Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  When by adroit news leaks and prearranged congressional demands, Robert Kennedy assured that Valachi would deliver his confessions in public, Hoover tried to cover his retreat. Two days after the March on Washington, he issued an “FBI Bulletin” to law enforcement officers across the country, claiming that the FBI had long since established “a successful penetration…into the innermost sanctum of the criminal deity.” Just as Kennedy was advertising Valachi’s impending testimony as a historic breakthrough, Hoover minimized information he said “corroborated and embellished the facts developed by the FBI as early as 1961.” Going a step further, Hoover wrote that public appearances by informants “serve, in a larger degree, to magnify the enormous task which lies ahead.” Reporters seized upon the word “magnify” as a veiled charge that Robert Kennedy was making the FBI’s job more difficult. Kennedy asked Hoover to issue a clarifying statement, but Hoover refused, saying his language spoke for itself.

  Joe Valachi, surrounded by heavily armed U.S. marshals, first appeared before a Senate committee and a nationally televised audience on September 27. His tales of comic terror, godfathers, snags in the heroin business, and Mafia manners (“How can I ’splain that to you, Senator?”) were the gripping originals for a later generation of entertainment. Because of Valachi, Kennedy said privately, “the FBI changed their whole concept of crime in the United States.” The New York Times published an “underworld glossary” of terms Valachi introduced. Opening-day coverage overshadowed all contemporary events, including President Kennedy’s schedule and King’s anguished “MacArthur speech” to the Richmond SCLC convention, and Valachi dominated the news for much of the next month. Robert Kennedy published a national summons to war against “the private government of organized crime,” in which he praised the IRS and the Bureau of Narcotics but mentioned the FBI only in passing. This was a momentary departure from Kennedy’s patient cultivation of Hoover, most likely owing to pride or irritation. The Attorney General quickly resumed his courtier’s campaign of flattery and encouragement.

  Kennedy had special reason to be gentle in victory over Hoover and his prized internal security apparatus: he knew they held the balance in a quivering scandal that might well ruin President Kennedy. FBI agents had discovered that among the President’s mistresses was a woman named Ellen Rometsch, who had fled her native East Germany in 1955 and made her way to Washington in 1961 as the wife of a soldier stationed in the West German Embassy. To the Bureau, this made Rometsch suspect as a possible East German spy. Even so, the scandalous implications might easily have been buried because of the President’s privacy in such matters, except that Rometsch was part of a collateral scandal that could not be contained. She was one of many courtesans and party girls associated with Bobby Baker, an old Lyndon Johnson protégè on the Senate staff.

  Baker’s anonymity was about to be shattered by a disgruntled vending machine contractor angling to sue Baker for default on bought favors. That triggering event eventually sent Baker to prison. Long before then, it promised to open many lurid avenues of revelation about him as a one-man backroom marketplace who assiduously arranged contracts, cash, and backrubs. Robert Kennedy knew that one of those avenues led through Ellen Rometsch to President Kennedy. He had her quietly deported in August, but all through September, as lawyers and investigators circled Baker in private, the information left behind was a threat of the utmost sensitivity. Essentially, it was a reprise on John Kennedy’s un-known Inga Arvad affair of the 1940s. Both these exotic romances with foreign women lay within Hoover’s dreaded files, and Hoover, more than any other person, had the power to determine whether the Rometsch affair stayed as quiet as Arvad or became as noisy as the Profumo scandal in England, which was lurching toward a conclusion marked by suicide and political disgrace.

  Far from public view, the King wiretap and the Baker scandal began in lockstep. On Friday, October 4, William Sullivan formally recommended that Hoover once again seek Kennedy’s approval for a wiretap on King’s home in Atlanta, “because of the communist influence in the racial movement shown by activities of Stanley Levison as well as King’s connection with him.” The proposal was a watershed for Hoover, especially since Kennedy had turned him down once already in July. “I hope you don’t change your minds on this,” he scribbled to Sullivan in an acid reminder of his brief apostasy. Possibly he was warning Sullivan to prepare for blame if Kennedy again crossed the Bureau on this vital question.

  Bobby Baker went into hiding that same Friday, ducking a command summons from his Senate boss, Majority Leader Mike Mansfield. With Minority Leader Everett Dirksen and Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, Mansfield waited much of the afternoon, joined by Senator John Williams of Delaware, a conservative, abstemious Republican who, through scandals dating back to the Truman Administration, had earned a reputation as an independent “watchdog” of Senate ethics. By diligent research into the rumors flying between Capitol Hill and the FBI, Williams had gained results so alarming that he wanted to confront Baker with them in the presence of the Senate leadership. When Baker failed to appear, Mansfield promised to reconvene the meeting as soon as he could be located.

  Hoover took Sullivan’s draft of the new King wiretap request home for a final weekend of thought, then sent it to the Attorney General on Monday. That afternoon, Senator Mansfield told his private leadership group that an inebriated Baker had shown up to resign his Senate position rather than face Senator Williams. Baker had shouted that it was all a partisan witch-hunt designed to injure Vice President Johnson because of their close association. Rumors already circulated that Robert Kennedy was encouraging the Baker investigation surreptitiously, because of his dislike for Johnson, but Baker, Williams, and Hoover were among those who already knew that the Attorney General had his own reason to fear a scandal.

  On Thursday, amid early ripples of publicity about Baker’s resignation, the Senate unanimously ordered a Rules Committee investigation of Baker’s conduct. That afternoon, having sent a terse note—“Courtney, speak to me”—Robert Kennedy met privately with Courtney Evans, his FBI liaison. He still had not signed the King wiretap authorization. To Evans, Kennedy stressed the political delicacy of the issue, saying that any public discovery of such a tap would be a disaster of the highest order. Logically, there was no more reason to tap King now than in July. The way to get at the contact between Levison and King was to monitor Levison, which the Bureau was doing already by every available means, including bugging. The results had failed for two years to corroborate the primary allegation of conspiracy between Levison and any Communists, let alone the Soviets. Moreover, the substance of the communication between Levison and King had been deemed dangerous only by FBI axiom that Levison was sinister. From any less rigid perspective, Levison appeared to be more or less as sensible as the civil rights movement itself.

  Politically, there was less reason to tap King than in July. Since then, King’s speech at the March on Washington had established him as a national spokesman for a significant minority of whites as well as the vast majority of Negroes. Also, the Birmingham church bombing had caused a perceptible increase in national sympathy for the Negro cause, and indirectly for King. If word of the wiretap got out, Kennedy could not hope to gain public support for an action that added to King’s persecution. No law enforcement official could easily accept responsibility for tapping King when so many crimes against King’s movement remained unsolved. That very day, Burke Marshall informed Robert Kennedy that Wallace’s state troopers had arrested three men believed to have done the church bombing and charged them with minor offenses—deliberately, said Marshall, to protect them from imminent arrest on capital murder charges. Marshall’s information came directly from Floyd Mann in Alabama, in secret. By his own high standards of crusading against criminal corruption, Kennedy had far more reason to slap a wiretap on Governor Wallace than on King.

  Although neither Kennedy nor Courtney Evans spoke so plainly in their private memos, the best arguments for a wireta
p on King had to do with obtaining political intelligence. Ironically, much of that information had been shut off by Kennedy’s insistence that King stop talking to Levison, which had reduced the take from the Levison wiretaps. More than ever, Kennedy needed to know exactly what King intended. Congress was aflame over the civil rights bill. A surprise demonstration or a denunciation of the Administration could be calamitous from Kennedy’s point of view. To deal with King—to court, control, or, in a dire emergency, renounce him entirely—he needed to know every possible detail. This was the unspoken bait from Hoover, who was not above larding his intelligence reports with political gossip.

  On the other hand, it was a trap. If Kennedy handed Hoover a signed wiretap authorization on Martin Luther King, the precarious balance of their relationship would shift. Hoover would possess a club to offset Kennedy’s special relationship with the President. Thereafter, it would become more difficult for Kennedy to restrain Hoover from any action he proposed against King. For that matter, it would become more difficult to suggest practically anything to Hoover. How could Kennedy hope to control Hoover once he had agreed to wiretap King? There was a Faustian undertow to Kennedy’s dilemma, and he did not feel strong enough to resist. Some time later, after holding the matter entirely to himself, he told an aide tersely that there would have been “no living with the Bureau” if he had not signed.*

  King tried to sort out his dead ends after the Richmond convention. Heavy bail indebtedness and other obstacles meant that demonstrations were “an absolute last resort,” he concluded, especially in Birmingham. “Our challenge now,” he wrote his staff, “is to be ingenious enough to keep the threat of demonstrations alive so as to give the local and national public a picture of our determination and continued militancy, and yet constantly find face-saving retreats in order to avoid demonstrations if possible.” He embarked on a circuit-riding tour of escalating bluster, fully conscious that he was racing his engine while braked.

  He made four passes through Birmingham in October, once hitching a ride with Nelson “Fireball” Smith down to Selma. Mrs. Amelia Boynton, the local woman whose “honor roll” of would-be registrants had prompted John Doar to file voting suits there, had invited King to give a boost to her beleaguered registration campaign. By the time he addressed a mass meeting there, went on to Montgomery, and circled back to Birmingham, Alabama investigators had established that the car in which King made one leg of his journey had been rented by an observer from the Justice Department. Governor Wallace angrily denounced the federal government for subsidizing King’s conspiracy against state laws. Two state grand juries and the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals eventually entered a swelling controversy that obliged King to issue several public statements. Congressional inquiries and contradictory evidence forced Burke Marshall to apologize for an earlier firm denial. Marshall fired the young Negro staff attorney who had been in charge of the car† for his panicky cover-up, and very nearly fired John Doar for lax supervision.

  Hypersensitivity infected public discourse about civil rights and King in particular. At the White House, emissaries Blaik and Royall promised to divulge at least a summary of their report to President Kennedy on events in Birmingham since the church bombing, but they never came close to formulating a report to summarize. Their prescription for Birmingham was calm. Anything they said or did about the state of race relations was certain to cause turmoil. Therefore, they said nothing. Privately with the Kennedys, they talked about football. Their evasiveness became so blatant that some moderate whites in Birmingham sent secret protest notes to the Justice Department, and Earl Blaik himself complained privately to Marshall that his partner, Royall, was “never interested in any of my reports” and favored a “bland, PR approach” to Birmingham. In time, the two soldiers asked for and received permission to dissolve their assignment without report, recommendation, or public comment, as though it never happened.

  While King was in Selma, Robert Kennedy went before the full House Judiciary Committee to ask for the deletion of strengthening amendments that had been added to the civil rights bill in subcommittee. For this he was roundly denounced not only by Roy Wilkins but by liberal Republicans, who complained that Kennedy, unable to deliver the votes of his own party, was pleading for bipartisan support while stripping out the few amendments for which Republicans could claim credit. The legislative tangle was a cartoonist’s cloud of flying fists. Politicians claimed they needed a weaker bill now to get a stronger one later, and vice versa. Jujitsu effects were calculated out to the third and fourth degree, as charges of posturing competed with pronouncements of political genius. “For an understanding of this bizarre battle,” declared The New York Times, “it is helpful to look both backward and forward.”

  Stanley Levison gradually deepened his involvement in King’s Birmingham book. At first he had made awkward excuses when King’s agent and publishers asked why he had dropped out of the editing process, but when they complained that Al Duckett’s revisions were unsatisfactory, Levison found another writer. Upon new complaints about the revisions, Levison agreed that the second writer made the “fatal mistake” of “talking down to the readers.” By then, the publishers were exerting pressure to get the book done quickly, fearing that public appreciation for the Birmingham story had faded already. King’s agent, Joan Daves, told Levison that Clarence Jones was ineffective as King’s editorial go-between. Levison worked on the manuscript himself while finding a third writer. Through Jones, he sent word to King that the book was hostage to continuing events in the movement. If King pulled out of Birmingham for Danville, Levison warned, he could not expect readers to get excited about the watershed events of the previous spring. King would come off “like a child who can’t finish something and moves on to some other game.” By October, Levison had had more than one direct talk with King about the manuscript. He stopped telling friends that he was out of touch with King and began saying he had to “finish off this book thing that was started.”

  All this came through on the FBI wiretaps, but the Bureau was less excited about such contact after Robert Kennedy approved the wiretap on King’s home and New York office. Long before any results could be obtained, Hoover made a supplementary request to wiretap all four telephone lines at King’s SCLC headquarters in Atlanta. On Monday, October 21, Courtney Evans found the Attorney General upset, vacillating. He approved this further request but reserved the right to review all the King wiretaps in thirty days. That Friday, Kennedy called Evans in again, this time “obviously irritated.” He had just learned that the Bureau was disseminating within the government a scalding report on King as “an unprincipled man,” one who “is knowingly, willingly, and regularly taking guidance from communists.”

  Full of sarcasm and wrath, Kennedy said people all through the Pentagon were talking about the report. “The Attorney General asked what responsibilities the Army had in relation to the communist background of Martin Luther King,” Evans reported, adding that his technical explanation about the Army’s security functions “seemed to serve no purpose.” Dismissing Evans, Kennedy called Hoover. He extracted a promise that Hoover would recall the report to prevent leaks, but he threatened no discipline. The damage had been done. “I have talked to A.G. & he is satisfied,” scrawled Hoover, sounding satisfied himself.

  That weekend Kennedy scrambled to plug two rumbling volcanoes at once. While the rebellious FBI was painting the Administration as an ally of a Communist Negro movement, the Ellen Rometsch scandal suddenly threatened to erupt. A reporter working with Senator Williams wrote the first exclusive story—“U.S. Expels Girl Linked to Officials”—which revealed that Rometsch had been “associating with congressional leaders and some prominent New Frontiersmen.” It said Rometsch’s name had surfaced in the Bobby Baker investigation, and that there was some concern about security risks, even espionage, “because of the high rank of her male companions.” Senator Williams, who wanted to know why she had been expelled from the country if she was no
t a security risk, and what it meant if she was, had scheduled an appearance before a closed session of the Senate Rules Committee on Tuesday. The newspaper story referred to Rometsch as a “party girl” and stressed her sex appeal: “Those acquainted with the woman class her as ‘stunning,’ and in general appearance comparable to movie actress Elizabeth Taylor.”

  For Robert Kennedy, the only solace in this calamity was that the story appeared in an Iowa newspaper. This obscure origin gave a brief reprieve, as the story would not take hold in the national press until after the weekend. Kennedy had a little time. Among his first acts was an emergency call to La Vern Duffy, a close friend and Senate investigator, who had just finished work on the Valachi hearings. The Attorney General gravely asked him to jump on the first plane to West Germany and stay there. His assignment was to find Rometsch, calm her down, and keep her from talking. One foreboding detail of the Iowa story made Duffy’s mission all the more vital: Rometsch was rumored to be angry that her “important friends” had allowed her to be shipped out of the United States. Duffy took off like James Bond. Kennedy then called the President. They agreed that the only way to control Williams by Tuesday was through the influence of the Senate leadership. Unfortunately, the only way to move the Senate leadership on something like this was through J. Edgar Hoover.