Death of a King Read online

  The squabbles are endless. The finance committee is complaining about a pile of unpaid phone bills accumulated by Jesse Jackson in Chicago. Staff members from Grenada, Mississippi, lament over the diminishing dedication to nonviolence. How can they stop the militants from winning the minds of the young?

  Another segment of the staff argues vociferously that the movement must focus on a Poor People’s Campaign in northern cities like Chicago and Cleveland.

  Still another segment of impassioned activists maintains that core concentration must remain in the South, where discrimination continues to be the most blatant.

  But while they disagree on so much, nearly every member of the staff is certain that, no matter the geographic area, the negative fallout from Riverside has been disastrous. People jump up to argue against the linkage between the civil rights and antiwar movements.

  These are bright people, many of whom Doc has recruited himself. These are earnest and hardworking people not afraid to speak their mind. Doc has long supported a symposium where ideas flow freely. He’s a firm believer in healthy debate. But the atmosphere at Frogmore goes beyond that. The feeling is personal. Doc’s leadership is being questioned. His focus is under attack.

  Doc fights back the only way he knows how. He paints the big picture. He says, “We have been in a reform movement… [but] after Selma and the voting rights bill, we moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution. We must see the great distinction between a reform movement and a revolutionary movement.”

  Against the charge that he is confusing matters and weakening his cause by joining issues that should be treated separately, he argues, “We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together, [and] you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others.”

  Here it is again—his thesis in a nutshell. Racism, poverty, and militarism. The three-legged monster he sees destroying the American dream. The three-legged monster he sees destroying the American soul. It grieves him that his supporters don’t see it that way. He needs them to back him up. He yearns for allies. But ultimately, even if it means the corrosion of his authority within the organization he founded, he cannot yield on core principles.

  “When I took up the cross,” he tells the group, “I recognized its meaning.… The cross is something that you bear and ultimately that you die on. The cross may mean the death of your popularity.… It may mean the death of a foundation grant. It may cut your budget down a little, but take up your cross and just bear it. And that is the way I have decided to go.”

  Doc’s cross is his unyielding stand against the war.

  When he reads the papers and political journals, all evidence points to the fact that the pro-war LBJ administration is more adamant than ever. When he reads about the casualties, his heart sinks: 1,380 Americans will die in Vietnam in May alone, making it the bloodiest month yet. Since the start of the conflict, 13,368 American lives have been lost. God only knows the number of fallen Vietnamese. Estimates put it at hundreds of thousands. And it’s only getting worse.

  There is no way for Doc to know that there is growing division among LBJ’s senior advisers. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, one of the war’s chief architects, is expressing grave doubts about the efficacy of the bombing. He’s also questioning the validity of the domino theory—that if we don’t stop communism in North Vietnam, all of Indochina will fall. But McNamara’s relatively dovish views are falling on deaf ears. The president is leaning on hard-core hawks like General William Westmoreland, commander of the U.S. forces in Vietnam, who believes that the policy of attrition is working and that more force will eventually cripple the Vietcong. Decades later, historian Taylor Branch will write that Johnson “backed into Vietnam with Cold War inertia bottomed on his naked political fear of being called a coward.”

  Most of the war’s critics within LBJ’s administration, like McNamara, will retreat in the name of loyalty to their president. The White House will grow more arrogant in its insistence that this war is essential in protecting American interests. Opponents like Doc will grow bolder in their insistence that the war is morally corrupt and unnecessary.

  In America, all the gaps are widening.

  The same is true in Doc’s own life, where there is a growing gap between him and his family. The separation between Doc, a man in continual motion, and his wife and children takes a terrible toll, contributing to his feelings of heavy guilt.

  Then there is the gap between him and his former supporters in the Negro mainstream establishment. This week’s meeting has shown his staff in open revolt. And his loyal Jewish backers—namely attorney Stanley Levison and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel—are highly critical of his antiwar stance.

  The turbulent Frogmore conference comes to an end. There has been no time for softball games but plenty for a prolonged series of heated disputations. Rather than feeling refreshed by the retreat, Doc is exhausted. As he prepares to leave the island, he reads a piece in Newsweek that has him reflecting on Levison and Heschel, and then one that explains how President Nasser of Egypt has denied Israel the use of the Straits of Tiran, a vital shipping lane from the Red Sea. Israel is threatened.

  On the drive back down Highway 21 to the Savannah airport, Doc considers what this threat means. Inevitably—and understandably—Jewish interest will turn from the three-prong evils that never leave Doc’s mind: racism, poverty, and militarism. Jewish interest will focus on the survival of the Jewish nation. Before the month is over, Levison himself will complain that the antiwar effort is “suffering badly because half the peace movement is Jewish, and the Jews have all become hawks.”

  The clouds of war are darkening—war in Southeast Asia, and now the ominous prospect of war in the Middle East.

  War weighs on Doc’s mind as he returns home only long enough to kiss Coretta and the kids, pack a bag, and catch a plane from Atlanta to New York, where he will board still another plane and make still another trip, this one across the Atlantic to an international conference in Geneva, where the topic will be the world’s obsession with war.

  It is in neutral Switzerland that Doc will denounce the Vietnam War as “costly, bloody and futile.”

  “If we assume that life is worth living and that man has a right to survive,” he says before the august body of assorted diplomats and scholars, “we must find an alternative to war. In a day when vehicles hurtle through outer space and guided ballistic missiles carve highways of death through the stratosphere and napalm flames destroy God’s green earth and his children, no nation can claim victory in war.”

  It is at this same conference that he sees the delegates’ attention switch from Hanoi and Saigon to Cairo and Tel Aviv.

  The conference is quick. Doc is back on a plane heading home. He reads, he drinks, he smokes, he sleeps, he dreams. He awakes in the middle of the night, not quite realizing where he is. The newspaper on his lap says it is the start of June. An attack on Israel is imminent. More than a hundred thousand Egyptian troops are amassed in the Sinai desert along with nearly a thousand tanks. Seventy-five thousand Syrian troops stand ready at that country’s border with Israel. Additionally, Jordan has fifty-five thousand troops and three hundred tanks.

  Doc knows it’s only a matter of days.

  He rustles through his attaché case and finds an advance copy of his new book, due out later this very month, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

  He ponders the question.

  Chapter Six

  WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

  Doc’s close associates love to analyze his motives, methods, and psychology. This is only natural. Charismatic characters are always subjects of speculation. We want to know what makes them tick. Some say that Doc’s feverish drive is fueled by the pure passion of his sociopolitical convictions. Others say that his restlessness is rooted in some deep dissatisfaction with a conventional church-and-home life that cannot pacify his adventuresome spirit. Some view him a
s a modern version of the itinerant country preacher, traveling from one community to another to spread the Word.

  Doc has heard all these theories, and while they hold some interest for him—he is, after all, no stranger to introspection—he ultimately dismisses the conjecture. He may be exhausted, he may be despondent, he is surely battle weary, but that’s not important: all that matters is that he has a plane to catch, a rally to attend, a war to stop.

  The Six-Day War shocks the world. The armies and air power surrounding Israel are decimated with deadly precision. It is a historic victory for the Jewish state and a crushing blow for Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. It also changes the dynamic of the Negro-Jewish coalition in America that has long fought for civil rights and, more recently, protested the war in Vietnam.

  Doc is a staunch supporter of Israel. A week before the war, he was one of eight church leaders who signed a letter to the New York Times urging the Johnson administration to back Israel. Among his closest colleagues, though, he expresses concern that the very nature of the sweeping victory—and the fact that Israel has occupied the Sinai, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank of the Jordan River—could injure the soul of the Jewish state. The captured land gives Israel a defensive buffer against its sworn enemies. But now some six hundred thousand Arabs will be living in the West Bank under Israeli control. “Israel,” Doc tells his confidantes, “faces the danger of being smug and unyielding.”

  Once seen as the underdog fighting for its very survival, Israel is suddenly transformed into a military power of unprecedented effectiveness. The nation is now an occupying power. And while the lightning victory has emboldened the spirits of Jews worldwide and, in the aftermath of Hitler’s Holocaust, given credence to the cry “Never again!,” Doc worries about an impact on the antiwar movement in America. As he says to Stanley Levison, “It has given Johnson the little respite he wanted from Vietnam.”

  Two conflicting movements are on the rise: a significant segment of American Jews is becoming increasingly obsessed with Israel while black nationalism is finding favor among black youth. Doc stands outside both of these movements. His drive to underscore the evils of poverty, racism, and militarism does not fit into a paradigm of nationalism, Jewish or black.

  Doc feels the tension building and races up to New York on June 12 for a secret meeting at Union Theological Seminary with, among others, activist priest Daniel Berrigan and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. The rabbi, recently returned from Jerusalem, is ecstatic over the Israeli victory. “It is as if,” he says, “the prophets had risen from their graves.”

  Doc worries about what reveling in military victory will do to the spirit of nonviolence. His own spirit is further assaulted when on this same day the Supreme Court, in a five to four decision, grants the state of Alabama the right to reimprison him for his refusal to follow a 1963 injunction that prohibited him from protesting in Birmingham. It doesn’t matter that an editorial in the New York Times calls the decision “profoundly embarrassing to the good name of the United States” or that Chief Justice Earl Warren has vigorously dissented. Doc is going back to jail.

  “Even the Supreme Court has turned against us,” he tells his friends.

  The next day Lyndon Johnson nominates Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court. Once confirmed, he will be America’s first Negro high court justice. As the man who successfully argued the 1953 Brown v. Board of Education case outlawing public school segregation, Marshall is a highly respected attorney—although he is no fan of Martin Luther King Jr.

  Unlike Doc, Marshall backs Johnson on Vietnam. He also opposes Doc’s protest marches and civil disobedience, calling him a “boy on a man’s errand.” Later he will reluctantly acknowledge King’s role as a leader, saying, “As an organizer he wasn’t worth shit.… He was a great speaker… but as for getting the work done, he was not too good at that.… All he did was to dump all his legal work on us [the NAACP], including the bills. And that was all right with him, so long as he didn’t have to pay the bills.”

  No love is lost between Doc and Thurgood, and no time is wasted during Doc’s appearance on ABC’s Sunday morning news program Issues and Answers, where he is asked about the infighting among Negro leaders. As usual, Doc rises to the occasion. He takes the high road.

  “No movement worth its salt is devoid of philosophical debate,” he tells the national audience, “and there are moments in any social revolution where you have peaks of united activity and you have other moments of debate and even dissension.”

  A reporter quotes Where Do We Go from Here to question the soundness of Doc’s approach as laid out in his new text. Doc has written, “We [the Negro community] must develop, from strength, a situation in which the government finds it wise and prudent to collaborate with us.”

  “How can you speak out against the administration’s policies in Vietnam,” asks a journalist, “and achieve this end? Aren’t you in effect defeating the purpose?”

  Doc replies, “We have never achieved anything, we haven’t made a single gain without the confrontation of power with power.”

  When asked to comment on the Middle East, he asserts, “All people of good will must respect the territorial integrity of Israel.… We must see what Israel has done for the world. It is a marvelous demonstration of what people together in unity and with rugged determination can do in transforming almost a desert land into an oasis. But the other side is that peace in the Middle East means something else.… The Arab world is part of that third world of poverty and illiteracy and disease and it is time now to have a Marshall Plan for the Middle East.… We must see that there is a grave refugee problem that the Arabs have.”

  Before the interview is over, Doc’s support of Muhammad Ali is challenged once again. Given that Ali is a man who makes his living fighting in a ring, isn’t it inconsistent for him to refuse to fight for his country?

  “I don’t find it inconsistent at all,” says Doc. “I find it a very great act of courage.” He adds that he hopes Ali’s position “will cause many young people to take a greater stand against the draft and to refuse to fight in the war in Vietnam.”

  Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? is published with little fanfare. The road to publication has been rocky. When Doc first showed the text to Stanley Levison, his friend was alarmed by the absence of fresh material. He pointed out that Doc was actually plagiarizing from his previous book, Why We Can’t Wait. Doc owned up to his mistake, writing to his editor, “I made a definite literary mistake.… I lifted a great deal of what I had said in the last chapter of Why We Can’t Wait because I felt it was so relevant at this point.”

  Doc did write a new chapter analyzing Black Power that the publisher felt was strong enough to garner interest. Yet Joan Daves, Doc’s literary agent, encounters stiff resistance in her attempt to sell an excerpt of the book. Doc’s politics are considered too well-known and obvious. The media wants something new and strong, not a rehash of previous positions.

  The reviews are lukewarm to outright hostile.

  Eliot Fremont-Smith, in the New York Times, mentions Doc’s advocacy of “legal political Black Power” and his call for a “return to nonviolence, an alignment of Negroes and poor whites to force the massive Federal poverty-civil rights program once advocated by the President.”

  In Commonweal magazine, though, David Steinberg claims that “King’s book seems to be groping for something which it never finds.” He sees Doc in a state of “great confusion and doubt.”

  Writing in the New York Review of Books, one of the most prestigious intellectual journals in the country, Andrew Kopkind is caustic: “He [King] has simply, and disastrously, arrived at the wrong conclusions about the world.… Whites have ceased to believe him, or really to care; the blacks hardly listen.” Viewing Doc as the standard-bearer of liberalism, Kopkind writes that issues surrounding the Vietnam War and black militancy “have contrived this summer to murder liberalism… and there are few mourners.”

  Reali
zing the devastating effect of these barbed reviews, Stanley Levison sends a more positive notice from the Washington Post, along with a letter to Doc in which he writes, “Many of the reviewers seem to be so pessimistic they are shaken up because you are not in black despair. I believe they are reflecting the unhappy defeatist mood of intellectual America at the moment. The fact that the book insists on not burying the positive indicates how much this lesson needed to be expressed.”

  In the Post, Martin Duberman sees the book as Doc’s attempt “to summarize the recent conflicts within the civil rights movement, to consider the larger context, both national and international, which helps to account for these conflicts, and finally, to suggest possible lines for action.” He points to Doc’s practical programs versus Stokely Carmichael’s reliance on slogans without substance. “Yet when King himself comes to spelling out a program for pooling black resources, economic and political, its stock generalities prove vulnerably close to Carmichael’s sloganeering.” In the end, the review concludes on a pessimistic note: “King’s position seems to me impeccable in theory, but it suffers, as he himself must realize, from the lack of available allies for the coalition he advocates.”

  The lack of allies.

  In a year of best sellers like William Manchester’s tome on Kennedy—The Death of a President—Doc’s book sells poorly and soon vanishes from the shelves.

  Doc is out of style and out of step. Even the language of the day outdates him: he is the ultimate Negro at a time when Negroes are seeing themselves as blacks. The hope that his new text might reassert his relevance—by quieting his critics and winning back those increasingly disillusioned with his nonviolent strategy—has been dashed. On a professional level, there can be no doubt: Doc has the blues.

  On a personal level, Doc’s blues deepen when, on a Saturday night in the third week of June, he gets a frantic call from brother A. D. in Louisville.