the mistresses but also for gangsters who would not shrink from blackmailing the President. On these points, Hoover had a strong case. That same afternoon, the President had his last known phone conversation with Judith Campbell, apparently a sign-off, and Kennedy also decided not to stay with Frank Sinatra during his upcoming visit to Palm Springs. Instead, he would stay with Sinatra’s rival, Bing Crosby, and break off social contact with Sinatra altogether.

  Meanwhile, FBI technicians in New York first turned on the receivers for the newly implanted Levison bugs at 10:10 on the morning of March 16. Thereafter, the ear of the U.S. government would remain surreptitiously close to Levison and King throughout the remainder of King’s life.

  For King, the year had begun as it would end: being dragged toward Birmingham. While Hoover and the Kennedys sparred over communism, King was beseeching the Administration to keep Fred Shuttlesworth out of jail.

  On January 8, Shuttlesworth flew into Birmingham from his new home in Cincinnati. One of a score of prosecutions from his past had come to an unfavorable end that day, when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review his conviction for riding in the front of a Birmingham bus in 1958. Although the courts had struck down the segregation ordinance involved, the Justices denied Shuttlesworth’s appeal as technically flawed. His lawyers had failed to file a copy of the trial transcript within sixty days of his original conviction, as required by Alabama law. Lean, blunt, and eloquent as ever, Shuttlesworth stood before the regular mass meeting in Birmingham to castigate his own lawyers, Arthur Shores and Orzell Billingsley, who were two of the most distinguished Negro lawyers in Alabama. “My Calhouns,” he called them acidly, after the polysyllabic bumbler on the “Amos ‘n’ Andy” show. “From now on, I am telling the lawyers how to fight my cases.”

  King wired Attorney General Kennedy on January 15, requesting an appointment to discuss emergency intervention by the Justice Department. Burke Marshall responded by phone with what was becoming known as Marshall’s theory of federalist limitation. Because the Constitution severely curtailed the powers of the federal government in the fields of police action and law enforcement, Marshall wrote in a follow-up letter, he had “not been able to discern any basis upon which this Department might possibly intervene in the cases.” Marshall also deflected the lesser steps King had in mind, such as arranging for Shuttles-worth to be confined outside Birmingham. Most likely these would be ineffective, and Marshall wanted to conserve the Justice Department’s public authority for more advantageous cases. Attorney General Kennedy would not talk with King on the subject, les
t he raise false expectations.

  Collateral events only punctuated King’s disappointment with this response. The day after King’s talk with Marshall, federal judge Hobart Grooms pronounced sentence in Birmingham on six men who admitted FBI charges of mayhem and assault in the destruction of the first Freedom Rider bus outside Anniston the previous May. Grooms gave five of the men a year’s probation. He allowed the sixth to serve a term concurrent with a prior burglary sentence. The news emanating from the courtroom was that none of the defendants would spend a single day in jail for their vicious attacks on one bus, whereas Shuttlesworth would serve ninety days merely for sitting in another.

  That night, dynamite bombs severely damaged three Birmingham churches that recently had hosted mass meetings, including Shuttles-worth’s former church. A policeman, responding to emergency broadcasts about the first two blasts, happened to be driving by the third targeted church when the last bomb went off. Concussion shattered the windows of his squad car from a distance of a hundred yards, sending him to the hospital with lacerations. Bull Connor first denied that the bombings were racially inspired, then later tersely declared, “We know that Negroes did it.” Connor also announced his candidacy for governor in that year’s election. One of his first steps in office, he pledged, would be to buy a hundred new police dogs to sic on any Freedom Riders who ventured into Alabama.

  On January 25, as Shuttlesworth surrendered at the Birmingham city jail along with his companion from the 1958 bus test, Rev. J. S. Phifer, King appealed to Robert Kennedy for protection. “It is clear that hundreds of segregationists, in and out of jail, would like nothing better than to do bodily harm to the Rev. Mr. Shuttlesworth,” he wrote. King sent Wyatt Walker immediately to Birmingham, and by the next morning they had secured the endorsement of twenty-eight civil rights organizations for a joint telegram to Kennedy. High fees and new legal bills drove King to send out a desperate plea to his most trusted friends in the Negro clergy:

  None of us ever dreamed he [Shuttlesworth] would actually have to serve time. We had to secure additional counsel to perfect the legal steps we are taking to free him. William Kunstler, Esq., of New York City is now in our employ on this matter. Mrs. Shuttlesworth is not well; to relieve both her and Fred of unnecessary anxiety, we have committed ourselves to fill his pulpit in Cincinnati in his absence. SCLC is responsible for all these expenses. Trial costs for the Freedom Ride along with attorney’s fees still remain to be met. The three million dollar libel suits continue against Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, Joseph Lowery and S. S. Seay, Sr. The day-to-day operation must continue, but with this sudden drain on us, we cannot keep pace…Would you possibl[y] arrange to take an after-offering this coming Sunday?

  “Dear Mike,” replied Rev. O. Clay Maxwell, with whom King had just exchanged such painful correspondence over the schism in the Negro Baptist church, “I was a bit distressed by the letter I received from you the latter part of last week in which you requested that I lift an offering of one hundred dollars for you…I don’t know what others may be able to do but I did know that we at Mount Olive were able to do better than one hundred dollars.” Maxwell sent five hundred.

  “Maintenance of law and order in any locality is the primary responsibility of local officials,” Marshall wrote King later that month. He sent a similar reply when King called for a federal investigation of the bombing that demolished the home of C. O. Simpkins, the SCLC board member from Shreveport. King’s appeals seemed to have less effect than public criticism. To Negro reporters who wanted to know why the Justice Department did not authorize the FBI to investigate the triple church bombing in Birmingham, Marshall conceded that the Justice Department did not permit the FBI to take the initiative in such cases. Uncomfortably, Marshall said he was reviewing this policy, which, he added, he had inherited from the Eisenhower Administration. King chafed at the Administration’s aloofness but was unwilling to risk a break. “While the President has not yet earned unqualified confidence and support,” he wrote in The Nation, “neither has he earned rejection and withdrawal of support.”

  On Lincoln’s Birthday, King flew to Birmingham for a mass meeting in support of the jailed preachers, Shuttlesworth and Phifer. The crowd at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church overflowed into the basement and then into the street, growing so large that it required fully a half hour just to collect the offering. Although President Lucius Pitts of Miles College considered Shuttlesworth a martinet, and dangerously provocative, he too came to the mass meeting. Just as he was telling the crowd that Negro youth would never get anywhere in life if they kept wearing sharp-pointed, odd-colored shoes and tight, short skirts, or if they kept doing vulgar new dances instead of studying, King made his entrance.

  He spoke glowingly of economic discipline and scholarship, but warned that these would not be enough to win freedom in Birmingham. “I wish I could tell you our road ahead is easy,” he said. “That we are in the promised land, that we won’t have to suffer and sacrifice any more, but it is not so. We have got to be prepared. The time is coming when the police won’t protect us, the mayor and [police] commissioner won’t think with clear minds. Then we can expect the worst. We want to be free.” To offset these clairvoyant forebodings, he told the crowd of his unpublicized visit to President and Mrs. Kennedy—how the Kennedys had shared a wonderful meal with him and given him a tour of the White House, and how in the Lincoln Room he had asked the President to sign a Second Emancipation Proclamation. Faced with implacable and determined opponents in Birmingham, King emphasized his hopes for the Kennedy Administration rather than his frustrations.

  Two weeks later, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ordered Judge Grooms to free Shuttlesworth on appeal bond if the Alabama courts failed to do so within five days. “Whites can’t stop us now,” declared a triumphant Shuttlesworth upon his March 1 release. “Negroes are beginning to realize Birmingham is not so powerful after all—not in the face of a federal edict.” Wyatt Walker came into town to address the next mass meeting, saying, “The world situation for the Negro will be straightened out by the three K’s: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and King.” Roy Wilkins followed Walker the next week. By then, students and Shuttles-worth supporters had seized upon the anger generated by the incarceration to begin a boycott of the segregated stores in downtown Birmingham. Leaflets appeared bearing the slogan “Wear Your Old Clothes for Freedom.” Reverend Phifer told the next mass meeting that they should all wear old jeans to church on Easter Sunday as a sign of their commitment. “Bull and Old Art’s [Mayor Arthur Hanes] days are numbered,” he said. Phifer became so ecstatic in his sermon that scores of shouters joined him spontaneously on the rostrum, and several preachers labored to restore calm.

  Bull Connor noticed the boycott. “I don’t intend to sit here and take it with a smile,” he said at a City Commission meeting on April 3. Connor then moved to cut off city distributions to the needy from the federal government’s surplus food program, reasoning that most of the recipients were Negroes. The next day, his officers found Shuttlesworth and Phifer walking down the street and arrested them for blocking the sidewalk. On making bail, Shuttlesworth declared that Connor’s reprisals would increase rather than decrease support for the new campaign. With defiant relish, he described the boycott as “like Ivory Soap—99 and 44/100ths percent pure.”

  Birmingham was not yet the main focus of King’s activities. He spent less time there than in many other cities, and he stayed nowhere very long. If there was anything new in his chaotic pursuits, it was a steady accumulation of evidence that there was life after all in the dreams of the past five years. The breakthroughs came in several areas almost at once—fund-raising, voter registration, the recruitment of professional cadres. Where there had formerly been pennies, fruitless committees, and pitiful delays, there suddenly sprang up a well-financed registration operation. Roughly speaking, the spark came from King. The fuel came from the new Voter Education Project grants, as supervised by a newcomer named Andrew Young. Th
e payload came from Septima Clark’s citizenship schools, which were training registration workers. And the indispensable mechanics came from Jack O’Dell, who was the manager of Stanley Levison’s direct-mail operation in the New York SCLC office.

  O’Dell soon became significant to the Kennedy Administration because of his Communist background. Five years King’s senior, he had been left as a child to grow up in the home of his grandfather, a janitor in a Detroit public library, and grandmother, who raised him as a strict Catholic—so devout that O’Dell remained an altar boy even in college, at Xavier in New Orleans. During World War II, he ferried war cargoes under destroyer escort for the Coast Guard merchant marine, and, like Harry Belafonte, first encountered political history through Negro sailors who introduced him to the works of W. E. B. Du Bois. For nearly six years, he killed long hours below decks reading Du Bois on Reconstruction, world history, the NAACP, and the subjugation of Africa. Then he went back to New Orleans and found work as an organizer for his union, the National Maritime Union. It was renowned among Negroes as the first seamen’s international to break the color line. Shipping jobs were not posted by race. One of its international executives was the first Negro to hold such a position in any trade union. In its racial advances, the NMU followed the policy of the Communist International. When an anti-Communist faction purged the union in 1950, O’Dell was expelled for circulating peace petitions.

  He had found work selling burial insurance in Birmingham. By 1957, O’Dell’s skill with numbers earned him a promotion to manager of the company’s Montgomery office, and there, as a lapsed Catholic, he went several times to hear the newly famous Martin Luther King preach at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Later, while doing graduate work in New York, he volunteered to work under Bayard Rustin on the 1959 Youth March for integrated schools. Through Rustin, O’Dell met Stanley Levison, who later asked him to promote the 1961 Sammy Davis-Frank Sinatra benefit concert for the SCLC at Carnegie Hall, just after the Kennedy inauguration. That evening was a high point in the life of O’Dell, who was a most unusual man. He still retained his Communist friends, as well as his deep appreciation for the Communist Party’s efforts in behalf of Negro sailors. At the same time he kept up his fraternity contacts, still felt the tugs of the Catholic faith, and treasured the memory of hearing Frank Sinatra sing “Moonlight in Vermont” at Carnegie Hall.