Parting the Waters (150 page)

King was determined to resist President Kennedy's personal order to banish Levison. Clearly, since he could not fire someone who did not work for him, Kennedy's demand meant that the Administration laid claim to govern not only King's hiring practices but also his friendships and contacts—even the advice he could seek and the words he could hear. This amounted to thought control, managed by the obsessively narrow-minded J. Edgar Hoover. For King, who labored to maintain a receptive spirit of
agape
toward his bitterest enemies in civil rights, few prospects were more repugnant than shunning a dear friend as unfit for human contact.

His first line of defense was the proof. In July, King sent word that he would take no action until the Administration delivered the evidence promised by President Kennedy in the Rose Garden. This notice put Robert Kennedy and Burke Marshall into a stall, as they could not fulfill the promise to King without violating their duty to protect Hoover's secrets. Paralyzed, having to accept Hoover's word themselves, they expected King to accept it too, but finally, after several postponements, Burke Marshall agreed to meet Andrew Young at the Federal Courthouse in New Orleans. When Young arrived, Marshall guided him into a hallway for security against unseen spies, then delivered an earnest question in place of the long-awaited evidence. “Do you know who Colonel Rudolf Abel is?” asked Marshall. He explained that Abel was the highest-ranking KGB officer ever convicted of espionage.
*
If Young knew who Abel was, Marshall added significantly, then he knew Stanley Levison. Marshall said he could divulge no more, but that the message to Dr. King was clear: Levison was a man like Colonel Abel.

King and his advisers were not sure how to interpret this communication. Could Marshall really be saying that Stanley Levison was a Russian, insinuated into the United States years ago by Stalin or Beria? If so, why was the government negotiating his “punishment” with Martin Luther King? Could Marshall really believe such a thing himself? For King, who had received an escalating series of excuses and hair-raising new charges for more than two years, this round cracked any lingering faith in the oracles of national security. If Stalin had invented a puppet named Stanley Levison, joked King and his aides, the monstrous dictator should be credited with a service to humanity. Later, Harry Wachtel and others gave Levison the private nickname “Colonel,” in mock tribute to the superspy Colonel Abel.

This was hardly the first time that something ridiculous from the white world had caused pain or obliged King to devise a soberly respectful strategy in opposition. What the “Colonel Abel” message meant, it seemed, was that the Kennedys either believed J. Edgar Hoover or felt they had no choice but to submit to him. King preferred to concentrate on the latter interpretation, recalling President Kennedy's talk of omniscient surveillance and his hints of political blackmail. On this theory, he fashioned a tactical compromise that he hoped the Kennedys could use to mollify the FBI Director.

King sent Clarence Jones to present his plan to the Administration on July 16. Privately, in Burke Marshall's office, Jones gave a lawyerly cast to what was essentially a groping response. He said he was assuming that the root of the problem was political, because otherwise the government's criminal prosecutors and espionage experts could take care of it themselves. Therefore, said Jones, King was willing to take steps to reduce the Administration's political vulnerability to segregationists and others who might distort the Communist issue. Specifically, King would stop communicating directly with Stanley Levison. That way, whoever was eavesdropping on the movement would not pick up the conversations which, by President Kennedy's account to Dr. King, were triggering the accusations of subversion. While he was willing to impose this sacrifice upon Levison and himself, Jones continued, King wanted the Administration to understand that he had received no legitimate reason to stop communicating altogether with Levison, toward whom he maintained full confidence and affection. King reserved the right to exchange ideas with Levison indirectly, through intermediaries such as Jones.

Jones intimated to Marshall that the plan would work better if the government could suggest which indirect channels might be used safely. Specifically, Jones said he had reservations about talking on the telephone with Levison. Marshall, correctly interpreting this as an effort to find out which telephones were wiretapped, ignored the hints and merely stressed that all parties “had no choice” but to make sure that King broke off contact with Levison. Jones took Marshall's enigmatic pronouncements as a grudging acceptance of the compromise, but this reading proved to be woefully optimistic. When Marshall told Robert Kennedy that Jones expected him to conspire with King to circumvent the FBI, Kennedy responded with calculated fury. That very afternoon, Kennedy told the FBI he wanted to supplement the Levison surveillance with wiretaps on Martin Luther King
and
Clarence Jones.

Kennedy's resentments overflowed for at least three reasons. First, Jones's timing could not have been worse. Over the past four days, Governors Barnett and Wallace had attracted national headlines by attacking the Administration on the subversion issue: “Barnett Charges Kennedys Assist Red Racial Plot,” announced
The New York Times
. In Senate testimony against the new civil rights bill, both governors had displayed a poster-sized photograph of King addressing the 1957 convention at Highlander Folk School, which they identified as a “Communist training school.” Barnett said he knew that the FBI had information on “the real motivation” of civil rights leaders, and he challenged the senators to ask the FBI about the photograph. Wallace introduced for the Senate record a news article quoting Karl Prussion, a self-described “FBI counterspy of 22 years' experience,” to the effect that King belonged to more Communist organizations than any man in the United States.

Just that morning, Kennedy and Burke Marshall had made an emergency call to their FBI liaison, Courtney Evans, giving him less than an hour to identify Myles Horton and several others who appeared with King in the Highlander picture. Senators were asking whether the Highlander photograph really proved that King had been trained as a Communist, and the Attorney General urgently needed the information in time for a scheduled appearance on Capitol Hill. The Bureau had met the deadline with a factually truthful report. Highlander was not a Communist training school, Evans told Kennedy, but it advocated racial brotherhood and at times had allowed individual Communists on the premises. King had not been “trained” at Highlander—he had visited there only once, to make a speech. As to the photograph, Evans reported that none of those shown with King was a Communist except for Abner Berry, a Negro correspondent for the old
Daily Worker
. Evans left to Kennedy the unenviable task of explaining to senators and reporters whether all this meant that King was mixed up with Communists or not. This siege put Kennedy in no mood to hear from Marshall that King wanted his permission to keep associating indirectly with Stanley Levison, a man Hoover flatly described as a top-echelon Communist agent.

A second negative factor was the intermediary. Kennedy remembered Clarence Jones as the one who, though he could have come to his defense, had sat silently through his verbal stoning at the James Baldwin meeting in May. That experience, plus the FBI report he had since received, fixed Jones in Kennedy's mind as a suspicious character—elegant, manipulative, married to a wealthy white woman. In his subsequent oral history, Kennedy stressed the mixed marriage as a sign of instability, describing both Jones and Harry Belafonte as questionable types animated by guilt and beguiled by celebrity glitter and wealth. Having marked Jones as a clan enemy, Kennedy rewarded his overture with a wiretap instead of a favor.

A third inflammatory reality lay coiled in Marshall's report: Clarence Jones was letting it be known that President Kennedy had warned King of FBI surveillance. The spread of such information could endanger the President himself. Already Jones knew, and had told Marshall. If Jones talked to Levison over the FBI wiretap, then reports of President Kennedy's warning to King would circle back into the FBI's files. No doubt the Attorney General realized that his brother had mentioned the surveillance for good reason on that Saturday in the Rose Garden, meaning to intimidate King with the powers of an omniscient FBI. Still, the President's disclosure might be construed as a serious breach of security that compromised the FBI's effort to control subversion. This was the last thing Robert Kennedy wanted, now that leaks and innuendo from FBI files already were tilting the unstable center of public opinion on civil rights. The Attorney General did not seriously worry that Hoover would accuse a sitting President of treachery, as he once had accused ex-president Truman, but it was not farfetched to imagine a defter, less confrontational leak (“President Told King to Ditch Reds”) that would undermine the Administration.

Kennedy did not advertise this political danger even to Marshall, in whom he placed full trust. In this Machiavellian intrigue, the Attorney General saw his core function as the protection of his brother, and this was best done alone. He waited until Marshall left to call Courtney Evans, and never afterward did he tell Marshall of his fateful step. By ordering wiretaps on Jones and King, Kennedy signaled Hoover that he was standing with the FBI's interpretation of the Levison matter rather than King's. He told Evans that the new surveillance would help ensure that King had no contact whatsoever with Levison, direct or indirect.

The order stunned Evans. Normally wiretap requests were initiated within the Bureau and forwarded to the Attorney General for disposition. This one came suddenly the other way. “I told the AG,” Evans reported back to the Bureau,

Hoover's formal requests for the two wiretap authorizations went to Attorney General Kennedy within a week. This was fast, eager work by the Bureau. Upon completion of security checks and a small mound of paperwork, Hoover notified Kennedy on July 22 that the FBI could wiretap Clarence Jones at his law firm, his home, and at the Gandhi Society. Early the next morning, FBI couriers rushed the wiretap request on King to the Attorney General, although headquarters had received only preliminary assurance from the Atlanta office that the taps were technically feasible. What required the extra day after the Jones request, most likely, was deliberation over a unique loophole phrase. Hoover asked for written authority to wiretap King “at his current residence or at any future address to which he may move.” The key word here was “address.” An “address” was not necessarily a residence, nor a “move” more permanent than an overnight stay. If the Attorney General truly wanted “complete coverage” on a moving target such as King, then perhaps he would authorize the FBI to install short-order surveillances in hotel rooms and guest houses—wherever King went.

Kennedy signed the authorization for the three taps on Jones, but he brooded over the King request for the better part of two days. He was wavering. In a decision of this magnitude, he had to consider not only his relations with Hoover and King but also the risk of public revelation. Externally, the political equation was shifting every day. In the short time since the Attorney General had set this tap in motion, President Kennedy had refuted charges of racial subversion by the “few remaining Communists” at a televised news conference, labeling such talk a “scapegoat” search by fearful segregationists, and
Newsweek
had published a bold special issue entitled “The Negro in America.” Among its splashy revelations was a feature entitled “The Big Man Is Martin Luther King,” and a nationwide poll showing that King commanded the support of 88 percent of American Negroes. Similarly, the
Newsweek
poll revealed that since the introduction of the civil rights bill, Negro voters favored President Kennedy by an astonishing 30 to 1 over any Republican opponent.

The Attorney General was straddling a thin line. On the one hand, he wanted to protect the Administration against charges of being soft on communism. On the other hand, he did not want to give the FBI license to attack the civil rights bill and the Administration's base of Negro support. No one knows how candidly Courtney Evans spoke to him about the dangerous wording of the King authorization. (In later years, almost visibly crushed by the open hostility between the Kennedy and FBI forces, Evans would give testimony of zombielike vagueness on these issues, altogether avoiding the thick layers of innuendo.) By now, Kennedy knew that no move in this tangle was simple or discrete; each caused a host of adjustments, none more than this one. If he signed the line marked “Approved” and returned the King authorization to the FBI, he would give Hoover an irrevocable, written endorsement of the suspicions Hoover had lodged against King's civil rights movement.

On July 25, Kennedy released a letter in response to the public charges of communism in the civil rights movement. He invoked the authority of the FBI files behind his assertion that no leader, including King, was a Communist or “Communist controlled.” By careful wording, he did not rule out Communist influence or inspiration, as such assurance might have pushed Hoover to public revolt. Kennedy may have concluded that it made no sense to exonerate King and order his phones tapped on the same day. For whatever combination of reasons, the Attorney General decided that the Jones wiretap was enough for now. He returned the King authorization unsigned, which set off a silent wail of disappointment in the Bureau.