The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [463]
After meeting with civil rights leaders on June 22, Kennedy led King out into the Rose Garden for a private talk. “I assume you know you’re under very close surveillance,” the president said. King was not sure whether the president was worrying about being bugged himself or meant that the civil rights leader’s movements were being monitored even in the White House. King did not say, as another man might have, that this was supposed to be an America where a man walked free and talked free, without fear of secret monitors.
“You’ve read about Profumo in the papers?” Kennedy asked. It was a curious analogy for Kennedy to make, telling King that if he was as loyal to Levison as Prime Minister Macmillan was to his defense minister, it was not a government that would be brought down but a noble cause. The president went on to tell King that Levison and another of his aides were Communists, and in a voice scarcely a whisper said that King would have to “get rid of” them.
King and his associates sought some way to placate Kennedy while continuing to do their work as they felt they must do it. King had faith in Levison’s judgment, both as a friend and an adviser; he would not walk away from him. Clarence Jones, King’s attorney, decided that to avoid having their conversations overheard on a wiretap; Levison would have to communicate with King through an intermediary. That rankled the attorney general, and on July 16, 1963, he told the FBI’s Courtney Evans that he wanted new wiretaps on both King and Jones.
This was not the notorious Hoover of the liberal imagination leading the innocent attorney general down the path of unrighteousness, but a petulant Bobby going ahead on his own. If Hoover had been simply an evil manipulator trying to ensnarl Bobby in some illegal acts, he would have immediately ordered his teams to begin their secret work. Instead, in that meeting Evans warned Bobby about the dangers of wiretapping King, telling him “there was considerable doubt that the productivity of the surveillance would be worth the risk because King travels most of the time and there might be serious repercussions should it ever become known that the government had instituted this coverage.” Nine days later Bobby decided to follow Evans’s advice and backed off from the King wiretap. The FBI went ahead immediately with the Jones wiretap, an act far beyond the pale of a legitimate investigation. Jones was an attorney who talked on his phone with clients such as King. Beyond that, there were no allegations that Jones was a Communist. His mistake was to have raised Bobby’s ire by saying nothing at the infamous Baldwin meeting and then approaching the attorney general to compliment him on all the good he was doing.
In a democratic society, if wiretapping is used at all, it must be limited to the most serious of cases in which there is strong evidence, and the results must be held within the smallest possible circle of officials. Bobby read the transcript excerpts from Hoover as if they were tabloid entertainment, passing on the juicier bits to his brother. The Reverend King heard on these tapes was at times not the saintly leader revered by his followers. He was a bawdy gossip talking about sexual adventures of his own and discussing the sexual mores of his colleagues with immense relish. He worried that one of his colleagues, Bayard Rustin, might indulge his homosexuality too openly, get drunk, and “grab one little brother.”
Bobby was so peeved by what he was reading that he spoke publicly about matters that could only have come from these tapes. “So you’re down here for that old black fairy’s anti-Kennedy demonstration?” he assured Marietta Tree, the American delegate at the UN. “He’s not a serious person. If the country knew what we know about King’s goings on, he’d be finished.”
A very different Martin Luther King stood before a quarter-million black and white Americans in August at the March on Washington, giving one of the great speeches in American history. “I have a dream that