Nine Days

by Paul Kendrick

  Louis Martin, meanwhile, sat thinking of King. He had once talked casually with him in the minister’s small Sunset Avenue home during a three-hour visit to Atlanta in 1964 on political business. He was impressed by the minister’s ability to focus completely on the person before him. When King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Martin spontaneously booked a flight to see the presentation. Invited to a King family reception at their Oslo hotel, he broke into tears listening to Daddy King talk with pride about his son. Unlike his political bosses, who tended to see King as a problem to be handled, to Martin the young minister was “an apostle of love, love for all members of the human family.” Martin worked with the administration to coordinate logistics for the March on Washington and helped arrange the meeting between President Kennedy and the organizers at the White House afterward.

  Martin believed that the Reidsville incident was a “turning point in King’s life.” Yet it was a turning point for many, because before King, “for generations, blacks lived in mortal fear of jail.” No one had seen a leader like him before—how he kept “standing up to them in a manner that had never been done.” Martin thought this was why photographs of King in handcuffs were so affecting: “His ability to turn a jail term into a badge of honor thrilled blacks.”

  Even at this dark moment, Martin refused to submit to despair. True, as he said in a speech soon after, “Our time seems to be out of joint and we live in a worried world. We have troubles abroad and a crisis at our doorstep.” However, he could also see the changes that King had helped to bring about, the way he had managed to shift, as he often said, that great mountain of racism. Martin said later that April, “I feel optimistic. I believe the facts indicate we are moving—however much we might be stumbling—toward a better day.”

  * * *

  At the service, Wofford—thinking back over the thirteen exhilarating, fearful, and triumphant years he had known King—wondered, “How had it all come to this?” A tape of King’s “Drum Major Instinct” sermon, in which he had eerily summed up how he wished his life of service to be remembered, finished playing over the loudspeakers. The casket was brought out through the throng and placed on a rickety wooden wagon, to be drawn by two mules during the four-mile procession. The silence of witnesses gathered ten-deep along the steamy sidewalks was broken only by the muffled clop-clop of the mules’ hooves. Wofford and his daughter, Susanne, found their place near the front of the procession and followed in the midday sun. The rain had evaporated, ushering in a humid Georgia morning that would overwhelm many on the way to the Morehouse campus quadrangle.

  As the celebrated guests emerged from the church, some left immediately, and others fell in line behind the family. Nixon had worked out a plan with his advance man to have a taxi ready so that he could slip out the back at the close of the service, but he had been seated up front. Then, with the other candidates for president within hearing, his supporter Wilt Chamberlain came and placed his hand on his shoulder. “Are you going to march with us?” Nixon looked shocked.

  Though Nixon received occasional heckles, most of the dignitaries were simply absorbed into the thousands about to march behind King’s casket. Standing next to Ethel, pregnant with their eleventh child, Bobby kept his head down, draped his suit jacket over his shoulder, and accepted a cold cola from a bystander. The crowd seemed to stir as he passed, excited by his presence. He was surprised by the reminiscences of King’s friends, who described his sometimes ribald, joshing sense of humor. “I’m afraid I never saw that side of him,” Bobby admitted.

  The great procession, at long last, began to flow. In that Holy Week before Easter, Wofford felt it was right they were all advancing as one: “For Martin King marching was also a form of liturgy—a way of making words become flesh.” He later recalled, “As we moved up a long slope towards Morehouse College, fifteen, twenty abreast, we could look back a mile or so upon a sea of people that stretched beyond the horizon, and memories went back to other marches in Montgomery, Albany, Birmingham, Washington, D.C., Selma, Chicago, rural Mississippi, and Memphis.”

  At a sharp turn, Nixon spied his taxicab waiting down a side street, and he began to move toward an escape. He turned to indicate to Chamberlain that he was going to head to the airport. Chamberlain asked, “Can I get a ride?”

  The Republican candidate tried to detach himself from the march as inconspicuously as he could, though the crowd was perhaps tipped off by the presence of a seven-foot-tall basketball star with him. He and Chamberlain squeezed into a taxi and were gone. It had taken two trips, the result of many changes of mind, but he had done something that might finally put the disquieting shadow of this old relationship with King firmly behind him.

  The vast crowd passed by the famous clock of Rich’s department store before finally converging on the Morehouse quadrangle.

  * * *

  As King’s casket was lowered into the ground at the South-View Cemetery, Abernathy’s benediction could barely be heard over the rain, which had begun again. After five days of chaos in the public eye, at dusk that day the King family was finally allowed some privacy to grieve and retreat to Sunset Avenue. Cameras stopped clicking, reporters left to file stories, and out-of-towners dispersed, heading back to the airport or to hotels.

  Bobby Kennedy gathered his family and staffers that night in his hotel suite after an exhausting day. As he entered the packed room, Wofford felt his faith in Bobby growing—Bobby, the man who had so offended him during their first meeting eleven years earlier and who had excoriated him in front of Louis Martin. All of that seemed unimportant now.

  True, Bobby’s Democratic primary campaign had been chaotic and halting. Kennedy might lose the upcoming Oregon primary to Eugene McCarthy and would still have to overcome Vice President Humphrey, who could swamp him at the upcoming Chicago convention. But this struggle was about more than just winning an election; if King had taught them anything, he had surely taught them that.

  Bobby Kennedy walked up to Wofford, shirtsleeves rolled up, blue eyes hollowed out from exhaustion yet intent. “Could you put things aside and join the campaign in California?”

  * * *

  The term “October surprise” is often associated with Nixon’s own machinations while seeking the presidency. In 1968, Nixon’s lead over Humphrey had evaporated in the closing weeks of the campaign, and he once again faced the prospect of defeat. Nixon also suspected that President Johnson would announce peace talks in Paris to end the Vietnam War in the final days of October. So he set to work, seeking to secretly scuttle the talks and extend the war past Election Day. Johnson suspected Nixon was engaged in near treason, but did not say so publicly. The historian John Farrell recently discovered H. R. Haldeman’s long-lost notes from a late-night call with Nixon in October 1968, during which the candidate ordered his staff to throw a “monkey wrench” into the talks. Little noticed at the time, those same penciled notes contain revelations about Nixon’s true feelings toward the civil rights movement. The moderate Nixon of 1960 was, by 1968, nowhere to be found. In those notes, Nixon instructs Haldeman and his staff to convey to southern politicians that he would, if elected, retreat on civil rights; in fact, he would “lay off pro-Negro crap.”

  After making a bargain with Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina senator who epitomized segregation, Nixon locked arms with him to help him to secure the nomination. Nixon brought together the moderate side of his party with the hard right and mastered the dark art of the racist dog whistle. He believed that words like “law,” “order,” “welfare,” “busing,” “giveaways,” “quotas,” “crime,” and “violence” would resonate with his “silent majority.” As his adviser John Ehrlichman reflected, “Nixon always couched his views in such a way that a citizen could avoid admitting to himself that he was attracted by a racist appeal.” This time there would be no racial moderate like Lodge throwing out promises. Jackie Robinson, never reluctant to state his mind, said, “The GOP didn’t give a damn about my vote or the votes—or welfa
re—of my people.” He came to bitterly regret his campaigning and wrote, “The Richard Nixon I met back in 1960 bore no resemblance to the Richard Nixon as President.”

  In many ways, Nixon’s views and policies created the political realities of today. The arrest of King is not only the fulcrum on which the 1960 election pivoted but the dividing line between a moderate Republican vice president and the president who reshaped a political order that divides us still. Nixon’s intuitive genius for exploiting racial divisions, born in the final stretch of the 1960 election, maintains its hold over us.

  By way of his “southern strategy,” Nixon took America’s explicit rhetoric of racism and smoothed down its rough edges in public so that the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, the party that Frederick Douglass called “the deck, [when] all else is the sea,” could turn the solid Democratic South red by 1972 and keep it that way for decades.

  The 1960 campaign stayed in Nixon’s mind, informing the choices he would later make over the course of a presidency haunted by the past. He never stopped believing that the Kennedys played dirtier than he had in 1960, and he resolved to never be outdone on that front again. Knowing that Lawrence O’Brien, a Kennedy strategist, was head of the DNC at the Watergate office complex ate away at him. Though he was ahead in the polls throughout his 1972 reelection bid, Nixon sank to a level of criminality that would ultimately destroy his presidency. At the worst moment of the impeachment proceedings, wondering if he would go to prison for obstructing justice, Nixon remarked, “The best political writing in this century has been done from jail.” One wonders if he thought, however uncharacteristically, of King.

  * * *

  Of all the October surprises over the years, the arrest of Martin Luther King was a singular occurrence. The distribution of the Blue Bomb remains an enviable campaign feat. There was certainly some amount of subterfuge involved—Kennedy’s manipulation of Vandiver, and Stewart’s coaxing of Mitchell—but the Kennedy campaign’s response to the crisis, especially the actions of Wofford, Martin, and Shriver, was imbued by a true surprise for the standards of politics: an uncommon sense of decency. Years later, Wofford said that Shriver, more than anyone he had ever known (other than Barack Obama, who was assigned the old Senate seat where Wofford sat after he was elected to that body in 1991), should have been president. And he would smile when recalling Louis Martin, thinking of how much fun they had together.

  The reality of King’s travails throughout the 1960s, however, was altogether harsher. King was certain of one thing: that suffering need not be meaningless, that it could be redemptive. During one march in the midst of his Chicago campaign, he was struck in the head by a rock, causing him to stagger, but he kept walking. He said, “I have to do this—to expose myself—to bring this hate into the open.” He said repeatedly over a decade that he had no instinct for martyrdom, that he wanted to live a full life, but that he knew something dark in American life was going to claim him. When a filmmaker asked King how a movie about him would end, King replied, “It ends with me getting killed.”

  When King was at the height of his powers, on the verge of that transformational year of 1963, when he triumphed in Birmingham and channeled that momentum into the March on Washington, his friend James Baldwin published a short but powerful letter to his teenage nephew, which he titled “My Dungeon Shook.” Baldwin offered a lacerating assessment of what had been done to Black Americans and where they found themselves. He told his nephew, “The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.” Baldwin reminded him that part of the tradition from “whence you come” consists of poets who sang the great spirituals: “One of them said, The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off.”

  The lines quoted by Baldwin—the “dungeon shook”—are found in at least three “sorrow songs” (as W. E. B. Du Bois and Howard Thurman called them): “I Am Free” (“Remember the day, I remember it well”), “You Got a Right” (“We all got a right to the tree of life”), and “Free at Last,” the spiritual invoked by King in the conclusion of his “I Have a Dream” speech. King knew that dungeons were often mentioned in the Bible (twenty-two times, in fact) and that they represent more than a simple jail cell: a dungeon is a dark place designed to crush the soul. King declared during his Chicago campaign that “jail cells are not dungeons of shame, they are havens of freedom and human dignity.” To King, who evoked the image of a dungeon many times, it was not just a preacher’s metaphor; it signified something bitterly real. It was a phrase he would use over and over in the eight years after Reidsville—each time real, each time shaken.

  Though Andrew Young, a future mayor of Atlanta, was not yet on King’s staff at the time of the Reidsville incident, he was one of the few people King ever talked with about those hours riding to the prison. Young recounted, “He shared very little; that was unusual because he talked constantly about other tragic things. He used to laugh and tell jokes about being stabbed in Harlem, and he used to talk about when people came to his house with guns.” But his transfer to Reidsville? “It was the thing he talked about least, and I decided that was probably the time when he came close to a nervous breakdown. He thought he was going to his death; it was probably when he decided he would not live a long and comfortable life.” Young traced King’s “paralyzing fear of being alone in jail” back to Reidsville, writing, “Martin’s sojourn at the Reidsville prison brought out the best in John Kennedy, but it left scars on Martin that never healed.”

  When Young heard of the South African activist Steve Biko’s death in police custody seventeen years later, he thought of how King’s ride to Reidsville could well have ended the same way. The prison was nothing less than “an old Christian idea of the dark night of the soul: the moment of ultimate despair and hopelessness, and you almost have to go through that to find faith.” After Reidsville, Young thought King understood that his life “was going to be one challenge and confrontation after another, and in a way he sort of became comfortable with the idea of his own death after that. He would tell me, ‘Oh yeah, you all don’t know what it is to be at the door of death.’”

  During their late-night conversations, Young realized that Reidsville “was crucial to his decision to push ahead regardless; I think he kind of made that decision that night.”

  * * *

  Shriver had imagined that he would continue his political career in Illinois after helping the new administration during the transition, but the chance to found the Peace Corps became the greatest challenge of his life. He overcame his brother-in-law’s skepticism and made the Corps into one of the most enduring accomplishments of Kennedy’s short-lived administration. Johnson made full use of Shriver as well, conscripting him to take on the superhuman assignment of running his War on Poverty while continuing to lead the Peace Corps. Working sixteen-hour days for the next four years, Shriver created programs like Head Start, Job Corps, Legal Services, and VISTA.

  Shriver’s aspiration to hold elected office was always thwarted. Vice President Humphrey nearly picked Shriver as his running mate in 1968. By the time George McGovern selected Shriver to be the vice presidential nominee in his campaign against Nixon in 1972, the race had already been lost. Shriver ran for the presidency himself in 1976 but fared poorly, doomed by perceptions that the era of vigorous liberalism he personified was over. His biographer Scott Stossel writes that “a good case can be made that Shriver, through the programs he started and ran, and through the generation of public servants he inspired, may have positively affected more people around the world than any twentieth-century American who was not a President or other major elected official or Martin Luther King.” Seeing Shriver only as the embodiment of Great Society liberalism is to miss his true impact. His influence remained creative and effectiv
e. With Eunice, he nurtured a small initiative serving a thousand special needs children into the worldwide Special Olympics.

  * * *

  Louis Martin was both a masterful insider and someone willing to be, in Bobby’s words, a “bomb thrower.” When King’s Birmingham campaign was playing out, Martin told the president during a cabinet meeting, “We need dramatic action understood by Negroes as clearly as the picture from Birmingham of Negroes being attacked by police dogs.” That was the day Martin believed Kennedy made up his mind to move on civil rights legislation. When a Department of Justice adviser proposed removing public accommodation protections from civil rights legislation during a meeting in Bobby’s office in 1963, Martin told the staffers about an Italian restaurant up in Silver Spring turning away Black customers. Martin said, “If one of my daughters got turned down there, I’d shoot him. And I’m an old man, and if I feel like shooting someone or throwing a rock, what do you think about Negros who aren’t trained?” To the shocked faces, Martin said, “I’m telling you, that public accommodation bill has got to go in there, or we’re going to have one hell of a war in this country.” The protections remained part of the final bill.