Outside Looking In (3 page)

We went back to the Dupont Plaza Hotel for breakfast. Da Silva opened the
Washington Post
and found a tiny notice of our arrest. “I've had better reviews, I must admit.” The last time he had been in Washington, it had been in Nixon's White House, where he performed his Ben Franklin song from the musical
1776
. We learned from the
New York Times
why Papp had been so urgent to get back to New York—he was being given the state's cultural medal by Governor Nelson Rockefeller. His wife had to take it in his place, and she announced that he could not be there because he was in jail.

A couple of weeks later, much the same group assembled again at the hotel to plan the same protest, this time at the entry to the Senate. As we crammed ourselves to block the way in and out, Karl came over and sat by me: “I hope we end up in the same cell again.” I asked why. “I've been studying Greek, and I want to go over verb forms.” Unfortunately, we got separated at the fingerprinting stage and did not share a cell that night. While we were talking in the Capitol, Senator Goldwater moseyed up to the bunch of bodies. Someone told him, “Your old speechwriter is in that crowd.” Goldwater said, “Really?” He picked his way through the bodies and pulled Karl up on his feet, shaking his hand, to say, “I haven't seen you in ages. Why don't you come visit me?” Karl, by this time booted and bearded and wearing camouflage garb, said, “I'm afraid your staff would be pissed at me.” “Well, piss on them. You're my friend.” Later, at the Institute for Policy Studies, I asked Karl if Goldwater was always so warm and gracious. “Always. He is the most loyal and truthful politician I have ever met.”

Then he told me something from the 1964 campaign. Goldwater had voted against the Civil Rights Act that spring, and some right-wing crazies thought that if they could stir up race conflict in the summer it would show that Goldwater was right in saying that the civil rights movement should not be caved in to. Word of this got to Goldwater and he called in his top staff—Clifton White, Denison Kitchel, Karl, and others—and told them: “You guys know me well. I want you to get word to the troublemakers that if there are race riots this summer I am pulling out of the race.” I asked Karl if he thought Goldwater would have done that. “Of course. He gave his word.” Politically, Karl could not differ more from Goldwater by this time. But personally he could not have admired him more.

Karl died before he could carry his study of Greek very far. But another political figure was more successful. I met I. F. Stone at Kent State University, just after the National Guard had shot four students. We were there to write about the event. Stone knew that I taught ancient Greek at Johns Hopkins, and he told me that his fondest wish was to read Plato in the original. “When I retire, I am going to study Greek.” We got to know each other well at the Institute for Policy Studies, and he repeated his pledge over the years. When the improbable occurred, and he actually did retire from writing
I. F. Stone's Weekly,
he plunged into the study of Greek. He took some courses at American University, and got some coaching from my old teacher at Yale, Bernard Knox, then director of the D.C. Center for Hellenic Studies. Since I was a night person then, and he had always been, he would call me in Baltimore at 2 or 3 a.m. when there was no one up he could turn to for help. He would ask me, for example, to explain a construction that was puzzling him, or seek advice about Aeolic forms in Sappho or Alcaeus.

But then he stopped calling. The next time I saw him in Washington, I went over to greet him, but he turned and walked away. “What's that all about?” I asked Marc Raskin, the Institute's director. “He's mad at you for your Hiss review. He says he'll never talk to you again.” I had reviewed Allen Weinstein's book on Alger Hiss, and had agreed with the book's conclusion that Hiss had been a traitor. Stone's brother-in-law, Leonard Boudin, belonged to the law firm that defended Hiss. So in fact I did not hear from Stone for years—until, one night around 3 a.m. the phone rang. Izzy said, “I can't stand it! I just can't get through this passage. I need help.” But it was the last call. He had relapsed from his anti-Wills resolve, but he did not mean to make a practice of it. I was left outside again. I was not only on the Nixon enemies list, but on the Hiss enemies list as well.

Another man who knew the relevance of Greek studies was the CIA director William Colby. He was called to testify to the Church Committee on CIA misdeeds. To the horror of many in the Agency, he meant to be honest in revealing illegal actions carried out by CIA agents, as the charter of the CIA required—he would be called a traitor for conforming to the law. To brace himself just before testifying, he went to see an old friend teach a class at American University. The friend was Bernard Knox of the Center for Hellenic Studies. The two men had trained together in England to drop behind enemy lines during World War II and work with resistance forces (which both of them did). They had stayed in touch over the years, and Colby knew that Knox was lecturing that day on
Antigone,
the play about a woman following her conscience despite resistance from her family and from state officials. Few knew when he testified the next day that he was drawing inspiration from a Greek source.

It was only later that I learned how Whittaker Chambers, in the last years of his life, signed up for ancient Greek classes at Western Maryland College, near his farm (famous for its pumpkin-repository of Hiss papers). I cannot imagine four more different persons than Hess, Stone, Colby, and Chambers. But one thing they did have in common—the Greeks.

I
was soaking in the bathtub, reading a book (as was my wont), when my wife burst in. “They've killed Dr. King,” she said in shock. That is the way we Americans react. “They” killed President Kennedy, or his brother Robert, or Malcolm X. This was not a conscious profession of conspiracy theory, just the idea that there was an apparent inevitability to the deaths of these controversial leaders. It was crushing, but it was not entirely unexpected.

I asked Natalie to call the airline while I threw clothes onto my body and into my bag. She got me the last seat for the flight to Memphis out of Baltimore that night. King had been in Memphis supporting a strike by the sanitation workers. On the plane, I saw Bill Coffin, the liberal activist and Yale chaplain. Once I had stayed overnight at his rectory after I interviewed him in New Haven, and on the plane we shared our horror over what had happened in Memphis. Since Coffin was a famous preacher, I asked if he would speak at any memorial for Dr. King. He shrugged: “If they ask me.”

Arrived in Memphis, I dropped my bag at a hotel and went to the murder site (the Lorraine Motel), where I met Art Shay, the brilliant
Life
photographer. He invited me to go with him in his rented car to the police station, to find out what was happening. On our way there, we saw a liquor store whose glass front was broken in. Shay rushed to photograph the ravaged interior while I, always the outsider, stayed on the street to see if more trouble was on its way. At the police station we were told that Dr. King's body had been moved from the police morgue to the Lewis Funeral Home for embalming. We drove there through streets emptied by the curfew.

When we reach the funeral home, there is only one other reporter there. We huddle in the main viewing room to talk with the owner, Clarence Lewis. On the other side of a thin partition, he tells us, is the operating room, where morticians are at work on Dr. King's body. We can hear the black radio station playing King speeches while his speechless body is being repaired. “His jaw was shot away,” Lewis tells us. “We have to build a plaster jaw and powder it dark.”

When at last they bring the body out, at 8 a.m., there is a scrim over the open coffin. Shay protests that he cannot photograph through a scrim. Lewis agrees to take it off. “People would probably just tear it off to see him anyway.” A line of mourners (all black) had formed outside at dawn. When the crowd is let in, Lewis stands poised to intervene if anyone tries to touch the makeup on the artificial jaw—one woman does kiss the cheek, and Lewis quickly guides her away. Shay later sent me a picture of the first grieving women who filed past the coffin—it hangs over my desk as I write this.

We hear over the radio that Dr. King's widow, Coretta Scott King, is about to arrive at the airport, so we drive there. She was slow to come, since Jesse Jackson, who called her with the sad news, wanted to soften it by saying simply that her husband had been shot, not that he was dead. She had gone to the airport in Atlanta to fly to the husband she thought was injured. But Mayor Ivan Allen gave her the full news of her husband's death before she boarded the plane. At that, she turned around and went back home to steady her children. Now, the next day, she is about to reach Memphis. The plane must be emptied onto the tarmac, with Mrs. King coming down a rolling stairway. Shay grabs another stairway and pushes it close to the one that will be used. He climbs on it to have a good angle for seeing her as she emerges. But the police rush out to clear Shay off the tarmac. He tries again with another rolling perch, but they stop him again. He will have to use a long-distance lens.

After Mrs. King comes in, Shay follows her motorcade back to the funeral home, while I go to the union building where meetings of the sanitation strikers have been held. Inside, a large crowd has come to hear preacher after preacher mourn and memorialize Dr. King. Given the emotional occasion, there is a good deal of weeping, as over a dozen Baptist ministers preach call-and-response sermons. “Dr. King was
for us,”
the preachers call out, and the congregation shouts, “
Tell
it!
That
he was.” I go over to Bill Coffin and ask again if he means to say something. “Not here,” he answers; “this is the
big
league.” The crowd and the speakers are perfectly united in grief and in biblical resources, as wave after wave of “
Stay
there!” rumbles from the congregation.

The best speech is the last. In fact, it is the most moving speech I have heard, then or now. The preacher is a compact and natty black minister, with oddly precise diction and smoldering eyes, James Bevel. He has been a prolific inventor of strategies for King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, some strategies brilliant, some crackpot, all of them daring. He was in the forefront of the sit-ins, the freedom rides, Freedom Summer, the opposition to the Vietnam War. He was the one who persuaded King to include children in the march at Birmingham in 1963, and he helped pressure the Johnson administration into the 1964 Civil Rights Act by threatening to march children from Birmingham all the way to Washington. He had been married to the beautiful and brilliant civil rights leader Diane Nash, for a time his even braver (and saner) better half.

At the union hall, Bevel begins quietly, matter-of-fact: “Dr. King died on the case. Anyone who does not support the sanitation workers' strike is not on the case. You getting me?” They murmur that they are. “There's a false rumor around that our leader is dead. Our leader is not dead.” They shout, but tentatively, “No!” Does he mean his spirit is not dead? “That's a false rumor.” More support, but wavering: “False!” He is picking up the rhythm: “Martin Luther King is not”—not
dead,
they seem to anticipate—“Martin Luther King is not
our leader
.” Stunned, they hesitate and wonder. “Our leader is the man”—what man? the whole company is caught up in suspense—“is the man who led Moses out of Egypt.” Now they know, and they cry
yes
with relief.

After each sentence there is a high sobbing response. He has touched just the right chords for that day and that place.

Bevel speaks to an even larger crowd the next day, and speaks well, but not with the magic of the moment in that first speech. After this second sermon, I go up and ask Bevel for an interview. He brushes past me, saying he has no time for that; he has to get ready for the funeral in Atlanta. Mrs. King is conferring with Ralph Abernathy, Jesse Jackson, and others. They are preparing for a memorial march in Memphis before going to Atlanta for the burial (Robert Kennedy has chartered a plane to take them there). The SCLC leadership seems to be neglecting the sanitation strikers. The union spokesman, a rotund little garbageman named T. O. Jones, tells me that SCLC leaders promised to arrange for a fleet of buses to take them to the funeral in Atlanta, but T.O. has trouble confirming the arrangements. A hundred and fifty or so are supposed to gather at Clayborn Temple, the unofficial headquarters of the strike, on Monday, April 8, bringing their best clothes to wear at the funeral when they reach Atlanta.