Parting the Waters (160 page)

While King was in Selma, Robert Kennedy went before the full House Judiciary Committee to ask for the deletion of strengthening amendments that had been added to the civil rights bill in subcommittee. For this he was roundly denounced not only by Roy Wilkins but by liberal Republicans, who complained that Kennedy, unable to deliver the votes of his own party, was pleading for bipartisan support while stripping out the few amendments for which Republicans could claim credit. The legislative tangle was a cartoonist's cloud of flying fists. Politicians claimed they needed a weaker bill now to get a stronger one later, and vice versa. Jujitsu effects were calculated out to the third and fourth degree, as charges of posturing competed with pronouncements of political genius. “For an understanding of this bizarre battle,” declared
The New York Times
, “it is helpful to look both backward and forward.”

 

Stanley Levison gradually deepened his involvement in King's Birmingham book. At first he had made awkward excuses when King's agent and publishers asked why he had dropped out of the editing process, but when they complained that Al Duckett's revisions were unsatisfactory, Levison found another writer. Upon new complaints about the revisions, Levison agreed that the second writer made the “fatal mistake” of “talking down to the readers.” By then, the publishers were exerting pressure to get the book done quickly, fearing that public appreciation for the Birmingham story had faded already. King's agent, Joan Daves, told Levison that Clarence Jones was ineffective as King's editorial go-between. Levison worked on the manuscript himself while finding a third writer. Through Jones, he sent word to King that the book was hostage to continuing events in the movement. If King pulled out of Birmingham for Danville, Levison warned, he could not expect readers to get excited about the watershed events of the previous spring. King would come off “like a child who can't finish something and moves on to some other game.” By October, Levison had had more than one direct talk with King about the manuscript. He stopped telling friends that he was out of touch with King and began saying he had to “finish off this book thing that was started.”

All this came through on the FBI wiretaps, but the Bureau was less excited about such contact after Robert Kennedy approved the wiretap on King's home and New York office. Long before any results could be obtained, Hoover made a supplementary request to wiretap all four telephone lines at King's SCLC headquarters in Atlanta. On Monday, October 21, Courtney Evans found the Attorney General upset, vacillating. He approved this further request but reserved the right to review all the King wiretaps in thirty days. That Friday, Kennedy called Evans in again, this time “obviously irritated.” He had just learned that the Bureau was disseminating within the government a scalding report on King as “an unprincipled man,” one who “is knowingly, willingly, and regularly taking guidance from communists.”

Full of sarcasm and wrath, Kennedy said people all through the Pentagon were talking about the report. “The Attorney General asked what responsibilities the Army had in relation to the communist background of Martin Luther King,” Evans reported, adding that his technical explanation about the Army's security functions “seemed to serve no purpose.” Dismissing Evans, Kennedy called Hoover. He extracted a promise that Hoover would recall the report to prevent leaks, but he threatened no discipline. The damage had been done. “I have talked to A.G. & he is satisfied,” scrawled Hoover, sounding satisfied himself.

That weekend Kennedy scrambled to plug two rumbling volcanoes at once. While the rebellious FBI was painting the Administration as an ally of a Communist Negro movement, the Ellen Rometsch scandal suddenly threatened to erupt. A reporter working with Senator Williams wrote the first exclusive story—“U.S. Expels Girl Linked to Officials”—which revealed that Rometsch had been “associating with congressional leaders and some prominent New Frontiersmen.” It said Rometsch's name had surfaced in the Bobby Baker investigation, and that there was some concern about security risks, even espionage, “because of the high rank of her male companions.” Senator Williams, who wanted to know why she had been expelled from the country if she was not a security risk, and what it meant if she was, had scheduled an appearance before a closed session of the Senate Rules Committee on Tuesday. The newspaper story referred to Rometsch as a “party girl” and stressed her sex appeal: “Those acquainted with the woman class her as ‘stunning,' and in general appearance comparable to movie actress Elizabeth Taylor.”

For Robert Kennedy, the only solace in this calamity was that the story appeared in an Iowa newspaper. This obscure origin gave a brief reprieve, as the story would not take hold in the national press until after the weekend. Kennedy had a little time. Among his first acts was an emergency call to La Vern Duffy, a close friend and Senate investigator, who had just finished work on the Valachi hearings. The Attorney General gravely asked him to jump on the first plane to West Germany and stay there. His assignment was to find Rometsch, calm her down, and keep her from talking. One foreboding detail of the Iowa story made Duffy's mission all the more vital: Rometsch was rumored to be angry that her “important friends” had allowed her to be shipped out of the United States. Duffy took off like James Bond. Kennedy then called the President. They agreed that the only way to control Williams by Tuesday was through the influence of the Senate leadership. Unfortunately, the only way to move the Senate leadership on something like this was through J. Edgar Hoover.

By early Monday morning, October 28, Robert Kennedy had alerted the Senate leaders, Dirksen and Mansfield. Then he called in Courtney Evans to declare that he and President Kennedy were greatly concerned about the Ellen Rometsch allegations. They could harm the United States. To emphasize his battleship mood, he telephoned the President in front of Evans and exchanged words to the same effect. Then he sent Evans to forewarn Director Hoover of an imminent conference.

Almost immediately, Kennedy appeared at Hoover's door, and the Director, pleased that the upstart Attorney General had made the humble journey rather than summoning him, dismissed his aides. Alone, Kennedy told Hoover that he and the President urgently wanted him to brief Mansfield and Dirksen on the larger dangers of the Rometsch case. If the case blew open, it could hurt so many officials inside
and
outside the executive branch of government as to damage the integrity of the United States.

Hoover let Kennedy suffer a bit. Implying that the whole business was distasteful to him, he said that the Bureau already had furnished him a complete memorandum on the personal aspects of the case. The Attorney General could read it to the senators himself if he wished. Kennedy could only reply that the senators were primarily interested in the security aspects, and that Hoover's personal authority was essential. What he meant was that only Hoover could convince the senators that there would be no partisan profit or duty in a Profumo-style attack on the President. He must say that an attack would bring down retaliation in kind upon Republican and Democratic senators alike, supported by Hoover himself.

Hoover did not give a direct response. He said only that he already had a phone message from Senator Mansfield, and would speak with him. Kennedy changed the subject to the Birmingham church bombing and King. His words suggested a kind of wistful reproach, of pride mixed with a plea that Hoover recognize what he had risked to accommodate the FBI. Kennedy said he was sorry they had not been able to solve the church bombing; Hoover replied that the Bureau would have cracked the case if not for the obstruction of Alabama, but had not given up. As for King, Kennedy explained why he had been so upset on Friday about the new FBI report on King and communism. Hoover did not give an inch. When Kennedy mentioned the flak and gossip still coming from the Pentagon, Hoover replied that the report had been disseminated to the CIA and the State Department too, among others. When Kennedy said he was worried because, although the report did not say so explicitly, most readers would quickly conclude that King was a Communist, Hoover replied that every statement in the report was “accurate and supported by facts.”

Hoover called Senator Mansfield at eleven o'clock, just after the Attorney General withdrew. The Majority Leader said he and Dirksen badly needed a meeting with the Director alone within the next few hours. Capitol Hill was swarming with reporters working on the story out of Iowa, he warned, and any unscheduled sighting of the three of them would attract attention. Therefore, Mansfield suggested that they meet at his home, and Hoover agreed.

Afterward, Hoover called the Attorney General. Almost simultaneously, President Kennedy obtained his first report from Senator Mansfield, who said he was badly shocked by what Hoover had laid out, complete with names, dates, and places: Rometsch, Bobby Baker's other party girls, senators from both sides of the aisle, foreign women, Negro mistresses, cruises, quarrels, deals. Mansfield's battered state suggested that an emergency silence might be imposed on the seething mess, but the first true test came the next morning at one of the rare hearings of the Senate Rules Committee that made the front pages. Before appearing as the committee's sole witness, Senator Williams issued a statement that the Iowa story was not on his agenda. Inside the closed hearing, he told the senators that he would not speak on the Rometsch issue. They could ask for pertinent FBI information if they wished. Then Williams began detailed, sworn testimony on Baker's financial irregularities. When it was over, the committee chairman faced the waiting reporters and said, “We didn't go into West Germany.”

Three days later, on November 1, Robert Kennedy approved an FBI request to wiretap Bayard Rustin. The Administration had lost much of its control over Hoover, but the danger of a Profumo scandal receded from the brink. Already the investigation was settling upon Capitol Hill, and specifically upon Bobby Baker's finances. Living close to the edge, President Kennedy felt confident enough to tease reporters with hints of what Hoover knew about Ellen Rometsch. “Boy, the dirt he has on those senators,” he said brashly. “You wouldn't believe it.”

 

Rebel troops overthrew the South Vietnamese government in Saigon that same November 1, assassinating President Diem and his brother who had commanded the secret police. The bloody coup shocked many Americans into an unsettling first awareness of the Vietnam War, as news accounts speculated delicately but persistently about clandestine U.S. support for the revolt. All through the breakthrough year of 1963, the Vietnam crisis had built as a haunting foreign echo of civil rights. On May 8, during the peak of Bevel's children's marches in Birmingham, Vietnamese soldiers had killed monks and civilians in Hue to enforce a government order prohibiting the display of Buddhist colors on Buddha's birthday. Buddhist protest had seized world attention a month later, on the day of the Medgar Evers assassination in Mississippi, when a monk named Trich Quan Duc publicly immolated himself in downtown Saigon. Vietnam's Catholic rulers contemptuously dismissed a string of later suicides as “Buddhist barbecues” inspired by the Communist enemy.

Americans awakening to the Vietnam crisis puzzled over the conduct on both sides. Given the overwhelmingly Buddhist population, it was as though a Jewish U.S. president had forcibly suppressed Christmas as a Communist conspiracy. Uncomfortable barriers of religion and race plagued Kennedy Administration officials most responsible for U.S. war policy in Vietnam, so that they “decided long ago,” wrote Max Frankel in the
Times
, “to discuss it as little as possible.” Privately, however, they split over the most divisive internal question of the entire Administration: whether it was moral, democratic, or necessary to overthrow Diem in order to preserve a war against tyranny in Vietnam. “My government's coming apart!” President Kennedy had exclaimed on the day before the March on Washington. Two days later, his ambassador in Saigon cabled that the course was set toward a coup: “There is no turning back.” All through September and October, the secret cable traffic had flopped erratically between excited hopes of imminent success and bouts of bloody remorse, like speeches from
Macbeth
. When it was over, U.S. officials tried to make the best of a fresh start with a new Vietnamese regime of French-educated, Catholic generals.

In Atlanta, another subterranean track remained entirely hidden. Agent R. R. Nichols, posing as the owner of an electrical engineering firm, rented a large office on West Peachtree Street to house the King surveillance equipment. Normally, wiretap lines ran from the phone company to the local FBI office, but this operation was so secret that some agents thought Hoover might not have the Attorney General's approval. Nichols hated the assignment. His frustrations were typical of a typical FBI career. After a first assignment to Birmingham's Communist squad in 1947, Nichols had been shipped to Washington to work in the giant new loyalty program. It was tedious background work, the worst of it being a long investigation of foreign-born government carpenters.

By the time of his transfer to Atlanta in 1955, Nichols had been tagged as a security specialist, which meant that he was shut out of criminal work. A few top security officials enjoyed prestige at headquarters, but the regular agents commanded very little status in the field offices. Nichols spent years hiring Negro college students to take notes on speeches inside the new Black Muslim temple in Atlanta. The students kept quitting because the speeches were repetitive and dull. Eventually, Nichols slacked off on the only real activity permitted him—suggesting to employers that Muslims be fired from their jobs or evicted from their quarters—because success only meant that he would have to locate them again. He developed a creeping insecurity about his abilities, having never worked on what he considered an interesting case. Criminal agents scorned his assignments, including the top-secret new King detail. There was no hope of making arrests. Even interviews with King or King's people were strictly forbidden because of potential controversy. It was all busy work—training extra shifts of headphone monitors and supervising stenographers. Although Nichols held no unorthodox opinions for an agent—saying that King was a communist of the kind who thought he was a liberal and didn't understand the danger of people like himself—he wished someone else had the job that stretched years ahead of him. On November 8, he notified his superiors that the King taps were up and running.