Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (22 page)

"Memphis," he said, "is the Washington campaign in miniature."
²⁶⁸
They had no choice. They
had
to go back there before they could go anywhere else. "The Movement lives or dies in Memphis," he said.

The staff would not relent. As far as most of his advisers were concerned, both Memphis
and
Washington were mistakes.

King finally lost patience with his staff. They were too impressed with themselves, too full of private ambition. He was especially angry with Jesse Jackson, who seemed to be trying to create his own fiefdom in Chicago. "You guys come up
²⁶⁹
with your projects," King said, "and you always pull me in. If I sensed that this was important to the movement and to you, it always had my full support. Now, I'm not getting
your
full support. Now that I want you to come back to Memphis to help me, everyone is too busy."

Finally he turned to Abernathy. "Ralph, give me my car keys.
²⁷⁰
I'm getting out of here."

Abernathy looked puzzled. During the conversation, he'd been playing with King's keys on the table, and he'd absentmindedly stuffed them in his pocket. Now he handed them over, and King stormed down the hall toward the stairs.

Abernathy followed him. "Martin," Ralph said. "What's bugging you?"

"Ralph, I'll snap out of it. Didn't I snap out of it yesterday?"

"Will you let me know where you'll be?"

King didn't answer.

Then Jesse Jackson tried to follow King down the stairs. "Doc, don't worry," he said. "Everything's going to be all right."

King paused on the landing and wheeled on Jackson. "Jesse," he said. "Everything's
not
going to be all right.
²⁷¹
If things keep going the way they're going now, it's not just the SCLC but the whole country that's in trouble. If you're so interested in doing your own thing that you can't do what this organization's structured to do, if you want to carve out your own niche in society, go ahead. But for God's sake, don't bother me!"

Jackson stood speechless as King climbed in his car and took off, leaving the staff flummoxed and heartsick. Abernathy tried to pick up the pieces. "The leader is confused,"
²⁷²
he said somberly. "He's under great stress. We need to rally around him in this difficult time." What happened in Memphis had shaken him to the core. He was experiencing a spiritual crisis. They had no choice now--they
all
had to go back to Memphis and make things right.

Everyone in the room agreed. "We had never seen Martin
²⁷³
explode that way, not with us," recalled Andrew Young. "After he left, people were so stunned they finally began to listen. Finally, the team of wild horses was one."

They talked about Memphis. They would send some of their best people ahead of King to work with the Invaders and plan every aspect of the march. They would give King everything he wanted.

The transformation was so complete that some board members thought the Holy Spirit had been in the room. There were war whoops and hallelujahs.
²⁷⁴
Andrew Young danced a little jig. Out of dissension, a consensus had formed.

Yet for several long hours they couldn't locate King to tell him the good news. What he did during his absence remains a mystery. Some said he met one of his mistresses
²⁷⁵
in an apartment hideaway. Others said he conferred with his father, Martin Luther King Sr.--Daddy King, as he was known. Still others said he experienced a kind of Gethsemane moment, a period of private doubt and soul-searching in some favorite place of seclusion.

When he showed up late that afternoon, King was immensely relieved to hear the staff had come together. He now had to pack for a quick trip to Washington--he was giving an important sermon the next day. When he returned, his time and energies would be focused on one place: Memphis.

AT SHORTLY AFTER eleven o'clock the following morning, King stepped into the grand white pulpit of the Washington National Cathedral. Cloaked in black clerical robes, he seemed to have emerged from the depths of the previous day's despair. He addressed an integrated crowd of more than three thousand worshippers packed inside the vast Gothic hall. A thousand more were gathered on the grounds outside, listening to a public address system. It would be King's last formal sermon.

King spoke in fulminous tones about Vietnam, calling it "one of the most unjust wars
²⁷⁶
in the history of the world." The conflict has "strengthened the military-industrial complex, it has strengthened the forces of reaction in our nation, it has played havoc with our domestic destinies, and it has put us in a position of appearing to the world as an arrogant nation."

The central theme of the sermon was poverty in America--and the moral imperative to address it. "Ultimately," he said, "a great nation is a compassionate nation. But America has not met her obligations to the poor." He likened poverty in America to "a monstrous octopus, spreading its nagging, prehensile tentacles." In recent months, he'd been to Appalachia, he said, and to the ghettos of Newark and Harlem, and to many other impoverished places in America where he'd seen conditions so squalid that "I must confess I have literally found myself crying." He told the crowd that in Marks, Mississippi, in the nation's poorest county, he'd seen so much hunger on the faces of sharecroppers there that he concluded something radical had to be done to acquaint the nation's leaders with the ravages of systemic, multigenerational poverty.

"We are coming to Washington in a Poor People's Campaign," he vowed. He would bring an army of people from all races and backgrounds, people "who have come to feel that life is a long and desolate corridor with no exit signs, people who have never seen a doctor or a dentist in their lives." Although King said that the members of his Poor People's Army "do not seek to tear up Washington," they will nevertheless engage in what he called "traumatic nonviolent action." Fighting would accomplish nothing--not in Memphis, not in Washington, not in Vietnam. "We must learn to live together as brothers," he said, "or we will perish together as fools." Nothing will ever be done about poverty in America "until people of goodwill put their hearts and souls in motion."

Afterward, King held a brief press conference in which he said outright that he could not support President Johnson for reelection. "I see an alternative
²⁷⁷
in Senator McCarthy and Senator Kennedy," he said, and though he had already privately concluded that Kennedy was the better choice, he stopped short of making an endorsement. As in Memphis, reporters pressed him to make a pronouncement on the prospect for riots over the summer. "I don't like to predict violence," King replied, "but if nothing is done between now and June to raise ghetto hope, I feel this summer will be not only as bad, but worse, than last year." This would be terrible, not only for the ghettos, but for the very health of American democracy. "We cannot stand two more summers like last summer without leading inevitably to a rightwing takeover and a fascist state."

What would it take for you to call off your Poor People's Campaign?
one journalist asked.
What would Congress or the president have to do?

King said he would gladly cancel the whole demonstration if Congress would adopt the recommendations recently proposed by the Kerner Commission, a bipartisan body that had made a thorough study of the riots in Watts, Newark, Detroit, and other cities. But King saw little cause for optimism. "I would be glad
²⁷⁸
to talk to President Johnson or anyone else," King said. "We're always willing to negotiate."

AT THAT MOMENT, President Johnson was decidedly not in the mood to negotiate with Martin Luther King. Johnson was only a few miles away at the White House, planning an important speech he would give that night on national television. The address was primarily about Vietnam, but Johnson was toying with the idea of tacking on a bombshell at the end. He was thinking about announcing to the nation that he was withdrawing from the 1968 presidential race.

For months, Johnson had been secretly thinking of leaving office at term's end. There were many reasons for this, but the truth was he'd become miserable in the White House. He'd been having nightmares about his health. His Gallup approval rating had plummeted to 36 percent. He had enemies on all sides. Trying to describe the White House mood, Lady Bird Johnson paraphrased Yeats: "A miasma of trouble hangs over everything."

Vietnam, the war that King so stridently criticized, lay at the center of Johnson's woes. The quagmire in Southeast Asia had become the president's obsession. It occupied most of his time and energy, and it hogged so much national treasure that he could no longer pursue the Great Society programs he had once doted on. Besieged by war critics, Johnson had become paranoid, distrustful of old friends, imprisoned in the office he once loved.

He wanted out.

"I felt that I was being chased
²⁷⁹
on all sides by a giant stampede coming at me from all directions," he later told the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. "Rioting blacks, demonstrating students, marching welfare mothers, squawking professors, and hysterical reporters. And then the final straw. The thing I feared from the first day of my Presidency was actually coming true. Robert Kennedy had openly announced his intention to reclaim the throne in the memory of his brother. And the American people, swayed by the magic of the name, were dancing in the streets."

Relinquishing power went against every grain of Johnson's being. Yet he had a hunch that by stepping down now, he could regain political capital and close out his term with a measure of grace, perhaps devoting his final months to extricating the country from Vietnam. It would be a retreat with honor, a magnanimous exit. His speechwriters composed two endings for that night's speech, and it was up to Johnson to decide which one to use.

The president spent the afternoon and early evening fretting over what to do. By dinnertime, no one, not even Johnson, was certain which ending he would pick. At 9:00, he went on the air. For twenty-five minutes, Johnson spoke of Vietnam and his desire for peace. He was halting the bombing over most of North Vietnam, he said, and was now proposing serious talks with Ho Chi Minh.

Then, with a change in tone that caught millions of viewers off guard, the president stared straight into the teleprompter. "With the world's hopes
²⁸⁰
for peace in the balance every day," he said, "I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President."

When the address was over, a euphoric Johnson leaped from his chair and bounded from the Oval Office to be with his family. "His air was that of a prisoner let free,"
²⁸¹
the First Lady wrote. "We were all fifty pounds lighter and ever so much more lookin' forward to the future."

The president described his mood this way: "I never felt so right
²⁸²
about any decision in my life."

18
TARGET PRACTICE AT SHILOH