Parting the Waters (99 page)

King had been considering lawsuits against Jackson and protest marches inside the convention hall, because he believed that “Dr. Jackson will continue his un-Christian, unethical and dictatorial tactics as long as no-one openly oposes [
sic
] him.” But, on reflection, he had decided that he would spare both Maxwell and himself the ordeal of further rebellion. “I do not feel that I am of the temperament to put up a struggle at this point,” he wrote. “I think it may give the impression that I am fighting to maintain an office…. It would make me look little rather than big, and my involvement in the struggle for the rights of my people must always keep me above the level of littleness.”

Then came the last year of postwar innocence. “What can you say,” John Glenn exclaimed after orbiting the globe, “about a day when you have seen four beautiful sunsets?” Mickey Mantle won the Most Valuable Player award; John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Intellectuals and Hollywood directors still showcased cigarette smoke as a positive image, paying little attention to obscure health warnings from Britain's Royal College of Physicians. The first of the baby-boom children turned sixteen, snatched up their driver's licenses, and created a new stage of life within Detroit's shiny creations. The Ford Motor Company designed tiny cars to compete with the German Volks-wagen, but Henry Ford publicly dropped the idea as un-American.

America was king, though some of its newly powerful citizens ached for the settled refinements of Europe. Cardinal Spellman announced that he had arranged to bring Michelangelo's
Pietà
to New York for exhibition, whereupon potentates in Washington, not to be outdone, borrowed Leonardo's
Mona Lisa
for the National Gallery. On television, a new show called “The Beverly Hillbillies” unexpectedly broke the hegemony of the Westerns atop the ratings charts, replacing frontier adventure with social satire that blended the extremes of gushing wealth and heartwarming naïveté. Through John and Jacqueline Kennedy, declared a story in
The New York Times
, “the average American has a much clearer idea of what it must be like to have everything.” Future writers chose 1962 as the year of nostalgia, the perfect setting for surf comedies and carefree romances. Still, forebodings of ideological dislocation ran beneath popular enthusiasms for achievement, new dance steps, gadgets, and peaceful change.

On October 1, 1961, W. E. B. Du Bois applied for membership in the Communist Party of the U.S.A. “I have been long and slow in coming to this conclusion,” Du Bois wrote in a public statement, “but at last my mind is settled.” He was ninety-three. Born a year before Mohandas Gandhi, during the Andrew Johnson impeachment trial of 1868, he was a year younger than the historic First Baptist Church (Colored) of Montgomery. More than sixty years after breaking the color line on Harvard doctorates, fifty after founding the NAACP, thirty after surrendering his beloved
Crisis
magazine to a “sportswriter” named Roy Wilkins, and ten after being hauled manacled into federal court for advocating peace talks in Korea, the old man decided that “capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all.” Still haughty in manner and freethinking in scholarship, Du Bois was an unlikely candidate for the discipline of a working-class party. In his membership application, he reviewed for party chairman Gus Hall his lifelong disagreements with the Communists.

His statement found its way into King's files as well as J. Edgar Hoover's. King cited the defection by “one of the most brilliant Negro scholars in America” in one of his warnings about the limits of Negro patience: “There can be no doubt that if the problem of racial discrimination is not solved in the not too distant future, some Negroes, out of frustration, discontent, and despair, will turn to some other ideology.” He did not speak publicly of Du Bois again for six years.

Hoover might have hailed the Du Bois statement as a vindication of the FBI's long-standing diagnosis of subversive tendencies, but he took no public notice of it. This supreme rebuke to Du Bois—that his last insult to American values failed to draw even recognition in mainstream politics—starkly illustrated his insignificance in the white culture. Although Hoover was waging a major battle over the security threat posed by the American Communist Party, the Du Bois defection was peripheral to him because he needed examples that would register with Attorney General Kennedy and with the public at large. Du Bois did not.

The running battle between Kennedy and Hoover took place on different ground. Kennedy wanted to shift the Bureau's priorities drastically from domestic intelligence to organized crime. Citing the FBI's own private figures that the American Communist Party had shriveled further since its collapse in 1956—until some fifteen hundred FBI informants within the party supplied a hefty part of its budget and membership—he insisted that the Bureau's vast domestic security network was a wasteful bureaucratic appendix from the McCarthy era. Kennedy was appalled to learn that there were only a dozen FBI agents targeted against organized crime, as opposed to more than a thousand in political security work. He would have preferred something close to a reversal, and it annoyed him almost beyond endurance that the FBI still denied the very existence of organized crime.

By the end of Robert Kennedy's first year as Hoover's nominal boss, worn edges were beginning to show. In December, Kennedy told a British journalist that the U.S. Communist Party “couldn't be more feeble and less of a threat, and besides its membership consists largely of FBI agents.” In sharp but indirect rebuttal, Hoover told a House committee the next month that the U.S. Communist Party was “a Trojan Horse of rigidly disciplined fanatics unalterably committed to bring this free nation under the yoke of international communism.” Hoover substantiated this ringing alarm by disclosing confidentially to the congressmen, and to selected senators as well, that a New York lawyer named Stanley Levison was both a secret member of the Communist Party, subject to orders from the Kremlin, and a guiding adviser to Martin Luther King. The message was clear: that the troublesome Negro revolution was Moscow's skirmish line, and that only the omniscient Hoover knew the full details. “The threat from without should not blind us to the threat from within,” he wrote. More pointedly, in a January 8 classified memo to Robert Kennedy, Hoover extended the reach of suspicion. Not only did the Communists have influence upon King through Levison, he warned, but through King, in turn, Levison and the Communists had “access” to the Attorney General himself and to the White House. Because King had met personally with both Kennedy brothers—even taken a meal recently with the President—there was a specter of Communist influence at the highest levels.

Kennedy made no recorded response, perhaps because he dismissed the notion that he was personally vulnerable to Communist manipulation. Not everyone in the Justice Department felt secure from the threat, however, as became evident as soon as Kennedy left on February 1 for a month-long goodwill trip around the world. The next day, Acting Attorney General Byron White called in the FBI liaison officer specifically to discuss Hoover's January 8 warning about Levison. “It is White's feeling that definitely some action should be taken,” the liaison officer reported afterward to the Bureau. White wanted to review Levison's FBI file for ammunition that might awaken the Kennedy Administration to the danger.

For the Bureau's purposes, White's enthusiastic initiative was too much of a good thing. His request for the Levison file raised thorny problems. For one thing, nearly all the intelligence information about Levison's Communist allegiance was at least five years old, and it came from two brothers, Jack and Morris Childs, who had infiltrated the party as FBI informants after having been purged in the factional turmoil of the late 1940s. Worse, the Levison record would show that the FBI itself twice had attempted to recruit Levison since then, which would make it difficult to explain why the Bureau now considered him so sinister. Finally, while the Bureau could show that Levison and King were close friends in the civil rights movement, there was no evidence as yet to show that either one of them followed the orders or even the wishes of the American Communist Party, let alone the Kremlin. In short, the January 8 memo had exaggerated the subversive linkages in order to get a message through to Kennedy, and Byron White's sudden embrace of the alarm now called for the Bureau to show its hand. This potential embarrassment rose instantly to J. Edgar Hoover for decision. “King is no good any way,” he scrawled on the memo outlining the problem. “Under no circumstances should our informant be endangered.”

By this, his first written assessment of King, Hoover marked him for FBI hostility in advance of any investigation. The terse comment, while crudely put, effectively guided FBI subordinates in their dealings with White. The important signal to get across was that King was tainted by his association with Levison. As to White's request for evidence, Hoover transformed weakness into strength: the information could not be revealed, he ordered, because it was too important. The Levison file must remain secret in all its details.

Courtney Evans, the FBI liaison, took Hoover's answer to White a few days later. White replied that he fully appreciated the reasons why he could not see the Levison dossier. Still, to restrain White, Evans went so far as to tone down Hoover's January 8 memo. It was not Levison himself who was talking to the Attorney General and the White House, Evans reminded White, but King. The Communist access was indirect rather than direct. Such assurance drew out White's sarcasm. “White said from the character of some of the people over at the White House he would not have been surprised if it were reported that Levison actually did have such a contact,” Evans wrote, transmitting to FBI headquarters a barb doubtless aimed at Harris Wofford.

From the FBI's point of view, Evans achieved an ideal understanding with Byron White, in that the Acting Attorney General seemed to embrace the Bureau's suspicions of King and Levison on Hoover's word alone. Moreover, the incident helped Hoover reestablish direct communications with the White House. Robert Kennedy had been able to cut the Director's cherished access to the President's office by insisting that FBI messages be cleared through channels at the Justice Department. On February 14, Hoover sent Byron White a file summary on King's miscellaneous contacts with supporters of left-wing causes. Simultaneously, he sent a similar report to Kenneth O'Donnell at the White House, delivered by hand in an important-looking FBI pouch. “My dear Mr. O'Donnell,” he began. “I thought you would be interested in the following concerning the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., prominent southern Negro leader…”

Meanwhile, Robert Kennedy circled the globe on his extraordinary tour, speaking confidently for the Administration on foreign policy and other subjects far afield from the Justice Department, traveling with legions of reporters who speculated that such trips foretold a Kennedy dynasty in which Robert would follow his brother into the White House. In poorer countries, Kennedy was bedeviled by persistent questions about the American stand on colonialism. Indonesians in particular refused to accept his neutral comments about their negotiations for the independence of New Guinea from the Netherlands. Kennedy, trying not to offend a NATO ally, took essentially the same position he maintained during the conflict in Albany, Georgia: that it was a matter for the local parties to decide for themselves. This earned him a barrage of criticism for his implied recognition of merit in the Dutch colonial claims. With his shy humor and dogged grit, Kennedy gamely faced hecklers in more than one country. Later he reflected that no amount of East-West debate on the claims of democracy against communism would dispel the global preoccupation with race and economics. “There wasn't one area of the world that I visited,” he said later, “…that I wasn't asked about the question of civil rights.”

 

J. Edgar Hoover welcomed the Attorney General home on February 27 with a dose of scandal so fantastic in those days that even the most credulous readers of supermarket tabloids would have dismissed it as lurid fantasy. Hoover's memo was the result of an investigation that had begun sometime earlier, when FBI agents in Las Vegas arrested private parties for placing illegal wiretaps on the home of singer Phyllis McGuire. Preliminary development of the wiretap prosecution had shown that the wiretappers were in the employ of Robert Maheu, a former FBI agent working for Howard Hughes, and Sam “Momo” Giancana, Al Capone's mobster heir in Chicago. That much was good news to the entire Justice Department—Hoover loathed Maheu as a Bureau renegade, and Kennedy had sought the conviction of Giancana almost as diligently as that of Jimmy Hoffa. The first of the bad news was that Maheu and Giancana claimed immunity from prosecution on the grounds that their wiretap was sanctioned by the CIA. Officials from the CIA, in turn, had confirmed through gritted teeth that Maheu and Giancana indeed had been working for them in a series of top-secret attempts to assassinate Cuban premier Fidel Castro by means of Giancana's gangster connections. Giancana, while plotting these missions, had asked Maheu and the CIA to make sure that his mistress, Phyllis McGuire, was not two-timing him while he was away, and the agency officials had decided that they were in no position to refuse.

All this was only the beginning. Further investigation, plus the wiretaps themselves, had revealed that Phyllis McGuire nursed her own complaints about the relationship, including the fact that Giancana maintained a second mistress, in California, named Judith Campbell. Singer Frank Sinatra had introduced Campbell to Giancana and to other gangsters with whom he socialized. Sinatra also had introduced Judith Campbell to John Kennedy, it turned out, and both John and Robert Kennedy to Marilyn Monroe, among others, in a serial exchange of lovers. In fact, it seemed that Sinatra did as much introducing as singing, and that his libertine social network included glittering figures of many kinds—from politics, gangsterdom, and show business. Giancana, for his part, was an old-school gangster, not merely in the assumption of his prerogative to wiretap one lady friend while carrying on himself with another, but also in his practical view of social matters. His affair with Campbell was strictly business, bestowing enormous hidden power upon him because he shared a mistress with the President of the United States.