In 1952, however, Morris Childs, together with his brother Jack, was recruited by the FBI as a secret agent. They reestablished their connection with the Party. For most of the next two decades, the Childs brothers, a duo code-named "Solo," would reveal everything the FBI needed to know about the Communist Party of America. It seems like a ludicrous project now, but beginning as it did in an era when Soviet spies penetrated, with disastrous consequences, the most rigidly guarded secret in U.S. history—Klaus Fuchs et al. at Los Alamos—and in an era when war with Moscow was regarded as all but inevitable, the recruitment of the Childs brothers was considered a counterintelligence coup. The secret of their FBI work would be protected, and the Childses would remain agents-in-place, for decades.
In 1954 Morris Childs's boss in the Communist Party was a New York lawyer named Stanley Levison. Together, Childs and Levison administered Party funds that the Kremlin smuggled into the United States, amounting to a million dollars a year. With Childs's help, the FBI was able to identify Levison as a key Soviet operative, and the Bureau put him under close surveillance. But in 1956 Levison's ties to the Communist Party evaporated. He quit, and had nothing more to do with the Moscow infiltration. Why? For the FBI, if for no one else, the answer would seem obvious when, within a year, Levison surfaced as an adviser, speechwriter and, eventually, trusted confidant to an until recently obscure Negro minister in Montgomery, Alabama. The minister had organized a transit boycott after a weary black woman named Rosa Parks refused to yield her seat on a bus to a white man. The minister's name was Martin Luther King Jr., and his close relationship with Levison would smolder, always threatening to ignite and obliterate the entire civil rights movement, until King's death in 1968.
One warm day in the summer of 1963, after a White House meeting of civil rights leaders, President Kennedy asked King to step out of the Oval Office into the Rose Garden. King would report to colleagues that he thought it odd to be asked outdoors for a chat, but now we know Kennedy was avoiding the hidden microphones that he'd had installed in his own office. In the garden, Kennedy warned King about Levison's background. If it became public that a one-time Communist Party official with proven ties to Moscow was at King's elbow, all chances of getting civil rights legislation through Congress would be destroyed.
King seemed not to believe Kennedy's assertions about: Levison, but he later promised the Kennedy brothers that he would break with the lawyer. And for a time it seemed he had. But continuing wiretaps on Levison revealed that King was still secretly consulting with him. That was what prompted Attorney General Robert Kennedy, in the early fall of 1963, to authorize the FBI to tap King's phone and put listening devices in his offices and hotel rooms.
Like most Americans, I knew nothing about FBI surveillance of Martin Luther King until it was revealed in the 1974 congressional committee hearings chaired by Senator Frank Church. Even more pointedly, like most Americans I knew nothing of the serious reasons for that surveillance—Stanley Levison's history with Morris Childs, the Communist Party, and their Moscow money connection—until the distinguished civil rights chronicler David J. Garrow summed it up in his 1981 book The FBI and Martin Luther King Jr.: From 'Solo' to Memphis, which is my source for all that I assert about Childs and Levison.
When, in the early 1960s, open accusations were made or sly innuendos dropped about Communist influence in the civil rights movement and on King, I, an incipient liberal, refused to credit them. That there was a substantial, if ultimately mistaken, reason to suspect King, knowingly or not, of advancing plans laid in the Kremlin seemed the ridiculous fantasy of Red-baiting segregationists who blamed unrest on "outside agitators." But Garrow's scrupulous presentation changes the way those events must be understood. The facts of the "Solo" infiltration establishing Levison as a legitimate target of FBI concern now indicate that some questions about King's associations were proper. For the purposes of this account of my transformation from junior redneck to fellow traveler, the most noteworthy fact is that, unknown to me at the time, my father was privy to "Solo." He had known of Childs since the 1930s and, as a counterintelligence partner of J. Edgar Hoover's, was briefed on Levison and King until the end.
In the beginning, there was no difference in the ways we perceived such things. The first square on which I stood was his, and it was labeled with the three words of the FBI motto: fidelity, bravery and integrity. To me, my father embodied those virtues just as surely as, to him, by the time we began to argue about it, Martin Luther King embodied their antithesis.
If I had not become a Paulist, King would not have become the occasion of my first, tentative disagreements with my dad. The Alexandria of my childhood was still a pure Southern culture, undiluted yet by suburban interlopers from up north. Civic holidays, public rhetoric, and dozens of formal and informal rituals enshrined the victim-cavalier ethos of the Confederacy. Robert E. Lee was the patriarchal god. Stonewall Jackson was the slain Christ. The woods in which we played were haunted by John Singleton Mosby, the Gray Ghost.
My cousins in Chicago, on summer visits, called me "Jimmy Reb," but my Virginia classmates mocked me as a Yankee—an accusation the true sting of which I wouldn't feel until moving to Boston, where it would be efficiently made plain that I was anything but. It was doubtless this confusion about my identity that prompted an overcompensation. As I grew older, I embraced the local mores with a vengeance. As a high school freshman, commuting into Washington to a Benedictine prep school not in the least enamored of the Confederacy, I asserted my chosen loyalty on an otherwise uncelebrated Lee birthday by raising the Stars and Bars on the school flagpole. Father Austin's furious reaction stunned me—a first lesson in the true meaning of that symbol. I was expelled, and only my father's plea—he had to appear in person, time taken from the Cold War—satisfied the headmaster.
Now I recognize the contempt I saw in that priest's eyes as the judgment he'd made on an ignorant boy unaware of his own white supremacist assumptions. I had thought nothing of the balcony reserved for blacks—"Blue Heaven"—at the Richmond Theater on King Street. I had thought nothing of the separate parishes for black and white Catholics in Alexandria: our handsome St. Mary's Church made of chiseled stone, their flaking clapboard shanty church, St. Joseph's, on the other side of the tracks. Segregation by race was an even more ruthless fact of the world I grew up in than by religion. I not only did not question it; I did not notice it.
Until one day, ironically enough, at the FBI. I worked at Bureau headquarters for three summers, beginning in 1960, as a cryptanalyst's aide in the code-breaking section of the FBI laboratory. I recall the awe I felt sitting before stacked pages of computer printouts showing endless rows of numbers, encrypted messages to various Washington embassies originating not only in Russia and Cuba but in England and France. My job was to do a primitive arithmetical analysis of those numbers, counting certain digits, watching for patterns, making marginal notes, which my agent supervisor would review later. A word of plaintext at the top of each page— Havana, Moscow, Vienna —identified the source and kept the transcendent meaning of the effort at the forefront.
It was mind-numbing work that computers would soon be doing in flashes, and, not surprisingly, it all came to nothing. The only chance the Bureau ever had of reading those pure-random ciphers lay in obtaining their cryptographic keys, which was why the office's agents periodically pulled "black-bag jobs" on the Washington embassies of friend and foe alike. Burglary was against the law, of course, and the intrusion on allies was a violation of the diplomatic code. The ends don't justify the means, et cetera, but not for a moment, son of the Cold War that I was, did I regard such tactics as wrong. On the contrary, I was thrilled to have a part in them. My hope always was that the secret pattern of the numbers before me would fall open. I did as I was told. I saw things the way I was supposed to. The structure of my moral universe seemed immutable.
On the day in question, those of us who were summer employees were summoned to a special meeting of all
the college interns working at the Justice Department. The attorney general himself was going to address us, making a Kennedy-style pitch for postgraduate careers on the New Frontier. Crossing into the southwest wing of the Justice Building and filing into the large, draped departmental auditorium, we FBI kids felt like a breed apart. For one thing, because of the Bureau's security requirements, we were all sons (not daughters) of senior agents, or, as in my case, of a former agent whose tie to Hoover held.
Another reason we felt like princes as we entered that auditorium was the FBI's role as the front line of Bobby Kennedy's own twin preoccupations: the fight against the Reds, for which he'd first become famous as an aide to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, and his newly launched campaign against Jimmy Hoffa. Bobby Kennedy, we felt, would look on us as special allies in the struggles he took most seriously. So imagine my surprise when what Bobby—the hair, the teeth, the rolled-up sleeves—chose to speak about that day was neither Reds nor the mob but the rights of colored people. In my mind, the NAACP might as well have been on the attorney general's list of subversive organizations, though I knew as little about it as I did about the Lincoln Brigade.
I remember the shrill pitch of his voice and the open palm of his hand slapping the podium. I remember his direct invitation to come back to Washington after graduation to join a new American crusade. "My fundamental belief," he said once, and I recall his saying something like it that day, "is that all people are created equally. Logically, it follows that integration should take place everywhere."
Fundamental belief? Powerfully faced with his, I had to admit that it was mine too. I remember, as it were, a light going on in my dull head: the flip side of "created equal" is "integration." It was an era when such lights went on all over the place. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. reports that after Bobby Kennedy and an aide took an early tour of the Justice Department, Kennedy asked, "Did anything occur to you as strange in our visit around the offices?" The aide referred only to how hard everyone seemed to be working. Kennedy replied, "But did you see any Negroes?"
There were 955 lawyers working at Justice, of whom 10 were black. At Kennedy's first staff meeting immediately upon taking office, he ordered the "thorough integration" of every departmental office, including field offices in the South. He personally recruited young black lawyers from the best law schools, and that day in the Justice Department auditorium I noted that a good number of the summer interns were black. But not one from the FBI side was, and to my astonishment, that now seemed a matter of deep shame. I was ambushed by two feelings at once, a first-time repugnance at the Bureau and a visceral attraction to Bobby Kennedy. We all knew that Hoover loathed Bobby, and until now I had not thought to choose between them. But if integration was to be a transcendent value...
J. Edgar Hoover, a Washington native, was an unapologetic segregationist. In response to earlier pressure to integrate the ranks of FBI agents, he had simply given his long-time chauffeur a badge—and kept him at the wheel of his car. In response to Robert Kennedy's question, Hoover had told him there were five colored agents in the group numbering over five thousand. "He wanted me to lower our qualifications to hire more Negro agents," Hoover later told a reporter, which will, he said, "never be done as long as I'm director of this bureau."
I well remember how conditioned most of us were to deflecting challenges to the segregated status quo by such ready talk of lowered qualifications, as if all the white people around us in every situation had achieved the highest of standards. "Qualifications" were not Hoover's issue, of course, and they had never been mine.
I returned to the FBI side of the Justice Building that day—shaken, but also seeing something new. Not only had Bobby surprised me with his passionate endorsement of the civil rights agenda, but, in the receiving line after his talk, he had made it particular to me. We'd been instructed to shake his hand firmly, look him in the eye, and announce what college we attended and what we were majoring in. As I approached, I wiped the palm of my hand on my trousers, feeling awed and afraid and embarrassed at what I had to say. When he turned to me and took my hand, I told him I was about to go off to the novitiate and seminary to become a Catholic priest. He clasped my forearm warmly, an affirmation I longed for. He said, What a great time to be a priest! Then he said something to the effect that priests were urgently needed in the streets, where the ministers already were. Kennedy's words thrilled me, but their meaning was unclear. The racial divide was shifting, and here was a hint that the denominational lines would be shifting too.
One of the jokes we told in those days touched on both divisions. Little Caroline Kennedy went to the Oval Office and announced her intention to marry Martin Luther King's son. "Oh, no," the president replied, "you can't marry him." Beat. Beat. "He's not Catholic." Laughter, which much later I would recognize as having been of the jittery kind.
When, near the end of that same summer, Bobby Kennedy sent federal marshals to Ole Miss to protect James Meredith, I had learned enough to understand that he sent marshals instead of agents because he could not trust the FBI. I also grasped by then that my beloved agents were not the only figures of mine absent from that first crucible. Its anonymous peacekeepers were the clergymen of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Ministers in the streets. Decidedly not priests. Catholics were nowhere to be seen in the early civil rights confrontations, and beginning with Robert Kennedy's comment, that came to seem anomalous. Later—I am ashamed to say years later—I would recognize Kennedy's words to me as a prophecy, and a conscription.
A few months after the crisis at Ole Miss, in November of 1962, while I was living in the hills of New Jersey waiting for a small lake to freeze, a headline appeared in the New York Times: "Dr. King Says FBI in Albany, Ga. Favors Segregationists." The article attributed this statement to King: "One of the great problems we face with the FBI in the South is that the agents are white southerners who have been influenced by the mores of the community." As a white man who had been influenced by such mores, I knew exactly what King was talking about, but I was still affronted by his open attack on the Bureau. How many episodes of The FBI in Peace and War had featured the decades-old crusade against the Klan? Hadn't the G-men put an end to the era of rampant lynchings in the South? Bureau tardiness on the issue was not the same as favoring White Citizens Councils. I was a connoisseur of bad guys, and I knew that in this case the bad guys were not, as I still thought of it, "us."
Martin Luther King was called a Negro militant, but his appeals to a philosophy of nonviolence were as unsettling as his stridency. Where would nonviolence get us with Moscow? And anyway, how could we take such rhetoric seriously when it came clothed in tactics designed to provoke violence? I accepted the assessment that Freedom Riders who courted arrest and the "direct action" demonstrators who defied redneck sheriffs did so for the sake of the now ubiquitous television cameras. Dr. King, in a phrase of the day, wanted too much too soon. Freedom now! How impatient the impatience of newly roused black people made us white people feel. I hated Bull Connor, but I also thought the demonstrators he seemed to take such pleasure in clubbing brought it on themselves. And when, in the summer of my novitiate year, 1963, Medgar Evers was assassinated in Mississippi, I was appalled by the deed but critical of Evers also. Only days before he had said, "I would die and die gladly." The vicious rednecks, I thought, gave him what he wanted. I did not know that Evers was a war veteran, and when he was buried at Arlington Cemetery I guessed it was because Robert Kennedy wanted him treated as a hero. To me, Evers had been a misguided man who'd made the plight of his people worse, not better.
And that's what King was. After Evers's death, anticipation and anxiety mounted as plans were laid for a massive march on Washington. Some of my fellow novices complained that we would be completing our program in New Jersey a few days after the rally at the Lincoln Memorial, just missing it. But I was not complaining. If we were in Washington, I, like other self-styled "moderates," would surely have stayed away. After the violence in B
irmingham and the summer's carnage in Mississippi, President Kennedy and even his brother were making plain their opposition to the demonstration. The Kennedys wanted their civil rights bill, and a mass of militant, threatening black people descending on the capital would make its passage more difficult, not less.
At Mount Paul, on August 28, we watched the demonstration on television, as we'd watched Pope John XXIII's opening speech to the Council and then, nine months later, his funeral. Now we were watching the gathering of a quarter of a million people, the vast majority of them black. I remember images of the reflecting pool below the Washington Monument lined with Negroes soaking their feet. I remember Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary.
I remember that, to my consternation, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Washington, Patrick Cardinal O'Boyle, was at the march as a participant. O'Boyle to me was a less charismatic version of Spellman. I had no appreciation for the fact, if I even knew of it, that he had anticipated the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling by ordering an end to the segregation of Catholic schools and parishes in Washington in 1948, the year Truman did the same for the armed services.
And I remember the white pillars of the Lincoln Memorial, the brooding presence in its shadows, which served as backdrop to the podium to which Martin Luther King finally came. I had spent a lifetime being entirely unaffected by parish sermons. I had spent several years holding off the real meaning of this turmoil in the South. So how could I have anticipated what was about to happen?
He began by saying, "Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice."
An American Requiem Page 13