Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Kennedy signed the authorization for the three taps on Jones, but he brooded over the King request for the better part of two days. He was wavering. In a decision of this magnitude, he had to consider not only his relations with Hoover and King but also the risk of public revelation. Externally, the political equation was shifting every day. In the short time since the Attorney General had set this tap in motion, President Kennedy had refuted charges of racial subversion by the “few remaining Communists” at a televised news conference, labeling such talk a “scapegoat” search by fearful segregationists, and Newsweek had published a bold special issue entitled “The Negro in America.” Among its splashy revelations was a feature entitled “The Big Man Is Martin Luther King,” and a nationwide poll showing that King commanded the support of 88 percent of American Negroes. Similarly, the Newsweek poll revealed that since the introduction of the civil rights bill, Negro voters favored President Kennedy by an astonishing 30 to 1 over any Republican opponent.

  The Attorney General was straddling a thin line. On the one hand, he wanted to protect the Administration against charges of being soft on communism. On the other hand, he did not want to give the FBI license to attack the civil rights bill and the Administration’s base of Negro support. No one knows how candidly Courtney Evans spoke to him about the dangerous wording of the King authorization. (In later years, almost visibly crushed by the open hostility between the Kennedy and FBI forces, Evans would give testimony of zombielike vagueness on these issues, altogether avoiding the thick layers of innuendo.) By now, Kennedy knew that no move in this tangle was simple or discrete; each caused a host of adjustments, none more than this one. If he signed the line marked “Approved” and returned the King authorization to the FBI, he would give Hoover an irrevocable, written endorsement of the suspicions Hoover had lodged against King’s civil rights movement.

  On July 25, Kennedy released a letter in response to the public charges of communism in the civil rights movement. He invoked the authority of the FBI files behind his assertion that no leader, including King, was a Communist or “Communist controlled.” By careful wording, he did not rule out Communist influence or inspiration, as such assurance might have pushed Hoover to public revolt. Kennedy may have concluded that it made no sense to exonerate King and order his phones tapped on the same day. For whatever combination of reasons, the Attorney General decided that the Jones wiretap was enough for now. He returned the King authorization unsigned, which set off a silent wail of disappointment in the Bureau.

  Stanley Levison returned from Ecuador on July 21—earlier than expected, his wife said, because their son had suffered nosebleeds in the heights of the Andes. His home country had been sunnily transformed from the cauldron he had left a month earlier, with Medgar Evers freshly buried. For the first time in his presidency, Kennedy discussed race issues regularly at his press conferences, and was doing his best to advertise the March on Washington as a wholesome expression rather than a threat. King and Wilkins seemed reconciled. Atlanta’s Mayor Ivan Allen stunned the political world by publicly endorsing the new civil rights bill, becoming the first and only elected Southern official to do so. Pounding the witness table, Allen spoke with a tempered anguish that brought tears to some of the spectators in the jammed hearing room. The civil rights issue seeped into the media culture beyond politics, as thinkers of all kinds came forward with discoveries about race.

  Yet Levison the insider ran smack into an undertow that was stronger than all these excitements. Sober men—the very ones guiding the destiny of the free world—were looking at the daily record of his long service to King, and in place of his avuncular, steady advice and his absorption with tedious practicalities such as mailing lists, they saw a surreptitious invasion of the United States by a one-man vanguard of the Red Army. The shocking news had a magical quality, like a peasant crowned king or a president elected overnight from the cornfields, except that Levison’s anointment was all sinister and secret. At first the FBI wiretap caught Levison chuckling over the irony that President Kennedy himself could perceive him as such a danger, given the fact that Levison had been arguing so recently to King that Kennedy was improving his civil rights performance and ought not to be the target of the March on Washington. Such musings vanished the very next day, July 25, as the FBI brought down a new sledgehammer of media punishment on King: “Onetime Communist Organizer Heads Rev. King’s Office in N.Y.” This was another attack on Jack O’Dell, appearing on the front page of the Atlanta Constitution. The newspaper’s executives had the nerve to copyright the story ostentatiously and otherwise promote it as an exclusive, even though much the same information had been published almost a month earlier in the Birmingham News, which in turn had been fed most of its salient facts by the FBI.

  The new attack sunk King into a state of stunned befuddlement. Technically speaking, the O’Dell story was not news, but it was an unmistakable declaration of war on King in his hometown, by a newspaper—Ralph McGill’s Constitution—that was regarded as a beacon of liberalism in the South. Alarmed by the political magnitude of the crisis, King immediately issued a public statement refuting the Constitution story as “packed with half truths and vicious innuendos.” He held a press conference in Atlanta to amplify his defense, and summoned Chauncey Eskridge from Chicago to fend off a parallel attack by Eugene Cook, the attorney general of Georgia. Cook, boring inward under sanction of state subversion laws, demanded to know the names of all King’s associates who had recommended or worked with O’Dell. He announced publicly that his office—“and to my certain knowledge the Attorney General of the United States”—possessed files on Communist activity within the SCLC.

  Privately, that same day, King initiated an emergency round of telephone conferences with the Justice Department and with his advisers in New York, in which he wondered out loud what more he must do to end these crippling attacks. King’s grievances ran headlong into Kennedy’s, just as the Attorney General was deciding not to sign his own request for a wiretap on King. Kennedy used King’s distress calls to clarify the warning about O’Dell and Levison: King should break off all contact, direct and indirect, and it was only upon assurance of strict compliance by King that the Attorney General publicly defended the movement as free of Communist taint. This was “the treaty,” as Clarence Jones called it.

  Fear invaded King’s councils during these discussions. In Atlanta, he circulated a special bulletin and required SCLC employees to sign it as proof of comprehension. “All staff members should be informed of the fact that the office phones, and some home phones, are tapped,” it starkly declared, “so we should be extremely careful of anything said on the telephone.” In New York, FBI wiretaps recorded that Clarence Jones, fearing wiretaps, began referring opaquely to Hoover as “the other person,” and to King or Levison as “our friend.” The code words made his reports on the complicated Kennedy talks so impenetrable that Levison often said he could not follow them. “Well,” Jones once explained, “if they [the Kennedys] didn’t have the assurances [that King would shun Levison and O’Dell], then they wouldn’t have made that statement [clearing King of Communist domination].” Levison replied, “Oh, now I see.”

  For Levison, this jolt of political vertigo drove home the depth of the predicament. Kennedy had promised Hoover more than he had let on to King, and King in turn had promised Kennedy more than he was willing to deliver. The gaps left all parties ample room to feel betrayed, and King still was vacillating over his obligations of principle and affection to Levison. Levison knew King well enough to perceive the paralyzing force of his dilemma, and within a few days he took the initiative himself. “I’m not going to let Martin make that decision,” he told Jones and Belafonte, among others. Instead, Levison resolved to withdraw from King’s counsel, sparing King the pain of severing their association. This was the only logical solution, he insisted, as no one person should become the stumbling block for the entire movement.

  Levison broke off direct contact w
ith King. He explained that he was inextricably involved in only one short-term project—the creation and publication of King’s book about Birmingham—and even there his work was mostly on the business side as King’s established representative with publicists, agents, and publishers. He transferred to Clarence Jones the editorial work that required dealing with King, and Levison could fade completely from King’s affairs as soon as the book was published. In early August, while in New York to work on the manuscript, King told Clarence Jones that he wanted to call Levison to tell him how sorry he was, or to share his latest thoughts on the mysterious duel with the Kennedys. More than once, King asked Jones if he was sure Levison understood why he did not call. “Oh, yes,” Jones replied. “In fact, he would be rather upset if you did.”

  One of the first fruits of the wiretap on Clarence Jones was an intercepted conversation in which King spoke of moving into Jones’s home two days later as a house guest. By this extraordinary coincidence, the eavesdroppers soon netted King accidentally. For the next three weeks, the tap meant for Jones overheard King instead, bringing delighted FBI executives their first intercepts of King’s salty conversations with people other than Levison. Although King and Levison spoke freely of rogues and weaknesses, never a cussword or a ribald comment passed between them. They spoke as blood brothers in the rush of a great cause, too busy for foolishness. Unmistakably, Levison defined a side of King, but the new wiretaps revealed a different facet, of wild preacher gossip and the nightlife of Negro princes. Beneath King’s sturdiest qualities there was an opposing release of instability, fury, wanton merriment, and profane despair.

  King was in a rare family mode, as Coretta accompanied him for the entire visit. While enjoying what she described as the Joneses’ “large, comfortable and well-appointed home” in Riverdale, they took sightseeing trips in an effort to squeeze in part of the vacation they had lost to the movement for three Augusts running. King slipped away on occasional speech runs, as always, or to frenzied planning sessions for the Washington march. He was preoccupied also by the continuing bombardment of post-Birmingham demands, including the determined harassment of the Georgia attorney general and the tug of demonstration crises in a half-dozen cities. Still, he managed to escape almost every day to the nearby Riverdale Motor Inn, where Clarence Jones had ensconced a writer named Al Duckett to help with crash production of the Birmingham book. A Negro publicist of broad Rockefeller and Republican connections—serving among other roles as ghostwriter for Jackie Robinson’s newspaper column—Duckett was living proof that Stanley Levison had relinquished his editorial hand in the book project, as Levison considered Duckett to be a public relations type of negligible skills and shallow character. He bluntly bemoaned Jones’s choice when he learned of it.

  By this time, King had lowered his personal barriers to Jones, offering him the essential secrets of his private life. Unerringly, King chose to reveal himself to men and women who could absorb the news without developing blisters of uneasiness between themselves and him. They did not scorn him as a fallen preacher, nor lapse into paralyzing discomfort. These were people who tolerated or even applauded King’s demon delights as a humanizing revelation that bonded them even closer to him and his public purpose. Often they accepted King more easily than he accepted himself. They saw sexual adventure as a natural condition of manhood, or of great preachers obsessed by love, or of success, or of Negroes otherwise constrained by the white world, and they objected to King’s mistresses no more than to the scores of concubines who had soothed King David during the composition of his Psalms. Some of them grew tired of King’s insistence that it was a sin, and of his endless cycles from hedonism to self-recrimination and back. In any case, they adjusted—whether by sigh, sly wink, or eager imitation—and such adjustment defined an innermost circle around him: Abernathy, Walker, Young, Jones, Bernard Lee, and a small network of others, mostly preachers. These were his road buddies, the people he could travel with and let go. King and Levison alone had formed a separate inner circle.

  Clarence Jones was privy to the secret, and he knew that a requirement of his trust was a sensitive instinct for protection. Astutely, by degrees, he had to gauge who was suspicious, who was vulnerable, who was dangerous. Already he sensed that his own wife, Ann, idealized King in such a way that she might not be able to handle the slightest knowledge. In this he proved tragically correct when hints from other sources later precipitated a crisis between them. “If the rumors are true, I never want to see Martin again,” she said at first, and in the divorce, depression, alcohol, and untimely death that followed her, King’s affairs distressed her nearly as much as her own husband’s. All this remained merely a risk to Jones in August 1963. Although he knew King’s regular mistress in the New York area, and helped arrange their meetings, he stayed carefully with his wife and contacted the Riverdale Motor Inn only by telephone.

  Although the FBI eavesdroppers picked up only the hints that passed over Jones’s phone wires, King’s language was startling enough for the FBI, which seized upon even the political conversations as a coup. They revealed for the first time King’s talk of sex and his Negro vernacular, proving to Hoover that he was not the high-minded moralist he claimed to be. Hoover had no trouble seeing King as both a bloodless Communist puppet and a sybarite of unbridled desire—a “tom cat,” as Hoover called him. The Director sent a confidential two-page summary to Nicholas Katzenbach on August 13. (This became the first item in a mountain of personal material that in 1977 federal judge John Lewis Smith would order locked away under seal for fifty years.) The summary was a racy, secret communication that shot upward to the Attorney General and on to President Kennedy himself. “I thought you would be interested in the attached memorandum,” a droll Robert Kennedy privately wrote his brother.

  Small indiscretions opened new opportunities for the Bureau. In one intercepted conversation about the advance anxieties of the March on Washington, a friend told King that “your boy Burke Marshall is scared to death, and so is the Attorney General.”

  King agreed, then added his own worry that the enemies of the march were moving to expose Bayard Rustin’s background. “They are going to make a hell of a mess of it,” King said, predicting that the Southerners would employ a “combination” attack on Rustin’s Communist connections and his “morals charge.”

  “I hope Bayard don’t take a drink before the march,” the friend knowingly fretted.

  “Yes,” King said. “And grab one little brother. ’Cause he will grab one when he has a drink.”

  Wiretap stenographers speedily transmitted King’s remarks to John Malone, Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the New York office. Malone stood out within the hierarchy as a kind of good-natured galoot—his Bureau nickname was “Cement Head”—but he was smart enough to send a verbatim Teletype straight to Hoover, who immediately incorporated King’s “grab one little brother” comment into a confidential memorandum for the Attorney General. Already the Bureau had collected more than a dozen reports on Rustin’s Communist associations—his party service in the late 1930s, his attendance as an observer at the 1957 convention of the CPUSA—parts of which found their way into speeches by Strom Thurmond. Now King’s comments prompted an emphasis on Rustin’s sodomy case in California. On August 13, the day after Hoover disseminated the “little brother” remark, Thurmond rose in the Senate to denounce Rustin for sexual perversion, vagrancy, and lewdness, inserting a copy of his police booking slip into the Congressional Record. When Thurmond’s attack attracted little notice in the news media, perhaps because it was distasteful and too obviously political, the Bureau reached for more explicitly shocking evidence. Two days later, the Los Angeles office notified headquarters that the 1953 incident involved oral sodomy upon two white men, “with Rustin taking the active part.” After that, no aspect of this one case was too vulgar, stale, or obscure for transmission by urgent Teletype, and headquarters badgered the field offices for new details well into November.

  Fro
m the FBI’s point of view, the hidden events of early August were satisfying in spite of Kennedy’s refusal to authorize the King wiretaps. While losing that skirmish, Hoover had shifted the terms of debate. No longer was the Bureau expected to prove that the KGB or the American Communists were controlling Stanley Levison, as King first demanded. Nor was it even required to show that Levison or O’Dell was conspiring with King to commit a criminal or subversive act. Those standards had vanished in concession to Hoover. Worn down by the FBI’s commanding persistence and by corrosive uncertainty, King and the Kennedys gradually yielded to a new, simpler definition: the slightest contact between King and the banned people threatened U.S. national security. The FBI sought to follow up its advantage with a stream of new reports seeking to establish that King was receiving messages from Levison. On August 7, Burke Marshall wrote the Attorney General of one such report: “I think this is inconclusive to show any continuing relationship. The Bureau should keep on it, and we should wait.”

  The issue became one of associations rather than crimes or deeds, in a world of contamination by word of mouth. Then the Jones tap picked up tantalizing hints of King’s hidden sex life, enabling Hoover to suggest more strongly that the Administration was in league with a pack of guttersnipes. One character issue joined another, and the associations raised taboos that were chilling to most Americans, especially white ones, of Negro back alleys and cutthroats and faceless subversives and hellish perversions. For the FBI, the true nature of King’s movement reduced to the issue of whether he did or did not have contact with undesirables—an elementary question suited to the Bureau’s skills and tastes. All it needed to prove or disprove these associations was comprehensive surveillance of King. For Robert Kennedy, the test soon became whether previous retreats before Hoover left any ground to defend.