Pillar of Fire (141 page)

*When Johnson asked Hoover to help him resist the
Washington Post's
press campaign for a commission, Hoover begged off, saying, “I don't have much influence with the
Post
, because I frankly don't read it. I view it like the
Daily Worker
.” Johnson, who was much friendlier with the
Post's
leadership than he was with Hoover, dryly replied, “You told me that once before,” and signed off.

*A Washington defense lawyer, Williams had earned prominence—and Hoover's lasting enmity—in large part by pioneering tactics designed to fight prosecutions through forced disclosure of politically sensitive government conduct, such as illegal wiretaps.

*“We have to be practical,” Moses told SNCC's Executive Committee at the December 1963 meeting in Atlanta, pointing out that SNCC already accepted various political restrictions attached to voter registation grants.

*After 1963,
Time
proclaimed, “the Negro will never again be where or what he was.”

*The author did not hear the bugging tapes from the Willard. These quotations, together with the one on page 250, are from interviews with three FBI officials of varying rank and outlook who did hear them. The eavesdroppers' shards presented here are the blackmail version of King, which FBI officials put into historical effect with a host of subsequent reports and oral briefings designed to ruin him.
Partly in reaction to the FBI's intrusive, hostile characterization, King's admirers have responded with anguish and outright denial over the subject of his extramarital affairs.

*The metaphorical cleansing of
Sullivan
anticipated and very likely facilitated the literal disappearance of the minority oral argument from archival records. Before 1968, the Supreme Court transcribed official recordings of historic proceedings, but never of case No. 40,
Abernathy et al. v. Sullivan
. When the Court Library destroyed the tape itself in the 1980s, the January 7, 1964, arguments were permanently lost.

*The recognition, which so outraged J. Edgar Hoover, nonetheless pricked King's ego with a “Man of the Year” essay that called him a humorless, unlikely, unimposing leader. “Whatever his greatness,” said
Time
, “it was thrust upon him.” Most painful to King, the essay ridiculed some of his worst youthful metaphors—segregation as “the adultery of an illicit intercourse between injustice and immorality,” which “cannot be cured by the Vaseline of gradualism.” Over wiretapped phone lines, Stanley Levison described the heavily qualified praise as a “typical hatchet job.” King mentioned no complaints in his letter of thanks to
Time
founder Henry Luce.

*“We have an office and one broken down typewriter,” Rita Schwerner advised a contact in a January 23 letter appealing for file cabinets and a mimeograph machine, plus books, paper, and pencils for her Freedom School classes. “We have big ambitions and we know it,” wrote Schwerner, “but with the help of people all over the country who believe in freedom, we know we can succeed.”
Her husband, Michael, a social worker two years out of Cornell, had first submitted to civil rights arrest the previous July 4 at a Baltimore amusement park, along with Rev. Eugene Carson Blake of the National Council of Churches. Two months later, the Birmingham church bombing had moved the Schwerners to apply together for long-term assignment in the South.

*Since enduring as vice president what for him was the terminal boredom of Pope John XXIII's funeral the previous June, Johnson often caricatured the drone of the Gregorian chant and the fog of liturgical incense in mimicry that incorporated his version of Indian peace pipe ritual.

*During their obscurity in Liverpool, the early Beatles made imitative “cover” recordings not only of gospel-bred crossovers Chuck Berry and Little Richard but of more obscure pioneers such as Arthur Alexander (“Anna”).

*“If they ask you what are they doin' up there,” Johnson explained to McNamara, “and you say, they're ceremonial, they'll say well here's a guy who cuts out lights in the White House…but he's got a big escort. If you say, it's to protect his life, they say Godamighty, what's happened?”

*Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach re-earned Hoover's enmity in February by insisting that he provide the Warren Commission with unpolished records about the Kennedy assassination. Some of them, such as reports indicating the Bureau had excised Lee Harvey Oswald's name from the address book of a Dallas FBI agent, became grist for later generations of conspiracy theorists.

*Two white teenagers, who confessed to the whimsical snipering of young Virgil Ware from his bicycle on the afternoon of the church bombing, received suspended sentences early in March.

*“I told Judge Smith also that despite our desire to see this scoundrel [King] exposed, it would be out of the question for us to furnish him information and then his expecting us to back it up later on,” DeLoach wrote obediently to headquarters in his own Runyonesque syntax. “I told Judge Smith that this would disrupt certain operations which appeared to be more important than an exposure of King from a communistic standpoint.”

*The circumstances of King's outburst remain obscure, and its causes are too personal for the scope of this history, but at least a sliver of hidden fury was traceable to the Birmingham church bombing. King felt the losses there as deeply as most Americans felt the tragedy of Dallas, and he was angry at President Kennedy for getting away with an empty show of Federal response, behind a retired football coach (see page 144).

*Clay “will mean more to his people than any athlete before him,” said Malcolm. “He's more than Jackie Robinson was, because Robinson is the white man's hero. But Cassius is the black man's hero. Do you know why? Because the white press wanted him to lose. They wanted him to lose because he is a Muslim. You notice nobody cares about the religion of other athletes.”

*In
Bette Poole et al. v. Ross R. Barnett et al
., church lawyer Jack Pratt pressed for specificity on the legal basis for the Jackson “kneel-in” convictions. A church-based, “private club” complaint of trespass would put segregated congregations in conflict with national denominations, framing the religious question starkly posed by Bette Poole on her arrest at the church door: “But what would Jesus do?” A state-based complaint, on the other hand, raised constitutional issues about political rules for religious worship.

*In a March 18 interview with Robert Penn Warren, King dwelled on the lingering affront of being pelted with eggs by Malcolm's followers the previous summer, of his efforts “to get my mind off of myself and feeling sorry for myself and feeling rejected,” and of frustration that Malcolm called nonviolence submissive. “I'm talking about a very strong force,” he insisted, “where you stand up with all your might against an evil system, and you're not a coward, you are resisting, but you come to see that tactically as well as morally it is better to be nonviolent.”

*Golden, as regional bishop for the segregated Central (Negro) Conference of the United Methodist Church, had been instrumental in opening the first Mississippi churches to movement meetings two years earlier in Hattiesburg and the Delta.

*“While it is somewhat of a fantasy to believe that all white men are devils,” Goodman wrote, “it is true that the white man (and by this I mean Christian civilization in general) has proved himself to be the most depraved devil imaginable in his attitudes towards the Negro race…. The historical contempt that the white race held for the Negroes has created a group of rootless degraded people.”

*“Now that we are ‘in orbit,'” wrote Ward of the Western nations, “our own wealth can multiply by compound interest because we are already wealthy…we now face thirty to forty years of world-building on a scale never known in human history….”

*On April 8, beneath an overarching banner headline, “Civil Rights—A Grim Day,” the
Boston Globe
published companion stories about the Wallace vote in Wisconsin and the death in Cleveland of a white Presbyterian minister, Bruce Klunder, who was crushed by a bulldozer during a sit-in against construction of segregated schools.

*The later historical record opened a tangle of irony beneath this jousting on sex and subversion. Hoover, reported the
Times
in 1964, charged that Soviet spies used “revolting” sexual entrapments to blackmail unnamed Americans. Alsop, without mentioning his own vulnerabilities, or his reliance on FBI spy information, warned readers that Communists were taking advantage of “Rev. King's political innocence.” He entitled his column “An Unhappy Secret.”

*Stung by the protests of kennel clubs and humane societies, Johnson explained ear-pulling as friendly stimulation—“If you ever follow dogs, you like to hear them yelp”—which only provoked the publisher of
Dog World
to charge that the President could not distinguish a healthy bark from a howl of pain.

*The “new” Malcolm's Jewish interests were not always speculative and weighty. In Harlem, tickled by one of the first multicultural advertising posters, he asked a friend to snap a picture of him next to the young black poster boy—“You don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's”—who looked at a slice of kosher rye bread with a smile of delight that matched Malcolm's.

*A seasoned optimist, Shriver omitted discouraging facts from his speech, such as the current balance of exactly $67 in his government account for preparing the national war on poverty.

*Lasting 534 hours, the 1964 filibuster filled 63,000 pages of the
Congressional Record
with an estimated ten million words.

*One writer put Simpson on notice that “we are not going to stand by and let TRASH like old KING and his bunch of GOATS punch us in the nose, and we are not going to be slaves to them.” A dentist asked “how does it feel to be an agent of the police state?” More polite letters complained that Negro demonstrations disturbed social harmony, and a few praised Simpson's courage, but most assailed him crudely: “You S.O.B., If I were a man I'd beat you to a pulp…. I hear rumblings of removing you somehow, and it's gaining momentum fast. Don't wait for that, just drop dead and save the expense so the whites can have equal rights again.”

*One contemporary magazine writer offered a similar distillation of Wallace's campaign oratory: “He gave every hearer a chance to transmute a latent hostility toward the Negro into a hostility toward big government. The technique was effective.”

*“We are asking that the Federal Government move before the fact this summer,” Moses wrote the President on June 14. “I hope this is not asking too much of our country.”

*William Rehnquist, Phoenix attorney and future Chief Justice, and Robert Bork, Yale law professor and future Supreme Court nominee.

† “Well, he's got a lot of broken bones,” Robert Kennedy told the President of his severely injured brother, “and his back is in bad shape, but he's not paralyzed….”

*Through a buffer of two subordinates, Archbishop Joseph Hurley had just turned aside King's latest entreaty for mediation on grounds that the local diocese was fully engaged already: “The Catholic church in Saint Augustine has used its influence consistently to achieve equal justice under law…. We have taught the lesson of justice and fraternity not only in words but also by example.”

*While waiting for the parents, the President turned to his closest aide, Walter Jenkins. “You better comb your hair, Walter,” he said. “Looks like you been sleepin' on it. Run in my office right quick there. Put some water on it. You're worse than George Reedy these days.”

*“…We are fully committed to continuing the Summer Project. This does not mean that we will attempt to provoke the state…. We are specifically avoiding any demonstrations for integrated facilities, as we do not feel the state is ready to permit such activity at this time. All workers, staff and Summer Volunteers alike, are pledged to non-violence in all situations.”