Still, Bobby believed it was a disgrace that no one had had the courage to contradict Judge Mitchell, who was making a mockery of legal procedure. While he had been only an indifferent law student, Bobby was fueled by a strangely Puritan moralism (so different from Jack’s own inclinations) and remained fascinated by the law and its application. Talking more to himself than to his aide, he muttered, “I’d like to just express on behalf of one lawyer in this country just what I feel … I’m not going to call him; I just think that too many people would think I was trying to do something political about it.” Bobby was wrestling with something. Without telling Seigenthaler about his conversation with the governor, he imagined out loud that if he just phoned the judge as a lawyer, simply offering advice about a legal question, maybe the political damage could be minimized. The clear-eyed strategist in him, however, understood the risk that this would entail.
Seigenthaler answered, “There’s a great deal of downside exposure. People in the South are going to be mad about you calling up the judge.”
“That’s right … I don’t think I’ll do it. I’m not going to call him. But I’ll tell you this. I resent it.”
“Just think about it a minute as a lawyer,” Seigenthaler said. “I just tell you, I wouldn’t do it … I don’t know a lawyer who’s not involved in a case who would do something like that … who would call the judge himself.” Bobby recognized that a man’s life was at risk in that southern prison, and Seigenthaler could see how torn he remained. Still, it seemed from Seigenthaler’s perspective that it was too great a hazard to the campaign.
“I think you’re right,” Bobby said as he set off with a stack of work to do on the flight. Bobby would be speaking in Philadelphia that evening, including to six hundred people in front of the Kennedy office on Chestnut Street near City Hall. Seigenthaler thought that had settled it.
But Bobby did try calling Judge Mitchell at some point in the day, but he couldn’t reach him. Bobby tried another number he got from Governor Vandiver: that of George Stewart. This Georgian picked up.
Stewart told the campaign manager that his friend Mitchell was open to allowing King out on bail, but the three of them needed to talk in the morning—at 8:00 a.m.
* * *
Nixon’s team was being peppered with questions about King’s imprisonment. It was not just reporters who were asking; Republican headquarters in D.C. also demanded to know what to say. Nixon would write two years later that he told his press secretary, Herb Klein, “I think Dr. King is getting a bum rap. But despite my strong feelings in this respect, it would be completely improper for me or any other lawyer to call the judge.”
Klein got the picture and went out to face the reporters. When the question came, he simply said two words, “No comment.” It was as close to silence as he could get.
* * *
Five hundred people packed into Atlanta’s Mount Zion Second Baptist Church for an emergency meeting led by King’s friend the Reverend Ralph Abernathy. Daddy King showed his stout stuff, telling them, “If my child can sit at Reidsville and take all that—I can certainly keep my head up and keep praying—for he’s sitting there tonight for every Negro in the world.” Somewhat more ominously, he also said that he didn’t think his son could “make four months.” Bridging the generations, Lonnie King spoke alongside Daddy King, saying the sit-in arrests had finally united the Atlanta Black community behind the student movement.
Abernathy, used to being at King’s side, said that instead of being in the pulpit, he wished he were “down on the road gang with my good friend.” He told the crowd that King was “the Moses of the 20th century, the greatest religious leader of modern time,” and announced he was planning a motorcade to drive to Reidsville so they could pray for him outside the prison.
* * *
When John F. Kennedy landed at LaGuardia long after midnight, at the end of a grueling day of campaigning in Michigan, he was confronted about his call to Coretta Scott King by a gaggle of reporters. He is said to have muttered to an aide something about a “traitor” in their campaign.
Then he regained his usual equanimity and took a few questions. Regarding the call, he simply said, “She is a friend of mine and I was concerned about the situation.” The answer was soothing and amiably distant. Mrs. King and Kennedy had never met, however, and in the remaining years of his life they never would.
Reporters heard differing things. The Constitution reported Kennedy as saying, “I had nothing to do with his release.” Did Kennedy think that Bobby’s (unanswered) call to the judge had already achieved the desired outcome, in which case the statement would have been, in the narrowest sense, true? In any case, the odd phrasing went unnoticed. JFK waved and wished the reporters good night, and after making yet more campaign calls, he settled in for his few hours of rest.
DAY 9: THURSDAY, OCTOBER 27
Some time before two in the morning, Louis Martin was woken by his bedside phone. An energetic voice on the line snapped him to attention: “Well, I talked to that judge down there … We’re going to spring him.”
Martin wasn’t dreaming. This was real, verging on the inconceivable. Bobby Kennedy went on, saying he gave this judge a stiff talking-to about freeing King: “I told him to get him out of there or I’ll take care of him, and I gave him hell.”
Momentarily speechless, Martin had difficulty absorbing this message, especially after the dispiriting conversation they had had just hours earlier. Bobby sounded like a different person, almost giddy with pride at what he had done. Martin replied, “We now make you an honorary brother.” Bobby laughed.
Bobby, of course, had exaggerated. Perhaps he hoped that Martin would convey the story of his tough talk to Black voters, or maybe he just wanted Martin to be happy with him.
Despite Bobby’s tale about talking to Judge Mitchell, it was in fact Stewart to whom he had spoken. The second and most important call—this time between Bobby and the judge for real—was scheduled for 8:00 a.m. The tone of that conversation would turn out to be much less adversarial than that of the fictitious one described by Bobby, but he was making things happen nonetheless.
* * *
King’s health, after all he had endured over the past eight days, was starting to suffer. He was stricken with a vicious cold and a bone-weary feeling. Eight consecutive nights on dank, hard prison mattresses in three different cells, along with the raw fear of a nighttime trip to Reidsville, had left his body vulnerable, and he wasn’t sure how much longer his spirit could hold out, either. The bangs and shouts of prison life woke him early, and he sat in his white uniform, praying and reading the books he had with him: Victor and Victim: The Christian Doctrine of Redemption and Dante’s Divine Comedy. Cockroaches scurried along the walls.
To his surprise, prisoners frequently slipped notes into his cell. He’d received nearly twenty already. They relayed that prison officials had warned inmates not to speak to him. One note informed him that the prisoners were willing to stage a strike to protest his being held at Reidsville. He was moved by the offer but did not know what repercussions such a strike might entail, and he wrote back advising them not to act.
While many just wanted to express concern for him, or to say how much they respected him, others asked him to speak out about conditions at Reidsville. They told him that their letters were intercepted, and that the prison ignored their physical ailments. King tried to respond to each note, finding ways to get encouragement back to whomever he could, and promised that he would speak up once on the outside.
These messages lifted King’s mood, but the guards at Reidsville were even crueler than he had expected. King was deeply affected by his time there and resolved that prison reform must become part of his work. Guards refused to call him “Reverend,” which was humbling, but far from the worst thing he experienced or witnessed. He saw guards speaking to the prisoners as if they were animals. Their cruelty and callousness drove the inmates deeper into a state of bitterness, though he could not h
elp but see something good in these prisoners as they respectfully nodded to him as he walked past.
After just thirty hours in solitary confinement, King was taken from an individual cell into a dormitory housing other newcomers, from which he would eventually be transferred to his work detail. Warden Balkcom had evidently made a decision quickly, even though he had told press the day before that it might take weeks. In the bunk below King was the young man accused of murder during a prison fight the week before. Whether this was a coincidence or an attempt to intimidate him, King resolved to keep as calm as he could.
* * *
“Kennedy Phoned to Express Concern, King’s Wife Says,” read the headline on the first page of The Atlanta Constitution, above a reprint of Anthony Lewis’s New York Times story. Lewis reported that there had been no Kennedy campaign release about the incident, but he confirmed that Mrs. King had indeed received a call. Mayor Hartsfield claimed to have no knowledge of any of it, remarking only that the state government was in a “picklement over this case.”
Coretta was quoted as saying,
Sen. Kennedy said he was very much concerned about both of us. He said this must be hard on me. He wanted me to know he was thinking about us and he would do all he could to help. I told him I appreciated it and hoped he would help. It certainly made me feel good that he called me personally and let me know how he felt. I had the feeling that if he was that much concerned, he would do what he could to see that Mr. King is let out of jail.
The Constitution asked if her husband would endorse Kennedy, but she replied he had been clear he would not endorse either candidate, and she knew of no change in that stance. When asked if Nixon had reached out to her, Coretta replied, “He’s been very quiet.” While she’d gotten calls from Chester Bowles, Mahalia Jackson, and Harry Belafonte, there had been nothing from Nixon. The Times noted that Republican headquarters was asked for “some kind of statement on the King case from Vice President Nixon or from Republican campaign officials here. An aide said the Vice President would have no comment.”
Pressure for King’s release was mounting in the pages of the country’s major publications. One Washington Post editorial was titled “Chain-Gang Justice,” decrying what was being done to King, which made Georgia look to the world as racist as South Africa. The Christian Science Monitor said that Mitchell had unintentionally “given an invaluable boost to the Southern Negro campaign for equal treatment. He did so by meting out patently unequal treatment to the Reverend Martin Luther King.” They noted how Brooklyn’s representative Emanuel Celler urged Eisenhower’s Justice Department to file an amicus brief in Georgia on King’s behalf. The NAACP asked Kennedy and Nixon “for the strongest condemnation on your part. We urge you to do so today.”
The American Jewish Congress wired Vandiver urging him to pardon King, though he told reporters he had no such power as governor. The AFL-CIO’s president, George Meany, sent a similar plea. Vandiver, for one, was experiencing another sort of fallout from the crisis, because four lieutenant colonels—an honorary title Georgia governors bestow to whomever they wish—resigned in protest over his alignment with Kennedy, who now gave the impression of supporting King. Vandiver could only wonder what would happen if word of his outreach to a sitting judge on King’s behalf ever got out.
The Kennedy campaign’s Georgia co-chair Griffin Bell assured the press once again that Kennedy was keeping his pledge to stay out of the King matter. He’d heard nothing about a call to Mrs. King. At every level of the Georgia Democratic Party, everyone was holding on.
* * *
At 8:00 a.m., the phone rang, as promised, in George Stewart’s office. Judge Mitchell, not wanting to be overheard in the courthouse, took the call from Bobby there. Bobby was ringing from a pay phone on Long Island, where he was to give a speech to rally Democrats later that day. He sounded congenial, reiterating what he told Stewart the day before: “We would lose the state of Massachusetts” if King was left in prison, so it would be helpful if they let him out. The lawyer in Bobby brought up the constitutional requirements for bail in Georgia, but Mitchell was not interested in all that; he already had legal grounds for releasing King and had known what he would do since the previous day.
Mitchell said, “Bob, it’s nice to talk to you. I don’t have any objection about doing that.” This was a purely political call. Bobby extended a future invitation to D.C. Now there was a story for white Georgia voters when news broke of King’s release.
There was one problem, however: Judge Mitchell did not tell Bobby that he was about to announce to the press—likely as a way of justifying his sudden reversal—that the Kennedy campaign had called him on King’s behalf.
Maybe this young man didn’t understand they’d been playing pretty hard politics in Georgia for a while.
* * *
“He has to do this,” Jackie Robinson pleaded. “He has to call Martin right now, today. I have the number of the jail.”
Nixon’s public relations and speechwriting aide William Safire had admired Robinson since he was a kid, watching his feats as a four-sport athlete at UCLA. Safire was sold on what his childhood hero, and crucial campaign surrogate, was telling him: the King matter could no longer wait. He brought him to see the campaign manager, Finch, in the midwestern hotel where the staff was staying. Nixon had stumped in Ohio on Wednesday and in Michigan on Thursday. Finch had also been getting pleas to help King from others around the country who saw him as one of the few ways to reach the candidate before he brought Robinson in to see Nixon.
Jackie Robinson had risked so much for Nixon: his newspaper column, his job, his standing in the civil rights movement. Already aggrieved that Nixon had not backed Lodge’s pledge to appoint the first Black cabinet member—and had then compounded the insult by refusing to campaign in Harlem—he was now angry that Martin Luther King was languishing in jail while his candidate stayed silent. Robinson’s wife, Rachel, had never thought highly of Nixon, and he feared she was being proved right. Knowing that other advisers were, in Robinson’s words, “counseling him not to rock the racial boat,” Robinson understood he was likely to fail. But what these other aides said ultimately did not matter; Nixon was his own adviser. It was his choice.
Only ten minutes later, Robinson walked out of the meeting with Nixon wearing a look of pained frustration; Safire thought he saw tears in his eyes. Robinson bitterly told Safire, “He thinks calling Martin would be ‘grandstanding.’” Hitting the wall against Nixon’s resolute caution, Robinson shook his head, muttering, to Safire’s horror, “Nixon doesn’t deserve to win.”
Nixon would later claim it was all very simple: Attorney General Rogers could not get approval from the White House to make a presidential statement that the administration was looking into King’s case. Nixon said he had asked the attorney general to see if King’s federal civil rights had been violated, and to get the White House involved. But Rogers, for his part, maintained that he had advised Nixon to speak out. Another clue comes from a note in the Nixon Library’s King file. It is not certain who on the campaign it is from but is signed by “R” and reads: “This is too hot for us to handle.”
When Nixon wrote his post-campaign memoir, Six Crises, he placed the blame on the bureaucracy of the Eisenhower White House, likely hoping to win over Black voters in the future. In an interview with Simeon Booker, Nixon continually referred to the White House, leading Booker to believe that he really meant Eisenhower. Perhaps Nixon had expected the president to make a statement about King, but when had the general stepped into the spotlight to speak out about civil rights? Finch would maintain that Nixon tried calling the White House, but “some hang-up occurred someplace.” The “hang-up” was likely in the Nixon camp, perhaps in the candidate’s own heart.
Robinson was tempted to quit the campaign and to speak out against Nixon. But just as he faced this crisis of doubt, he got a call from Branch Rickey, his former Brooklyn Dodgers general manager, who had supported Robinson throughout his t
rying baseball years. When the Republican Rickey heard that the Democrats were asking his star to abandon the GOP, he tracked Robinson down to persuade him to remain on the side of the Republicans. Rickey spoke to Rachel Robinson as well, learning that Bobby Kennedy had called her that morning to see if Robinson would make the switch. Despite her own wariness toward Nixon, she told her husband to keep going.
* * *
That same day, John Calhoun finally heard back from the Nixon campaign. A Republican staffer relayed a simple, chilling message from Nixon: “He said he would lose some black votes, but he’d gain white votes, so he was going to sit it out, and he wouldn’t say anything.”
Nixon would later say he never got any warning about how the King situation could affect his standing with Black voters, but Calhoun remembered being told, “The Vice President got your message … yes, he understands.”
Nonetheless, Calhoun would keep asking for funds to make the case for Nixon to Black voters. Eventually, he secured three hundred dollars to print campaign literature in Atlanta, and he felt confident that he could reach the Black Republicans he knew best. But he would not have the kind of story that Louis Martin could tell his voters—not at all.
Nine Days Page 20