Parting the Waters (159 page)

One effect of Sullivan's reeducation was to sharpen the selectivity of perception in his Intelligence Division. Officials had no trouble interpreting Hoover's instructions to keep pecking away at Kennedy with anything new on O'Dell or Levison. When surveillance agents once spotted O'Dell walking into the New York SCLC office, the Bureau rocketed this discovery to the Justice Department as proof of “King's duplicity” and O'Dell's continuing subversion. On the other hand, the Bureau did not report at all the wiretapped conversations of King's aides complaining that a wounded, rejected O'Dell had left the SCLC “high and dry,” taking with him mailing lists and files, with the result that the SCLC's direct-mail fund-raising effectively ceased.

These extraordinary bureaucratic exchanges signified an atmosphere of groping suspicion between the Bureau and the Justice Department. Mistrust and miscommunication were most pronounced over the hot issue of King, but they also intensified along at least two parallel tracks. One was organized crime. That fall, differences were personified in a crew-cut contract killer named Joe Valachi, who for his own reasons was willing to testify publicly about the inner workings of crime syndicates. For Kennedy, Valachi's proposed firsthand revelations about “capos” and “consiglieres” would prove that the old legends of Capone were alive, enlarged, and modernized into an established criminal conspiracy of enormous power. However, such revelations threatened to contradict Director Hoover's public position that organized crime theories were “baloney.” From a different angle, Valachi's testimony raised the same danger as Sullivan's short-lived declaration of victory over the Communists. If he publicly described the vast operations of the five New York crime families, Hoover could not long hold out against Kennedy's demand for new priorities within the Bureau.

When by adroit news leaks and prearranged congressional demands, Robert Kennedy assured that Valachi would deliver his confessions in public, Hoover tried to cover his retreat. Two days after the March on Washington, he issued an “FBI Bulletin” to law enforcement officers across the country, claiming that the FBI had long since established “a successful penetration…into the innermost sanctum of the criminal deity.” Just as Kennedy was advertising Valachi's impending testimony as a historic breakthrough, Hoover minimized information he said “corroborated and embellished the facts developed by the FBI as early as 1961.” Going a step further, Hoover wrote that public appearances by informants “serve, in a larger degree, to magnify the enormous task which lies ahead.” Reporters seized upon the word “magnify” as a veiled charge that Robert Kennedy was making the FBI's job more difficult. Kennedy asked Hoover to issue a clarifying statement, but Hoover refused, saying his language spoke for itself.

Joe Valachi, surrounded by heavily armed U.S. marshals, first appeared before a Senate committee and a nationally televised audience on September 27. His tales of comic terror, godfathers, snags in the heroin business, and Mafia manners (“How can I 'splain that to you, Senator?”) were the gripping originals for a later generation of entertainment. Because of Valachi, Kennedy said privately, “the FBI changed their whole concept of crime in the United States.”
The New York Times
published an “underworld glossary” of terms Valachi introduced. Opening-day coverage overshadowed all contemporary events, including President Kennedy's schedule and King's anguished “MacArthur speech” to the Richmond SCLC convention, and Valachi dominated the news for much of the next month. Robert Kennedy published a national summons to war against “the private government of organized crime,” in which he praised the IRS and the Bureau of Narcotics but mentioned the FBI only in passing. This was a momentary departure from Kennedy's patient cultivation of Hoover, most likely owing to pride or irritation. The Attorney General quickly resumed his courtier's campaign of flattery and encouragement.

Kennedy had special reason to be gentle in victory over Hoover and his prized internal security apparatus: he knew they held the balance in a quivering scandal that might well ruin President Kennedy. FBI agents had discovered that among the President's mistresses was a woman named Ellen Rometsch, who had fled her native East Germany in 1955 and made her way to Washington in 1961 as the wife of a soldier stationed in the West German Embassy. To the Bureau, this made Rometsch suspect as a possible East German spy. Even so, the scandalous implications might easily have been buried because of the President's privacy in such matters, except that Rometsch was part of a collateral scandal that could not be contained. She was one of many courtesans and party girls associated with Bobby Baker, an old Lyndon Johnson protégè on the Senate staff.

Baker's anonymity was about to be shattered by a disgruntled vending machine contractor angling to sue Baker for default on bought favors. That triggering event eventually sent Baker to prison. Long before then, it promised to open many lurid avenues of revelation about him as a one-man backroom marketplace who assiduously arranged contracts, cash, and backrubs. Robert Kennedy knew that one of those avenues led through Ellen Rometsch to President Kennedy. He had her quietly deported in August, but all through September, as lawyers and investigators circled Baker in private, the information left behind was a threat of the utmost sensitivity. Essentially, it was a reprise on John Kennedy's un-known Inga Arvad affair of the 1940s. Both these exotic romances with foreign women lay within Hoover's dreaded files, and Hoover, more than any other person, had the power to determine whether the Rometsch affair stayed as quiet as Arvad or became as noisy as the Profumo scandal in England, which was lurching toward a conclusion marked by suicide and political disgrace.

 

Far from public view, the King wiretap and the Baker scandal began in lockstep. On Friday, October 4, William Sullivan formally recommended that Hoover once again seek Kennedy's approval for a wiretap on King's home in Atlanta, “because of the communist influence in the racial movement shown by activities of Stanley Levison as well as King's connection with him.” The proposal was a watershed for Hoover, especially since Kennedy had turned him down once already in July. “I hope you don't change your minds on this,” he scribbled to Sullivan in an acid reminder of his brief apostasy. Possibly he was warning Sullivan to prepare for blame if Kennedy again crossed the Bureau on this vital question.

Bobby Baker went into hiding that same Friday, ducking a command summons from his Senate boss, Majority Leader Mike Mansfield. With Minority Leader Everett Dirksen and Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, Mansfield waited much of the afternoon, joined by Senator John Williams of Delaware, a conservative, abstemious Republican who, through scandals dating back to the Truman Administration, had earned a reputation as an independent “watchdog” of Senate ethics. By diligent research into the rumors flying between Capitol Hill and the FBI, Williams had gained results so alarming that he wanted to confront Baker with them in the presence of the Senate leadership. When Baker failed to appear, Mansfield promised to reconvene the meeting as soon as he could be located.

Hoover took Sullivan's draft of the new King wiretap request home for a final weekend of thought, then sent it to the Attorney General on Monday. That afternoon, Senator Mansfield told his private leadership group that an inebriated Baker had shown up to resign his Senate position rather than face Senator Williams. Baker had shouted that it was all a partisan witch-hunt designed to injure Vice President Johnson because of their close association. Rumors already circulated that Robert Kennedy was encouraging the Baker investigation surreptitiously, because of his dislike for Johnson, but Baker, Williams, and Hoover were among those who already knew that the Attorney General had his own reason to fear a scandal.

On Thursday, amid early ripples of publicity about Baker's resignation, the Senate unanimously ordered a Rules Committee investigation of Baker's conduct. That afternoon, having sent a terse note—“Courtney, speak to me”—Robert Kennedy met privately with Courtney Evans, his FBI liaison. He still had not signed the King wiretap authorization. To Evans, Kennedy stressed the political delicacy of the issue, saying that any public discovery of such a tap would be a disaster of the highest order. Logically, there was no more reason to tap King now than in July. The way to get at the contact between Levison and King was to monitor Levison, which the Bureau was doing already by every available means, including bugging. The results had failed for two years to corroborate the primary allegation of conspiracy between Levison and any Communists, let alone the Soviets. Moreover, the substance of the communication between Levison and King had been deemed dangerous only by FBI axiom that Levison was sinister. From any less rigid perspective, Levison appeared to be more or less as sensible as the civil rights movement itself.

Politically, there was
less
reason to tap King than in July. Since then, King's speech at the March on Washington had established him as a national spokesman for a significant minority of whites as well as the vast majority of Negroes. Also, the Birmingham church bombing had caused a perceptible increase in national sympathy for the Negro cause, and indirectly for King. If word of the wiretap got out, Kennedy could not hope to gain public support for an action that added to King's persecution. No law enforcement official could easily accept responsibility for tapping King when so many crimes against King's movement remained unsolved. That very day, Burke Marshall informed Robert Kennedy that Wallace's state troopers had arrested three men believed to have done the church bombing and charged them with minor offenses—deliberately, said Marshall, to protect them from imminent arrest on capital murder charges. Marshall's information came directly from Floyd Mann in Alabama, in secret. By his own high standards of crusading against criminal corruption, Kennedy had far more reason to slap a wiretap on Governor Wallace than on King.

Although neither Kennedy nor Courtney Evans spoke so plainly in their private memos, the best arguments for a wiretap on King had to do with obtaining political intelligence. Ironically, much of that information had been shut off by Kennedy's insistence that King stop talking to Levison, which had reduced the take from the Levison wiretaps. More than ever, Kennedy needed to know exactly what King intended. Congress was aflame over the civil rights bill. A surprise demonstration or a denunciation of the Administration could be calamitous from Kennedy's point of view. To deal with King—to court, control, or, in a dire emergency, renounce him entirely—he needed to know every possible detail. This was the unspoken bait from Hoover, who was not above larding his intelligence reports with political gossip.

On the other hand, it was a trap. If Kennedy handed Hoover a signed wiretap authorization on Martin Luther King, the precarious balance of their relationship would shift. Hoover would possess a club to offset Kennedy's special relationship with the President. Thereafter, it would become more difficult for Kennedy to restrain Hoover from any action he proposed against King. For that matter, it would become more difficult to suggest practically anything to Hoover. How could Kennedy hope to control Hoover once he had agreed to wiretap King? There was a Faustian undertow to Kennedy's dilemma, and he did not feel strong enough to resist. Some time later, after holding the matter entirely to himself, he told an aide tersely that there would have been “no living with the Bureau” if he had not signed.
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King tried to sort out his dead ends after the Richmond convention. Heavy bail indebtedness and other obstacles meant that demonstrations were “an absolute last resort,” he concluded, especially in Birmingham. “Our challenge now,” he wrote his staff, “is to be ingenious enough to keep the threat of demonstrations alive so as to give the local and national public a picture of our determination and continued militancy, and yet constantly find face-saving retreats in order to avoid demonstrations if possible.” He embarked on a circuit-riding tour of escalating bluster, fully conscious that he was racing his engine while braked.

He made four passes through Birmingham in October, once hitching a ride with Nelson “Fireball” Smith down to Selma. Mrs. Amelia Boynton, the local woman whose “honor roll” of would-be registrants had prompted John Doar to file voting suits there, had invited King to give a boost to her beleaguered registration campaign. By the time he addressed a mass meeting there, went on to Montgomery, and circled back to Birmingham, Alabama investigators had established that the car in which King made one leg of his journey had been rented by an observer from the Justice Department. Governor Wallace angrily denounced the federal government for subsidizing King's conspiracy against state laws. Two state grand juries and the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals eventually entered a swelling controversy that obliged King to issue several public statements. Congressional inquiries and contradictory evidence forced Burke Marshall to apologize for an earlier firm denial. Marshall fired the young Negro staff attorney who had been in charge of the car
†
for his panicky cover-up, and very nearly fired John Doar for lax supervision.

Hypersensitivity infected public discourse about civil rights and King in particular. At the White House, emissaries Blaik and Royall promised to divulge at least a summary of their report to President Kennedy on events in Birmingham since the church bombing, but they never came close to formulating a report to summarize. Their prescription for Birmingham was calm. Anything they said or did about the state of race relations was certain to cause turmoil. Therefore, they said nothing. Privately with the Kennedys, they talked about football. Their evasiveness became so blatant that some moderate whites in Birmingham sent secret protest notes to the Justice Department, and Earl Blaik himself complained privately to Marshall that his partner, Royall, was “never interested in any of my reports” and favored a “bland, PR approach” to Birmingham. In time, the two soldiers asked for and received permission to dissolve their assignment without report, recommendation, or public comment, as though it never happened.