While I was “in the neighborhood”—220 miles from Asheville—I contacted Betty.
“It is a four-hour drive from Chapel Hill to Asheville, and I seriously doubt it would be worth your while,” Betty wrote, answering my e-mail. Another roadblock.
But then she surprised me.
“I am attaching something I think you will find interesting,” she wrote. “[It’s a] transcription of my father’s 1978 notes detailing a conversation with Mr. Withers concerning their respective testimonies before members of the House Committee on Assassinations.”
Whoa. Jim had told me all those years earlier that Withers’s identity as a confidential informant was revealed in the late 1970s to members of a congressional committee re-investigating King’s assassination. It was devastating for the FBI, Jim said. Withers’s secret identity nearly went public. I’d read agent Lawrence’s testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. But there was no record in the committee’s published reports that Withers had testified. In fact, I could find no public reference to Withers at all. If he testified it had to have been in executive session—behind closed doors.
I eagerly opened the Word file attached to Betty’s e-mail, a verbatim transcription she’d made of handwritten notes her father scribbled in November 1978. In part, it read:
“I told 338 R—that in his testimony to guard against being so taciturn or evasive that he could inadvertently commit perjury—By denying that he had ever furnished info which I attributed to him and had so reported.—For if he chose to do so—no matter what his motive, (one of self-protection—and fear of retaliation, physical injury or harassment etc.) that it would nevertheless create a situation indicating that He or I had perjured ourselves in that I said one thing—and he another.”
I couldn’t believe what I was reading. There was no turning around now. The next morning I got a rental car and drove to Asheville.
* * *
—
BETTY WAS EXPECTING me. She’d finally relented. She invited me over.
With great anticipation, I parked outside her house, along a ridge overlooking downtown Asheville. I walked up the street but didn’t see her home, just a thicket of trees, then a clearing. Uncertain, I stepped off the sidewalk and tentatively followed a ribbon driveway up into the woods. Two paved tire tracks blazed through the grass and up over a rise.
Then it came into view: an ancient, weathered, two-story frame house. It was huge and rambling, one of the oldest in Asheville, built as a farmhouse before the Civil War and expanded over the years in fits of pioneering enterprise. From the yard, it whispered tales of country ghosts, lost causes, and mystery. I stepped across the porch, swallowed, and knocked.4
Betty’s grown son, William, opened the door and let me in.
“Mom’s upstairs,” he told me, then left me standing awkwardly by the door.
What a place. Austere but beautiful: wood floors, aging plaster, high ceilings that only encouraged the late-autumn chill seeping in from outdoors. It was a place of true character, a history buff’s dream. As Betty would later explain, the beams were all hand-hewn; the rafters were pole logs with bark still attached. Etched into the first-floor windows were the names of Jane and Dolly Sevier, members of a prominent family who had lived here in the 1870s. Following the custom of the time, they had used their diamond engagement rings to memorialize their names in panes of glass.
Another longtime occupant, Paul Ayres Rockwell, an American journalist and war adventurer who fought in the French army in World War I, left his French Legion of Honor medal behind. Betty found it in the garage and returned it to the late swashbuckler’s daughter.
Turning around I noticed a large metal rack holding dozens of old vinyl record albums. Much of it was jazz from the 1940s and ’50s, legendary pianists like Count Basie, Mary Lou Williams, and Dick Wellstood, the clarinetist Bob Wilber, various Dixieland artists, and big bands led by the likes of Kay Kyser and Benny Goodman. Even the mawkish, bubble-music Lawrence Welk resided in the rack.
Jim. Doggone. He was right again.
He’d told me years earlier that Bill Lawrence loved jazz. In fact, Jim said Lawrence’s enthusiasm for it once helped him recruit a key source of information within the civil rights movement, Memphis NAACP leader Vasco Smith, who held a huge jazz collection of his own and who swapped records with the G-man.
“We converted Vasco early on,” Jim had told me. He said Smith cooperated, in part, because he believed in the FBI, but also because he and Bill Lawrence shared a mutual interest in the likes of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington.5
When Betty came downstairs, the record collection was an immediate conversation starter.
“They were Daddy’s,” she confirmed. Daddy. Spoken like a true Southerner.
She recalled her father working long hours, from six in the morning to six at night. Once home, he’d collapse in an easy chair with his files, a cigar in his mouth, and his beagle, Boots, on the footstool before him. At times a baseball game blinked from the television set. Other times, he immersed himself in The Daily Worker, the Communist Party news organ he subscribed to under a thinly veiled alias, William Harvey, or the National Review, conservative William F. Buckley’s news magazine. But, always, soothing jazz syncopated from his walnut stereo cabinet.
Bill Lawrence wasn’t always easy to live with. He could be strict. Even grouchy. The long hours took their toll. When the Vietnam War broke out and Betty went away to college, it caused trouble in the Lawrence home. “I protested the Vietnam War. And my father didn’t like that one bit,” she said.
Betty wasn’t at all what I’d expected—not judging by her sober résumé. She practiced environmental law and estate planning, and had worked for a time on Wall Street. Recently, she’d represented a client in filing an ouster petition against Mike Nifong, the Durham County district attorney disbarred for pressing bogus rape charges against members of the Duke University lacrosse team.
No, I had expected someone stern. Someone grave. Someone more like how I’d imagined her father.
She was none of that. She was sixty-one, hazel eyed, with an easy, impish smile and a deep, playful voice. I detected a bit of the bohemian in her. That, and a down-home friendliness. Over the course of several hours, as the fireplace crackled in her study, she opened her father’s world to me, his world as she had understood it as a child.
“You’re sitting in the chair,” she laughed.
The chair. The very upholstered easy chair her father sat in when Ernest Withers snapped their family portrait back in 1967. It was much older now. And a bit worn. But it was unmistakably the chair.
She sugarcoated nothing as she handed me a series of documents she’d found among her father’s keepsakes: letters of commendation from J. Edgar Hoover, photographs, and news clippings, including one from 1978 reporting that Withers had been indicted for public corruption.
Most intriguing of all were various sets of handwritten notes.
“If you read this, you’d think Daddy hated Dr. King,” Betty said a bit sheepishly.
She handed me a book of notes her father had scribbled in retirement. It was an odd little artifact, thirty-two pages of lined paper torn from a pocket notebook that Bill Lawrence had frugally bound together by driving five staples into a makeshift spine. On the cover, in black ink, he scrawled a title, “BLACK POWER—MEMPHIS & M. L. KING—Aspects prior & after 4-4-68.” Below that, in blue ink, he wrote a subtitle: “Martin L King, Background Subversion & Black Power info Memphis.”
It weighed perhaps a few ounces, yet I felt the heft of history in my hand. Here were the personal, handwritten thoughts of the man who oversaw the government surveillance of Dr. King in Memphis in the days before his assassination. For anyone who believes the FBI murdered King, and there are many, this little booklet was a bombshell. Personally, I knew better. I’d studied the assassination enough to realize the enormity of evidence against James Earl Ray. A career criminal, he may have shot King for money.
But he didn’t do it for the FBI. There were no documented ties between the Bureau and him; Congress had investigated that thoroughly.
At the same time, the notes reveal the depth of the FBI’s animosity toward King—and Lawrence’s own distaste as well.
“If the subject of Dr. King came up, the thing Daddy always said disapprovingly was he was unfaithful to his wife,” Betty said.
Jim had said the same thing. He’d even implied once, without any evidence, that King had sex with a prostitute at the Lorraine Motel the night before he was shot.
But Lawrence’s notebook said nothing about King’s personal life. It was entirely focused on his politics. And Lawrence left little doubt that, at best, he considered King a dangerous militant; at worst, a traitor.
Reading like an official FBI monograph, the booklet retraces King’s final year and his opposition to the Vietnam War. Lawrence contends in his notes that King’s antiwar position was influenced—if not directed—by Communists. Lawrence records how Diane Nash, the courageous civil rights activist and wife of King’s close aide James Bevel, traveled to Hanoi, the North Vietnamese capital; how Bevel then took leave from his post at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and, with King’s “full support,” took charge of the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. King, Bevel, and entertainer Harry Belafonte led hundreds of thousands of demonstrators on a march from New York’s Central Park to the United Nations, where many in the crowd burned their draft cards.
Lawrence captured the outrage within the government and the general public at King’s actions, writing that President Johnson “flushed with anger” when he read about King’s famous speech at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, when he came out against the war, and how LBJ’s adviser John Roche had shouted, “King, you’ve given a speech on Vietnam that goes right down the Communist line!”6
Lawrence underscored key words and phrases with heavy ink. His underlining intensified as he discussed King’s seemingly growing allegiance with militants like Stokely Carmichael and with black-separatist and Black Power groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality.
Quoting a New York Times editorial, Lawrence wrote, “King had once sworn off any allegiances with these groups as long as they espoused racial separation—But now he seems to feel that the Peace effort outweighs other considerations.” Lawrence noted that King predicted there would be more rioting in major U.S. cities. He wrote that “less disciplined persons” viewed such statements “as an encouragement to riot.”
Those forces descended on Memphis during the 1968 sanitation workers strike, Lawrence wrote, describing how King’s first march through downtown on March 28, 1968, a week before his murder, “broke out in violence.” Despite a temporary restraining order barring a second march, there was “a real possibility that King would not obey it.” Police reports told of “Negroes buying guns,” Lawrence wrote, and how Memphis youths were given “instructions on how to make Molotov cocktails and Fire Bombs” in advance of King’s second march.
By his account, violence was certain.
But then, before the march could be organized, King was shot.
* * *
—
IN HIS BOOKLET, Lawrence devotes fewer than seventy-five words to the assassination, noting simply that James Earl Ray was identified as the killer and that he later pled guilty. He sums up his booklet on the final two pages under a heading, “After thoughts.” He writes:
“Dividing line between Super-militant nonviolence & Super-militant violence is often very thin—King tried to straddle & Bridge the two—Success depended on the charisma of one man (King)—His concept that each man had the right and or moral duty to accept or reject laws that met with his favor or disfavor—confused the ignorant and confused and gave a license to those prone to violate the law anyway—young impressionables. It led to irresponsible permissiveness & chaos, a sort of Chinese water torture, drop after drop of daily demonstrations, confrontation & of planned crises—Had its toll on the Blacks—But also upon the citizenry, including the police—making it well nigh impossible for some municipalities to govern selves.”
Now I understood Betty’s initial reservations. Her father’s antipathy for King was clear. It wasn’t a personal animosity, however. Rather, it reflected the huge gulf at the time between conservative, old-school America and the dissent spreading across the country. In a way, Lawrence’s booklet amounts to a rather eloquent critique of King’s blooming militancy in his final year, a side of him history often overlooks and one distantly removed from his 1963 “I Have A Dream” persona that we now embrace.
King aside, Betty said her father always supported civil rights. Though they made Memphis their home, her parents were Yankees, both from Ohio, raised without any cultural bias against blacks. Betty recalled her father making numerous trips into rural West Tennessee and North Mississippi to investigate voting rights violations and discrimination in public accommodations. He did so eagerly, she said, especially following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
“Daddy was gone pretty much that whole summer,” she said. “The agency itself I had seen as a friend to civil rights…And Daddy never left the slightest doubt that the discrimination was wrong. He and my mother, they raised us right.”
For Bill Lawrence, the enemy wasn’t civil rights.
It was communism. It was subversion. It was those disloyal to their country. And agitators. Much the same could be said for the FBI as a whole.
There is a popular misconception today that Hoover’s FBI was out to break the civil rights movement. Not so. It was out to break fragments of the movement, elements it perceived as Communist-influenced or prone to violence or simply dangerous for the country. The tragedy lay in the agency’s excesses—in its unconstitutional targeting of political activists for their beliefs and associations, in its illegal “dirty tricks” program, in its immoral campaign to destroy Dr. King and others.
* * *
—
BUT NONE OF this was enough to determine how Ernest Withers fit into the bigger picture—not until Betty finally handed over the handwritten notes she’d tickled in her e-mail the day before. They seemed so strange: sheets of 8½-by-11 typing paper, roughly ripped in half, each now about 4-by-5 inches, all stapled into a seven-page booklet. Her father’s scribbling appeared in dark ink across each page; on the back there was faded blue type from old, mimeographed reports. Betty said the reports came from East Tennessee State University in nearby Johnson City, Tennessee, where her father taught a criminal justice course in retirement. The frugal Lawrences kept such booklets of scratch paper hanging by the phone.
Dated November 21, 1978—the day Lawrence testified before the House committee reviewing Dr. King’s murder—the first page revealed a desperate, urgent scrawl in black ink.
“Called 338 late Tues Nov 21 per his request…in Wash w/ his son,” the notes read. “…I tried seven times.”
Then, the next morning, he wrote this:
“Finally located ECW (on) AM of Wed—Nov 22…going before committee this AM.”
* Nancy originally recalled that the photo was taken in the summer of 1968, when Betty was home from her first year of college in Florida. However, Betty recalled it being taken during Christmas break of her freshman year. The issue was laid to rest when they examined the back of the picture, which read, “Christmas 1967.” More of Withers’s color photos are discussed in chapter 20.
9.
THE SECRET OF THE NOTES
NOVEMBER 22, 1978
BILL LAWRENCE WAS ON EDGE. He called seven times last night. No one picked up. He tried again this morning. Still, no answer. Now he was truly worried.
This had become a most nerve-racking game of telephone tag.
It started yesterday as Lawrence rode the train back from Washington, where he’d just testified before a congressional committee investigating Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassina
tion.
That’s when Ernie called Bill’s home in North Carolina. He left a message with the ex-agent’s wife, Margaret—Withers was up in Washington. He, too, had been called to testify. He was staying with his son, Ernest Jr., who worked for the Democratic National Committee, and he gave Margaret his phone number.
But when Bill got home he couldn’t reach Withers—in Memphis or Washington.
Lawrence didn’t need this. He’d been retired now for eight years. It was 1978 and he was a month shy of his fifty-ninth birthday. His life was uncomplicated—and rewarding. He worked part-time at a community college, volunteered for the Special Olympics, and taught a Sunday school class in Spruce Pine, where he and Margaret had built a cozy retirement home in the blue mountains he loved so much.
Then the subpoena came.
A select committee of the U.S. House of Representatives wanted his testimony.
And now, it seemed, they wanted to expose one of his key informants, too.
He was quite put out, his daughter Betty would later recall: all of this because some “liberal congressmen” had a cockamamie idea that the FBI might have had something to do with Dr. King’s murder.
At the hearing, a congressman asked an audacious question: Did he have any knowledge of FBI involvement in the assassination?
“I can only answer that…with a sense of moral outrage,” the graying ex-agent had said. “Why people will make such statements, I cannot understand.”
Conspiracy buffs still conjecture whether John Wilkes Booth shot President Lincoln, he told the panel in his flat baritone.
“There are people who do not believe that Jesus Christ was actually crucified or have different conceptions than we have learned through our Christian teachings,” he said. “You will always have that. Naturally one resents it. But this is a free country.”1
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