Pillar of Fire (33 page)

 

E
LIJAH
M
UHAMMAD
struck on New Year's Eve. From Phoenix, he called one by one Captain Joseph and the principal ministers whom Malcolm X had been recruiting with cryptic “parables” about sexually corrupted prophets. All of them had warned of incipient revolt by Malcolm, but Muhammad guarded forcefully against double dealing. The parables were nothing but “rotten stuff,” he said, ridiculing Malcolm's claim to be his loyal agent preparing to defend the Nation if the devil's propaganda should spread. “What kind of fool would I be to go out to tell him to tell people something like that on me?” Muhammad demanded. No, Malcolm was a renegade. “I saw that in him a long time ago,” said Muhammad, “and I didn't think he would be able to stand any joy at all.” He vowed to remove Malcolm. “I'm going to strip him of everything,” he told Minister Louis X of Boston. He warned the ministers not to let Malcolm's fame seduce them into rebellion, saying that “all of Malcolm's speeches at the colleges did not make one convert and he did not make many where he went outside of Harlem.” Converts were the cement of the Nation; submission was its saving doctrine. Muhammad advised each of the ministers to judge very carefully between “Allah and his Messenger” on the one hand and “this person,” Malcolm X, “to see which one you would rather get along with.”

All the ministers swore loyalty to Muhammad and pleaded with him to disregard rumors to the contrary. Minister Louis X told Muhammad that Lonnie X of Washington, the prized new Ph.D. mathematician among the ministers, was “all torn up” over Malcolm's disclosures “and just can't figure it out in his own mind.” When Louis volunteered to help the Messenger secure Malcolm's territory in New York, Muhammad replied that he would take up the question of succession when Malcolm was “completely off the list.” Meanwhile, ministers should spread word that the Messenger would “not have any mercy” on those taking Malcolm's side. “Any laborer or minister who takes any of this poison shall be removed at once,” Muhammad warned Minister Isaiah X of Baltimore. “I will not let a man like that mess me up with twenty million people.”

Muhammad allowed his notice to reverberate for two days before calling Malcolm X. “I cannot understand why you took this poison and spread it out and told them it was poison,” he said. “…If you love Allah, you must love me as the Messenger of Allah.” Malcolm defended himself halfheartedly, then confessed that he had lost much of his drive since the previous February in Chicago, when Wallace Muhammad had confirmed rumors of extra children in his father's household. Muhammad chastised Malcolm. “You should have put out this fire when you and Wallace found it in Chicago,” he said, “rather than to start it up in other places.” Malcolm, on a conference call joined by two of his principal enemies on the financial corruption issue—National Secretary John Ali and Supreme Captain Raymond Sharrieff—plus FBI clerks listening in over wiretaps, prayed that Allah would forgive him.

Elijah Muhammad scrambled to contain the talk loosed already. To an assistant who reported that Muhammad's wife, Clara, was upset that he had bought maternity clothes for his secretaries, Muhammad admitted the purchases but said they “did not prove anything.” Through intermediaries, he supervised treacherous negotiations with his secretaries Evelyn and Lucille, the latter being “in the nest” expecting her third child by Muhammad. The women, already bitter that the Nation provided only $100 per month for each child, were holding out for $8,000 in relocation expenses instead of $5,000, arguing that they would have to move all the way to Hawaii to become safely isolated. Muhammad ordered the transfer done “even if they move to the Fiji Islands.” On another front, he told Captain Joseph to assume complete control of Temple No. 7 in New York, and specifically not to allow Malcolm to select the guest ministers any longer. Muhammad also ordered his aides to tell Wallace Muhammad that Malcolm had blamed him as the instigator—“Let my son know that,” he said—and then he summoned both men to summary court in Phoenix on January 6: “I'm not through with Malcolm yet.”

Wallace Muhammad managed to avoid the stacked hearing on the excuse that his parole officer would not let him leave Chicago. Malcolm appeared in Phoenix, and said little when Muhammad extended his ninety-day suspension indefinitely, contingent on what he called the strength of Malcolm's faith. As a first test, Muhammad ordered Malcolm to retract in person everything he had said. Malcolm sent an emergency request that Ministers Lonnie X of Washington and Isaiah X of Baltimore meet his return flight at a layover in Washington. At the airport, he told them he had lied about the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and was undertaking a mission of penance. Pacing the floor, he struck both his colleagues as agitated to the point of incoherence. As he rushed off to catch his next airplane, Malcolm promised to contact them soon about how this mistake had occurred, and what it meant, but he disappeared instead. Minister Lonnie X never saw him again.

Back in New York, Malcolm X recorded a statement about the multiple allegations of corruption against Chicago—personal and financial—plus charges of religious hypocrisy and charlatanism, saying some members from the Muhammad family had not bothered to learn the most basic facts about Islam. By mail, Malcolm presented the tape as a loyal fulfillment of the instruction to submit every trouble to the Messenger, but the tone and content shocked Muhammad. Each detailed “confession” from Malcolm carried the double edge of accusation, and the very enthusiasm of his humility had an undertow of threat. At first, Muhammad fretted to an aide about the Nation's changeling: “Sometimes he speaks nice and good, and other times he is altogether different.” Then in quick succession arrived another tape and a letter in which Malcolm charged that the other ministers were ridiculing him in hopes of usurping his job, and warned that he would do all in his power to stop them. Muhammad interpreted the lurching communications as a sign of desperation. “When a man is falling,” he said, “he reaches for everything that he thinks will support him.”

On January 14, Malcolm escaped into an airport hotel room to spend seven secluded hours with a magazine writer named Alex Haley. The two made an oddly matched team. In 1939, Haley's father, a stern professor, had been so disappointed with his dreamy, lackadaisical son's failing French grade in college that he had enlisted young Alex as a U.S. Coast Guard seaman. Lonely and adrift aboard ship, the younger Haley had developed a thriving business as the ghostwriter of individually tailored personal letters for less literate white shipmates, mostly Cyrano-style love entreaties to girlfriends on shore. Twenty years later, cushioned by his Coast Guard pension, Haley had turned his literary hobby into a second career as one of the few Negro freelance magazine writers.
Reader's Digest
hired him to write an article vilifying Elijah Muhammad in 1960, which positioned Haley three years later to interview Malcolm X for
Playboy
magazine. From that assignment slowly grew their collaboration on Malcolm's autobiography.

Once Haley had learned that Malcolm did not trust tape recorders, he sat patiently at his typewriter while Malcolm brooded across the gulf between them. Eventually, the ex-con Muslim sectarian and the mild-mannered writer established a working relationship based in part on common interests such as a love of Shakespeare. As Malcolm gradually disclosed his life, he maintained a disciplined reverence for Muhammad in private speech, so that Haley had no inkling of the explosive schism building between Malcolm and Chicago. Malcolm walled it off except for one or two classical allusions that he scribbled on a notepad: “You have not converted a man because you have silenced him—John Viscount Morley.”

From the airport session, Malcolm flew to Miami with his pregnant wife, Betty, and their three daughters. It was their first family trip in six years of marriage. The Miami FBI office picked up the strange informant report that a Malcolm X party was met and escorted to their hotel by the flamboyant young boxer Cassius Clay, known as the “Louisville Lip,” who was training for a February bout against heavyweight champion Sonny Liston. FBI analysts—perhaps more informed on the raw internal politics of the Nation than all but a handful of its leaders—were so skeptical of the unlikely pairing that the Miami office did not report the tip to FBI headquarters until five days later on January 21, when confirming informants reported that Cassius Clay flew with Malcolm to New York for a Temple No. 7 dinner at the Rockland Palace. Malcolm honored his banishment by declining to attend, but Clay teased the crowd of better than four thousand with the Muslim greeting and rejoined Malcolm for the return flight to Miami. Both the Miami and New York FBI offices rushed the puzzling news to headquarters by air telegram.

 

P
OPE
P
AUL
VI dominated world news during the first week of 1964 with his three-day pilgrimage—the first papal trip of any kind taken by airplane, and first papal visit to the Holy Land since the original Apostle Peter left Palestine for Rome in the first century. The Pope uttered the Muslim greeting on arrival in Amman, Jordan, and throngs surrounded his motorcade on its path down to Emir Abdullah Bridge, where Paul VI stood in silent vigil overlooking the Jordan River while the young Jordanian King Hussein piloted a security helicopter overhead. Inside the Damascus Gate to the Old City of Jerusalem, ecstatic worshippers were compressed so tightly in the narrow streets that several Jordanian police were trampled and the Pope's entourage briefly panicked for fear of being crushed.

On January 5, among private audiences for some of the visiting dignitaries who attended his historic mass at Nazareth, Pope Paul received Sargent Shriver, the director of the American Peace Corps, who delivered a goodwill letter from President Johnson. Though awed by the occasion, Shriver asked for a papal blessing upon the wooden crucifix he had supplied when President Kennedy's body lay in state, and Paul VI invited Shriver to accompany him back to Jerusalem, where that night he was to greet the Orthodox Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinople. In their twenty-nine-minute summit on the Mount of Olives—the first of its kind since an abortive meeting in 1431 between Pope Eugenius IV and Patriarch Joseph II—Paul VI and Athenagoras pledged to end the mutual excommunication that had divided the church into East and West since 1054.

With Shriver in the background stood the Greek Archbishop Iakovos of New York, the Patriarch's deputy for the Western Hemisphere, who had served for some years as a kind of secret agent of reconciliation for the Orthodox Church, working at the Vatican on a track parallel to that of Rabbi Abraham Heschel for the Jews. In 1965, Iakovos and Heschel would join as the two ranking clergy to march alongside Martin Luther King under threat of death in Selma, but for the moment, most observers struggled to acquaint themselves with the ancient religious separations between the leaders of half a billion white Christians.

As Shriver continued his courier's journey around the globe delivering presidential letters to the King of Nepal and other world rulers, he took with him ecumenical inspiration on the grandest scale. To Muslim audiences in the Holy Land, Pope Paul had quoted the Apostle Peter, who in turn was quoting the Psalmist King David: “He that would love life and see good days, let him keep his tongue from evil and seek peace and pursue it.” Religious politics seethed beneath the biblical words. Although Pope Paul was careful never to speak the word “Israel” or otherwise recognize the Jewish state in ceremonies with Israeli leaders, his visit inflamed anti-Israeli sentiments. At a closed conference in February, bishops representing the Christian minorities of the Middle East joined with theological supremacists in Rome to strip the long-proposed statement of fraternal truce with Jews and Judaism from the fall agenda of the Vatican Council.

 

O
N
J
ANUARY
6, as Pope Paul VI returned to Rome and Malcolm X submitted to summary court in Phoenix, Martin Luther King took a reserved seat at the U.S. Supreme Court for oral argument in the
Sullivan
case. He arrived among celebrities conscious of a historic occasion that commanded the attendance of three former U.S. Attorneys General and featured opening remarks warning the Court of constitutional dangers “not confronted since the early days of the Republic.” From the bench, Justice Arthur Goldberg discreetly sent down his copy of
Stride Toward Freedom
, King's book about the Montgomery bus boycott, with a note requesting an autograph.

On the appointed day, the Court never reached the portion of the
Sullivan
case closest to King. Having divided the appeal into two halves, the Justices consumed extra time with the arguments for and against the co-appellant
New York Times
, which Alabama courts had found guilty of libel for publishing the original 1960 advertisement seeking funds to defend King. The Justices held over the “Negro half” of the case, the libel judgments against King's four ministerial colleagues: Ralph Abernathy, Joseph Lowery, S. S. Seay, and Fred Shuttlesworth. This overnight delay, while a letdown, gave King an opportunity to meet with all his side's lawyers that afternoon at the Washington office of William Rogers, Eisenhower's second attorney general, whom Harry Wachtel had recruited for the oral argument.

Now and then for the rest of King's life, Wachtel was to be called Stanley Levison's “twin” by Negroes of the inner circle, who quipped that the only white advisers close to King were interchangeable Jewish lawyers from New York—you could not tell them apart, went the joke, which extended to a sporting confusion between their wives, Bea Levison and Lucy Wachtel. A relative newcomer, having first met King in 1962, Wachtel was a powerful corporate lawyer longing to recover some of the idealism of his days as a student radical in the 1930s. With Clarence Jones, he had drafted appellate briefs in the
Sullivan
case and incorporated for King's projects in nonviolence a tax-exempt conduit called the Gandhi Society. Brash and aggressive, Wachtel pushed himself forward as a partial replacement for Levison during the latter's grudging withdrawal. Although he lacked the monkish Levison's writing skills and long-established personal bond with King, Wachtel brought complementary talents as a successful practicing lawyer with connections in high places. From previous business dealings, he called Rogers by his first name, Bill, when he introduced the highly prized counsel to King.