Parting the Waters (119 page)

 

The soldiers, once marching, proved even more difficult to stop than to start. Long after the campus had quieted to Meredith-taunting and petty vandalism, new units piled in on top of each other until there were some 23,000 soldiers—three times the population of Oxford. The Marines got in on it; so did the Air Force. No fewer than 10,000 troops scrambled for a riot alarm on the night of October 11, surrounding what turned out to be a pre-engagement “pinning” serenade on the porch of a sorority house. Ordinary soldiers, while dodging a few rocks and grinning at the blistering obscenities they received from otherwise demure coeds, found enough humor to relieve the tedium. They named their tents “Andersonville” and “KKK HQ.” A giant sign proclaimed one latrine the “Governor's Mansion.”

Political ramifications helped pin the troops down in Mississippi, as neither the generals nor the politicians wanted to look as though they were backing down from Governor Barnett's torrent of indignant rage. All official Mississippi joined the governor in blaming the riot entirely on “trigger-happy marshals” and other federal intruders. Senator Eastland charged that the marshals had “provoked the students and others.” Lieutenant Governor Johnson, in a private complaint forwarded to Burke Marshall, charged that the tear gas “affected my lungs and my throat and caused, as the doctor put it, a blood clot upon my lungs.” The Mississippi senate passed a resolution expressing its “complete, entire and utter contempt for the Kennedy Administration and its puppet courts.” A Lafayette County grand jury indicted Chief Marshal McShane for inciting the riot. The Mississippi legislature's official report, oozing with self-pity and trampled virtue, charged the marshals with “planned physical torture” and other atrocities against Ole Miss students. This document caught the attention of President Kennedy, who lamented that such a brazenly fantastic inversion might one day be taken seriously by historians. Firsthand experience with Ole Miss made the President doubt his old Harvard professors, who taught that Northern fanatics trampled upon an innocent South after the Civil War. “It makes me wonder,” Kennedy said privately to Sorensen, “whether everything I learned about the evils of Reconstruction was really true.”

President Kennedy, while insightful about the effects of racial passions upon the perception of history itself, took steps toward a renewed mythology. To protect the racial sensibilities of Mississippi, he stripped Negro soldiers out of the military units at Ole Miss. Like Governor Barnett, he went out of his way to avoid mentioning that Meredith was a Negro. The President and his brother ignored most of Governor Barnett's slanderous accusations, and in fact they tasked the best legal minds in the Justice Department to find a way
not
to collect the contempt fines imposed on Barnett and Johnson. There might have been persuasive tactical reasons, as they did not want to renew the constitutional crisis, but such small steps consistently beckoned the Administration to minimize both the significance and the racial texture of the Ole Miss crisis.

President Kennedy's most effective political response to the Ole Miss riot was to move on to other things. Almost never did he mention the subject in speeches, nor did he exercise his famous aptitude for reviewing and interpreting political events during informal interviews. His power to define what was news consigned the Ole Miss story quickly to the back pages. The soldiers remained practically unnoticed at Ole Miss until the last five hundred departed late in the summer of 1963, after Meredith received his degree. The climate of the times helped contain the story. Had the riot occurred later, in the era of the “live network feed,” synchronized scenes of the Ole Miss rioting before, during, and after President Kennedy's national address might have been broadcast with jarring effect, making the President appear Pollyannish or incompetent. As it was, however, the sequence of events was blurred to his advantage, making the riot appear to be a rude answer to Kennedy's timely appeal. Friendly newspapers went to great lengths to adjust the speech to the riot.
The New York Times
went so far as to report that Kennedy “qualified his optimism most carefully” in his address, “and indeed made clear that the Government was waiting anxiously to see how Mississippi officials and citizens behaved.”

The Ole Miss crisis left people feeling victimized on all sides. Mississippians and other Southern leaders howled against the invasion. The formerly deputized marshals recovered from their wounds and went back to regular duty at prisons and border crossings. Kennedy's political advisers, realizing that all their efforts to accommodate Mississippi had served only to blanket the South with bumper stickers screaming
FEDERALLY OCCUPIED MISSISSIPPI
and
KENNEDY'S HUNGARY
, were reinforced in their belief that taking risks for integration invited political suicide. As for Negro leaders, all of whom praised President Kennedy in public for doing what was necessary to get Meredith registered, the sense of victory was hollow. NAACP lawyers, who had handled Meredith's case alone for nearly two years, felt shunted aside by Justice Department lawyers who had taken control of their case and even physical custody of Meredith.

Martin Luther King complained privately that President Kennedy had summoned the nation to nothing more positive than a grim obedience to law. In Kennedy's nationwide address there had been talk of burdens and closed books but not a word of freedom, fresh beginnings, or renewed hope. For King, by contrast, the issue went far beyond his identification with Meredith to touch his core conviction that human beings could transcend enemy-thinking. At stake was nothing less than the capacity to lighten the stain of evil and demonstrate the possibility of justice in the world's design, which for King was the realization of God's presence. His moral intensity in this regard struck President Kennedy as narrow and stifling. King, on the other hand, had heard enough glowing talk of Mississippi's gridiron traditions—and read enough of the political dickering between Mississippi and the Administration—to sink into profound depression. As much as he admired President Kennedy for his stylish command of the modern world, King knew that Kennedy and Barnett still had more in common with each other than either had with him. Their performance at Oxford, he wrote, “made Negroes feel like pawns in a white man's political game.” He blended this lament into a bleak assessment of 1962 as the year civil rights lost ground in national politics. No longer the “dominant issue” of domestic debate, it had receded since the year of the Freedom Rides and of the Kennedy Administration's early cry, “We will move!” King too had receded, as measured by his ineffectiveness in Albany, and his criticism of the Administration no doubt reflected his fear that no matter how mightily he shouted and sacrificed, he remained a cork in Kennedy's ocean, left to rise and fall with its tides.

In October 1962, CIA officials obtained photographic intelligence that Soviet nuclear missiles were being shipped to Cuba. “Can they hit Oxford, Mississippi?” asked the President, facetiously suggesting that Fidel Castro and the Russians could do worse than to obliterate the site of his recent vexations. The President kept his nerve during the crisis, if not always his humor. He convened his war chiefs to debate whether to bomb, invade, or quarantine Cuba to root out the missiles, and when it came time to brief congressional leaders, the fever of emergency was so high that Air Force planes retrieved Congressman Hale Boggs from his fishing boat in the Gulf of Mexico, first dropping him an SOS in a plastic bottle.

C. B. King was in Washington, pleading unsuccessfully for federal prosecution of Sheriff Campbell for caning him in July. When President Kennedy announced the naval quarantine of Cuba, King rushed homeward, driving down the East Coast past closed businesses and deserted towns, listening to bulletins on military movements and prayer services, and on his door found a note from his wife saying she had moved the entire family to Clarence Jordan's Koinania Farm for fear that the military bases near Albany would make prime targets for Soviet missiles. Hundreds of millions of people in scores of countries shared similar apprehensions. Certainly not since World War II, and perhaps never, had so many people experienced world politics so vividly at once.

On Sunday, October 28, Premier Khrushchev agreed that the Soviet missiles would be withdrawn from Cuba. In Birmingham, Bull Connor and the other two city commissioners were holding a secret negotiating session with leaders of the fire department. While greatly relieved that the world had not blown up, they quickly turned to gritty local politics: the city commissioners promised the firemen a million-dollar raise if they would vote against the referendum on the new city charter. Bargaining went on in blissful ignorance that a reform sympathizer among them was operating a clandestine tape recorder. The result was an extraordinary series of radio ads, in which a firefighter was heard asking, “Do we get the raise regardless of how the election comes out next Tuesday?” and the voice of Mayor Arthur Hanes replying, “Absolutely not. You don't get your raises unless
we
are here to give it to you.” An announcer then came on the air urging Birmingham to “stop corruption in city hall” by voting for the new charter. The ads exposed the stuff of dirty patronage—and the inevitable higher taxes to pay for it. This civic embarrassment was exactly the sort of shock the reformers needed to bury the segregation factor in the referendum, and on election day the voters unexpectedly approved the mayor-city council proposal. The miracle seeded by the Mother's Day beatings of the original Freedom Riders advanced another stage, as Bull Connor's job was abolished. If he wanted to keep ruling Birmingham, he would have to run for mayor in a special election the next March. Connor was teetering in power, making the city a slightly weaker colossus of segregation against the campaign being plotted by Shuttlesworth and King.

Elsewhere, people made glowing new resolutions, as though granted a rebirth. Political analysts, while groping for the secret arrangements through which Khrushchev's retreat had been secured, freely acknowledged that President Kennedy had faced down Armageddon. The Oval Office became even more of a hallowed shrine, and the Camelot mood returned. By lucky coincidence, a talented Kennedy mimic named Vaughn Meader taped a comedy album called
The First Family
on the very day Kennedy announced the quarantine of Cuba. The album quickly sold a million copies, pushing past the debut album of folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary to the top of the pop charts, alongside “He's a Rebel” by the Crystals and “You Are My Sunshine” by Ray Charles. In the afterglow of the missile crisis, presidential humor became a national fad. Even political detractors, outside Mississippi, laughed at Meader's parody of the Kennedy foibles: the President's flat-palate accent, his speedreading, his chasing daughter Caroline around the Oval Office, his remarks on snuggling down in a bed full of Kennedys (“Goodnight, Jackie…Goodnight, Bobby…”). By paradox at the extreme reaches of fame, humor helped make the Kennedy legend both human and supernatural.

Spectacular success gave the President freer rein to pursue his own interests, which were decidedly international rather than domestic, and the very nature of the missile crisis underscored his point that the global contest was of paramount importance. The tonic of national relief made it easier for people to slough off the troublesome, entrenched dilemmas of race. Civil rights “no longer commanded the conscience of the nation,” wrote King, who discovered that while fickle conscience did not operate well in an atmosphere of fear or ignorance, neither did it flower on abundant zest. The white world became too happy for civil rights. Such misalignments of perspective exasperated King in his struggle to lead whites and Negroes to see the same truths. Even the bitterest Negro, he said, must study cross-racial vision. This was the “added demon” necessary to survive in a predominantly white world. Trying at once to explain whites to Negroes and Negroes to whites, King felt all the more acutely the “anxieties and sensitivities” that “make each day of life a turmoil…another emotional battle in a never-ending war.” The Negro, he said, “is shackled in his waking moments to tip-toe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and in his subconscious he wrestles with this added demon.”

 

On October 26, a New Orleans newspaper published a story flatly declaring that Jack O'Dell was a “Communist who has infiltrated to the top administrative post in the Rev. Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference.” Citing “a highly authoritative source,” the unsigned article identified O'Dell as a “concealed member” of the party's national committee who for years had been “carrying out his Communist party assignments” in civil rights work.

This surprise attack caused dissension to erupt within King's own camp. King already knew that O'Dell had been expelled from the National Maritime Union, and that he had lost his insurance job in Montgomery after being called before the House Un-American Activities Committee as a suspected Communist. He wanted to make sure there was nothing deeper within O'Dell's past, nothing violent or sinister. Wearily, O'Dell told King that he was not a party member, as the article alleged, much less a member of the party's national committee, but he knew people who were. In the past, he had attended their meetings, and in 1956 he had written an article on Louisiana racial politics for a Communist publication. O'Dell traced his HUAC subpoena to such associations. Only four years earlier, congressional investigators had branded O'Dell a fiendish automaton, “part and parcel of the communist conspiracy,” scorning not only his professions of idealism but his Negro identity.

King did not doubt that O'Dell's labor for the SCLC was sincere. All that was understood, but it was also irrelevant. O'Dell, by his guileless insistence that the Communist program ought to be debated like any other, as in France or Italy, ignored the savage realities of Cold War politics in a white culture, where one brand of enemy-thinking was easily hitched to another. Politically, what mattered about the newspaper article was its public impact. Where did it come from? What did it mean? King saw the story as the second “signal” in two months—first the friendly warning from Washington through Kelly Miller Smith and now a hostile attack in print. These were detailed, official-sounding charges of subversion. The embattled SCLC could scarcely hope to survive a sustained barrage of such propaganda. King told O'Dell the entire SCLC board was upset. “What can I do?” he asked.

O'Dell analyzed the article as a likely plant by police or HUAC investigators in New Orleans. It mentioned the fact that his home in New Orleans had been raided. His recommendation to King was to ignore the attack. Only one small paper seemed to have picked up the story, and the matter would probably die out. To accept the challenge of satisfying segregationists of the purity of one's ideology was to lose in advance, O'Dell warned. If King felt compelled to answer the article, O'Dell would swear that he did not owe allegiance to any foreign power, nor advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government by force, but otherwise he would refuse all interrogations about his political beliefs. He would refuse to renounce the Communist Party or his Communist friends, even so far as the facts allowed. “I have nothing to apologize for,” he said.

Although King agreed with O'Dell that a free society betrayed itself by policing beliefs, he could not bring himself to leave the article unanswered. To break the chain of public suspicion, he decided that he must refute the connection between O'Dell and the SCLC rather than the one between O'Dell and the Communists. On November 1, without seeking to publicize it, he made available on request a statement of defense. “It is totally inaccurate and false to state that Mr. O'Dell is Southeastern Director of the SCLC,” he declared. “He has not only never been director but was never considered for the position.” From there, King minimized his association with O'Dell to the point of falsehood, stating that O'Dell “has functioned purely as a technician with 90 percent of his work taking place in the north, where he resides, and involving the mechanization of our mailing procedures. He was briefly and temporarily filling in in some areas of voter registration, but ceased functioning there long before this publicity appeared.” O'Dell had resigned “to avoid embarrassment to SCLC,” the statement went on, and King had “accepted it pending further inquiry and clarification.”

Privately, King assured O'Dell that all this was only for public consumption, that the “further inquiry” was already over and O'Dell was back on the staff. He never left for a moment, in fact. O'Dell submitted as gracefully as he could, but he was a proud and independent sort. It only weakened King to allow himself to be drawn into the game of denial and half-truth, he grumbled, and it hurt to be the one denied. Between the New York mail-room staff and the people processing VEP paperwork, O'Dell figured he had more people reporting to him than did Wyatt Walker. Yet King pretended barely to know him.

The New Orleans article was an extremely unpleasant distraction for King, who hoped fervently that the issue would fade away. Political fears caused him to dissemble and equivocate. Indeed, his behavior paralleled President Kennedy's course on civil rights. Painful as it was for King to hurt his own colleague, more than a few of his allies wished he had treated O'Dell more severely. When a lawyer in New Orleans sent the news clipping to Lotte Kunstler in New York, for instance, Kunstler's immediate reaction was to fear that this one charge of Communist infiltration might ruin her Sammy Davis fund-raiser for the SCLC on December 11. She did not consider such apprehensions farfetched or paranoid. On the contrary, she had seen two Scarsdale women wreck a benefit for the Freedom Riders earlier that same year on far weaker allegations. The women, wives of stockbrokers affiliated with the American Legion, had filed suit to stop the benefit as subversive, and failing in that, had recruited pickets with signs saying “Turn Left for Scarsdale” and “Doing the Moscow Twist.”

Her worries built steadily in early November, as O'Dell continued to handle many of the financial preparations for the Sammy Davis benefit. He signed rental agreements and insurance bonds in behalf of the SCLC and kept track of advance ticket sales. When Kunstler heard that O'Dell was supposed to have resigned from the SCLC, she demanded an explanation. Stanley Levison kept telling her that the story was a distortion of O'Dell's past, and was unlikely to surface, but Kunstler insisted that “this thing might bounce back on us,” and that rich people “would tell me to go fly a kite” if they suspected Communist involvement in the SCLC. When Levison suggested that she simply stop referring to O'Dell as the man in charge, she objected that “up to this point there has been no reason for us to use subterfuge, if you want to call it that.” She said her own integrity was at stake, because “many people may come back to me and say that I pulled the wool over their eyes.” They were dealing in mysteries of character and imagination, she told Levison: “Some people would laugh at this, but others might be terribly hurt…That spotlight is a powerful thing.”

FBI wiretappers intercepted these emotional exchanges over Levison's office lines in New York and forwarded transcripts to headquarters, where Levison's defense of O'Dell doubtless made perfect sense as one Communist vouching for another. The internal strife at the SCLC also was ample proof that the Bureau's first active blow against King had landed with telling effect. FBI agents had planted the unsigned New Orleans article, along with virtually identical ones in four other newspapers scattered from St. Louis to Long Island.

Hoover launched a full-scale investigation of King at the same time. While it may have seemed illogical for the Bureau to punish King even before gathering evidence of alleged misdeeds, Hoover shrewdly seized his chance to give both orders during the week when the whole country was huddling in fear of extinction by Soviet missiles. The missile crisis inspired and justified emergency measures such as the newspaper attacks on King for employing O'Dell. Because such activities were forbidden within the United States, Bureau officials undertook the operation in the utmost secrecy, knowing they could rely on the discreet collaboration of trusted press contacts. To carry out the first secret strike against King, ironically, they called in the Washington representatives of five American newspapers.