An American Requiem

by James Carroll

  Slavery. King's starting point was slavery. "But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free; one hundred years later the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination ... one hundred years later the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land."

  I had seen King in news clips before, had read about him repeatedly, and argued with my fellow Paulists about him. I had a rigid set of impressions, the very rods of which began somehow to melt as I listened to him speak. This was the first sustained attention I had ever paid to King, and it was obvious I knew nothing real about the man. Friends of mine at the FBI had called him "Martin Luther Coon," and I had never objected.

  As his sonorous, musical voice rose, his words came to my ears clearly, but to my mind as if I were under water, or slowly emerging from a lifelong deafness. I had never heard language used this way before—and by a preacher, which is what I was preparing to become. But my idea of preaching was to tell people what they already knew. This preacher—by how he looked and sounded, by what he was saying from his first words on, simply by who he was, the word become a self—he was telling me something I had never heard before.

  Slavery. Hard as it is for me to write these words or imagine how they could ever have been true, the evil of slavery had not dawned on me. I knew, of course, that the existence of slavery had contradicted American ideals from the start. Jefferson knew that—and kept his slaves. Perhaps, as a precondition of accepting the idea of cavalier Virginia, to claim a place with Jefferson, not to mention Lee, I had refused to move past the idea of the thing to the reality of it. For example, I had accepted the notion, perhaps breathing it in with the dust of slave-laid cobblestones in Alexandria, that despite the evident hardships, slaves were happy. Sambo was happy, wasn't he? And Uncle Remus? Wasn't the happiness I saw in the quick-stepping of Sammy Davis Jr. and the repartee on Amos 'n' Andy a vestige of slave happiness? The caddies at the country club, the janitors at St. Mary's, the orderlies who'd walked our dogs and cooked our meals and cleaned our houses in Wiesbaden and at Boiling—hadn't their smiles all been stunning? Wasn't their ingratiating deference a signal of an innate self-acceptance that permanently eluded, for one, me? And hadn't I embarked on a course, for comfort's sake, for security's, to make myself over into a slave of the Church?

  Years later, in A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn, I would read these words of John Little, a former slave: "They say slaves are happy, because they laugh and are merry. I myself and three or four others, have received two hundred lashes in the day, and had our feet in fetters; yet at night, we would sing and dance, and make others laugh at the rattling of our chains. Happy men we must have been! We did it to keep down trouble, and to keep our hearts from being completely broken: that is as true as the gospel! Just look at it—must not we have been very happy? Yet I have done it myself—I have cut capers in chains."

  Martin Luther King was not happy. Martin Luther King was not smiling. There was not a hint of deference in him. His somber gravity weighed on me, and I recognized in it the weight of the recent murders in Mississippi and Alabama, of the cattle prods and fire hoses turned on schoolchildren, of the poverty of sharecroppers and the insult of segregation. As the camera panned across the upraised, mainly black faces of King's listeners, my mind opened finally to the fact that underlay all these other facts: slavery.

  "Why am I a slave?" Frederick Douglass wrote in a version of the identity questions I had been putting to myself. "Why are some people slaves and others masters? Was there ever a time when this was not so? How did the relation commence?"

  Slavery was not, as I'd willfully imagined, finished with a century before. Its freshly biting consequences had carried these people to the nation's capital, which was also my hometown. A television camera mounted in a helicopter shot the crowd from the air, and I thought of the view from the observation deck of the Washington Monument, a favorite perch. This was a place of mine, and here it was, filled with the bodies of those who'd danced capers in chains. But they were not dancing now. The camera gave us a shot of the monument itself. Years before, in our out-of-towner tours, my mother used to point to the line in the stone a third of the way up the obelisk that marked the place where construction had stopped during the Civil War. When building resumed after a decade, the granite no longer quite matched. The color break was an odd curiosity of my childhood, but now it seemed like yet another scar of slavery.

  The color line cast in stone—King spoke directly to that assumption: "There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, 'When will you be satisfied?' We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horror of police brutality; we can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging ... We cannot be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating, 'For Whites Only'...No! No! We are not satisfied until 'justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.'"

  The crowd broke into thunderous applause, and King wiped the perspiration from his face, and I stood there in the novices' common room. We watched the speech in silence, thirty white men, not moving our eyes from the face of the black preacher. I don't know about the others, but it seemed to me that I was there in that Washington swelter. It also seemed that I was in his presence alone. "I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream ... I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day down in Alabama—with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification—one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today! I have a dream that one day 'every valley shall be exalted and every hill and mountain shall be made low. The rough places will be made plain and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.'"

  Martin Luther King was preaching the Word of God. Preaching! I saw that the conversion demanded by that Word is brought about not by words alone, but by words firmly rooted in the life of the one preaching. My reaction to King all at once took on a religious dimension—no, a religious substance. I who, since my childhood infatuation with the FBI, had been looking for a way to join my private impulse to a public crusade, was being shown it. I who, since Robert Kennedy spoke to me, had been looking for a way to match the timeless tradition in which I'd planted myself with the unprecedented energy of an inbreaking future, was being shown it. I who, since Pope John XXIII conscripted me, had been longing for a way the vocation I'd inherited from my father could feel like mine, was being shown it. King had stopped being a prophet of black liberation and had become, in a flash, a figure of my own.

  "...that day when all God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last! Free at last!'" My freedom, I saw. He was talking about my freedom too. "'Thank God Almighty'"—King's eyes were awash in tears, and stupefyingly, so were mine—"'we are free at last!'"

  "A powerful demagogic speech" was what he called King's oration—J. Edgar Hoover's top aide and an old friend of my father's, William C. Sullivan. The reaction indicates, perhaps, that he too had been moved, despite himself. That the black man who had dared openly to criticize the FBI should suddenly, through an act of rhetoric, lay claim to the American conscience would have been enough to prompt a resolve in Hoover to bring him down. In fact, by its own lights, beginning with Stanley Levison but not ending there, the Bureau had other, better reasons for setting out to do so. Which it did now.

  When, days later, I arrived in Washington as a newly sworn Paulist seminarian, ready to begin my formal academic training i
n philosophy and theology, the changes in my circumstances were dramatic. Paramount among them was my reunion with my mother and father, a return to the city, into the New Frontier aristocracy of which they had themselves recently been initiated. My father was almost the exact age I am as I write these words. It is much easier now for me to imagine how things looked from his side. He was just then completing his second full year as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. His assistant director was Lieutenant General William W. Quinn, whose daughter Sally would become a well-known writer and the wife of Washington Post editor Benjamin Bradlee. Dad would be reappointed as director four times, a record unmatched since, giving him tenure, unfortunately, through the worst failures of Vietnam.

  As Air Force inspector general, in 1961, my father had impressed Robert McNamara with his investigation of leaks in U.S. intelligence, and particularly with his unraveling of the story behind the defections to the Soviet Union of two national security analysts, B. F. Mitchell and William H. Martin. But mainly, I believe, McNamara was drawn to my father because, owing to his eccentric history as an FBI man turned general, he was not bound by the narrow military loyalties, and had in fact set himself against many of the Pentagon orthodoxies that McNamara, as secretary of defense, had made it his business to terminate.

  Now, in the year since the Cuban missile crisis in which DIA had played a pivotal role, my father's prestige, however discreetly manifested, was at its peak. His rivals within the military intelligence establishment had been defanged, and his turf-protecting counterparts at CIA, NSA, and the State Department had learned to work with him—a tribute to my father's skills as a bureaucratic infighter, and also a signal of the strong support he had from McNamara. I would later learn that only two months before this reunion in early September of 1963, my father had become the single representative of all military agencies on the U.S. Intelligence Board, where he shared the table as a peer with J. Edgar Hoover and CIA chief John A. McCone. Only a few days before my return to D.C., on the first of September, my father's reach within the clandestine side of government had been broadened significantly with the establishment of a separate DIA Office of Counterintelligence and Security.

  It goes without saying that my father never spoke at home about his work, but I sensed his power, and my mother's satisfaction in it. I understood that in some unprecedented and unhoped-for way, President Kennedy had tapped my father. Only a few weeks from now President Kennedy would be dead, and as was true of so many men Kennedy had empowered, something in my father would from then on be dead too.

  But not yet. Within days of my arrival from New Jersey, my parents came to visit me at St. Paul's College. My view of things was very narrow. I attributed the palpable difference I sensed in them not so much to their personal success or to the stunning communal arrival of their kind in the Kennedy era, but to the satisfaction they surely took in my recent act of self-sacrifice.

  We went for a walk up Fourth Street to the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. They were on either side of me. My father was in a civilian blue suit, but I was in uniform, the distinctive Paulist habit. This was the garb my devotion to which, within months, Hans Küng and his ilk in their neckties would puncture, but that day I felt a neophyte's delight in appearing in public as a clergyman. I sensed my parents' pride, subliminally aware of the enormity of the occasion, a promised filling in of the ancient void around which they'd built their lives. A filling in, of course, with me. My mother slipped her arm inside mine. She was wearing white gloves.

  We climbed the broad stairs to the entrance of the great basilica, with its brilliant blue mosaic beach ball of a dome. At the door, we glanced back toward the city spread out behind us, and now I imagine what we saw on that pristine early autumn day: the Capitol dome, the Washington Monument, the spires of my own Georgetown, and to the west, on the hill opposite this one, the towers of the National Cathedral (Episcopal), a pure Gothic masterpiece and a Protestant rebuke to the garishness of our church here. A seminarian's joke of the day described an apparition, the Blessed Virgin on the same top step, and her command, "Build me a beautiful church on this spot."

  The interior of the Shrine is dominated by a huge floor-to-ceiling mosaic of Christ behind the high altar, a stern but effeminate face, the eyes of which follow everywhere. The Lord sitting in judgment was the idea, but to me that day and ever after, because of those eyes, and perhaps because of what began to happen between me and my father, the Lord sitting less in judgment than in merciless rejection.

  Dad and I found ourselves alone. Maybe Mom had gone ahead to a bank of blue votive lights at the feet of Saint Mary, or red at the feet of Saint Joseph. She'd have been lighting candles for Joe's health and my vocation, the two main things she prayed for. Dad was a chain smoker, and we were in some marble-lined vestibule or corridor, out of sight of the apocalyptic eyes, where he could light up. And where, at last, I could tell him what was on my mind.

  "Martin Luther King," I said.

  We had never discussed King. I had not learned yet to dissemble with my father. Now that I had actually begun to shape my life according to the contours of the first one he'd chosen, I felt more desperately in need of his approval than ever.

  "What about him?" he said curtly. I sensed at once how the mention of King's name displeased him.

  My father listened in silence as I described my reaction to King's speech, how I'd recognized a dream of mine in what the Baptist preacher had said. And wasn't it amazing that in response to the viciousness of bigots in Alabama and Mississippi, he'd conjured up that vision of little black boys and black girls joining hands with white children? "He's right, Dad," I said. "Slavery won't be finished—"

  My father was shaking his head, which made me stall.

  I pushed on. "King said that if America is ever to be a great nation—"

  "America already is a great nation. Don't be a sap."

  "But King preaches nonviolence. He is the alternative to riots and rebellion, to Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X ..." How I longed for his ratification of the new feelings I had. I knew what fundamental shifts they implied, and my hope was that, since Dad was one of Kennedy's men now, and since Kennedy himself was so clearly changing—after first opposing the March on Washington, he had endorsed it—then wouldn't Dad be changing too? And couldn't he then encourage me to—?

  "Don't be taken in by King," he said. "The man is a charlatan."

  "Come on, Dad. Maybe you disagree with him, but you can't say he's not sincere."

  "That's exactly what I'm saying."

  "Not sincere? As in liar?"

  "Yes. Take my word for it, son." The curl of bitterness in his voice shocked me. "I know things about King that you don't know and that I can't tell you."

  "Like what?"

  "Just don't be taken in."

  "No, really, Dad." Now the curl was in my voice, which was insistent, pissed off, as surprising to me as to him. "Like what? You can't just stamp this 'classified.' This is important. I have a right to know. Tell me."

  Which of course he refused to do, on that occasion or any of the other dozen times, each demand an escalation of the previous one, until I was screaming at him and he was ordering me to silence as if I were an insubordinate aide.

  For the rest of 1963 and all through 1964, through the trauma of John Kennedy's assassination, the upheaval of Lyndon Johnson's campaign against Barry Goldwater, the steady release of racial furies in the South, as well as through the seismic shifts of religious meaning that jolted me in theology classes and in reading about the Vatican Council—through it all, every encounter with my father was charged with the same voltage that flashed around Martin Luther King—lightning, fire, the smell of carbon. But also plenty of illumination. My own instincts slanted steadily in King's favor, but I was kept from acting on them, or even voicing support in seminary debates, because my basic commitment still was to my father's instincts. Could I disbelieve his claim to having secret knowledge? And if I was building my
spiritual life around my father's will, how could I defy it on an issue that was, as I'd have still said, merely political?

  Yet when, in 1964, King was named winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, I went to Thanksgiving dinner at Boiling and gloated. "The Nobel Prize, Dad. Could they give that to a Communist? To a degenerate?"

  Communist. Degenerate. Words my father, for reasons unknown to me, had taken to using about King. He choked on his rage and replied with his version of what J. Edgar Hoover said that same week: "Martin Luther King is the most notorious liar in America."

  Decades later, David J. Garrow's book would lay out for me all that my father "knew," as a veteran of the ancient Chicago surveillance of Morris Chilofsky, a.k.a. Childs; as a participant in the rigid assessment of Stanley Levison's dual—but never simultaneous—role as a Moscow-sponsored operative and as King's confidant; as one privy to the bugging and wiretapping of King himself, which revealed no security breaches but a hidden life of illicit sexual encounters. Perhaps there is a kind of good news in the belated discovery that my father's furious rejection of King was neither the shallow racism nor the groundless paranoia I had concluded it was. Levison's history was a real issue. But in reading Garrow's account, I felt the simple shame of learning the terrible news that, in all likelihood, given his associations, my father had colluded in an FBI plot to destroy King—a true act of American fascism.

  In the beginning, one half of all people eligible to vote in Dallas County, Alabama, were black, but only one percent of them were registered. Fifteen thousand eligible blacks lived in Selma, the county seat, but only 156 of them were registered.

  For the last six months of 1964, the Student Nonviolent Co-ordinating Committee had been leading an effort to get the black citizens of Selma on the voting rolls. Among the obstacles to overcome were arcane literacy tests, poll taxes, the hostility of a registrar whose office was rarely open, a court order forbidding demonstrations and, most difficult of all, the dogs and electric cattle prods of a posse led by Sheriff Jim Clark. In January 1965, shortly after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, Martin Luther King went to Selma too, seeking, as he put it, "to arouse the federal government."