Pillar of Fire (32 page)

Back at his new COFO assignment in Hattiesburg, Guyot presented to local leaders his plan for a Freedom Day modeled on the October event in Selma. He argued that voting rights would remain null throughout Mississippi so long as the local registrar, Theron Lynd, successfully defied the Justice Department's marathon lawsuit against him. With Lynd's most recent contempt citation on appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court, and with the local movement paralyzed in the meantime by threat of imprisonment, Guyot proposed a one-day demonstration dramatic enough that it might push the U.S. government to enforce one of its decrees against Lynd, so that cowed local Negroes could “see his ass put in jail.” To supplement the jail-weary movement veterans, Guyot planned to recruit not only celebrities but also volunteer clergy, mostly white, from the North. (“I think there will be roughly 25 preachers in all,” his church liaison soon confided, “though not all of them will picket, i.e., go to jail.”)

Local scrutiny of Guyot's plan fell largely to the yeoman farmer Vernon Dahmer, who had lost his own church and his friend Clyde Kennard to the voting rights movement. “Are you strong enough for this?” Dahmer asked Guyot. “Do you know what these folks around here are capable of doing?” With Dahmer's blessing, recruitment went forward quietly beneath the larger debate over a statewide program for the summer. At a COFO meeting in mid-December, the plan rejected in November was reintroduced first as a grandiose scheme to import 100,000 college students into Mississippi, then pared all the way down to one hundred. “You're going to get a lot of folks killed!” shouted Willie Peacock when the vote carried, prompting another reconsideration. A number of delegates were reluctant to pursue the question in the absence of Bob Moses, who was away in New York, which prompted a stinging accusation that the self-consciously independent movement people were in fact captives of one leader. “I'm not attacking Moses,” said Guyot, who supported the summer project. “I'm mad because nobody's challenging Moses.” Another speaker voiced private doubts about “the Bob Moses mystique—we've operated as though the very word of God was being spoken.”

Moses only enhanced his moral authority by trying to reduce or escape its burden. When the Mississippi debate resumed after Christmas, at a SNCC meeting in Atlanta, he was reluctant to speak to the issue at all, saying it was too divisive within the movement and too fraught with responsibility for him to disclose an opinion either way. His doubts about the propriety of charismatic leadership within a democratic movement were a hallmark of SNCC culture generally, at odds with Martin Luther King and other leaders who actively cultivated techniques of command. Like King's SCLC, SNCC veterans did contend privately over the Cold War issue of red-baiting—whether the inclusion on principle of alleged subversives was worth the price of being tarred by association
*
—and they worried that a spectacular failure could destroy their organization, but SNCC's bias against hierarchy combined with the intense introspection of Moses to accent a personal, purgative quality in its debates. Among the roughly fifty SNCC leaders gathered in Atlanta, abstraction mingled with confessions about “bossism” of nearly every kind. To diagnose ongoing SNCC troubles around Albany, Georgia, some attributed an “image of failure” to the nebulous local goal of “freeing men's minds,” others to limitations of the mass meeting approach, and still others to project director Charles Sherrod's use of white staff workers.

On the awkward issue of racial tensions within the movement, speakers rose to say that the movement did not know how to utilize white staff people, or that whites required more supervision because of their erratic psychological passage through a predominantly Negro movement. (“Some of the whites in SNCC are among the strongest advocates of black nationalism,” said one white staff member. “This is a necessary step…. It is fruitless for all the whites in SNCC to try to be Negro.”) Whether viewed as growing pains or warning signs, apprehensions about whites in the movement saturated the looming decision about the Mississippi summer proposal “pushed by Al Lowenstein,” as Moses told the Atlanta meeting, to “pour in thousands of students and force a showdown between local and federal governments in an election year.” Nearly all those students would be raw white recruits, entering a state where movement veterans could not so much as carry a sign in public without being snatched away to hang from cell bars at Parchman. By unanimous exhaustion, as usual, the Atlanta meeting adopted Marion Barry's vague resolution that SNCC “intends to obtain” universal suffrage in Mississippi in 1964, “using as many people as necessary.” Details were left to a “final showdown” debate scheduled for late January in Hattiesburg, after Guyot's Freedom Day.

E
ARLY ON
M
ONDAY
, December 23, as swaths of black crepe were removed from the chandeliers of the White House state rooms and flags nationwide were raised from half staff to close the month of official mourning for President Kennedy, seven top FBI officials gathered in the office of Fred Baumgardner, section chief, Internal Security [Division Five], for an all-day conference “aimed at neutralizing King as an effective Negro leader.” Robert Nichols, one of two Atlanta agents flown to Washington for the occasion, arrived with some misgivings about his extraordinary new wiretap operation. Unlike other wiretap monitor lines, which ran from the telephone company to the Atlanta FBI office, the King tap monitors were wired into a phony engineering company that Nichols had been ordered to set up as a front, complete with a made-up name, a leased suite at the new downtown Peach Tree Towers, and rented office furniture. These stealthy arrangements made the taps more difficult to trace to the FBI, and already had prompted gossip among the Atlanta agents that Director Hoover must be operating without the required legal authorization from Attorney General Kennedy.

Assistant Director William Sullivan reassured the Atlanta agents that headquarters possessed signed wiretap orders for each installation. The documents left Robert Kennedy a figurehead in no position to supervise or restrict the FBI's pursuit of King, and Bureau officials, in restoring traditional direct channels to the White House, were free to disclose fruits of the unknown surveillance to the new administration as they saw fit. This was heady stuff for the Atlanta agents. (Afterward, Sullivan sent a memo to Hoover's office stating that “the men from the field expressed their appreciation for the opportunity of being brought into the Seat of Government…[and] were both enthusiastic about the case….”) Still, they would have preferred to hear that the King investigation was headed toward arrest or resolution, as criminal cases were the coin of respect among field agents. Agent Nichols in particular felt that his entire Bureau career had been trapped in Cold War loyalty investigations. No agents in Atlanta wanted to be part of his King detail, because they knew it was all sedentary paperwork and waiting—deciphering intercepted conversations, trying to fathom the personal dynamics of a separate world, writing reports. Agents on the lowly bad check squad, who at least got out to chase suspects, resisted transfer into security work as clerk duty.

The agenda for the headquarters conference of December 23 included a few virile options, such as recruiting inside informants or “placing a good-looking female plant in King's office,” but Assistant Director Sullivan ruled out the Bureau's standard technique of multiple, dragnet interviews to elicit cooperation. In fact, he strictly forbade all interviews, along with visits to “show the badge” and other actions that might disclose the FBI's interest in King. His operational summary repeated five times a first requirement that the operation must avoid “embarrassment to the Bureau.” Practically, such secrecy constrained the FBI to gather information by surreptitious, technical methods such as wiretaps, and to use the results covertly. Wiretaps conferred a special tactical advantage: by overhearing King's travel plans on the telephone, FBI eavesdroppers gained advance knowledge necessary to have electronic transmitters (popularly called “bugs,” known in FBI parlance as “misurs,” short for “microphone surveillance”) implanted in the walls of King's hotel room before he arrived. The conference adopted plans to let the first step—wiretaps on telephones—facilitate the more intrusive second step of bugs placed to intercept all sounds within a private space. The resulting peek at intimate, unguarded moments promised more gossip than evidence, information better suited to personal attack than courtroom prosecution. “We are most interested in exposing him in some manner or another in order to discredit him,” declared the preconference agenda.

For Agent Nichols and his primary King wiretap crew of fifteen recruits, it remained a disappointment that headquarters essentially restricted them to stenographic duties—long hours of tedium interrupted by disputes over how to distinguish one muffled voice from another over earphones. As consolation, they developed a kibitzer's interest in King's world, along with a proprietary stake in its importance. After only two months' eavesdropping, many of the wiretap crew took it for granted that King was the most significant American orator of the century. As they monitored the running debate over the departure of Wyatt Walker, some endorsed King's repeated assertion that money was the root of evil, while others argued for the fine distinction that not money itself but “the love of money” corrupted, which Walker used to legitimize his demand for a salary increase.

At a deeper level, however, the wiretap squad adopted the headquarters view that a fundamental defect made King the most subtle and dangerous of Communist allies—the sort who did not believe in the immediate threat of the Communist subversion. As a field agent, Robert Nichols did not pretend to understand the intellectual nuance marshaled by Assistant Director Sullivan, the Bureau's senior expert on Communism, but he picked up enough to stress one intercepted remark by King that he “pretty much agreed with Hegel” on dialectics in history, which Nichols knew was a tenet of German philosophy that had led to Marxism. At the December FBI conference, this was the ready explanation for King's shocking association with Stanley Levison against the explicit personal order of the President of the United States, and it became a standard theme of the wiretap shop that King was making the racial situation more uncomfortable than necessary. Atlanta's limited role was to funnel intelligence ammunition to headquarters under two most desirable headings: money and sex. Section Chief Baumgardner quoted the suspicion of an Alabama representative that “so-called civil rights organizations…could be a front for a full-grown racket.” On that premise, the conference resolved to enlist the quiet cooperation of the IRS to investigate King and his financial supporters for tax avoidance or unbecoming extravagance. As to sex, headquarters aimed to follow up the wiretap indications that King liked to pursue women after hours on the road. Assistant Director Sullivan closed his report on the December meeting with confident determination: “We will, at the proper time when it can be done without embarrassment to the Bureau, expose King as an immoral opportunist who is not a sincere person but is exploiting the racial situation for personal gain.”

Like every other successful FBI executive, Sullivan accurately read Director Hoover's moods. Less than a week later, when King appeared on the cover of
Time
magazine as “Man of the Year,” praised editorially for the historic Birmingham breakthrough
*
that made him “the unchallenged voice of the Negro people—and the disquieting conscience of the whites,” Hoover circulated at headquarters his own reaction: “They had to dig deep in the garbage for this one.” Animosity toward King gained free rein in FBI policy up to the restraining edge of “embarrassment to the Bureau,” as was evident a few days later when a crude letter of multiple assassination threats reached headquarters from St. Petersburg, Florida. “We here to get Martin Luthr King and Wilkson [Roy Wilkins] and Mayr [Ivan] Allen [of Atlanta],” said the letter. “We wont miss no. Two more in Washington to get Bob Kenedy and 2 nigers, then Johnson if he push integratin. We plege not fail or die. We not fail no.” In the midst of the standard full-scale trace alert on possible danger to President Johnson, the FBI extended notification to the lesser targets mentioned—except for King. In his newfound assertiveness after the Kennedy assassination, Director Hoover suspended official courtesies that smacked of FBI solicitude for King's welfare, and declared him specifically unfit to receive death warnings. On these instructions, the Atlanta FBI office notified only the local police, but complications arose when Roy Wilkins asked to have a copy of the threat letter for his personal files. If “Wilkson” saw King's name listed before his, natural conversation between them might reveal that King remained in the dark, excluded by an edict Hoover did not care to explain. To avoid such risk, Hoover's office ordered New York officials to “diplomatically decline” the request for the copy, and suggested several pretentious excuses to mollify Wilkins.

 

K
NOWING NOTHING
of the FBI's extraordinary war council against King, President Johnson left Washington to spend Christmas and New Year's at his Texas ranch. A small army of federal workers already had transformed the 1890 farmhouse and surrounding buildings into a presidential command post, complete with coding equipment for secure communications, radar saucers for air security, and perimeter searchlights for the assassination-haunted Secret Service. Johnson himself was a gadget person, but he preferred earthier uses: high-powered showerheads, special blades to cut thick steaks into the shape of Texas, an amphibious jeep that he loved to drive into his lake by “mistake” with unwitting passengers, and, mounted on his Lincoln touring convertible, a horn whose sounds stimulated the mating instincts of nearby cattle, producing sights that mortified those whom Johnson gleefully called “citified” guests.

Never was Johnson's domain more thoroughly overrun than these holidays, when he postponed Christmas dinner with twenty-odd relatives, including Aunt Josefa and Cousin Oriole, to take fifty of the regular beat reporters on a tour of the main house. The
New York Times
published on the front page a photograph of the President astride his horse, Lady B, and another of him speaking from an outdoor rostrum mounted on a bale of hay. Five Greyhound busloads of supplementary reporters covered the arrival of West German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard for the first state barbecue, with entertainment by classical pianist Van Cliburn. Erhard was followed closely by the Joint Chiefs and most of the Cabinet. Johnson handed out souvenir ashtrays and offered cigarettes from displays artfully swirled in hospitality bowls.

Stress showed more privately. Whenever Mrs. Johnson saw the President reaching for a cigarette, she matched his actions ostentatiously to achieve a silent standoff—having learned that her own threat to take up smoking if he returned to the habit yielded more effect, and less abuse, than verbal correction. The smallest criticisms could agitate Johnson for weeks, as when he noticed that
Jet
magazine mistakenly said he had refused to be photographed with Martin Luther King. He retrieved prints to prove otherwise, then pleaded with the Urban League's Whitney Young to make
Jet
“quit cuttin' us up sayin' we hate the nigras.” In his Christmas call to Roy Wilkins, Johnson protested in such unconsolable distress—“I had my picture made with every damn one of 'em!”—that his shortness of breath moved Wilkins to interject repeatedly, “Please take care of yourself.”

The new president also labored painfully to gain acceptance from aides who had been close to President Kennedy. Having courted Kennedy's chief speechwriter, Theodore Sorensen—“I've done as much as I can and have any pride and self-respect left,” he complained to a friend—Johnson commandeered him to the ranch for the holidays. Sorensen arrived with his three young sons and a vacant look, having lost not only a president but also a wife from whom he had recently separated. He remained polite but pinched as Johnson aggressively befriended him with compliments, Stetson hats, cowboy adventures, and overly close attention so transparently misguided that the household help winced for both men.

Poignant discomforts carried over to the marathon poverty caucus in the rustic guest house, a green frame structure set in a pasture where white-faced Hereford cattle grazed. With Bill Moyers and economist Walter Heller, among others, Sorensen brainstormed Johnson's charge to design a dramatic but practical legislative attack. The money people argued for something “experimental,” meaning visibly new but cheap, while the political people argued for something to spread among the competing bureaucracies that claimed expertise in health, education, and job training. As paper cups and crumpled scratch sheets piled up on the table, Johnson reacted to various proposals including one to create a trial “one-stop” poverty center in Washington's Union Station, envisioned as a synergetic beehive for experts and the needy alike. Horace Busby made the mistake of speaking up from his wall seat to ask how all the poor people would get there to seek jobs, and where would they park? This comment drew a withering look from President Johnson, who promptly summoned Busby outside for a scolding. “Why did you say that?” he demanded. “Don't you realize these are Kennedy's people?” Johnson's pride in Texas gave way to fear that yokelism within his camp would drive away the Ivy League holdovers who lent a sophisticated image to his government.

Hypersensitive and erratic, President Johnson attended a reception in part to make up with Busby. Alumni from the University of Texas were honoring Busby, the wartime editor of
The Daily Texan
, now a celebrity as special assistant to the President, with a party at an off-campus faculty retreat called the Forty Acres Club, a short helicopter ride from the LBJ Ranch. Like the university itself, the club had been locked in an icy, three-year standoff over segregation, with the politically connected regents maintaining an arcane fallback line since court-ordered integration. Restrictions banned some two hundred Negro students from all varsity sports and leading roles in campus theater, for instance, and a prolonged faculty boycott failed to breach strict segregation at Forty Acres. As Vice President, Johnson had hosted dinners to encourage some of the embattled professors, but these intercessions were trivial compared with the simple gesture of escorting Gerri Whittington to the Busby reception on New Year's Eve. Throughout the formal and informal salutes due the new president, faculty members pretended not to stare at the White House secretary on his arm. No one mentioned to Johnson that Whittington shattered precedent as the first Negro ever admitted to the premises. Managers at Forty Acres soon began accepting reservations for mixed tables, saying “the President of the United States integrated us on New Year's Eve,” and other university practices began to fall in line as though one step through the glass partition pretty much settled the entire race issue.