Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [21]
Ali went to trial on June 19, 1967. Up to the last second, even during the trial, government lawyers believed he would accept a deal with the Army’s Special Services. Trouble was that the Muslims insisted he never be in uniform and never be given a rank. “The Muslims,” a lawyer said, “seem to want him smack up against the wall. They want him to go down for the cause. I don’t know. We don’t want this. They want it.” Generous and fair or sympathetic are not words that come to mind about prosecutors. They are often ruthless, spiteful, and undiscriminating in pursuit of wins for themselves and departments. But the motor for the Justice Department’s chase after Clay came from J. Edgar Hoover, the petty, abusive FBI chief, a specialist in creating wild dogs his whole career, and he saw them and rebellion around every corner. An obsessive-compulsive snoop in all sorts of corners, he loved to crush wayward groups and their symbols. Clay was not a lone, crusading, principled obstruction as is commonly believed, and had he not become a Muslim chances are he would have remained “unfit” for duty, 1-Y, after failing two previous tests that put him near the moronic level.
Throughout the trial the next day, Ali sketched absently at his defense table. The jury soon retired, then returned in twenty minutes with a guilty verdict. Ali wanted his sentence immediately. The lead prosecutor, Morton Susman, asked Judge Ingraham for a reduced sentence, calling the outcome “a tragedy,” blaming it on the Muslims, who “could not hide behind religion” but were political up to their bow ties. Ingraham gave him the maximum five years and a $10,000 fine; his passport was turned over. He left the courtroom like a man who had heard the will and got the expected safe-deposit box and the waterfront. No bravado, no spleen or sorrow, no riffs or burlesque repartee. The drawings left on his table said more: first, a plane high up in the sky, a child’s depiction of puffy clouds and bright sun, then on the next sheet, rain and fog, and the aimed descent of the plane straight toward the top of a mountain.
Twigs and cold fires are too often all that’s left of the trail from the kid to the life. Desperate to see the child in the man, and to reach for connecting psychological tissue, it is easy to land on a pointed head. Usually, what is strikingly apparent is all there is. Fighters, by and large, have been colorful translators of what they did and felt, that is until the intrusion of the mass press conference with its numbing etiquette, prefabricated and surface inquiry. There used to be a direct path to fighters, and lazy days could be spent in productive talk until you left with a bit of confidence as to who they were. Not so with how they were formed or grew up; they became reticent or they didn’t know how to answer, perhaps because to some of them their origins were so hideous that they looked upon it as another lifetime. There had been no other time, this was it, the closet full of clothes, the identifying car and a woman or women to match. They were contenders.
For a good period, Joe Frazier seemed as if he had been born at the age of twenty-one. No one knew much about him. In many conversations he was agreeable enough, but there was a strained cheerfulness, and just below a restrained hostility. Or was it? Perhaps it was just a matter of confusion within that was behind his vague remoteness, a distrust of white