Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  King was slogging through enervating distractions in his own world—a money quarrel in Birmingham, the closing of Atlanta’s Funtown to thwart an integrated handful of patrons, the publication of a Saturday Evening Post profile accusing King of “arrogance and opportunism,” which wounded him to the brink of filing a libel action. He was still the outsider. But he could not long be denied a White House meeting now that the President had invited no fewer than 1,500 national leaders to discuss civil rights in the month since the Birmingham settlement. Kennedy aides finally scheduled King’s private audience with the President, early on a weekend morning. Then, having secured King’s acceptance, they sandwiched him between an even earlier presidential meeting with Roy Wilkins and a later one with all the major civil rights leaders, plus UAW president Walter Reuther. Only then did Kenneth O’Donnell notify King that he was expected to stay on for the larger meeting, which White House press officials presented publicly as the major story—the paired sessions with King and Wilkins being a kind of administrative preparation. All these pains reflected his leverage as well as the aroused opposition among his allies. Taking the best he could get, King kept his White House appointment on Saturday, June 22.

  While Roy Wilkins met first with President Kennedy, Burke Marshall gathered privately with King and several SCLC aides, including Andrew Young and Walter Fauntroy. Marshall took King aside for one of those urgently confidential government discussions, which turned out to be the first whispered ambush of the day. King could no longer defer the threat of Communist infiltration in the SCLC, Marshall warned. Specifically, he must sever relations with Stanley Levison, who was a Communist functionary, and with Jack O’Dell, whom Levison had “planted” inside the SCLC to influence the civil rights movement. King’s first reaction was to shrug in amused disbelief. He was nonplussed, caught between the utter gravity of Marshall’s tone and his own instinctive dismissal of the claims. No doubt he felt disoriented by whiplash: having come at last to make his case that the glory of the national freedom movement was at hand, King met instead the preemptive charge that he was harboring the most sinister enemies of peace and freedom. When he tried to tell Marshall that there must be some mistake, some confusion perhaps between an outright Communist and a person who had sympathized with Marxist tenets, Marshall contradicted him. This was not paranoid mush, he said, but hard intelligence from the very pinnacle of the U.S. government. Levison was something much more dangerous than an old New York radical; he was “a paid agent of the Soviet Communist apparatus.” Marshall told King that he was authorized to say no more. When King asked to see proof, the point Marshall stressed was that neither he nor King was in a position to second-guess the highest U.S. national security experts, and even if they were, the politics of the moment rendered their doubts irrelevant. The controlling fact was that President Kennedy was about to “put his whole political life on the line” with the civil rights bill, and the President simply could not make himself vulnerable to charges of Communist association.

  Seeing from King’s face that he was not convinced, Marshall was obliged to deliver him straightaway to Robert Kennedy for another round on the same subject. The initiative for these confrontations had come from the Attorney General, who had called J. Edgar Hoover the previous Monday to arrange a special FBI briefing on just how dramatic and explicit he could make the new warning to King without endangering the Bureau’s sources, principally the Childs brothers. Hoover was only too happy to comply, knowing that such favors weakened Kennedy’s case for shifting Bureau manpower out of the internal security field. For once, Kennedy was pushing Hoover about the threat of domestic subversion instead of vice versa. Now the Attorney General found it worth paying tribute to Hoover in order to gain a measure of control over King. Here was a man who was boring in on the White House, threatening to transform or destroy its domestic political base, and yet he held no public office, displayed no personal ambitions that could be traded on, succeeded by methods such as going to jail, and thrived on the very upheavals that most unsettled the Administration. These qualities, on top of the prosaic fact that at first sight King would be mistaken for a waiter at most Washington establishments, put him beyond the reach of the Kennedys’ political and social language. With King talking of a demonstration that might turn the capital into a giant Birmingham, Robert Kennedy sought to check his momentum. He would gain a bargaining hold if King admitted that his movement was poisoned. He would gain the upper hand if King conceded to the government the unilateral right to define what was poisonous.

  But King shrugged off Robert Kennedy too. He kept asking for proof, saying that these terrible spy terms did not ring true of the men he had known so well, that he could not very well throw them out of the movement on unsupported allegations. Everybody he knew in the movement had been called a Communist for years, himself included. People across the South were calling even Robert Kennedy a Communist, and a reporter had recently asked the Attorney General to his face if he was a member of the party. Kennedy insisted that this was different. He buttressed his claim by pounding on two themes: first, that Levison’s true nature was even more fiendish than he was being allowed to tell King, and second, that the evidence came from the highest and most sophisticated machinery of American espionage, the James Bond stuff, where secrets were true beyond doubt. Hinting at things Hoover had forbidden him to disclose to King, Kennedy intimated that Levison was working on Soviet orders to weaken the United States by manipulating the civil rights movement. To King, however, these state secrets only fed the spiral of disbelief. The higher Kennedy reached for authority, the less his descriptions sounded like the Levison whom King knew. The more Kennedy evoked the omniscience of the government’s central brain, the more that brain sounded like an ordinary segregationist.

  Kennedy saw that he was not getting through. In the oral history he gave jointly with Burke Marshall the next year, on condition of secrecy, he recalled the crux of the impasse as King’s stubborn refusal to take the charges seriously. He said King was “always sort of dismissing the whole idea.” Kennedy could not understand it. “Well, he’s just got some other side to him,” he remarked. “So he sort of laughs about a lot of those things, makes fun of it.” In the oral history, Burke Marshall said that King “must have believed it,” especially after they passed him up the ladder to President Kennedy that same day to receive the ultimate warning. After that, Marshall concluded, “I think he was probably just weak about it.” Beyond King’s unfathomable temerity, what astonished the oral-history interviewer was hearing the disclosure that President Kennedy himself had bothered to lobby a civil rights leader on the national security dangers posed by particular Communists. “The President talked to King?” he asked in disbelief. When Robert Kennedy replied “Yes,” the interviewer gasped, “My God! And what was King’s reaction?”

  King must have been at least that dumbfounded as it was happening. Part of the psychological battle was his own uncertainty about whether the Kennedys themselves really believed that Stanley Levison was a danger to the United States, or whether they were merely saying so to get a hook into King. His doubts intensified in the heat of their serial performance. When King walked into the Oval Office, President Kennedy asked him to take a private stroll outdoors in the White House Rose Garden. When they were alone he said, “I assume you know you’re under very close surveillance.” King said little in reply. He was trying to figure out whether this amazing precaution meant that the President feared that he himself was bugged, or whether he meant that the surveillance of King extended even into the White House. Whatever the case, the President’s Rose Garden manner employed the most potent combination of power and intimacy to warn that King could have no secrets. Conservatives in Congress were denouncing the idea of a march on Washington as a Communist tactic, Kennedy confided. J. Edgar Hoover had similar worries and would not hesitate to leak them, especially since the Bureau knew that King had two Communists working for him.

  What King later remembered
most vividly was that the President put a hand on his shoulder and almost whispered that he had to “get rid of” Levison and O’Dell. “They’re Communists,” Kennedy said. When King replied that he was not sure what that meant, as Hoover considered a great many people Communists, President Kennedy came back instantly with specifics: Jack O’Dell was a ranking member of the national committee of the American Communist Party. Stanley Levison’s position was too highly classified for him to give details, but the President could say that Levison was O’Dell’s “handler,” and King could draw his conclusions about Levison from that. These were the hard facts, said Kennedy. O’Dell was fully engaged in conspiracy as the “number five Communist in the United States.”

  King tried to soften the pressure. “I don’t know how he’s got time to do all that,” he managed to reply. “He’s got two jobs with me.” He laughed weakly, but his attempted humor failed to lighten the President’s mood. Kennedy stressed the international implications of the threat by declaring that both Levison and O’Dell were “agents of a foreign power.” This pushed King over the line of rebellion. He wanted to deny it vehemently on his own personal conviction, but the best he could muster to the President’s face was a gentle rejoinder that he didn’t think so. He said he would need to see proof before he could believe such things of these men.

  President Kennedy took another tack. “You’ve read about Profumo in the papers?” he asked. King said he had. John Profumo, the British Secretary of State for War, had given his name to a sensational scandal by first denying, then admitting, that he had carried on an extramarital affair with a gorgeous lady of the night named Christine Keeler, who was simultaneously romancing a Soviet diplomat among many others.* The ongoing revelations obsessed President Kennedy to the point that he had ordered all State Department cables on the Profumo case sent to him at full length, without summary. Now, not fully aware how soon or how fatefully the example might apply to King as well as to himself, Kennedy warned King that sudden explosions from the underworld of sex and spying could ruin public men. “[Prime Minister Harold] Macmillan is likely to lose his government because he has been loyal to a friend [Profumo],” said the President. “You must be careful not to lose your cause for the same reason.” Truth was only part of the equation. In England, once the tawdry question reached the tabloids, it quickly became irrelevant whether or not British military secrets really had passed from Profumo across Keeler’s pillow to the Soviet diplomat. Kennedy’s point was that King must not let his personal esteem for Levison blind him to the enormous stakes he was playing for, or to the fact that ruthless opponents could turn a spark of truth into a blaze of scandal. “If they shoot you down, they’ll shoot us down, too,” Kennedy told King. “So we’re asking you to be careful.”

  The heads of two men, Levison and O’Dell, seemed a small enough price to insure something so vitally important as a full partnership between the White House and the civil rights movement, but King said he still would like to see some proof, especially on Levison, just for the sake of fairness. President Kennedy said of course, that was no problem. Rather than extend further appeals to King’s trust, he broke off the discussion and led the way back inside from the Rose Garden.

  There was quiet coughing in the Cabinet Room, where the milling civil rights leaders whispered protocol questions about who should sit in what chairs when President Kennedy arrived. Some of them snickered at the diminutive Walter Fauntroy for cheekily claiming the empty one next to the President’s, and then, when King came in at the last minute, beckoning him over to take the prize. Of those looking on, Joe Rauh realized that such childish musical chairs might have lasting political effect. Perhaps the most important practical competition to be decided that day was the selection of a White House liaison for lobbying on the civil rights bill. Rauh knew that Walter Reuther coveted that role, as did Roy Wilkins, both of whom had asked him to help them jockey for first recognition from the President, on the theory that Kennedy would grant the lobbying power to the first supplicant rather than immerse himself in a catfight. Rauh grudgingly admired the King forces for seizing the tactical advantage of the chair on Kennedy’s immediate right.

  John Lewis, the newly elected chairman of SNCC, was among those oblivious to the parliamentary jostling. He would remember his first sight of President Kennedy in the flesh—the big smile and the choppy “Hello, hello, hello” as he hurriedly shook hands around the table. Robert Kennedy observed from a chair on the perimeter of the room, holding one of his daughters in his lap, as the President made welcoming remarks about the partnership behind the historic new civil rights bill. Now their great challenge was to get it through Congress, he said, plunging into a detailed analysis of the obstacles—the tangled committees, the sectional and personal complications of key legislators, the formidable muck of a Southern filibuster in the Senate. In closing, President Kennedy pulled out a scrap of paper. He said it was the latest poll, showing that his national support had plunged from 60 to 47 percent in the few days since he came out strongly for civil rights. None of those in the room ever could locate this dire poll—the President was famous for pulling fresh ones from his pocket for dramatic effect—but they had no doubt that the fight in Congress would be desperate. “I may lose the next election because of this,” said Kennedy. “I don’t care.” He was committed, and he needed their help.

  At this signal, the Cabinet Room came alive like a classroom or a presidential press conference, with a flock of hands shooting into the air. The President heeded several people who were chanting “Call on Roy,” and Wilkins, after appropriate reminders of his dedication, declared that the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights stood ready to work with the White House in mobilizing support. This was a shrewd choice, as Wilkins headed the venerable umbrella group and the other leaders, being board members, could not protest their exclusion. President Kennedy merely nodded, and the lobbying role was fixed. Then Whitney Young of the Urban League gained recognition to ask whether the President in fact opposed the idea of a march on Washington, as indicated by press reports. His question invited the President to plant himself firmly against the idea, which offered him the best chance to scuttle the march but left no dignified avenue of retreat if the Negroes marched anyway. “We want success in the Congress,” he replied, “not a big show on the Capitol.”

  A. Philip Randolph was the first to speak up on the other side. “The Negroes are already in the streets,” he declared, and he told why he thought it was rightly so. To Randolph, this made the question academic. He said the situation was different from his near-march of 1941. “There will be a march,” he announced with his booming bass voice and clipped accent. The only question was what form it would take, whether it would be violent or nonviolent, well or poorly led. James Farmer spoke up for Randolph, as did others who had been caucusing in New York. In reply, Vice President Johnson told them why he thought the President had a better approach to the same goal. He knew congressmen, he said, and the way to move them was by methods they understood: arm-twisting, deal-making, nose-rubbing, flesh-hammering corridor politics. Anything else might backfire. Johnson’s was an outburst of great effect; some were saying that this series of civil rights meetings had brought him to life again. Only then, near the end of the two-hour session, did King speak up for the first time, arguing that the march and the traditional politics were not antagonistic alternatives. He thought they were complementary. The march, said King, could dramatize the civil rights issue positively, “mobilizing support in parts of the country that don’t know the problem firsthand. I think it will serve a purpose,” King added. “It may seem ill-timed. Frankly, I have never engaged in a direct-action movement that did not seem ill-timed. Some people thought Birmingham was ill-timed.”

  “Including the Attorney General,” quipped the President.

  Others spoke up for the march on the basis of the internal politics within their own organizations, saying they would face leadership challenges from aroused supporters if they
did not march. President Kennedy appropriated this theme for his exit. “Well, we all have our problems,” he said, rising to his feet. “You have your problems, I have my problems.” The President said his problems included Congress, the Russians, NATO, and President de Gaulle, which reminded him that he was late for a final briefing before flying off to Europe. They should help each other and by all means keep in touch, he said, and his guests were soon facing the reporters gathered outside the White House. King’s description of the meeting gave their news stories a slant that nettled the Administration: “Negroes Inform Kennedy of Plan for New Protests,” said the Times. “If there is a filibuster in Congress, we will have a nonviolent, peaceful demonstration in Washington,” said King, adding that the President had not explicitly opposed the idea. Roy Wilkins drew less attention with a qualified demurral that he was “not involved at the present time.” Of the march he said, “That little baby does not belong to me.”

  As they spoke, President Kennedy left the South Lawn by helicopter, heading for a stopover at Camp David and then on to Germany that night aboard Air Force One. King was flying to Detroit. This was to be a life-shaping trip for each of them. King, like Kennedy, hoped to escape the shackles of everyday politics and show that he stood for an idea of awesome, sustaining power. Kennedy, like King, hoped to prove that his message transcended all barriers of culture, language, and race. Each left Washington with the other prominently in mind, and each promptly broke through to success of frightening dimensions. It was as though they had sprinkled magic dust on one another. The similarities between their miracles were striking enough, but the contrast gave them depth. King and Kennedy were at odds over the innermost meanings of freedom. Having wrestled to a secret, preliminary draw in the Rose Garden, they acted out their differences in gargantuan public spectacles of haunting, providential aptness, like a thunderclap after confession.