Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  For the second time in the ten-day crisis, Johnson listened impassively and promised to look into the matter. He weighed the Hoover-King issue on the scale of national politics, where it registered with surprising balance. Mass polls favored Hoover three to one over King, while a smaller sample of letters to the White House favored King two to one. Johnson assumed a high posture during his thirty-fourth presidential news conference that Saturday, saying that both King and Hoover “have exercised their freedom of speech on occasions,” and vowing to make sure that friction “would not degenerate into a battle of personalities.” After comments on Cabinet changes and the chances of war with China, Johnson answered a question about the safety of Hoover’s job by referring reporters to an earlier statement of support. Thus he muted any FBI crisis with a calibrated message that did not offer the Director a renewed endorsement but declined to reevaluate his status. This was balm enough for Hoover, who on Monday, November 30, sent letters to key supporters bidding good riddance to “the alleged reports of my being replaced as Director of the FBI.”

  Johnson’s private calculation on whether to fire Hoover was direct: “I’d rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.” This quip reflected Johnson’s estimate of their relative standing in the press. Like other presidents since Calvin Coolidge, who had first appointed the FBI director, Johnson instinctively chose to side with Hoover against reporters rather than with reporters against Hoover. He ordered his staff to warn the FBI that Bradlee of Newsweek was not a reliable outlet for confidential information, which of course betrayed Katzenbach’s brief and sent Hoover only the subtlest notice that the President was personally aware of his scurrilous “battle of personalities.”

  When the next issue of Newsweek suggested that Johnson was “disenchanted” with Hoover and might fire him, the President gave Bill Moyers a personal response for Bradlee: “Fuck you.” These measures sprang from Johnson’s unsparing view of a captive press that regarded Hoover as an impenetrable source—not a target—for scandal. Not in Johnson’s lifetime would revelations reach print about the whispering smear that had spread through subofficial Washington. Many reporters resented the heavy-handed FBI, or were proud of resisting ugly stories about King so long as the Bureau refused to stand behind them, but it scarcely occurred to any of them that they could or should write from firsthand evidence the facts about FBI habits far beneath constitutional grade. “If I had seriously proposed exposing the FBI,” recalled James McCartney of the Chicago Daily News, “it wouldn’t have stood a chance of getting into print.”

  ON NOVEMBER 30, CORE leader James Farmer reached King at the Chicago home of Judge Archibald Carey, speaking urgently of “a matter of life and death” that could not wait nor be discussed safely on the telephone, and King agreed to meet Farmer that night on a stopover in the New York airport. Farmer’s contacts had supplied dire reports that the FBI “goods” on King included embezzled funds in Swiss bank accounts, and that Roy Wilkins had said, “Let them hang him.” Mistrust was eating at movement alliances. Farmer did not tell King that FBI sources had sent him assurances of safety for the other leaders—“It’s just King we gotta get”—but he did get King’s blessing to keep a secret meeting with DeLoach, scheduled in the back of a moving limousine for mutual security. As Farmer tested the rumors, saying, “You’ve got to level with me, so we can find out what we can do,” King asserted innocence on money and Communism but straddled warily on marital fidelity. “When a man travels like you and I do,” he said, “there are bound to be women.” King did not tell Farmer of a planned truce meeting with J. Edgar Hoover that was being arranged by Judge Carey.

  Archibald Carey was a special authority on mending relations with the FBI. Although long established as a pillar of South Side Chicago—judge, banker, twice-elected city alderman, AME pastor, and renowned orator (his “Let freedom ring!” address to the 1952 Republican National Convention inspired a refrain in King’s “I Have a Dream” speech)—he had been branded since a 1953 field investigation as “a highly controversial colored lawyer” whose FBI file contained “voluminous information of a subversive nature.” Reports catalogued speeches to blacklisted groups such as Paul Robeson rallies, and charged that Carey “associated with known or suspected communist sympathizers.” Nevertheless, without defiance or recanting, Carey revived his patriotic rating with a courtier’s gift for flattery. Beginning with a 1957 headquarters tour in the company of baseball magnate Branch Rickey, he asked to meet Director Hoover, then to introduce his niece on a later trip, and soon to bring his grand-niece Liberty. By 1960, DeLoach had chastised headquarters with a note that “the Director was considerably embarrassed over the failure of our photographer in Chicago to take pictures of the Director and Dr. Carey’s sister.” In his correspondence with Hoover, Carey exercised a flair for the well-chosen compliment,* and Hoover in return posted word that he invited Carey to call “any time the Bureau or I could be of service to him, officially or personally.” At least once, Hoover put his own Bureau car and driver at Carey’s disposal for a day.

  King knew his FBI mediator was no starry-eyed fool. Part of Carey’s FBI cultivation was an accommodation to power in the long tradition of popes without armies. Having learned the FBI culture well enough to prod its officials confidentially on the lack of Negro agents, without triggering their defenses, Carey now translated King’s Hoover troubles into the language of church princes. Perhaps because the more easygoing King did not have an autocrat’s temperament, he consistently provoked alarm in those who did, including Hoover, J. H. Jackson, and to a lesser degree Adam Clayton Powell. King should talk to Hoover about mundane things, Carey advised, not big issues. If he could not bring himself to soothe the Director with apologetic gestures, he should listen on FBI turf. Carey briefed King on Hoover’s office manners, phobias, and preferred small talk. Most important, he used his private telephone numbers and cultivated rapport to request the parley, and Hoover, with encouragement from Attorney General Katzenbach, agreed to receive King on Tuesday afternoon, December 1.

  DeLoach handled the last-minute preparations with Andrew Young. “I interrupted Dr. Young again at this point,” DeLoach advised colleagues by bulletin, “and told him that it was useless for them to request a ‘peace meeting’ with us as long as the crusade of defamation against Mr. Hoover and the FBI was to be carried on by Reverend King and his organization.” Such bully talk—added to what was assumed to be the psychological crush of the suicide package, which had been mailed to King ten days earlier—led FBI officials to expect a more pulverized man than the one who posed for photographers in the crowded hallway near Hoover’s office.

  The confrontation turned into a nervous but mannerly chat. King pointedly deferred to Abernathy for a comment about the great privilege of meeting the Director, then commended the Bureau’s progress in civil rights cases. He disavowed any personal criticism of the Director and reaffirmed his opposition to Communism. This prompted Hoover to observe that “Communists move in when the trouble starts,” and from there he consumed most of the hour in a review of cases back to the 1920s. Along the way, the Director said it was wrong that a shoeshine boy he met in Miami could get no better job with a Howard University degree, and explained that the Bureau had few Negro agents for the same reason Notre Dame lacked Negro football players—“their grades are never high enough.”

  In Mississippi, Hoover declared, the Bureau had “put the fear of God in the Ku Klux Klan” and would soon bring suspects to trial on excellent evidence in the Neshoba County triple murder, though he could not guarantee conviction. He closed with a piece of advice: Negro leaders should concentrate on getting their people registered to vote. King flinched, amazed by Hoover’s presumption, but said only that he intended to renew precisely that effort soon in Selma, where he feared “a great potential for violence.” With Hoover’s permission, he told waiting reporters that the discussion had been “very friendly, very amicable,” and that he especially welcomed notic
e of impending action in the Mississippi triple murder.

  At that time, inside the Mississippi governor’s mansion, Inspector Sullivan and SAC Roy Moore were negotiating intensely over whether to bring state or federal charges in the Neshoba County case. Each side invited the other to go first. The Mississippi attorney general presented ten legal impediments to successful prosecution, including the fact that under Mississippi law only the county coroner was empowered to arrest a sheriff, and that “a Klansman judge is unlikely to disqualify himself or to eliminate Klan members” from jury service. A supervising prosecutor objected vehemently that Washington wanted a state trial but did not trust local officials to preview the confessions in detail. Sullivan pressed Burke Marshall’s argument that even a perfunctory state trial on murder charges would be a positive step for the whole country, although he and Justice Department prosecutors felt that a federal trial on weaker civil rights charges offered the only slight chance for conviction.

  Governor Paul Johnson pitched two fresh items from Washington: first, Director Hoover had answered a telegram from King with word that the FBI had identified the Neshoba County killers, and now King had brought from Hoover a pronouncement of forthcoming action. To Mississipians, said the governor, this pattern “indicated that King was calling the shots,” and any official who said a kind or dutiful word about state prosecution would be seen as King’s stooge. Teletypes rocketed back to Washington, and Burke Marshall observed that only President Johnson himself might have the influence to push the governor forward. With rumors flying, and suspects feared to be plotting flight or revenge, Katzenbach and Marshall made a command decision to proceed on federal warrants.

  Fifty of Sullivan’s agents fanned out before dawn on Friday, December 4, to arrest nineteen of twenty-one targeted suspects in Neshoba and Lauderdale counties. Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Deputy Cecil Price, who were said to be out looking for a moonshine still, surrendered later in the morning. Crowds gathered on the square in Philadelphia to watch a parade of their handcuffed neighbors, and a few hotheads chased news photographers with knives. “In a small town like this,” a young secretary told reporters, “you are either related to the people involved or they are friends of your friends.” The vice president of Citizens Bank saw the dragnet as bitter proof that “the whole country is taking orders from Martin Luther King.”

  News flashes for that Saturday’s world headlines reached King at John F. Kennedy Airport. Unable to say no, he had allowed his traveling party to grow to twenty-six people, for a dozen assigned seats at the Nobel Prize ceremony—the men leaving first with King, the women (plus Daddy King) on a second flight with Coretta. Before takeoff for London, King issued a hurried statement on the news from Mississippi. “I must commend the Federal Bureau of Investigation for the work they have done in uncovering the perpetrators of this dastardly act,” he said. “It renews again my faith in democracy.”

  Senator-elect Robert Kennedy was nearby in the Carlyle Hotel, recording under a veil of lifetime secrecy a lengthy installment of oral history about his late brother. Burke Marshall helped him refine his earlier reflections on the FBI as “a very dangerous organization.” On race, Kennedy painted Hoover as a figure of ingrained white supremacy, who casually stated that “Negroes’ brains are twenty percent smaller than white people’s,” but he carefully refuted “general criticism…that the FBI doesn’t do anything in civil rights.” While Hoover had been reluctant to take risks, and especially to offend powerful Southerners in Congress, Kennedy said “that was true of the government as a whole.” Now, he added, “the whole country and the whole government have changed,” and Hoover was too professional a bureaucrat to be fundamentally out of step.

  Kennedy placed in the secret record what he had learned of the “notorious liar” summit meeting only three days earlier. King came in extremely vulnerable, said Kennedy, and “what I understand from Hoover’s account that he’s given to the FBI offices around the country is that he told him that he was a Marxist and he told him that he was involved in sexual orgies…and said that he wasn’t going to take any lip or any opposition from anybody like that…and gave him a lecture for an hour.…I believe that was the reason why Martin Luther King was so mild when he left the meeting.” Afterward, Kennedy added, the FBI picked up a phone call in which King expressed anguished amazement that Hoover knew all his secrets. None of this had happened. Kennedy presented as privileged truth Hoover’s fantasy version of his face-to-face conquest.* It revealed the lingering spell of Kennedy’s own intimidation by Hoover. Of his relations as attorney general with King himself, Kennedy remarked matter-of-factly, “I never really had any conversations with him over the period other than what he should be doing in connection with the Communists.”

  38

  Nobel Prize

  MALCOLM X RETURNED to the United States on November 24, just before King’s summit meeting at the Barbizon Hotel. Shivering in the clothes he had packed for a summer trip, he stepped off a flight from Paris to greet sixty assorted admirers, reporters, and undercover FBI agents. At an airport press conference, he replied “no comment” when asked why he had called Elijah Muhammad a “religious faker” in Cairo, and he ducked other questions about internal conflict—explaining later that he would have “felt foolish coming back to this country and getting into a little two-bit argument….”

  Malcolm spoke instead of global politics, making good his confident remarks over wiretapped lines that he was “coming back loaded” with larger connections and perspective. He told reporters that he had traveled the African continent for nearly five months to be received by seven heads of state and scores of ministers who had welcomed him with “open minds, open hearts, and open doors.” He had gained authority to dispense fifteen scholarships for study at Islam University in Saudi Arabia, and the World Muslim Council had assigned a learned Sudanese imam, Sheikh Ahmed Hassoun, to tutor him in Sunni Islam. Malcolm did flick his fiery tongue about a rebellion in the Congo, which was drawing scandalized headlines (New York Times: “Congolese Forced American Officials to Eat U.S. Flag”). Only when white people got hurt did Americans notice the Congo, he charged, adding that “Congolese have been killed year after year” by puppet regimes and United States-backed mercenaries. “President Johnson is responsible for what happens in the Congo,” he said, and America “is getting what she asked for.”

  He left the airport for brief personal reunions with his wife and four young daughters, including a baby he had scarcely seen before his trip. Days earlier, Malcolm’s estranged brother Philbert X had arranged the release of their mother from her commitment since 1939 at a Kalamazoo asylum. Louise Little had not recognized Malcolm when he visited her in 1952, shortly after his own release from prison, and her faculties were scarcely improved now when Malcolm rushed to see her in Detroit. He rejoiced quietly over her freedom, and her remaining teeth, then returned to war alarms in New York. Far from cooled by Malcolm’s prolonged absence, Elijah Muhammad raged privately against Malcolm’s potential to join with Elijah’s renegade son Wallace, supported by new Saudi money. Muhammad ordered Captain Joseph to warn at a press conference that Malcolm “stands alone…and we shall see how successful he will be.”

  Earlier in November, soldiers from New York’s Temple No. 7 had beaten to death on the street a former member named Kenneth X Morton, who had rejected sectarian discipline for reasons loosely inspired by Malcolm. On November 30, six days after his return, an FBI informant inside Washington’s Temple No. 4 reported a general announcement to the Fruit of Islam that Malcolm was to be attacked on sight. That same day, on learning that Malcolm was going abroad again, Director Hoover cabled the FBI’s London attaché to monitor his appearances in England.

  To British audiences in the industrial cities of Sheffield and Manchester, Malcolm attacked the veneer of racial progress in America. “No matter how many bills pass,” he said, “black people in that country, where I’m from still—our lives are not worth two cents.” At Oxford Universi
ty, he debated Member of Parliament Humphry Berkeley on television, defending Goldwater’s motto on extremism in defense of liberty. He bristled at Berkeley’s accusation that his extremism fit the separatist mold of South African apartheid, but earned a standing ovation with his insistence that black people must discard “this wishy-washy love thine enemy approach.” In the British press, blurbs about Malcolm trailed beneath accolades for Martin Luther King, in England on his way to Nobel ceremonies. While King was feted on the BBC, or met with Commonwealth intellectuals such as the radical scholar C. L. R. James, Malcolm offered his trademark barbs. On December 5, he told a London radio audience that King’s nonviolence was “bankrupt,” having been tried and abandoned by Nelson Mandela in South Africa. He said he was a man of peace, but “never could accept a peace prize in the middle of a war.”

  On Sunday, December 6, while King preached to an overflow crowd in London—the first non-Anglican ever allowed in the pulpit of St. Paul’s Cathedral—Malcolm X returned to New York. FBI surveillance agents watched diplomatic limousines whisk him from the airport, and traced their license plates to the new African nation of Tanzania. The next day, Supreme Captain Raymond Sharrieff marked his return with an open telegram to the press: “Mr. Malcolm, we hereby officially warn you that the Nation of Islam shall no longer tolerate your scandalizing the name of our leader….” Malcolm recognized the source. “That was Elijah Muhammad’s wire,” he said. “Raymond Sharrieff has no words of his own.” In Muhammad Speaks, Minister Louis X of Boston called Malcolm the agent of defections, including that of Muhammad’s youngest son, Akbar. “Malcolm shall not escape,” he wrote. Daring the “international hobo” to come home and “face the music,” Louis X invited his former mentor to picture his head “on the sidewalk,” and Muhammad Speaks reprinted among its “Top Stories of ’64” the cartoon of Malcolm’s severed head bouncing down a road toward the tombstone of traitors.