Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  By early Monday morning, October 28, Robert Kennedy had alerted the Senate leaders, Dirksen and Mansfield. Then he called in Courtney Evans to declare that he and President Kennedy were greatly concerned about the Ellen Rometsch allegations. They could harm the United States. To emphasize his battleship mood, he telephoned the President in front of Evans and exchanged words to the same effect. Then he sent Evans to forewarn Director Hoover of an imminent conference.

  Almost immediately, Kennedy appeared at Hoover’s door, and the Director, pleased that the upstart Attorney General had made the humble journey rather than summoning him, dismissed his aides. Alone, Kennedy told Hoover that he and the President urgently wanted him to brief Mansfield and Dirksen on the larger dangers of the Rometsch case. If the case blew open, it could hurt so many officials inside and outside the executive branch of government as to damage the integrity of the United States.

  Hoover let Kennedy suffer a bit. Implying that the whole business was distasteful to him, he said that the Bureau already had furnished him a complete memorandum on the personal aspects of the case. The Attorney General could read it to the senators himself if he wished. Kennedy could only reply that the senators were primarily interested in the security aspects, and that Hoover’s personal authority was essential. What he meant was that only Hoover could convince the senators that there would be no partisan profit or duty in a Profumo-style attack on the President. He must say that an attack would bring down retaliation in kind upon Republican and Democratic senators alike, supported by Hoover himself.

  Hoover did not give a direct response. He said only that he already had a phone message from Senator Mansfield, and would speak with him. Kennedy changed the subject to the Birmingham church bombing and King. His words suggested a kind of wistful reproach, of pride mixed with a plea that Hoover recognize what he had risked to accommodate the FBI. Kennedy said he was sorry they had not been able to solve the church bombing; Hoover replied that the Bureau would have cracked the case if not for the obstruction of Alabama, but had not given up. As for King, Kennedy explained why he had been so upset on Friday about the new FBI report on King and communism. Hoover did not give an inch. When Kennedy mentioned the flak and gossip still coming from the Pentagon, Hoover replied that the report had been disseminated to the CIA and the State Department too, among others. When Kennedy said he was worried because, although the report did not say so explicitly, most readers would quickly conclude that King was a Communist, Hoover replied that every statement in the report was “accurate and supported by facts.”

  Hoover called Senator Mansfield at eleven o’clock, just after the Attorney General withdrew. The Majority Leader said he and Dirksen badly needed a meeting with the Director alone within the next few hours. Capitol Hill was swarming with reporters working on the story out of Iowa, he warned, and any unscheduled sighting of the three of them would attract attention. Therefore, Mansfield suggested that they meet at his home, and Hoover agreed.

  Afterward, Hoover called the Attorney General. Almost simultaneously, President Kennedy obtained his first report from Senator Mansfield, who said he was badly shocked by what Hoover had laid out, complete with names, dates, and places: Rometsch, Bobby Baker’s other party girls, senators from both sides of the aisle, foreign women, Negro mistresses, cruises, quarrels, deals. Mansfield’s battered state suggested that an emergency silence might be imposed on the seething mess, but the first true test came the next morning at one of the rare hearings of the Senate Rules Committee that made the front pages. Before appearing as the committee’s sole witness, Senator Williams issued a statement that the Iowa story was not on his agenda. Inside the closed hearing, he told the senators that he would not speak on the Rometsch issue. They could ask for pertinent FBI information if they wished. Then Williams began detailed, sworn testimony on Baker’s financial irregularities. When it was over, the committee chairman faced the waiting reporters and said, “We didn’t go into West Germany.”

  Three days later, on November 1, Robert Kennedy approved an FBI request to wiretap Bayard Rustin. The Administration had lost much of its control over Hoover, but the danger of a Profumo scandal receded from the brink. Already the investigation was settling upon Capitol Hill, and specifically upon Bobby Baker’s finances. Living close to the edge, President Kennedy felt confident enough to tease reporters with hints of what Hoover knew about Ellen Rometsch. “Boy, the dirt he has on those senators,” he said brashly. “You wouldn’t believe it.”

  Rebel troops overthrew the South Vietnamese government in Saigon that same November 1, assassinating President Diem and his brother who had commanded the secret police. The bloody coup shocked many Americans into an unsettling first awareness of the Vietnam War, as news accounts speculated delicately but persistently about clandestine U.S. support for the revolt. All through the breakthrough year of 1963, the Vietnam crisis had built as a haunting foreign echo of civil rights. On May 8, during the peak of Bevel’s children’s marches in Birmingham, Vietnamese soldiers had killed monks and civilians in Hue to enforce a government order prohibiting the display of Buddhist colors on Buddha’s birthday. Buddhist protest had seized world attention a month later, on the day of the Medgar Evers assassination in Mississippi, when a monk named Trich Quan Duc publicly immolated himself in downtown Saigon. Vietnam’s Catholic rulers contemptuously dismissed a string of later suicides as “Buddhist barbecues” inspired by the Communist enemy.

  Americans awakening to the Vietnam crisis puzzled over the conduct on both sides. Given the overwhelmingly Buddhist population, it was as though a Jewish U.S. president had forcibly suppressed Christmas as a Communist conspiracy. Uncomfortable barriers of religion and race plagued Kennedy Administration officials most responsible for U.S. war policy in Vietnam, so that they “decided long ago,” wrote Max Frankel in the Times, “to discuss it as little as possible.” Privately, however, they split over the most divisive internal question of the entire Administration: whether it was moral, democratic, or necessary to overthrow Diem in order to preserve a war against tyranny in Vietnam. “My government’s coming apart!” President Kennedy had exclaimed on the day before the March on Washington. Two days later, his ambassador in Saigon cabled that the course was set toward a coup: “There is no turning back.” All through September and October, the secret cable traffic had flopped erratically between excited hopes of imminent success and bouts of bloody remorse, like speeches from Macbeth. When it was over, U.S. officials tried to make the best of a fresh start with a new Vietnamese regime of French-educated, Catholic generals.

  In Atlanta, another subterranean track remained entirely hidden. Agent R. R. Nichols, posing as the owner of an electrical engineering firm, rented a large office on West Peachtree Street to house the King surveillance equipment. Normally, wiretap lines ran from the phone company to the local FBI office, but this operation was so secret that some agents thought Hoover might not have the Attorney General’s approval. Nichols hated the assignment. His frustrations were typical of a typical FBI career. After a first assignment to Birmingham’s Communist squad in 1947, Nichols had been shipped to Washington to work in the giant new loyalty program. It was tedious background work, the worst of it being a long investigation of foreign-born government carpenters.

  By the time of his transfer to Atlanta in 1955, Nichols had been tagged as a security specialist, which meant that he was shut out of criminal work. A few top security officials enjoyed prestige at headquarters, but the regular agents commanded very little status in the field offices. Nichols spent years hiring Negro college students to take notes on speeches inside the new Black Muslim temple in Atlanta. The students kept quitting because the speeches were repetitive and dull. Eventually, Nichols slacked off on the only real activity permitted him—suggesting to employers that Muslims be fired from their jobs or evicted from their quarters—because success only meant that he would have to locate them again. He developed a creeping insecurity about his abilities, having never worked on
what he considered an interesting case. Criminal agents scorned his assignments, including the top-secret new King detail. There was no hope of making arrests. Even interviews with King or King’s people were strictly forbidden because of potential controversy. It was all busy work—training extra shifts of headphone monitors and supervising stenographers. Although Nichols held no unorthodox opinions for an agent—saying that King was a communist of the kind who thought he was a liberal and didn’t understand the danger of people like himself—he wished someone else had the job that stretched years ahead of him. On November 8, he notified his superiors that the King taps were up and running.

  At first the taps missed King, who was enduring a new leadership schism in Detroit. Rev. C. L. Franklin had scheduled a two-day convention at Cobo Hall, scene of King’s triumphant speech in June, for the purpose of forming a Northern organization comparable to the SCLC in the South. But the conference barely survived its planning sessions. Fistfights broke out between Franklin and other preachers, many of whom had resented his highhanded ways since the struggles within the National Baptist Convention. An unlikely combination of Muslims, militants, and J. H. Jackson loyalists walked out to convene an alternative Grass Roots Leadership Conference. What united them against Franklin was an aversion to nonviolence and to King’s eagerness for fellowship with white people. “I’m sick and tired of singing ‘We Shall Overcome,’” declared one preacher. Conservative Baptists preached racial pride, SNCC veterans such as Gloria Richardson wondered what virtue of integration could induce black people to give up the right of self-defense, and keynote speaker Malcolm X declared that integration was a training exercise for Negroes, run by whites. “You bleed when the white man says bleed,” he said, scolding a delighted crowd.

  At Grass Roots, a new sense of power ran into an old sense of injury, foreshadowing the separatist reaction a few years ahead. Much of the emotion was still personal and evanescent, but Malcolm X did preach one line that drove a deep wedge between King’s movement and his church heritage. Malcolm revered Moses as a common prophet of Islam and Judaism, and also as the father figure of the Negro Christian church. “Nowhere in that Bible can you show me where Moses went to his people and said, believe in the same god that your slavemaster believes in, or seek integration with the slavemaster,” Malcolm said often. “Moses’ one doctrine was separation. He told Pharaoh, ‘…Let my people go.’” Malcolm X challenged King to prove how he could reconcile the ecumenical spirit of integration with the tribal cohesion of a Negro culture that was joined at the hip to Moses.

  After huddling with C. L. Franklin, King decided to duck an appearance at the fracas in Detroit. Back in Georgia for the second anniversary of the Albany Movement, he criticized the Justice Department for “unjust blows” and fired off another telegram urging Robert Kennedy to stop the prosecution of the Albany Nine. By then, a large staff was trying to “work up on a movement in Danville,” as Andrew Young put it, and Shuttles-worth was urging a renewed push in Birmingham. Frictions among local Negroes made King reluctant to go to either place, but he had no better idea how to overcome the battle-weary lull in the movement. He told Clarence Jones on November 16 that he was suffering from a case of perpetual hiccoughs.

  At New American Library, King’s editors were frantic about the fired writers and other messy delays on the Birmingham manuscript. King’s literary agent in turn was “terribly uncomfortable,” and her anxiety fell mostly upon Stanley Levison, who was far more accessible than Jones or King. Levison and Jones finally arranged a crisis meeting at New York’s Idlewild Airport, when King passed through on his way home from a conference of Reform and Conservative Jews. The various FBI wiretaps intercepted the plans well enough in advance to cover the airport rendezvous in heavy numbers, on a cold, rainy Wednesday. Agents managed to overhear some of the conversation, which indeed concerned the Birmingham book. Among other things, King asked Levison to try to rehire the woman who had worked on Stride Toward Freedom. Of far greater importance to the Bureau was an achievement that the Intelligence Division quickly trumpeted at headquarters: “Notwithstanding trying circumstances, both from a climatic and security standpoint, our New York Agents were able to secure a photograph of the aforementioned three individuals.” One of Sullivan’s deputies, harking back to the Smith Act heresy convictions, speculated that the picture might one day become evidence in a Communist conspiracy trial.

  That same day, Robert Kennedy was celebrating his birthday at a small party in the Justice Department. He stood on his desk amid joking friends and delivered a chipper little talk about how the fight would go on even if his own days on the job were numbered. At the White House, President Kennedy had called in Lee White to make sure that the local Washington barbers quit complaining about serving Negro customers, as was reported in the newspaper. Another, nastier bit of racial politics had reached his desk. Congressman John L. Pilcher, of Albany, Georgia, was lobbying to create wily new pork-barrel opportunities from segregation. If civilian hospitals near Turner Air Force Base remained segregated, and were thus unserviceable under new Pentagon regulations on equal opportunity, did that mean Turner would become eligible for construction of a new military hospital? Budget officials, keen to the ramifications of Pilcher’s game, insisted that such an interpretation of the regulation would require presidential approval, but Kennedy made no final decision before leaving on a trip to make peace between quarrelsome Democratic factions in Texas. As soon as he left, an army of White House craftsmen stripped the Oval Office for a quick remodeling in his absence.

  Stanley Levison rode the train to Washington for the Kennedy funeral. He came back talking of “a whole city in which no one talked in a normal tone of voice.” People were whispering, moving in slow motion. In all the eerie mass pain he saw only one hopeful turn of emotion: the news commentators were not hysterical, but instead were talking about how much hatred there had been. “A feeling like that covering a country can be more important than anything else,” Levison told his secretary. He called King’s literary agent to say that the Birmingham book must be postponed yet again. “This book always seems to be in the shadow of tragic deaths,” he said—Medgar Evers, the four girls, and now President Kennedy. At times Levison gushed, calling Kennedy the first intellectual president since Jefferson, and he offered wobbly speculations on the murder of the assassin by Jack Ruby. Once he said that Ruby was a Communist who killed Lee Harvey Oswald because he thought Oswald was a right-winger discrediting the left. Another time he said Oswald himself must have been from the “Chinese wing of the ultra-left.” Then he said Oswald was the sort of person who could be influenced by extremists from either side. Struggling to regain his political realism, he remarked that he was “not at all pessimistic” about Lyndon Johnson on civil rights, because he saw Johnson as a liberal New Dealer at heart. King liked Johnson, which was good, and in certain areas Johnson had more ability than Kennedy.

  King also attended the funeral, though neither he nor Levison was aware of the other. He traveled alone, without even his constant road man Bernard Lee, and stood unnoticed on the street. Like Roy Wilkins, he was deeply hurt not to have been invited to the funeral Mass at St. Matthew’s. King still identified with both Kennedys, especially the President. They had many things in common, such as coarsely overbearing fathers and a penchant for noble romance. Each was a closet smoker, catnapper, and skirt-chaser. Between them they delivered most of the memorable American oratory of the postwar period.

  What King had envied in President Kennedy was his self-esteem and his lack of perceptible angst. Although politically on the defensive nearly every time King communicated with him, Kennedy always possessed an independent sense of well-being. By contrast, King was personally self-conscious. He worried about his looks, his tough skin, about what people thought of him and whether they might find out that he had ghostwriters for his books. Race accounted for much of the difference, but President Johnson was a worrier like King, and for that reason King never looked up to
him personally. From their first meeting in the White House, when the new President nervously refused to be photographed with King, Johnson seemed to be insecure in ways that aroused only occasional sympathy and no admiration from King.

  Kennedy’s best qualities remained his alone, untransferable to King, but the reverse was not true. In death, the late President gained credit for much of the purpose that King’s movement had forced upon him in life. No death had ever been like his—Niebuhr called him “an elected monarch.” In a mass purgative of hatred, bigotry, and violence, the martyred President became a symbol of the healing opposites, King’s qualities, which had been much too earnest for the living man. President Johnson told the nation that the most fitting eulogy would be swift passage of his civil rights bill. By this and other effects of mourning, Kennedy acquired the Lincolnesque mantle of a unifying crusader who had bled against the thorn of race. Honest biographers later found it impossible to trace an engaged personality in proportion to the honor. Because the best spirit of Kennedy was largely absent from the racial deliberations of his presidency, the issue remained an exogenous factor to the most intimate, admiring accounts of his life. In his seminal history, A Thousand Days, which was written and published during the peak of the national movement, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., introduced civil rights in the thirty-fifth of thirty-seven chapters.

  As for Robert Kennedy, King’s travail with him was largely over. The two of them had stumbled through relations from camaraderie to contempt. Kennedy had been more of an ally to the movement during the Freedom Rides than during Birmingham, which contradicted common notions of steady growth in his character. His experience as Attorney General, and specifically with King, may well have begun to reverse his theory that the way to engineer social change was to minimize the discomfort of politicians, but for the time being he was simply too dispirited. His admirable, underappreciated campaign to reform the fundamental structure and purpose of the FBI came largely to grief, and Kennedy suffered much for that. Hoover abruptly severed all but the barest pretense of professional obligation or courtesy on the very day of the assassination in Dallas. Without the intervening power of President Kennedy, a state of mutual hatred quickly set in. From the standpoint of personal injury to King, Robert Kennedy did perhaps his greatest disservice by remaining a caretaker Attorney General for another ten months, when the FBI ran unchecked.