|
 AFTER THE ASSASSINATION
Back they went to Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel.
Could the grieving disciples of Martin Luther King, Jr., have
possibly chosen a grimmer spot to reconvene — the spot where
he’d been murdered only a few hours earlier, where his blood
still stained the cement on the balcony outside? And yet when
they left the hospital in Memphis where King had died on the
evening of April 4, 1968, what better place was there to mourn
him than where he’d spent much of his last day on earth?
Gathered there, with King’s personal effects nearby — his small
attaché case, a crumpled white shirt, a can of Hidden Magic
hairspray, his Bible, a half-filled Styrofoam coffee cup, a pair
of glass tumblers, and the remnants of a dessert — Ralph
Abernathy, Andrew Young, and the others grappled with the
catastrophe that had just befallen them. What would now happen
to their movement? Who could take King’s place? What if his
murder was only the first of a series that was still under way?
Who among them would be next? And how could they help stop the
rioting that had broken out in ghettos across America — the
violent antithesis of everything for which King had stood?
But the same nineteen-inch Philco Starlite television set that
beamed scenes of America aflame that night also brought some
consolation, from Indianapolis, where Senator Robert F. Kennedy
had spoken shortly after King had been declared dead. Huddled
against the cold in his big brother’s old overcoat, he told a
stunned and edgy crowd in the city’s most dangerous neighborhood
that King had just been killed, then pleaded for calm and
brotherhood, reminding everyone — as if anyone could not have
known — that someone he’d loved had also been killed, and also
by a white man. And unlike so many other cities that night,
Indianapolis had stayed calm.
“We’d wanted to get on television and tell people not to fight,
not to burn down the cities,” recalled Andrew Young. “We were
trying to get the message out to people, ‘This is not what Dr.
King would have you doing.’ But the press didn’t want to talk to
us. They were right there at the hospital, and all they wanted
to do was talk about the autopsy. Or they were going around
chasing the kids with the firebombs, trying to interview them.
It was almost like they were trying to provoke a riot.
“We were saying, ‘Look, Dr. King has gone. The important thing
now is for us to keep his work going, and people are out in the
streets now doing things that he wouldn’t want them to do.’ They
weren’t interested in that. Bobby Kennedy’s was the only voice
we identified with that night. We were grateful he was out
there.”
He almost hadn’t been. Kennedy’s most senior advisers, the ones
running his fledgling presidential campaign, had urged him to
cancel the event: doing anything political on such a night would
look bad, and going into the ghetto was just too dangerous.
(Just be sure that in any statement he put out, they counseled,
he not suggest he’d been too afraid to speak.) So had the mayor
of Indianapolis, Richard Lugar, a lifelong resident who’d never
set foot around 17th and Broadway, where a couple thousand
people, nearly all of them black, had already gathered. So had
the Indianapolis police. So had the customarily fearless Ethel
Kennedy, who’d gone back to the hotel, praying in the back seat
every minute en route.
Even Kennedy might have had second thoughts. While his
relationship with King had slowly improved from contentious to
careful to respectful over the eight years they’d known each
other, and their causes had come increasingly to overlap, the
two men had never been close: the racial and cultural divide
between them had simply been too broad. They’d become allies,
but never had they been friends. Why would Kennedy, of all
people, subject himself to such a risk?
And yet, improbably, Bobby Kennedy, a near-total stranger to
black America only ten years earlier, felt more at home in it
now than any other white politician in America — and more
welcome, and comfortable, there than he would have in ostensibly
safer and more “respectable” places. When the moment came, he
knew instantly what he wanted, and needed, and had promised, to
do. So when, shortly after he’d landed in Indianapolis, police
officials reiterated their warning, he brushed it aside. “My
family and I could lay down in the street there and they
wouldn’t bother me,” he told them with a confidence bordering on
bravado that would have been unimaginable from just about any
other white person in America. “If they would bother you, you’re
the one with the problem.” That everyone urged him to stay away
was, for him, only another reason to go.
The story of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy is hard to
tell because they left so few fragments of it behind. For two
such famous men whose lives and fates were so closely
intertwined, there was only a scant paper trail. Lots of what
happened between them happened privately, mostly in unrecorded
phone calls, beyond the reach of journalists and historians.
They evidently wanted it that way. And then, in the last few
years of their lives, it trailed off almost entirely into
telepathy.
As often as they came to appear together posthumously — in the
memorial drawings, photographs, tapestries, and crockery,
usually in triptychs with John F. Kennedy, found largely in
black homes — there are few photographs of the two, most of them
snapshots or group pictures. In none of them can they be seen
engaging — talking to each other, smiling at each other, shaking
each other’s hand…
They were roughly the same age — Kennedy barely three years
older. Both had larger-than-life, tyrannical fathers. Both were
deeply religious. Both were charismatic. Both were ever in a
hurry, for each knew about the capriciousness and brevity of
life. But their differences — not just in race and class but in
geographic origins, temperament, power, and position — were much
more dramatic…
In one sense, Kennedy’s journey had been shorter: he’d been born
into wealth and fame and never strayed far from it, while King
had been born obscure and became one of the most famous people
in the world. In another, Kennedy’s path was far longer. Early
in his career, he’d been better known for his hatred than his
love…
The term for him was “ruthless,” and rarely, if ever, has a
single word attached itself to anyone so tenaciously. It popped
up so often — in virtually every profile — that it became a
running joke: he’d call himself “Senator Ruthless” or sign his
notes that way. People were forever diagnosing the many, many
moments when Robert Kennedy changed out of that. Perhaps that
meant he never really did, or had and then relapsed. By the end,
though, there was little doubt that he was profoundly altered…
King, by contrast, didn’t so much change as deepen. Though his
faith occasionally faltered, there were few epiphanies. He just
grew more famous, ambitious, revered and inspiring, loathed and
threatening, angry, bitter, radical, desperate.
As elusive as it was, King’s relationship with Bobby Kennedy was
much deeper, more personal, and more intricate than his
relationship with Jack, and not just because it lasted twice as
long. Though there were some exceptions — like the time in June
1963 when John Kennedy escorted King through the Rose Garden and
warned him he was under surveillance, a gesture for which King
was profoundly grateful — Attorney General Robert Kennedy was
usually his point of contact. That meant three years of tense
telephone standoffs, telegrammed pleas for protection, stiff,
formal, typewritten complaints, and, occasionally, compliments.
[to top of second column] |
For both Kennedys, King meant trouble — a distraction from the
things, like managing the Cold War or the American economy, they’d
come to Washington to do. “Until the end of 1963, every big
demonstration or turmoil that Martin King led was a problem for the
president, so that affected the way Bob Kennedy would look at it,”
Robert Kennedy’s key deputy at the Justice Department, Burke
Marshall, later said.
It was Robert Kennedy who had helped spring King from jail in
Georgia; saved his life (or so he thought) when King huddled in the
basement as an angry mob besieged a Montgomery, Alabama, church;
pleaded with him to halt the Freedom Rides; and, when King refused
to drop two aides with past communist ties, directed that his
telephone be tapped. Theirs was an uneven relationship, and for
King, a slightly degrading one: he was the black man invariably
asking for things, and Kennedy the white man doling them out, but
only when his brother’s political interests permitted. King was the
one to say “please” and “thank you.”
King was not without his powers — he’d arguably gotten John Kennedy
elected, and he was the custodian of a large chunk of his legacy.
And while he hectored, lectured, criticized, and exasperated Robert
Kennedy, he also helped educate him. When they’d met, Kennedy had
little experience with, or interest in, or understanding of, or
empathy for blacks. King helped coax out Bobby Kennedy’s better
angels, especially with the 1963 protests in Birmingham that led to
the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But a little boy with a distended
belly sitting on the dirt floor of a shack in the Mississippi delta
may have done more to change Robert Kennedy than Martin Luther King
ever did.
The ostensibly spiritual King approached Bobby Kennedy with a
hardheadedness that the pragmatic Kennedy would have admired. He had
no illusion about Kennedy’s instincts, which were viewed initially
by the skeptical civil rights community as authoritarian, pragmatic,
and not especially sympathetic. But it was Robert Kennedy with whom
he knew he’d have to deal, and he ordered his colleagues, most
notably Harry Belafonte, to go find Kennedy’s moral center, and not
return until they had.
Following President Kennedy’s assassination, much changed between
the two. As a United States senator, Kennedy no longer lorded over
King and had fewer plums to dispense. He was freer to identify with
King, or to distance himself from him, and did both. And King had
fewer favors to ask.
So, over the last four years of their truncated lives, they barely
saw each other — maybe only once: at hearings on urban poverty
before a committee on which Kennedy sat. Their various underlings
sometimes communicated, but that was largely it; even those
surrogates didn’t know how often, if ever, they got together, or
spoke in private. No longer compelled to deal with each other, they
didn’t. Inveterately social and intellectually adventurous, Kennedy
probably invited more blacks to his home — the black essayist and
novelist James Baldwin among them — than any white politician of his
era, but Martin Luther King was never among them… And yet, their
preoccupations and goals — ending the war in Vietnam; tackling
racial discrimination in the United States, South Africa, and
elsewhere; fighting poverty — increasingly overlapped…
When, in 1966, Kennedy visited Chief Albert Luthuli, the South
African civil rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner living in
internal exile, he is thought to have delivered a letter from King.
After Kennedy toured the poverty-stricken Mississippi delta, King
praised him. While Lyndon Johnson remained mum, Kennedy
congratulated King for winning the Nobel Peace Prize. King had moved
his activism up north to Chicago, in part, at Kennedy’s urging. Only
three weeks before his flight to Indianapolis, Kennedy vied for
King’s endorsement as he ran for president.
But that was an exception — a bow to the polyglot politics of
California, which was to hold its presidential primary on June 4,
1968. Politically, Kennedy typically took care not to cozy up to
King, [whose] views on Vietnam — he favored immediate
withdrawal — were far too extreme for Kennedy to embrace, as was his
larger critique of American foreign policy and culture…
Stylistically, Kennedy seemed to prefer the company of grittier
black leaders, like the ones who’d organized the rally for him in
Indianapolis. Kennedy might have been bitter over King’s sex-laced
wisecracks about his late brother and his wife, overheard and
recorded and then gleefully transmitted to him by Hoover’s FBI. But
guilt too, may have been a barrier…
For his part, King never got in bed with politicians, even the most
promising, and sympathetic: invariably, they’d disappoint him.
Unless he kept them guessing, and bidding for his support, they’d
take him for granted. “Sometimes you can’t dine with the president
and represent vigorously black people in America,” King once said…
Then there was always the question of just how independent Bobby
Kennedy really was. “We considered him our number one ally but we
also knew that Hoover had more on him than he had on us and we never
knew when he’d try to pull the string,” said Andrew Young. “I don’t
know what it was, but they just were not pals,” said a longtime
Kennedy aide, Peter Edelman. “They were shadow-boxing a lot of the
time,” recalled William vanden Heuvel, a key Kennedy aide who was
close to King as well. “Wary” is the word most frequently invoked to
describe them. “They were friends, and didn’t even know that they
were friends,” said U.S. Representative John Lewis, who worked with
them both…
King would probably not have endorsed Kennedy in 1968 — he never
endorsed anyone — but would have made it clear Kennedy was his
choice. In other ways, he was moving toward Kennedy, like in the
mass protest he was planning in Washington when he was killed…
“What do I say?” Kennedy had asked his press secretary, Frank Mankiewicz, on the flight into Indianapolis that night [of King's
murder.] Should he use what his speechwriters had hastily prepared
for him, or go with his gut, even though he had never been the
gifted orator his brother was, and rarely spoke extemporaneously,
and had never talked of King publicly before? In fact, as was often
true when Kennedy asked such questions, he already had his answer.
Standing on the back of a flatbed truck at 17th and Broadway, he
spoke for seven minutes. He held some notes, but after glancing at
them at the beginning, he never referred to them again. As moving as
his speech that night in cold and drizzly Indianapolis had been, it
elicited little commentary afterward: it came too late for the
morning papers, and, like King’s equally memorable remarks the night
before — his last speech, the one about having been to the
mountaintop — it was lost in the enormity of the assassination. But
in Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel, Kennedy’s words were duly noted…
Kennedy could never replace King. But to his disciples back at the
Lorraine Motel that night, and throughout the black community, he
had picked up his torch. In him, everyone in that room at that grim
moment seemed to agree, resided pretty much all of whatever hope
remained. There was but one question about that torch: how long
Bobby Kennedy would get to hold it. “I don’t know, I almost feel
like somebody said, ‘He’s probably going to be next,’ ” Young later
recalled. “I can’t remember that. But that was the feeling that many
of us had.”
(From: “The Promise and the Dream,” by David Margolick. Copyright ©
2018 David Margolick. A Lawrence Schiller book published by
RosettaBooks. Publication date: April 3, 2018.)
[© 2018 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2018 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Thompson Reuters is solely responsible for this content. |
