Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (34 page)

By 6:30 the crowds outside grew so unruly that hospital officials, fearing a riot, requested more police to set up barricades. Only the closest of King's staff--Young, Bevel, Chauncey Eskridge--were able to enter the facility. A resourceful reporter for the
Commercial Appeal
, realizing he was following one of the biggest stories of his career, suddenly complained of chest pains--"I think I'm having a heart attack!" he moaned--and gained admittance to the ER.

In the waiting room, Andy Young sat
³⁹⁰
with his head in his hands, and an FBI agent paced the corridors. Eskridge leaned on the wall in the waiting room and said, "Why, why would anybody want to do this? I just don't understand it." Young found a phone booth down the hall and called Coretta, not knowing that Jackson had just reached her from the Lorraine. She was hurriedly packing, planning to hop on the next flight to Memphis. A television newscast droned somewhere in the background of the King home.

Young disabused her of the hopeful idea that King was merely shot in the shoulder. "The
neck,"
³⁹¹
Young corrected her. "It's very serious. But he's not dead, Coretta. He's not dead."

"I understand," Coretta said again--Young thought she sounded "almost serene." She was scheduled to depart Atlanta on the 8:25 flight, she told him.

"All right," Young replied. "We'll be looking for you at the airport. But, Coretta, bring someone with you."

She said she would--in fact, Ivan Allen, the mayor of Atlanta, had offered to drive her to the airport, and Dora McDonald, King's personal secretary, was ready to fly with her to Memphis. Hanging up the beige receiver,
³⁹²
she turned to Yolanda, Dexter, and Marty, who'd been trying to follow the conversation. Coretta opened her mouth to speak, but Yoki, as Yolanda was nicknamed, cupped her hands over her ears and ran out of the room, screaming, "Don't tell me! Don't tell me!"

Coretta gathered her two boys in her arms and took a deep breath. "Your father--there's been an accident."
³⁹³

JESSE JACKSON EMERGED from his room at the Lorraine and, looking deeply distracted and in disarray, roamed about the courtyard in the swirling lights of the squad cars.

"I need to see Dr. King!"
³⁹⁴
Jackson yelled impatiently to someone off in the distance. "Can I get a ride to the hospital to see Dr. King?" He saw a gaggle of reporters attempting to interview the musician Ben Branch. "Don't talk to them!" Jackson yelled. Branch agreed, thinking Jackson meant that they should all decline interviews until Abernathy and Young returned from the hospital. They, after all, had been closest to King and had seen the most. Branch told the reporters, "No comment," and walked away.

A few minutes later one of the television crews spotted Jackson. "Jesse? Reverend?" a reporter said. "Could you tell us just what happened, please?"

Jackson demurred at first--"Can you excuse us, Jack? Can it wait a little while?"--but the reporter persisted. "Would you tell me just what happened so we can get this film in, please?"

Finally Jackson relented. More than anyone else in the SCLC (aside from King himself), the twenty-six-year-old Jackson was a natural before the klieg lights, and when the cameras began to whir, he brightened just a little. "The black people's leader," he began, "our Moses, the once in a 500-year leader, has been taken from us. Even as I stand at this hour, I cannot allow hate to enter my heart at this time, for it was sickness, not meanness, that killed him. The pathology and the neurosis of Memphis, and of this racist society in which we live, is what pulled the trigger. To some extent Dr. King has been a buffer the last few years between the black community and the white community. The white people don't know it, but the white people's best friend is dead."

When the reporter pressed him for details about what happened at the Lorraine immediately after the shot, Jackson replied, "People were, uh, some were in pandemonium, some in shock, some were hollering, '
Oh God.'
And uh ..."

He glanced off camera and hesitated a moment. Perhaps the stress of the tragedy was getting the better of him, or perhaps he sensed an opportunity, but at this point Jackson began to spin a small fiction that would grow in the days ahead, one in which he imagined himself playing the approximate role that Abernathy had in fact played on the balcony. "And I immediately started running upstairs to where he was," Jackson said. "And I caught his head.
³⁹⁵
And I tried to feel his head. I asked him, 'Dr. King, do you hear me? Dr. King, do you hear me?' And he didn't say anything. And I tried to--to
hold his head
. But by then ..."

The SCLC staffer Hosea Williams glanced from his room window and saw Jackson speaking to the press. Curious, he wandered out to the courtyard and listened. Jackson's account gave Williams pause, because in all the confusion he couldn't remember Jackson ever getting near the fallen King, let alone cradling his head in his arms. Some people at the Lorraine couldn't remember seeing Jackson at all after the shot was fired, while others said he'd hidden somewhere behind the swimming pool's privacy wall until the ambulance arrived.

Williams was thus already suspicious when he thought he heard Jackson tell the television reporter, "Yes, I was the last man in the world King spoke to."

It's possible that the older and more seasoned Williams felt a stab of jealousy over the brazen way in which the young Jackson assumed the limelight. But the baldness of this apparent lie so infuriated Williams that he climbed over a railing and pushed his way toward him, yelling, "You dirty, stinking, lying ...!"
³⁹⁶
People standing around the Lorraine had to physically restrain him to keep him from assaulting Jackson. "I was gonna stomp him in the ground!" Williams fumed.

Even as King clung to life in the hospital, internecine dissension seethed in the ranks; the young Turks were beginning to fight for proximity, real or imagined, to the heat of the drama. "It's a helluva thing
³⁹⁷
to capitalize on, especially one you profess to love," Williams later told a reporter. "The only person who cradled Dr. King was Abernathy. I have no hang-ups about Jesse talking to the press. But,
why lie?"

The conflict with Williams seemed to rattle Jackson. He told another SCLC staffer that he was sick and had decided to leave for Chicago later that night. "This whole thing's
³⁹⁸
really shot my nerves," Jackson said, noting that he planned to check in to a hospital back home.

Yet his account was already gaining purchase in the media, and his star as King's logical successor was beginning to rise. As the NBC correspondent David Burrington
³⁹⁹
reported from the Lorraine, only minutes later: "The Reverend Jesse Jackson of Chicago, one of King's closest aides, was beside him when he was shot while standing on a veranda outside his motel room."

INSIDE THE St. Joseph's ER, the attending doctors could tell that King's heart was faltering. At 6:45 p.m., Dr. Ted Galyon ordered a medical technician to wire King's bare chest to an EKG machine. The heartbeat was desperately weak--the electric needle scratched languid zigzags across the slow-spooling paper. Dr. Galyon requested an Adrenalin injection directly into the heart muscle, while another physician initiated closed-chest cardiac massage--using the heels of his hands to rhythmically knead the lower sternum. High along King's rib cage, right beside his breastbone, the doctors could see an impressive old scar--the cross-shaped wound left from the surgery King had undergone in 1958 to remove the letter opener the demented lady had plunged into his chest at the book signing in Harlem.

King did not react to the resuscitative efforts now under way, and when a doctor shone a bright penlight in his eyes, his pupils were massively dilated and unresponsive. One of the surgeons, shaking his head, turned and spoke under his breath to Ralph Abernathy and Bernard Lee. "He won't make it,"
⁴⁰⁰
he said.

Abernathy looked dazed and puzzled. "Then why are they all still in here?" he replied, casting his eye over the busy team of physicians, nurses, and orderlies.

The doctor said gently, "With somebody as well-known and important as Dr. King, you try everything. But nothing's going to work now."

The doctors continued to massage King's heart for more than fifteen minutes, but the EKG needle stopped scribbling altogether. The tape emerging from the machine showed no cardiac function at all. The same doctor came over to Abernathy and Lee again and said, "He's going. If you'd like to spend a few last moments with him, you can have them now."

Abernathy took King in his arms and held him. His breathing was "nothing more than prolonged shudders,"
⁴⁰¹
Abernathy said. "The breaths came farther and farther apart. Then, a pause came that lengthened until I knew it would never end."

Dr. Jerome Barrasso entered the room and at 7:05 p.m. pronounced Martin Luther King dead.

Abernathy joined hospital officials outside in making a brief statement to Memphis, and the world. As they did so, the St. Joseph's chaplain, Father Coleman Bergard, was summoned to the emergency room. Following the hospital's protocol, Bergard leaned over the body and gave conditional absolution, praying for the soul of Martin Luther King.

Then, gently, Father Bergard closed King's eyes.
⁴⁰²

IN ATLANTA, KING'S parents listened to the radio
⁴⁰³
at Ebenezer Baptist Church. They knew their son had been shot and seriously wounded, but they still held out hope. Martin Luther King Sr. had a little radio set up near his desk in his upstairs study. As he prayed aloud, Alberta King cried in silence. She had grown up in Ebenezer and had been the church's organist since 1932; Ebenezer was her home, and her sanctuary, the best possible place for her to be in such a crisis.
"Lord, let him live, let him live!
" King senior moaned as the minutes drained away.

Then the somber bulletin came over the airwaves. King turned to his wife, but neither said a word. For years they had feared the coming of news like this--its possibility had lurked behind every late-night phone call, behind every startling noise. Daddy King recognized that in the face of concerted evil, his son had nowhere to hide. "No matter how much protection
⁴⁰⁴
a person has, it will not be enough if the enemy is hatred," he would write. His son's fate, he realized, had been sealed years earlier. "To avoid it was impossible, even as avoiding the coming of darkness in the evening."

The Kings held each other in the study and tried to absorb the blow. Mrs. King recalled her conversation with both her sons earlier in the day, how from the motel room in Memphis they had teased her by each pretending to be the other. It had meant so much to her to hear from them, to know they were together and safe.

Daddy King removed his glasses, and the tears coursed down his cheeks, toward his gray-flecked mustache. "I always felt I would go first," he said over and over. He could only think of his son as a child, growing up, like his mother before him, in this very church, his young life revolving around Ebenezer. "My first son,
⁴⁰⁵
whose birth had brought me such joy that I jumped up in the hall outside the room where he was born and touched the ceiling--the child, the scholar, the boy singing and smiling--all of it was gone. And Ebenezer was so quiet; all through the church, the tears flowed, but almost completely in silence."