An American Requiem

by James Carroll

  King's presence drew the attention of the nation to Selma. In a courthouse confrontation, dozens of demonstrators were brutally arrested. "I hope the newspapers see you," one demonstrator said to Sheriff Clark, who answered, "Dammit, I hope they do." Photographs of Clark wielding his stick appeared all over the country. But then, as Juan Williams writes in Eyes on the Prize, "With speaking engagements elsewhere, King had to leave town for a while." It seems an odd moment for King's departure, and it prompts a digression from the narrative of Selma to consider what, besides speaking engagements, might have drawn King away at such a crucial time.

  In October of 1963, within weeks of my first conversation with my father about Martin Luther King, Attorney General Robert Kennedy approved an FBI request to tap King's phone lines and place listening devices in his offices and hotel rooms. Rebutting common accusations and my own long-held conclusions that the request was part of a personal, essentially racist vendetta designed to punish a Bureau critic, David J. Garrow writes, "The origins of the King investigation lay in an honestly held FBI belief that Stanley Levison was a conscious and active agent of the Soviet Union, and that Levison's friendship with King was motivated by something other than a desire to advance the cause of civil rights in America."

  But the effect of the bugs on King, especially of his hotel rooms, was to shift the FBI's preoccupation away from a perceived Communist threat and toward a puritanical repugnance at the perceived hypocrisy implied by his sexual behavior. For more than a year, FBI microphones gathered graphic information on King's secret life. Garrow states that Hoover, to the consternation of Bobby Kennedy when he learned of it, dispatched transcripts of tapes to the Pentagon—no doubt to my father. A puritanical, but also prurient, obsession with King's sexual restlessness fed Bureau rage, and when the civil rights leader won the Nobel Prize, Hoover decided to launch a covert campaign to discredit him.

  Hoover recruited Cardinal Spellman, for one, to intervene with the Vatican, to head off King's meeting with Pope Paul VI. Spellman tried, but it is a measure of the inexorable tilting of the Church's axis that the pope ignored his warning and met with King—a fact I used against my father in our arguments. My father was forced to say, as he did one day to me—seismic shifts everywhere—that the pope himself was naive.

  FBI efforts to discredit King became an effort to destroy him. On January 6, just as the climax of events in Selma was approaching, Coretta Scott King discovered a letter and a tape recording in the mail. The tape, compiled from more than a year's worth of bugging, contained "highlights" of her husband's encounters with other women in hotels in various cities. The accompanying letter contained an anonymous threat to expose King as "a colossal fraud ... a dissolute, abnormal imbecile." The tape demonstrated that this letter was written not by a crackpot but by someone in the government. And then the letter went beyond a threat to expose the minister: "King, you are done ... there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is ... There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation."

  How far the Bureau had come from Roger "Terrible" Touhy, when it took on its enemies directly, bravely, like men—my father's voice "the voice of doom." According to David J. Garrow, this cowardly poison-pen letter proposing suicide was written by Hoover's top assistant, William Sullivan, my father's old friend. It was surreptitiously carried to Miami and mailed from there by Lish Whitson, a counterspy legend and father of one of my cryptanalysis section chums. The threat to expose King was carried out when Deke DeLoach, another Hoover aide and family friend of ours, offered a transcript of the sex tape to Benjamin Bradlee. The editor refused to take it, and instead informed high Justice Department officials, who told the president of the plot. Instead of rebuking Hoover, Lyndon Johnson instructed his aide Bill Moyers, as Garrow writes, "to warn the Bureau that Bradlee was unreliable."

  Martin Luther King was a tormented man. No one was more aware of the conflict between his public image and his flawed private life than he. The discovery that powers in Washington were also aware of that conflict and were using the threat to expose it as an inducement to suicide nearly crushed him. "They are out to break me," he said, referring not to Sheriff Jim Clark but to the very leaders—Hoover, the Justice Department, and Johnson—who alone could rescue him and his people from the bigots of Selma.

  These were the likely thoughts of Martin Luther King at the time he "left town for a while." The man's greatness is nowhere more evident than in the fact that he returned to Selma, and on February I deliberately allowed himself to be arrested. "If Negroes could vote," he said, "there would be no Jim Clarks."

  King's arrest riveted the nation, and white resistance in Selma grew more militant. At the end of February, state troopers killed a young black demonstrator, Jimmy Lee Jackson. At his funeral, King denounced a federal government that preferred a war in Vietnam to protecting "the lives of its own citizens seeking the right to vote."

  The war in Vietnam? Hadn't we just elected Lyndon Johnson as the peace candidate? In fact Johnson, with my father's help in the Pentagon, was preparing to launch Operation Rolling Thunder, the bombing of North Vietnam, but who knew that? In my view, this first mention of the war by King seemed a huge mistake, one I hoped he would not repeat. The war was none of his business. On that front, Johnson's men, my father among them, knew what they were doing.

  King announced a fifty-mile walk to Montgomery to protest at George Wallace's state capitol. Even SNCC opposed the idea as too provocative. The SCLC stood firm. The day of the march arrived, but King was in Atlanta. "Although he had promised to lead the march," Juan Williams writes, "he now said he needed to be in his own pulpit that day." At the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the six hundred marchers were attacked and routed. From Atlanta, King issued a call to the nation: "No American is without responsibility ... Join me in Selma for a ministers' march to Montgomery on Tuesday morning, March 9."

  It is speculation on my part to see in King's alternating presence and absence as the tension mounted in Selma evidence of a powerful internal struggle. My point is simply that the heroic role in which history has cast him does not do justice to the fierce and mostly secret conflicts—conflict of his own character and conflict with a fascist impulse of the federal government—he had to overcome in order to respond to the deepest call of his own conscience. Push had come to shove, and Martin Luther King was there. On March 9 he led fifteen hundred people onto Edmund Pettus Bridge again. That night one of the ministers who'd responded to his call, James Reeb, was fatally clubbed. Reeb was white. The nation that had been indifferent to the death of Jimmy Lee Jackson now exploded with demonstrations of support.

  And at long last so did I. It took the death of a white man to break my inner—one could surely say Oedipal—paralysis. But more important to me than his race was the fact that Reeb was a minister. By then the effect of Hans Küng's advocacy of Christian reunion, and the Council's embrace of the ecumenical impulse, had undercut my sharp sense of the old distinction between ministers and priests. Hadn't Roman collars of all kinds—even on Unitarians—become ubiquitous at civil rights demonstrations? And James Reeb was a Washington minister at that. All Souls Unitarian Church, where he had served, was at a downtown crossroads I had passed through a thousand times. I can picture the church now, with its sweeping staircase, classic columns, and stately pediment rising on the corner of Sixteenth and Harvard streets. After Selma it would always seem like a monument, one of Washington's grave memories. Reeb was a man I might have known, and his death made the faraway events shockingly personal to me. It was a turning point, the occasion of a large and complete reversal in my life story.

  SCLC organizers in Washington put out a call to ministers and priests who couldn't get to Selma to come to a sympathy demonstration on the street outside the White House, to demand that Lyndon Johnson intervene in Alabama. With a dozen other Paulists I went along, wearing black. The scene was alien and intimidating. Most of the demo
nstrators were young turks, Afro-haired and dashiki-clad. A commando-like contingent of youthful blacks organized by a—to me—inflammatory young preacher named Marion Barry frightened me and reinforced my instinctive rejection of provocative tactics. The militants wanted to draw police into violent overreaction, to discredit them. I remember how mutely I walked in the picket line, the steady long loop on the Pennsylvania Avenue sidewalk, while chants and shouted slogans broke the air above me. I was more afraid of my fellow demonstrators than of the police.

  As a way of detaching myself from my threatening surroundings, I began to watch the blank windows of the White House, looking for movement. I wondered if Lynda Bird was in the mansion, peeking at us through the curtains. I had last seen her when she passed my spot on the avenue during her father's inauguration parade, a sad parade because it evoked Kennedy's funeral procession. But there had been consolation in it too, since LBJ, my own "Mr. Johnson," had defeated the warmonger—and reserve Air Force general—Barry Goldwater. The thought of Lynda Bird made me realize that I wanted her to see me on that street—she would never know how afraid I was.

  And that thought put me instantly in mind of the one I hoped would never see me doing such a thing. The demonstration, as long as we obeyed orders to keep moving and stay on the sidewalk, was perfectly legal, but it was nevertheless for me an act of mortal transgression. I had until then opposed such activity, secretly afraid my father, who knew everything, was right about it. Even lawful protests—how I had argued this myself—lead to disorder. Which is what happened that day.

  I was moving in the picket line behind a man who carried a sign that said, "God Is Love." I was acutely aware of him, as I was of everything around me—the cops on horseback, the plainclothes Secret Service agents, the White House guards, the cameras from which I kept my distance, shielding my face as if I were a mobster. Passersby stopped to jeer us. I heard the words "nigger" and "nigger lovers," which alone helped me feel some satisfaction with myself. This is all right, I remember thinking. I can do this.

  But then the man in front of me and others drifted into the street. The policemen began to shove them back, and the horses bumped roughly into the line. The cops' harshness sparked resistance, and more demonstrators veered off the sidewalk into the avenue, blocking traffic. Orders were given through battery-powered bullhorns, which I'd never seen before. Sirens sounded, clubs were swung. People screamed, ran, shoved back against each other.

  The pandemonium ended as quickly as it began. Those arrested were efficiently carried off, and the rhythm of the moving picket line was reestablished. I had never ventured toward the curb, nor moved to resist, and when someone had intoned the familiar anthem "We Shall Overcome," I could hardly bring myself to join in, though in the deepest part of myself I had longed for years to sing those words in exactly such a setting.

  Next morning, the front page of the Washington Post carried a photograph of a protester hitting a policeman on the head with his hand-lettered sign, "God Is Love." I nearly fainted at the sight of it. It took me a long moment to focus so that I could study the photograph and make sure—oh, Christ, what if Dad sees this?—I wasn't in it. What a hero I was to myself then. A familiar self-contempt, bile in my throat.

  What happened to me that weekend was nothing compared to the electric bolt that linked Selma to D.C. The next day, Lyndon Johnson said that he saw in the struggle in Selma "the heart and the purpose and the meaning of America itself." I like to think the demonstrators outside his window played a small part in it—Lynda Bird fetching him to watch? Pointing at me? That day the president stopped being J. Edgar Hoover's ally and became Martin Luther King's. That night, in one of the greatest speeches ever given by an American president, Johnson proposed the Voting Rights Bill. I saw the speech on the television in the Paulist common room. LBJ concluded with a stirring report of his own, as I'd learned to call it, metanoia. Then he leaned toward us, his "fellow Americans." He peered above the rims of his glasses, like an old man hunched over a steering wheel. With a sharp intake of breath, he said in that redneck drawl of his, "And we shall overcome!" The words, I would later read, brought tears to the eyes of Martin Luther King. They certainly did to mine.

  In support of the Voting Rights Bill of 1965, I helped organize a round-the-clock seminarians' vigil at the Lincoln Memorial, teams consisting of a Protestant, a Catholic, and a Jew. One rainy spring night during a shift of mine, at about two in the morning, a car pulled up to the curb in front of us and stopped abruptly. The doors slammed open. Lincoln's Doric temple loomed behind the figures who approached aggressively. They wore trench coats with swastika armbands, a melodramatic sight it was impossible at first to take seriously, but which then made us all afraid. They came right up to us, cursed us, and spat at our feet. "Nigger lovers!" one said, and to the Jewish seminarian, "Kike!" I recognized one antagonist as George Lincoln Rockwell, the crackpot head of the American Nazi Party. He would later be assassinated. Instead of getting back in their car, the three Nazis took up positions down the street from us, a countervigil. Oddly, their presence was a kind of triumph, making our small part in the struggle seem more real.

  That spring and summer, the Voting Rights Act passed in both houses of Congress. Senator Hubert Humphrey praised the religious community for making the difference in its passage. Lyndon Johnson, with Martin Luther King at his side, signed the act into law. Within months, nine thousand blacks had registered to vote in Dallas County, Alabama. In the next election, Sheriff Jim Clark was voted out of office.

  Joseph F. Carroll, as an FBI agent in the early 1940s, fires his weapon on a practice range. After capturing the notorious Chicago gangster Roger Touhy in 1942, he would become a member of J. Edgar Hoover's Washington inner circle.

  Mary Carroll holds me outside our Chicago apartment building. It is 1943, the year the family moved to Washington.

  Over objections of the brass, Joseph Carroll was commissioned directly to the rank of brigadier general in 1947, the youngest general officer in the U.S. military.

  J. Edgar Hoover and General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, Air Force chief of staff, watch as Air Secretary Stuart Symington presents the Legion of Merit to Brigadier General Carroll in 1949. By then Carroll's Office of Special Investigations had proven its worth despite its Pentagon critics.

  Mary and Joe pose in the living room of the house in Hollin Hills, Virginia. They are on their way to a White House reception in the early 1950s.

  Joe and Mary welcome Francis Cardinal Spellman to Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1958. To Mary's left is Colonel (Father) Edwin Chess, chief chaplain of the Air Force in Europe. Next to Joe is the cardinal's secretary.

  Pope John XXIII receives the Carroll family in January 1960. I am standing behind my mother. Next to General Carroll is his mother.

  I have just preached my first sermon, in the chapel at Boiling Air Force Base, Washington, in February 1969. To my right is Major General (Monsignor) Edwin Chess, by now the Air Force's chief chaplain.

  Lieutenant General Carroll's official portrait, taken in the late 1960s, at the peak of his power as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

  General Carroll, grand marshal of the Chicago St. Patrick's Day parade, marches with Mayor Richard Daley in 1970. (Jeff Lowenthal/© 1970, Newsweek, Inc.)

  At a peace demonstration at Pease Air Force Base in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, I wore a Vietnamese peasant-style hat with the words "Orphaned Boy." A few moments after this picture was taken, the demonstrators fell to the ground, miming a napalm attack.

  At a retreat center in 1972, I preach on the theme of a believer's obligation to resist the war.

  In an act of passive resistance, I am carried off by police at Hanscom Air Force Base in Lexington, Massachusetts. Scientists at Hanscom had developed electronic sensors that, when used in Vietnam, called in B-52 strikes on civilians and soldiers alike. (Lexington Minuteman)

  In the early seventies I celebrated Mass at Marsh Chapel, Boston University, with Reverend John F. Smith, B
U's Episcopal chaplain.

  Joseph Carroll in the mid-1980s, photographed when the new DIA building was dedicated in Washington. In 1995 the Air Force named the OSI building at Andrews Air Force Base in his honor.

  Mary Carroll receives the flag from her husband's coffin at his funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. The flag is presented by Lieutenant General Harry E. Soyser, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. It is January 1991, the week the Persian Gulf War began.

  My father, with his steady access to a series of secret Bureau briefings, each called "Martin Luther King: A Current Analysis," had gone from denouncing him as a Communist or Communist dupe, which I'd never credited, to calling him a degenerate, which I'd refused to believe, to labeling him a radical who wanted to overthrow the system—which came to seem the exact and proper truth.

  "America is deeply racist and its democracy is flawed both economically and socially..." This is King talking to an interviewer in 1968. "The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its inter-related flaws—racism, poverty, militarism and materialism. It is exposing evils that are deeply rooted in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws, and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced."