Authors: Lamar Waldron
potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercise their
potential for violence.” Taylor Branch pointed out that many agents
chafed at the request, while others wondered, “What did Hoover’s
nobly dramatic words really mean?” To “neutralize” someone?24
The number of FBI officials and agents involved in these efforts in
some capacity surely ran into the hundreds, and Hoover’s pressure
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created a situation in which Milteer or Marcello could have used a racist
FBI agent or supervisor, either knowingly or unknowingly. For example,
on February 15, 1968, Dr. King was followed in Mississippi by both the
FBI, ostensibly to protect him, and by agents of the state’s racist Sov-
ereignty Commission. It’s not clear whether the two agencies were in
competition or if they were cooperating and sharing intelligence on Dr.
King, but they could have been doing both, depending on the agents
involved. Another way in which Milteer could have compromised an
FBI agent or supervisor was if the man had friends or family in one of
the White Citizens’ Council chapters. While most FBI agents at the time
simply tried to do a good job, the example their own director set created
the potential for problems.25
The FBI also had excellent contacts with most city and state police
forces, which furthered the Bureau’s reach. Because Hoover’s request for
federal wiretaps had been refused, Hoover would need those local con-
tacts, as well as Army Intelligence and the CIA, to help monitor Dr. King.
The total number of local and federal officials involved in all aspects of
the surveillance and operations against Dr. King and his movements
would number in the thousands, given the extensive paperwork that
was generated in those pre–desktop computer days.
For the murder of Dr. King in the South, Milteer and Marcello could
have utilized one or more law enforcement officials in some way.
Milteer’s involvement in the plot to kill Dr. King yielded access to law
enforcement officials and officers who would not have helped the Mafia,
but who were so racist they would have willingly accepted a bribe to
assist somehow with Dr. King’s elimination.
Marcello and Milteer could also take advantage of others in law
enforcement and domestic surveillance without making them knowing
players in the plot to kill Dr. King. As in the JFK hit, they could glean and
feed information and disinformation to the right people, who could be
expected to react predictably based on their past behavior. These factors
are important to keep in mind as the story of Dr. King’s assassination
unfolds.
Chapter Forty-six
Martin Luther King was encouraged to develop his last great initiative,
the Poor People’s Campaign, by several key people—including Bobby
Kennedy. The idea of bringing people to Washington not just for one
demonstration, but for a longer stay, was not new. One of Dr. King’s
advisors had in mind the “Bonus Army” from the Great Depression, the
desperate World War I veterans who camped near the Capitol—until,
on the orders of President Hoover, General Douglas MacArthur ordered
his troops to forcibly disperse them. A few years later, under President
Roosevelt, the veterans finally got what they wanted. Nick Kotz writes
that “an encampment of the poor also had been suggested by [Bobby
Kennedy], who passed the idea on to Dr. King via Marian Wright, an
NAACP lawyer.”1 Kotz, who covered Bobby’s transformative trip to
Mississippi, writes that the Senator “was becoming more involved in
poverty issues as he considered challenging Johnson for the presidency.”
While Bobby’s concerns for the poor were genuine, he told Wright that
in addition to being a way to “dramatize the issues of poverty [it would]
give President Johnson trouble, a possibility Kennedy viewed with some
relish.”1
Bobby still wrestled privately with the contradiction of wanting to
run for president while being constrained by whatever implicit under-
standing had been reached with LBJ the previous spring—when Bobby
began publicly supporting LBJ after the Jack Anderson articles stopped.
While the evidence shows that LBJ did not instigate the articles, he may
well have prevailed upon Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson to stop
them, to avoid embarrassment to his own administration. LBJ likely
conveyed to Bobby, through any of several intermediaries on good terms
with both men, that Bobby’s public support of LBJ would ensure that the
articles didn’t resume. The two adversaries probably struck no formal
deal, but Bobby’s public remarks since the spring of 1967 demonstrated
clearly that Bobby knew what he had to say, at least in public. Even
when Bobby increased his rhetoric involving poverty and maintained
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his antiwar stance, his comments to the press stopped short of attacking
LBJ, for whom he publicly expressed nothing but support.
Many people, from some of Bobby’s advisors to the crowds who
greeted the Senator, wanted him to run for president, and the news
media constantly brought up the subject. Finally, on the morning of
January 30, 1968, Bobby Kennedy told a group of journalists that he
would not seek the Democratic nomination for president “under any
conceivable circumstances.” According to Evan Thomas, Bobby’s press
secretary, Frank Mankiewicz, almost immediately “softened the state-
ment to read ‘any foreseeable circumstances.’ But the damage had been
done. [Bobby] was brutally ridiculed on two prime-time comedy shows,
Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In
[America’s most popular TV show] and the
[overtly liberal]
Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
, for, in effect, chickening
out.” An advisor told Bobby “the columnists and [political] cartoonists”
were also hitting him hard. Bobby was being attacked because his pub-
lic statements in late 1967 and early 1968 were so divergent from LBJ’s
position that the press and public expected him to join the race. They
couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t—unless he was afraid.2
LBJ was still far ahead of the only other declared Democrat in the race,
Senator Eugene McCarthy, running on a peace platform. But all that
started to change on the afternoon of Bobby’s January 30 statement, when
the White House began receiving word that Saigon was under heavy
mortar attack, even though it was the start of Tet, the three-day Buddhist
holiday period. Within hours, it was clear that a major offensive by the
Viet Cong had begun, as the US embassy and diplomatic compound in
Saigon became a battleground. According to Taylor Branch, “Seventy
thousand guerrillas [some estimates place the number of enemy forces
far higher] launched similar attacks of coordinated surprise in” most of
Vietnam’s provinces. These would drag on for weeks, “killing nearly
four thousand American and six thousand South Vietnamese soldiers,
plus an estimated 58,000 Communist soldiers and 14,000 civilians.”3
Richard Helms’s earlier capitulation to US military demands to
reduce by half the CIA’s estimates of Viet Cong forces played a role in
the debacle. Those lower estimates may have led LBJ, and the press and
public, to underestimate the Viet Cong’s ability to mount a country-
wide, coordinated attack on such a large scale. Even after the US even-
tually triumphed in what has come to be known as the Tet Offensive,
Helms’s artificially low estimates would continue to affect US planning
for the war, since it appeared that American forces had killed a much
larger percentage of the enemy than they really had.
By 1968, the American public had been hearing from officials and the
press for years that US forces had nearly prevailed and troops would
start coming home soon. In the week before Tet, the White House and the
US military had issued especially optimistic assessments of the war that
were carried by outlets from the Associated Press to the
New York Times
.
But the Tet Offensive shattered the rosy image LBJ and his generals tried
to depict. One infamous incident and image from Tet galvanized the
transition of American feeling about the war: a starkly disturbing pho-
tograph, taken near a Buddhist temple, in which the South Vietnamese
national police chief fired a pistol point-blank into the head of a suspect.
After that, Branch says, US polls “recorded the most decisive single drop
in American support for the Vietnam War.” Conversely, McCarthy’s sup-
port increased to 40 percent in New Hampshire, site of the first primary
race, giving him a real chance of beating the incumbent president.4
As Bobby Kennedy said, “Tet changed everything.” He was finally
ready to make his move, though carefully. Just nine days after saying
he wouldn’t challenge LBJ for the nomination, Bobby finally broke the
mold of the preceding months—he gave an antiwar speech on Febru-
ary 8, 1968, that criticized, directly, LBJ’s handling of the war. Bobby’s
advisors noted the change immediately, and talk about his challeng-
ing Johnson increased. However, the most recent historian to chronicle
Bobby’s last campaign, Thurston Clarke, pointed out that “Ted Kennedy,
Ted Sorensen, and other former JFK White House aides . . . were strongly
opposed to his running.”5
But the tide of American opinion seemed designed to force Bobby’s
hand. In the wake of JFK’s assassination, Walter Cronkite had become
America’s must admired newscaster and on February 27, 1968, he
broadcast from Vietnam and pronounced it a “quagmire.” On March 6,
Cronkite took the then unprecedented step of announcing his opposition
to the war during his broadcast, using terms like “futile” and “immoral.”
This was a courageous act at the time, as other news anchors remained
neutral or, like ABC’s Howard K. Smith, encouraged an expansion of
the war.6
By March 10, 1968, Bobby Kennedy had begun to tell aides and associ-
ates, like Ed Guthman and Cesar Chavez, that he was going to run for
the nomination. On the advice of Senator George McGovern, he decided
to hold his announcement until after the March 12 New Hampshire pri-
mary, to avoid splitting the antiwar vote with Eugene McCarthy, which
would have guaranteed a decisive victory for LBJ. Meanwhile, Bobby
had worked hard in the Senate on a bill to protect civil rights workers;
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it had finally passed on March 11, 1968. Also supporting the bill was
LBJ—so, at least at a distance, they had finally found some common
ground. Martin Luther King also backed the bill, marking one of the last
times all three men publicly shared the same objective.7
On March 12, 1968, the political landscape shifted dramatically when
LBJ mustered less than half the vote in the New Hampshire primary.
Though he still won, with 49 percent to Eugene McCarthy’s 42 percent,
LBJ, like much of America, was stunned. The next day, Bobby announced
for the first time that he was “reassessing” whether to run. But Bobby
still had several matters to consider before actually announcing his
candidacy—including whether there was still time to stop Dr. King from
endorsing McCarthy before Bobby was even in the race.
Martin Luther King’s latest problem with President Johnson had been
over the report of the Kerner Commission, appointed by LBJ following
the previous summer’s race riots. Headed by Illinois Governor Otto
Kerner, the commission found that racism and poverty had caused the
riots, and recommended a wide range of programs to address the issues.
When news of the report broke on March 1, 1968, Dr. King had embraced
its findings, even saying he might call off his Poor People’s March on
Washington—then scheduled for April 22—if its recommendations were
implemented.8
In contrast, LBJ tried to ignore his own commission, viewing its report
as a slap in the face to his own civil rights efforts. LBJ was having prob-
lems enough trying to fund the Vietnam War, and thought the country
couldn’t afford the antipoverty programs the Kerner Report called for.
By 1968, LBJ had reduced much of his originally ambitious funding
for his Great Society programs in order to fund the war and balance
the budget. But Dr. King saw clearly what had happened: Vietnam
was siphoning needed funds away from America’s inner cities, and
he was determined to support another candidate for the Democratic
nomination.9
On March 14, one of Bobby Kennedy’s aides began trying frantically
to reach Dr. King, who was going to Los Angeles to address the Cali-
fornia Democratic Council. Though the council was endorsing Eugene
McCarthy, Bobby hoped that Dr. King could be persuaded to delay
announcing his endorsement until after Bobby had officially entered
the race. On March 15, Bobby’s aide finally reached King, who agreed
to Bobby’s request.10
Bobby also had to deal with Lyndon Johnson. There was no point in