by Garry Wills
It was finally resolved that everyone should do what he or she wanted on the next day. Dr. Benjamin Spock said that nonviolent noncompliance was the best course, and most followed his advice, though some—Gloria Steinem and Marlo Thomas among them—would fade away when told that anyone staying was under arrest.
When we got to the Capitol, Congress members greeted us—Bella Abzug and John Conyers—and said they would offer our petition inside the chamber. We sat down and scroonched ourselves as tightly as we could around the entry, a bottle stopper to block those trying to go in or come out. At one point, Congressman Gerald Ford came to the door to stare at us. Karl Hess, the former Republican who had written speeches for Ford, got up and stepped over bodies to say hello to his old boss. He reminded him of the things they had said against Lyndon Johnson’s war, but Ford, who now supported Nixon’s war, did not remember such “good old days.” Hess, later that night, would tell me in the cell we shared that he was disappointed at Ford for giving him such a cold shoulder.
The rest of us squirmed around for hours, occasionally distracted by Judy Collins as she sang “Amazing Grace.” Gawkers circled the huddle. And then the arrests began, polite and recorded on police Polaroids. Down the Capitol steps, into buses, to be delayed endlessly in an underground garage. The women (about thirty) were taken to the women’s detention center—including one who would become a very good friend later on, Ida Terkel (wife of the oral historian Studs Terkel). The men (about seventy of us) were driven to the D.C. lockup. Out of the buses. Our names were taken down by a guard who recognized Spock (“Hi, Doc”) from other demonstrations. I smiled to see that Joe Papp was among us, despite all his talk the night before against being arrested. Then taken up for fingerprints and mug shots. (I wondered what Richard Avedon would make of his official photograph.) One phone call (mine to my wife, not a lawyer).
Then into the cells—four of us in two-man cells—a bunk bed (two metal trays with no mattresses or pillows or blankets) and a metal john with no seat attachment. Across from our cell, Spock was rolling up his suit jacket for a pillow and sliding under the bottom bunk (he was too tall to fit in one of the trays). In the cell next to ours, someone complained that the john did not work. Spock shouted, “The john in cell 38, you have to kick the button in the wall.” Noisy efforts, with no success. “When I say kick it, I mean kick it.” Noisy success.
Someone was fingering a flute. The actor Howard da Silva shouted that he should give it to someone who knows music. “David” (the composer David Amram), “where are you?” When Amram answered, down the line, da Silva said to pass the flute to him. After some obscure fumblings from Amram, da Silva shouted, “Send it back!” At this point, Mark Lane went from cell to cell. He had signed the petition the previous night but had kept from arrest, and now entered the lockup pretending to be our lawyer. He came to our cell, instructing us not to plead nolo contendere and pay our fine in the morning, but to demand a trial and make a test case against the war, with him as our attorney. None of us were buying from the self-promoting con man. He wanted a big case he could write about.
Later, I would learn what the women’s stay was like from Ida. She said that a guard brought them stew in a styrofoam cup and coffee thick as syrup with cream and sugar. The diet-conscious ladies in their cells—who included Felicia Bernstein and Francine du Plessix Gray—shuddered at the sugary mix. Ida explained to them that poor people all drink their coffee that way, since they are starved for nourishment. Judy Collins gave their cells better music than da Silva had been able to coax from Amram.
During the hours of that long night, I talked mainly with one of my cell mates, Karl Hess. We knew each other from being fellows at the Institute for Policy Studies. Hess was known for being Barry Goldwater’s speechwriter in the 1964 presidential campaign. Since then, he had gone from being a libertarian to being an anarchist. He refused to pay taxes used for war purposes, and lived on a farm, creating metal sculptures. An autodidact and devourer of books, he asked what was the volume I carried with me through the arrest. It was the Greek New Testament. He asked why I had it. I answered that I read it every day for spiritual sustenance. Besides, “It’s the most influential book in Western culture.” Yeah, but why Greek?
I said that learning Greek is the most economical intellectual investment one can make. On many things that might interest one—law and politics, philosophy, oratory, history, lyric poetry, epic poetry, drama—there will be constant reference back to the founders of those forms in our civilization. Politics and law will refer to Aristotle on constitutions and balanced government. Philosophy will argue endlessly with Plato. Historians must go back to Herodotus and Thucydides. Students of Virgil or Milton have to gauge their dependence on Homer. Drama harks back to Sophocles or Euripides for tragedy, to Aristophanes or Menander for comedy. Oratory is measured against Demosthenes or Isocrates, lyric poetry against Sappho or Anacreon. The novel begins with Longus and others. It helps, in all these cases, to know something about the originals. He objected that the remains of ancient literature seem exiguous. That is partly true. Only three of the dozens of Greek tragedians survive, and only about 10 percent of their output. But that gives a kind of detective-story interest to their study. To rebuild the social setting for judging them, one must call on the study of papyri, coins, inscriptions, vase paintings, and archaeological ruins. (The only art history course I ever took was a graduate class on Greek vases.) Karl liked the puzzle aspect of this.
In the morning, after the judge arrived, we were allowed to make individual statements before pleading nolo contendere and paying our fine (I had to borrow some money to pay mine). We scrambled for the few cabs outside the lockup. I ended up in one with da Silva and the writer Martin Duberman. The harried Duberman asked us to go first to Union Station, where he had put his luggage in a twenty-four-hour locker (he had not expected to get arrested). The locker held the only copy of his latest book’s typescript (this was before computers), and he was terrified at the thought that the time had run out and someone had taken his luggage. Happily, he found the luggage with the book still in it.
We went back to the Dupont Plaza Hotel for breakfast. Da Silva opened the Washington Post and found a tiny notice of our arrest. “I’ve had better reviews, I must admit.” The last time he had been in Washington, it had been in Nixon’s White House, where he performed his Ben Franklin song from the musical 1776. We learned from the New York Times why Papp had been so urgent to get back to New York—he was being given the state’s cultural medal by Governor Nelson Rockefeller. His wife had to take it in his place, and she announced that he could not be there because he was in jail.
A couple of weeks later, much the same group assembled again at the hotel to plan the same protest, this time at the entry to the Senate. As we crammed ourselves to block the way in and out, Karl came over and sat by me: “I hope we end up in the same cell again.” I asked why. “I’ve been studying Greek, and I want to go over verb forms.” Unfortunately, we got separated at the fingerprinting stage and did not share a cell that night. While we were talking in the Capitol, Senator Goldwater moseyed up to the bunch of bodies. Someone told him, “Your old speechwriter is in that crowd.” Goldwater said, “Really?” He picked his way through the bodies and pulled Karl up on his feet, shaking his hand, to say, “I haven’t seen you in ages. Why don’t you come visit me?” Karl, by this time booted and bearded and wearing camouflage garb, said, “I’m afraid your staff would be pissed at me.” “Well, piss on them. You’re my friend.” Later, at the Institute for Policy Studies, I asked Karl if Goldwater was always so warm and gracious. “Always. He is the most loyal and truthful politician I have ever met.”
Then he told me something from the 1964 campaign. Goldwater had voted against the Civil Rights Act that spring, and some right-wing crazies thought that if they could stir up race conflict in the summer it would show that Goldwater was right in saying that the civil rights movement should not be caved in to. Word of this got to Goldw
ater and he called in his top staff—Clifton White, Denison Kitchel, Karl, and others—and told them: “You guys know me well. I want you to get word to the troublemakers that if there are race riots this summer I am pulling out of the race.” I asked Karl if he thought Goldwater would have done that. “Of course. He gave his word.” Politically, Karl could not differ more from Goldwater by this time. But personally he could not have admired him more.
Karl died before he could carry his study of Greek very far. But another political figure was more successful. I met I. F. Stone at Kent State University, just after the National Guard had shot four students. We were there to write about the event. Stone knew that I taught ancient Greek at Johns Hopkins, and he told me that his fondest wish was to read Plato in the original. “When I retire, I am going to study Greek.” We got to know each other well at the Institute for Policy Studies, and he repeated his pledge over the years. When the improbable occurred, and he actually did retire from writing I. F. Stone’s Weekly, he plunged into the study of Greek. He took some courses at American University, and got some coaching from my old teacher at Yale, Bernard Knox, then director of the D.C. Center for Hellenic Studies. Since I was a night person then, and he had always been, he would call me in Baltimore at 2 or 3 a.m. when there was no one up he could turn to for help. He would ask me, for example, to explain a construction that was puzzling him, or seek advice about Aeolic forms in Sappho or Alcaeus.
But then he stopped calling. The next time I saw him in Washington, I went over to greet him, but he turned and walked away. “What’s that all about?” I asked Marc Raskin, the Institute’s director. “He’s mad at you for your Hiss review. He says he’ll never talk to you again.” I had reviewed Allen Weinstein’s book on Alger Hiss, and had agreed with the book’s conclusion that Hiss had been a traitor. Stone’s brother-in-law, Leonard Boudin, belonged to the law firm that defended Hiss. So in fact I did not hear from Stone for years—until, one night around 3 a.m. the phone rang. Izzy said, “I can’t stand it! I just can’t get through this passage. I need help.” But it was the last call. He had relapsed from his anti-Wills resolve, but he did not mean to make a practice of it. I was left outside again. I was not only on the Nixon enemies list, but on the Hiss enemies list as well.
Another man who knew the relevance of Greek studies was the CIA director William Colby. He was called to testify to the Church Committee on CIA misdeeds. To the horror of many in the Agency, he meant to be honest in revealing illegal actions carried out by CIA agents, as the charter of the CIA required—he would be called a traitor for conforming to the law. To brace himself just before testifying, he went to see an old friend teach a class at American University. The friend was Bernard Knox of the Center for Hellenic Studies. The two men had trained together in England to drop behind enemy lines during World War II and work with resistance forces (which both of them did). They had stayed in touch over the years, and Colby knew that Knox was lecturing that day on Antigone, the play about a woman following her conscience despite resistance from her family and from state officials. Few knew when he testified the next day that he was drawing inspiration from a Greek source.
It was only later that I learned how Whittaker Chambers, in the last years of his life, signed up for ancient Greek classes at Western Maryland College, near his farm (famous for its pumpkin-repository of Hiss papers). I cannot imagine four more different persons than Hess, Stone, Colby, and Chambers. But one thing they did have in common—the Greeks.
2
“They’ve Killed Dr. King”
I was soaking in the bathtub, reading a book (as was my wont), when my wife burst in. “They’ve killed Dr. King,” she said in shock. That is the way we Americans react. “They” killed President Kennedy, or his brother Robert, or Malcolm X. This was not a conscious profession of conspiracy theory, just the idea that there was an apparent inevitability to the deaths of these controversial leaders. It was crushing, but it was not entirely unexpected.
I asked Natalie to call the airline while I threw clothes onto my body and into my bag. She got me the last seat for the flight to Memphis out of Baltimore that night. King had been in Memphis supporting a strike by the sanitation workers. On the plane, I saw Bill Coffin, the liberal activist and Yale chaplain. Once I had stayed overnight at his rectory after I interviewed him in New Haven, and on the plane we shared our horror over what had happened in Memphis. Since Coffin was a famous preacher, I asked if he would speak at any memorial for Dr. King. He shrugged: “If they ask me.”
Arrived in Memphis, I dropped my bag at a hotel and went to the murder site (the Lorraine Motel), where I met Art Shay, the brilliant Life photographer. He invited me to go with him in his rented car to the police station, to find out what was happening. On our way there, we saw a liquor store whose glass front was broken in. Shay rushed to photograph the ravaged interior while I, always the outsider, stayed on the street to see if more trouble was on its way. At the police station we were told that Dr. King’s body had been moved from the police morgue to the Lewis Funeral Home for embalming. We drove there through streets emptied by the curfew.
When we reach the funeral home, there is only one other reporter there. We huddle in the main viewing room to talk with the owner, Clarence Lewis. On the other side of a thin partition, he tells us, is the operating room, where morticians are at work on Dr. King’s body. We can hear the black radio station playing King speeches while his speechless body is being repaired. “His jaw was shot away,” Lewis tells us. “We have to build a plaster jaw and powder it dark.”
When at last they bring the body out, at 8 a.m., there is a scrim over the open coffin. Shay protests that he cannot photograph through a scrim. Lewis agrees to take it off. “People would probably just tear it off to see him anyway.” A line of mourners (all black) had formed outside at dawn. When the crowd is let in, Lewis stands poised to intervene if anyone tries to touch the makeup on the artificial jaw—one woman does kiss the cheek, and Lewis quickly guides her away. Shay later sent me a picture of the first grieving women who filed past the coffin—it hangs over my desk as I write this.
We hear over the radio that Dr. King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, is about to arrive at the airport, so we drive there. She was slow to come, since Jesse Jackson, who called her with the sad news, wanted to soften it by saying simply that her husband had been shot, not that he was dead. She had gone to the airport in Atlanta to fly to the husband she thought was injured. But Mayor Ivan Allen gave her the full news of her husband’s death before she boarded the plane. At that, she turned around and went back home to steady her children. Now, the next day, she is about to reach Memphis. The plane must be emptied onto the tarmac, with Mrs. King coming down a rolling stairway. Shay grabs another stairway and pushes it close to the one that will be used. He climbs on it to have a good angle for seeing her as she emerges. But the police rush out to clear Shay off the tarmac. He tries again with another rolling perch, but they stop him again. He will have to use a long-distance lens.
After Mrs. King comes in, Shay follows her motorcade back to the funeral home, while I go to the union building where meetings of the sanitation strikers have been held. Inside, a large crowd has come to hear preacher after preacher mourn and memorialize Dr. King. Given the emotional occasion, there is a good deal of weeping, as over a dozen Baptist ministers preach call-and-response sermons. “Dr. King was for us,” the preachers call out, and the congregation shouts, “Tell it! That he was.” I go over to Bill Coffin and ask again if he means to say something. “Not here,” he answers; “this is the big league.” The crowd and the speakers are perfectly united in grief and in biblical resources, as wave after wave of “Stay there!” rumbles from the congregation.
The best speech is the last. In fact, it is the most moving speech I have heard, then or now. The preacher is a compact and natty black minister, with oddly precise diction and smoldering eyes, James Bevel. He has been a prolific inventor of strategies for King’s Southern Christi
an Leadership Conference, some strategies brilliant, some crackpot, all of them daring. He was in the forefront of the sit-ins, the freedom rides, Freedom Summer, the opposition to the Vietnam War. He was the one who persuaded King to include children in the march at Birmingham in 1963, and he helped pressure the Johnson administration into the 1964 Civil Rights Act by threatening to march children from Birmingham all the way to Washington. He had been married to the beautiful and brilliant civil rights leader Diane Nash, for a time his even braver (and saner) better half.
At the union hall, Bevel begins quietly, matter-of-fact: “Dr. King died on the case. Anyone who does not support the sanitation workers’ strike is not on the case. You getting me?” They murmur that they are. “There’s a false rumor around that our leader is dead. Our leader is not dead.” They shout, but tentatively, “No!” Does he mean his spirit is not dead? “That’s a false rumor.” More support, but wavering: “False!” He is picking up the rhythm: “Martin Luther King is not”—not dead, they seem to anticipate—“Martin Luther King is not our leader.” Stunned, they hesitate and wonder. “Our leader is the man”—what man? the whole company is caught up in suspense—“is the man who led Moses out of Egypt.” Now they know, and they cry yes with relief.
Our leader is the man who went with Daniel into the lions’ den. Our leader is the man who walked on water in Palestine. He is the man who came out of the grave on Easter morning. Our leader never sleeps or slumbers. He cannot be put in jail. He has never lost a war yet. Our leader is still on the case. Our leader is not dead. One of his prophets died. We will not stop because of that. Our staff is not a funeral staff. We have friends who are undertakers. We do business. We stay on the case, where our leader is.