Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  King flew that afternoon to New York’s Abyssinian Baptist, where he pursued a competitive preachers’ truce offstage. Adam Clayton Powell, having belittled the nonviolent movement as well as the civil rights bill, now tacitly acknowledged Nobel Prize stature, while King paid homage to Powell as a besieged titan. He mediated an arrangement for his former aide Wyatt Walker to fill the coveted Abyssinian pulpit during involuntary absences soon to begin for Powell, who was resolved to dodge New York arrest warrants and contempt citations building from the Esther James case. At King’s request, Powell endorsed the big-church guest collection of $1,844.80 to SCLC before taking King along to his hideaway home on the Caribbean island of Bimini. By then, the Lutheran FBI agent in Atlanta had informed the Constitution that there would be no King girlfriend at the Miami airport after all, which more than ever perplexed Patterson about the Bureau’s haphazard vendetta. Hidden intelligence sources, meanwhile, overheard King tell a friend on his way to Bimini that C. T. Vivian was already in Alabama scouting the political terrain. The Miami FBI office flashed a coded radio warning to headquarters that King had approved tiny Selma as the “site of renewed SCLC activity beginning about first of January.”

  ON THE FOLLOWING DAY, Wednesday, November 18, Hoover gave a rare press briefing—his first in many years, the first ever with exclusively female reporters—to a maverick offshoot of the Women’s National Press Club. Because women were barred (until 1971) from membership in the National Press Club, pioneers had formed the WNPC, and because most members of the Women’s National Press Club specialized in traditional ladies’ features on family or fashion, the Hoover interview fell to an informal club called the McLendon Press Group, founded by Texas reporter Sarah McLendon. Some members, including one soon to be fired for saying she expected no hard news, shied away from the anticipated spy lecture as so much “male shadowboxing,” but eighteen reporters filed into the imposing Director’s office furnished with a new silver coffee urn and lamp fixtures in the shape of pistols.

  Hoover talked nearly three times his allotted hour. When his monologue on FBI history slowed toward possible questions, he called for the FBI annual report and read excerpts with biting asides. Concerning the section on civil rights enforcement, he commented that the jury’s acquittal in the Lemuel Penn case was “absolutely outrageous,” and sharply criticized the judge who had suspended sentences in the McComb bombings. He expressed frustration that “in spite of some remarkable success in civil rights cases, some detractors alleged the FBI has done nothing in this field.” Hoover indignantly recalled Martin Luther King’s complaints about FBI performance in Albany, Georgia, during 1962, which the Director attributed to a misguided belief that FBI agents were native Southerners. “In view of King’s attitude and his continued criticism of the FBI on this point,” said Hoover, “I consider King to be the most notorious liar in the country.”

  Deke DeLoach, fearing a public relations disaster, passed Hoover several notes suggesting that the “liar” comment be placed off the record along with Hoover’s assertions that King was “one of the lowest characters in the country” and “controlled” by Communist advisers, but Hoover rebuffed any notion of retraction. “The girls,” DeLoach would testify eleven years later, “could hardly wait to leave to get to the telephone.” No such story had been broken by female journalists alone, and more than a few male news staffs tried to mask their secondhand accounts of the women’s interview behind an original emphasis. (“Hoover Assails Warren Findings,” announced the New York Times, and the Washington Post headlined his “Blast at Police Corruption.”) Nevertheless, the “notorious liar” charge exploded above such distractions.

  Vacationing in Bimini with King, Andrew Young knew something big had struck when helicopters chartered by reporters began landing. In New York, the first radio bulletins about the “notorious liar” statement broke up a research committee meeting on plans for the Nobel Prize trip. Harry Wachtel drafted a caustic emergency reply for King: “…While I resent the personal attack on my integrity, I will not allow Mr. Hoover to blur the real issue….” FBI wiretaps intercepted Bayard Rustin’s suggestion that Wachtel “drop the part about King being resentful, because King is not resentful,” along with their stern advice that King should say nothing before consulting them. On Bimini, however, the onslaught of reporters forced King to compose his own brief statement for a press conference at the Big Game Fisherman’s Lodge:

  I cannot conceive of Mr. Hoover making a statement like this without being under extreme pressure. He has apparently faltered under the awesome burden, complexities and responsibilities of his office. Therefore, I cannot engage in a public debate with him. I have nothing but sympathy for this man who has served his country so well.

  In Washington, Acting Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach walked into Hoover’s office. “I couldn’t be more unhappy,” the Director declared before Katzenbach said a word. “Never should have done it. Never should have seen all those women reporters. DeLoach got me into it.” In a preemptive monologue, Hoover said he of course had to tell the truth about King once DeLoach trapped him into a foolish predicament. A despairing Katzenbach went directly to the White House, where the major civil rights leaders loudly complained about Hoover’s intrusion into their much anticipated post-election meeting with President Johnson. Roy Wilkins, King’s severest private critic among them, announced that Johnson listened without response as “we solidly backed Dr. King.”

  From New York, before they decided that King’s restraint had been wise after all, Wachtel and Rustin peppered SCLC contacts with messages that King’s “nothing but sympathy” posture signaled dangerous weakness. On Thursday, King compromised with a telegram to Hoover that melded his own wounded tone—“What motivated such an irresponsible accusation is a mystery to me”—with his advisers’ call for strong rebuttal. He had never ascribed shortcomings “merely to the presence of Southerners in the FBI,” King wired, but he had “sincerely questioned” the Bureau’s effectiveness in racial investigations, “particularly where bombings and brutalities against Negroes are at issue.”

  Inside the FBI, agents and officials massed behind Hoover as though it were King who had initiated the attack. By late Thursday night, the Atlanta office compiled a review of all past dealings since “the freedom rides in the summer of sixty [sic],” under counterpoint headings—“King States,” answered by “Facts”—to buttress Hoover’s charge that King was a liar. Each FBI rebuttal, while at least slightly off point, bristled with grievance. Of King’s statement that there had been no arrests in the Birmingham church bombing among many notorious cases, the brief responded that interference by Alabama had hampered the Bureau’s “most intensive type of investigation which is still vigorously continuing.” Of King’s statement that he had always cooperated with Bureau investigations, including those targeting the movement, headquarters charged that on July 22, 1961, “King kept the Agent waiting for one hour past the appointed time and stated he was behind in his paper work and had completed some of it before admitting the Agent.”

  One-way intercepts allowed headquarters to make the worst of rattled private opinions. Wiretaps picked up King telling C. T. Vivian that Hoover “is old and getting senile.” Bureau supervisors pounced on wiretap intelligence that Rustin and Wachtel wanted King to seek Hoover’s replacement, calling such behavior “further evidence” of subversion “in line with a long-held communist objective, to launch a campaign to oust the Director as head of the FBI.” Hoover scrawled a response on Friday’s memo recommending that he neither dignify King’s telegram with a reply nor justify his own conduct further:

  O.K. But I don’t understand why we are unable to get the true facts before the public. We can’t even get our accomplishments published. We are never taking the aggressive, but allow lies to remain unanswered.

  “Being handled—11/20/64,” DeLoach wrote next to Hoover’s comment. Propaganda operations expanded clandestinely to more reporters, to religious groups, and to
civic leaders. Agents rushed the first new batch of anti-King material to other government agencies by Sunday, the first anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, and assembled even before then a “highlight” recording of bugged sex groans and party jokes, together with a contrived anonymous letter calling King “a great liability for all of us Negroes.” The letter to King warned that “your end is approaching,” and concluded, “You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.” FBI specialists combined the highlight recording with the letter, and moved what became known as the suicide package at a lightning pace for government work on a weekend—through bureaucratic approval, technical selection, composition, air shipment via courier, and finally mail drop to King from Miami (in order to camouflage its Washington origin)—all by Saturday night, November 21.

  AT FBI HEADQUARTERS on Monday, Inspector Joe Sullivan entered the fray from another battle zone. Twenty Mississippi agents had just patrolled the successful integration of restaurants and hotels by traveling NAACP squads in “racially torn” McComb, which made national news, and Greenwood prosecutors declined for the fourth and last time to go to trial in the 1963 highway ambush on Bob Moses, deflating FBI teams that had matched a bullet from the neck of SNCC worker Jimmy Travis with a machine gun belonging to one of two confessed suspects. In Jackson, the new FBI field office processed cases based on nearly two hundred reported intimidations growing out of COFO’s second election day Freedom Vote, including that of a Stanford student who was beaten senseless and urinated upon by a circle of attackers in Marks.

  Sullivan’s abrupt emergence from “the field,” on matters called too sensitive for coded teletype, created expectations of a major break in the Chaney-Goodman-Schwerner case. Rumors buzzed the corridors that his elite squadron was answering the Klan’s gutter warfare with its own untraceable terror. There was admiring talk of nighttime FBI raids to shove condom-wrapped shotgun shells into the rectums of hostile Klansmen, daring them to complain, and of Mafia informants secretly imported to extract information by old-fashioned torture. Sullivan deflected the rumors. He told Assistant Director Alex Rosen of threats and insults to Mississippi sources as well as agents, and recommended that federal or state charges be lodged to bring endangered witnesses to official shelter. When Rosen and his executive council declined, saying they needed at least one corroborating witness for the James Jordan confession, Sullivan pulled from his pocket the freshly signed November 20 confession of Klansman Horace Doyle Barnette. Like Jordan, Barnette had fled Mississippi, and agents pursuing the fearful ones had tracked him to Springhill, Louisiana. From the jailhouse handoff to bulldozer burial, his statement matched Jordan’s account of the murder conspiracy by some two dozen White Knights out of two county klaverns, and established Schwerner’s last words—“Sir, I know just how you feel.” It contained a host of details down to Barnette’s own minimized role: “I only put Chaney’s foot in the car.”

  Inside the FBI, triumph nearly burst the seams of secrecy, indecision, and crosscutting political warfare. Hoover picked that moment to expand upon his “notorious liar” remark. In a Tuesday evening address to a thousand dinner guests at Chicago’s Loyola medical school, he denounced “pressure groups that would crush the rights of others under heel” and zealots who “think with their emotions, seldom with reason.” He spoke off his text in staccato fury: “They have no compunction in carping, lying, and exaggerating with the fiercest passion, spearheaded at times by Communists and moral degenerates.” Negro publications in particular interpreted the second volley as proof of an intentional, all-out attack upon King, and King was forced to broaden his own war council. With the utmost reluctance, he invited Harry Wachtel to the “trilogy” meeting at the Barbizon Hotel of New York.

  Advisers gathered somberly in King’s room on Wednesday night, November 25, with the returned vacationers Abernathy, Bernard Lee, and Andrew Young in pajamas to receive the New Yorkers: Clarence Jones, Bayard Rustin, noted psychologist Kenneth Clark, labor leader Cleveland Robinson, and Wachtel. Was Hoover acting for Johnson or not? What did Hoover know? What did he want? Why an attack now, and why on an issue so remote as the hometowns of FBI agents in Albany, Georgia? Hunches and secrets about the FBI were reviewed, such as the hushed notice to King from President Kennedy himself that the movement was under close surveillance. Even so, it had been commonly believed that local police did most of the dirty work, and that the FBI remained traditional and grumpy but basically honest. Now, with paranoia running on rumors that even Johnson could not control Hoover’s bureau, King sought advice on whether to fight or negotiate a truce.

  “Trilogy” emerged from the meeting as shorthand for the three arenas of vulnerability in surveillance politics: money, loyalty, and sex. The most devastating of the three was presumed to be money corruption—slush funds, tax fraud, hidden wealth, charities fleeced for private gain—but here King said he was happy to prove himself innocent again as in his 1960 trial, no matter how much snooping the FBI did. As for the protracted struggle over the taint of Communism, the prevailing view was that the movement had behaved too defensively already. Rather than retreat further, King talked of restoring his friendship with Stanley Levison. On the matter of his private life, however, King conceded vaguely that there were “things that could be exploited.” He was squeamish about revealing himself to his white friend Wachtel, and privately enlisted his aides to keep the admission from filtering back to Levison, but the puzzling emergency drove King to seek Wachtel’s judgment about Hoover.

  Wachtel offered advice from his experience in the corporate world. He saw Hoover as an entrenched chief executive who had sounded off impulsively and now needed a face-saving escape. “If you were one of my clients,” Wachtel told King, he would recommend that he arrange a meeting at which Hoover could vent his criticism over King’s lifestyle, and then “maybe you and he can issue a statement that you’ve had a fruitful discussion.” This proposal aroused a chorus of dissent from the other advisers, who saw Hoover as an enemy who gave no quarter. They cited the day’s late-breaking news: formal release by FBI headquarters of its detailed rebuttal to King’s telegram, with a vindicating claim that the Bureau “has developed information identifying those responsible” for the Mississippi triple murder. Wachtel argued that this sensational and clearly improper announcement, which diverted a major criminal investigation outside judicial channels into a public feud, showed how badly Hoover needed a way out of his dispute with King. The others argued the opposite, that the statement proved Hoover would subordinate official duty to his vendetta.

  King withdrew undecided from the Barbizon. Over the Thanksgiving weekend, a blind memorandum informed Director Hoover that headquarters had inventoried from six bugging operations in six scattered field offices more than fifty reels of “Highly Sensitive Coverage” on King. Over the relatively calm voice of DeLoach, who thought comprehensive transcription of the recorded arsenal could be postponed because of the “tremendous amount of work,” Hoover decreed that “it should be done now while it is fresh in the minds of the specially trained agents.” That same Friday, November 27, DeLoach held a showdown with his occasional contact Roy Wilkins, and as Wilkins tried to insulate the NAACP and kindred groups from Hoover’s wrath, DeLoach rattled his antlers. “I interrupted Wilkins at this point,” he reported to headquarters. “I told him that the Director, of course, did not have in mind the destruction of the civil rights movement as a whole…[but] if King wanted war we certainly would give it to him.”

  Wilkins pressed DeLoach to refrain from using the power of the FBI to expose King, fearing collateral damage to all Negro groups, and DeLoach pressed in return for collective action by Negro leaders to force King into retirement as “president of Morehouse College or something.” (“I told him,” DeLoach reported, “that the monkey was on his back….”) From the Wilkins meeting, headquarters capitalized with two instant strokes: a “My dear Mr. President”
letter in which Hoover told Johnson how “Wilkins admitted that he had criticized me unjustly,” and a more devious plan to exclude Ralph Bunche and other Negroes of government status from any anti-King cabal, “as they might feel a duty to advise the White House….”

  Years later, a number of prominent correspondents acknowledged being pitched by DeLoach and his staff with anti-King briefings on sex and skullduggery. From pay phones and self-conscious trysts, reporters at the time circulated tidbits among government and movement sources, massaging reactions toward an attributable story, and Attorney General Katzenbach himself undertook to trace the Thanksgiving rumors. He called in Ben Bradlee of Newsweek, who refused on principle to name DeLoach as his source, and DeLoach, who flatly denied that the FBI leaked anything. This dead-end matched Katzenbach’s experience in the Justice Department. In order to investigate leaks, he could call only upon the FBI, and FBI reports always categorically defended the Bureau itself.* Katzenbach tried to broker a screened confrontation between Bradlee the anonymous accuser and DeLoach the indignant accused, which both declined. Frustrated and angry, Katzenbach took the extraordinary step of presenting his alarm directly to President Johnson on Saturday, November 28, at the LBJ Ranch in Texas. With Burke Marshall, Katzenbach put forward his conviction that the FBI was peddling anti-King poison all over Washington and beyond, that DeLoach was lying about it with brazen impunity, that Hoover was out of touch, bordering on senile, and that the circus of impropriety was especially dangerous now because of breaks in the Mississippi murder case.