Pillar of Fire (86 page)

King continued with a small group to Stockholm, where he met the famed sociologists Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, and danced in public with Coretta in a rare, somewhat controversial exhibition for a Baptist preacher, then on to Paris, where he took his parents to a soul food restaurant on Rue Clauzel owned by a Morehouse graduate, and stayed behind when the others visited the Lido nightclub. “Only Martin's family and close staff members knew how depressed he was during the entire Nobel trip,” Coretta disclosed privately some years later. “…He was worried about the rumors, and he was worried about what black people might think. He always worried about that.” Andrew Young traced his mood more narrowly to disappointment over the childish jealousy from Abernathy: “Ralph's estrangement was much more worrisome to Martin than anything he thought J. Edgar Hoover might do.”

 

W
HILE
K
ING WAS ABROAD
, Defense Secretary McNamara drew President Johnson aside after a Vietnam strategy session with Ambassador Maxwell Taylor. “It would be impossible for Max to talk to these people,” warned McNamara, of White House reporters waiting nearby, “without leaving the impression that the situation is going to hell.” Accordingly, Taylor slipped through a rear exit and returned to Saigon. In meetings between December 7 and 10, he carried out instructions to demand that South Vietnamese military factions unite behind their civilian government in exchange for approval by President Johnson of a morale-building secret bombing campaign against North Vietnamese targets in Laos.

On December 10, Bill Moyers addressed the lingering scandal threat of Adam Yarmolinsky, the former Pentagon official who had been dismissed as the price of Southern support for the poverty bill. “
Esquire
Magazine and the
Saturday Evening Post
are both planning stories which will make this a kind of ‘Dreyfus' case,” warned Moyers, who reminded the President that he had promised to “help Yarmolinsky at the right time.”
*
Johnson chose to risk the publicity rather than a confirmation dispute over a Yarmolinsky appointment.

In California, more than a thousand members of Berkeley's Academic Senate met in crisis. A photograph on the front page of the December 8
New York Times
showed campus police dragging Mario Savio from the stage upon his first words to a university assembly; nearly eight hundred students had been arrested at sit-ins protesting the reinstatement of restrictions on political speech. “We are told that the mob is waiting outside!” shouted a professor of cell biology. Against an appeal by philosopher Louis Feuer, who recalled how Nazi students “helped destroy freedom and democracy in the universities of central Europe,” the faculty voted to support the basic principles of what was now known as the Free Speech Movement, but the university Regents stood firm against an inchoate public image of unruly youth. Across the country, the
New York Times
reported that “Berkeley Protest Becomes a Ritual” and noted that “beards and long hair and guitars were much in evidence along the corridors of Sproul Hall. At least one young man came in barefoot.”

In Washington on the night of December 10, Jack Warner of Warner Brothers Studios agreed to pay J. Edgar Hoover $75,000, plus $500 per episode, to film a television series called
The F.B.I.
Hoover's negotiator, Deke DeLoach, who had made it his urgent priority to reverse public relations damage from the “notorious liar” incident, faithfully extracted a host of “image” stipulations for the show—among them that the lead FBI character (based on Inspector Joe Sullivan) would always button his coat, never use informants, and always subdue the villain with a single, nonfatal shot—but DeLoach himself grew weary of Hoover's ever-expanding list of forbidden sponsors: alcohol, lingerie, makeup, footwear, and all bathroom products. The series would enjoy a nine-year run on ABC.

In Los Angeles, not until the afternoon of December 11 did anyone connect the undignified corpse—found in a cheap Watts motel the previous night, clad in a raincoat and one shoe—to the celebrity-red Ferrari parked outside with a copy of
Muhammad Speaks
on the seat. Police routinely accepted statements that the Negro victim was a foiled kidnapper-rapist, and dispatched the body unclaimed to the morgue before entertainment reporters descended upon the LAPD's 77th Precinct station with doubts that Sam Cooke died a low-life criminal. Too late, their investigations established it more likely that Cooke, convinced the motel was in cahoots with the prostitute who ran off with several thousand dollars and his clothes, had accused the female desk clerk, who shot him. These clarifications offered modest relief to Cooke's towering reputation or comfort to the five thousand disbelieving fans who gathered at the Chicago funeral, where Billy Preston played an organ prelude and Lou Rawls performed “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.” Ray Charles turned up unexpectedly, and was guided down the aisle of Mount Sinai Baptist Church to sing “Angels Watching over Me.” The death of Sam Cooke remained a sensational tragedy in the Negro press, but elsewhere it was a bigger story that an Illinois schoolgirl claimed to possess the cremated, post-operative tonsil of Beatles drummer Ringo Starr.

In Saigon, Maxwell Taylor dressed down four South Vietnamese officers who had just arrested military rivals and leaders of the civilian government. “I told you all clearly at General Westmoreland's dinner that we Americans were tired of coups,” the ambassador said sternly. “Apparently I wasted my words. Maybe this is because something is wrong with my French…. Now you have made a real mess. We cannot carry you forever if you do things like this.” The assembled Young Turks, who included future rulers Nguyen Cao Ky and Nguyen Van Thieu, seethed with humiliation. Their commander, General Khanh, threatened to have Taylor expelled as a colonialist; Taylor countered that Khanh should go into exile. “Generals acting greatly offended by my disapproval of their recent actions,” the ambassador cabled President Johnson before Christmas.

 

H
OME BEFORE
K
ING
, Bayard Rustin and Harry Wachtel plotted how they might induce President Johnson to invite King aboard
Air Force One
after their meeting on December 18, then “drop him off” in Atlanta on his way to the LBJ Ranch. Rustin also told friends of the prostitute chases in Oslo, boasting that he had thought quickly enough to warn that any arrest would bring down shame on Norway for allowing its criminals to pester King's friends. The calls gave FBI wiretappers “the first indication we have had that President Johnson may see King,” and Hoover wrote “Expedite” on paperwork to send the White House a secret bulletin.

Another FBI wiretap picked up a distress call on December 15 between Clarence Jones and Stanley Levison. Neither had gone to Oslo, but they had heard the wild stories. Jones's wife, Ann, who idolized King, could not accept that he would allow such antics around him. When Jones tried to excuse the behavior as harmless sport, she confirmed first that he was neither offended nor surprised, then suddenly realized that her husband had been an accomplice to similar events—including some in their own home. “I never want to see Martin again,” said Ann Jones. Clarence Jones would consider the shock of the Oslo reports a precipitating factor in his divorce, and perhaps even in his ex-wife's untimely death from alcohol depression. At the time he called Levison, who said he knew how much the news had upset the Jones household. They made plans to talk in person, and FBI surveillance agents followed Jones from a distance.

King arrived from Paris to a whirlwind on December 17. Mayor Robert Wagner presented him with New York's Medallion of Honor at a ceremony that overflowed the City Council chamber in lower Manhattan. An enterprising reporter discovered that King was carrying the Nobel Prize check for 273,000 Swedish kroner in his left inside coat pocket, and counted four floodlights, nineteen microphones, and “14 motion picture and television cameras” at the afternoon press conference in the midtown Waldorf-Astoria. King said he was “greatly humbled” on the Oslo trip to hear that many countries beset by ethnic violence looked to the American freedom movement “with a certain amount of hope,” and he announced his intention to support the MFDP's expected challenge to the seating of all five Mississippi representatives at the opening of the 89th Congress on January 4.
*
After an evening reception in his honor at the Waldorf, featuring Vice President-elect Hubert Humphrey, King completed the day's uptown trek with a tumultuous night rally at Harlem's 369th Artillery Armory, on 142nd Street.

Rally organizer Cleveland Robinson, King's friend, who served as New York City's commissioner of human rights, claimed a crowd often thousand in the armory. Police said eight thousand. Governor Rockefeller joined Mayor Wagner on the speaker's platform. Andrew Young went down into the crowd to sit briefly with Malcolm X. In his speech, King first returned the Harlem tribute by thanking movement colleagues from “old Sister Pollard” of the bus boycott to “my great abiding friend and a great leader in his own right, Ralph Abernathy.” He wrestled out loud with pressures to grasp sweet renown in the larger world. For ten days he had been “talking with kings and queens, meeting and talking with prime ministers of nations,” King said. “That isn't the usual pattern of my life, to have people saying nice things about me. Oh, this is a marvelous mountaintop. I wish I could stay here tonight. But the valley calls me.”

Six days earlier in Oslo, addressing what he called “man's ethical infantilism,” King had used the Greek myth of Ulysses to illustrate his belief that it was better to overcome the siren music of evil by listening to the melodies of Orpheus than by stuffing wax into one's ears. Now he preached in the Harlem armory on his favorite biblical parable of the rich man Dives, condemned because he never noticed the humble beggar Lazarus outside his door. King did not mention his resolve to go straight to Selma, but six times he tore himself from the mountain. “Oh, there are some humble people down in the valley!” he cried, in his distinctive mix of despair and inspiration. “…I go back with a faith that the wheels of the gods grind slowly but exceedingly fine,” he said. “I go back with a faith that you shall reap what you sow. With that faith, I go back to the valley.”

He stopped off at the White House on the way, transported Friday afternoon in Governor Rockefeller's private plane. On the other end, aides briefed President Johnson to steer King off three politically troublesome courses: his criticism of the triple murder prosecution, his support for unseating the five incumbent Mississippi congressmen, and the “statements he made abroad about an economic blockade of South Africa and a perhaps unfortunate linkage of Mississippi and South Africa.”
*
Johnson chose instead to emphasize their common agenda. To illustrate the Texas roots of his new poverty program, he showed King and Coretta the family heirloom letter to his Grandfather Baines from Texas hero Sam Houston in 1857 (“…paper currency will not pass in heaven. It must be the coin…from an honest heart”) and promised to send them a copy. The President said he had signed the new civil rights law and Justice Tom Clark had “rounded up nine votes” to uphold it, and he made a point of having Clark's son Ramsey, an assistant attorney general, nearby for introduction as yet another Texan in the fight. “Now what's Georgia doing?” the President asked King. “You ought to get back down there and get them to work.”

When King pushed for legislation to secure Negro voting rights in the South, Johnson embraced that goal for his administration but deflected it beyond 1965. He did attend to social courtesies by walking to a satellite office to retrieve Ralph and Juanita Abernathy, along with Andrew Young and Walter Fauntroy, for a handshake and a brief return to the Oval Office. Then he was off to light the national Christmas tree, and the Kings flew to Atlanta for the Nobel homecoming.

 

T
HAT
S
UNDAY AFTERNOON
, December 20, Malcolm X first encountered Fannie Lou Hamer at a small, integrated church rally in New York. SNCC's Freedom Singers performed movement songs, including a tribute to Vice President Oginga Odinga of the newly independent Kenya, and Hamer asked the audience why the United States could intervene to protect white settlers in the Congo but not Mississippi Negroes who sought the ballot. She told her story of the Winona jail beatings, which was new to Malcolm. He soon gained the floor to speak. “When I listened to Mrs. Hamer,” he said, “a black woman—could be my mother, my sister, my daughter—describe what they had done to her in Mississippi, I asked myself how in the world can we ever expect to be respected as
men
when we know that we will allow something like that to be done to our women and we do nothing about it?” He belittled a nonviolent response. “The language they were speaking to Mrs. Hamer…,” he declared, “was the language of a brute, the language of someone who has no sense of morality, who absolutely ignores law…. Let's learn his language. If his language is with a shotgun, get a shotgun…a rifle, get a rifle…a rope, get a rope…. Speak his language. There's nothing wrong with that. If something was wrong with that language, the federal government would have stopped the cracker from speaking it to you and me.”

Malcolm half apologized. “I know I'm in the church,” he said. “I probably shouldn't be talking like this, but Jesus himself was ready to turn the synagogue inside out and upside down when things weren't going right.” Malcolm said America measured champions—except for Negroes—by their willingness to fight when provoked. “Your own Patrick Henry said ‘liberty or death,'” he told whites in the audience, “and George Washington got the cannons out, and all the rest of them that you taught me to worship as my heroes, they were fighters….