‘Evidence that can’t be produced is not evidence, Joe, it’s hearsay – weren’t you listening in law school?’
‘Sources of intelligence have to be protected.’
‘Who have you sent this crap to?’
‘Let me check. Ah . . . the White House, the Secretary of State, the Defense Secretary, the CIA, the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force.’
‘So it’s all over Washington, you asshole.’
‘Obviously, we don’t try to conceal information about our nation’s enemies.’
‘This is a deliberate attempt to sabotage the President’s civil rights bill.’
‘We would never do a thing like that, George. We’re just a law enforcement agency.’ Joe hung up.
George took a few minutes to recover his temper. Then he went through the report underlining the most outrageous allegations. He typed a note listing the government departments to which the report had been sent, according to Joe. Then he took the document in to Bobby.
As always, Bobby sat at his desk with his jacket off, his tie loosened, and his glasses on. He was smoking a cigar. ‘You’re not going to like this,’ George said. He handed over the report, then summarized it.
‘That cock sucker Hoover,’ said Bobby.
It was the second time George had heard Bobby call Hoover a cock sucker. ‘You don’t mean that literally,’ George said.
‘Don’t I?’
George was startled. ‘Is Hoover a homo?’ It was hard to imagine. Hoover was a short, overweight man with thinning hair, a squashed nose, lopsided features and a thick neck. He was the opposite of a fairy.
Bobby said: ‘I hear the Mob has photos of him in a woman’s dress.’
‘Is that why he goes around saying there is no such thing as the Mafia?’
‘It’s one theory.’
‘Jesus.’
‘Make an appointment for me to see him tomorrow.’
‘Okay. In the meantime, let me go through the Levison wiretaps. If Levison is influencing King towards Communism, there must be evidence in those phone calls. Levison would have to talk about the bourgeoisie, the masses, class struggle, revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, Lenin, Marx, the Soviet Union, like that. I’ll make a note of every such reference and see what they add up to.’
‘That’s not a bad idea. Let me have a memo before I meet with Hoover.’
George returned to his office and sent for the transcripts of the wiretap on Stanley Levison’s phone – faithfully copied to the Justice Department by Hoover’s FBI. Half an hour later a file clerk wheeled a cart into the room.
George started work. Next time he looked up was when a cleaner opened his door and asked if she could sweep his office. He stayed at his desk while she worked around him. He remembered ‘pulling all-nighters’ at Harvard Law, especially during the absurdly demanding first year.
Long before he finished it was clear to him that Levison’s conversations with King had nothing to do with Communism. They did not use a single one of George’s key words, from Alienation to Zapata. They talked about a book King was writing; they discussed fund-raising; they planned the march on Washington. King admitted fears and doubts to his friend: even though he advocated non-violence, was he to blame for riots and bombings provoked by peaceful demonstrations? They rarely touched on wider political issues, never on the Cold War conflicts that obsessed every Communist: Berlin, Cuba, Vietnam.
At 4 a.m. George put his head down on the desk and napped. At eight he took a clean shirt from his desk drawer, still in its laundry wrapper, and went to the men’s room to wash. Then he typed the note Bobby had requested, saying that in two years of phone calls Stanley Levison and Martin Luther King had never spoken about Communism or any subject remotely associated therewith. ‘If Levison is a Moscow propagandist, he must be the worst one in history,’ George finished.
Later that day, Bobby went to see Hoover at the FBI. When he came back he said to George: ‘He agreed to withdraw the report. Tomorrow his liaison men will go to every recipient and retrieve all copies, saying it needs to be revised.’
‘Good,’ George said. ‘But it’s too late, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ said Bobby. ‘The damage is done.’
*
As if President Kennedy did not have enough to worry about in the autumn of 1963, the crisis in Vietnam boiled over on the first Saturday in November.
Encouraged by Kennedy, the South Vietnamese military deposed their unpopular President, Ngo Dinh Diem. In Washington, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy woke Kennedy at 3 a.m. to tell him the coup he had authorized had now taken place. Diem and his brother, Nhu, had been arrested. Kennedy ordered that Diem and his family be given safe passage to exile.
Bobby summoned George to go with him to a meeting in the Cabinet Room at 10 a.m.
During the meeting an aide came in with a cable announcing that both Ngo Dinh brothers had committed suicide.
President Kennedy was more shocked than George had ever seen him. He looked stricken. He paled beneath his tan, jumped to his feet, and rushed from the room.
‘They didn’t commit suicide,’ Bobby said to George after the meeting. ‘They’re devout Catholics.’
George knew that Tim Tedder was in Saigon, liaising between the CIA and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the ARVN, pronounced Arvin. No one would be surprised if it turned out that Tedder had fouled up.
Around midday, a CIA cable revealed that the Ngo Dinh brothers had been executed in the back of an army personnel carrier.
‘We can’t control anything over there,’ George said to Bobby in frustration. ‘We’re trying to help those people find their way to freedom and democracy, but nothing we do works.’
‘Just hang on another year,’ said Bobby. ‘We can’t lose Vietnam to the Communists now – my brother would be defeated in the presidential election next November. But as soon as he’s re-elected, he’ll pull out faster than you can blink. You’ll see.’
*
A gloomy group of aides sat in the office next to Bobby’s one evening that November. Hoover’s intervention had worked, and the civil rights bill was in trouble. Congressmen who were ashamed to be racists were looking for a pretext to vote against the bill, and Hoover had given them one.
The bill had been routinely passed to the Rules Committee, whose chair, Howard W. Smith, from Virginia, was one of the more rabid conservative Southern Democrats. Emboldened by the FBI’s accusations of Communism in the civil rights movement, Smith had announced that his committee would keep the bill bottled up indefinitely.
It made George furious. Could these men not see that their attitudes had led to the murder of the Sunday School girls? As long as respectable people said it was all right to treat Negroes as if they were not quite human, ignorant thugs would think they had permission to kill children.
And there was worse. With a year to go before the presidential election, Jack Kennedy was losing popularity. He and Bobby were especially worried about Texas. Kennedy had won Texas in 1960 because he had a popular Texan running-mate, Lyndon Johnson. Unfortunately, three years of association with the liberal Kennedy administration had just about destroyed Johnson’s credibility with the conservative business elite.
‘It’s not just civil rights,’ George argued. ‘We’re proposing to abolish the oil depletion allowance. Texas oil men haven’t paid the taxes they ought to for decades, and they hate us for wanting to scrap their privileges.’
‘Whatever it is,’ said Dennis Wilson, ‘thousands of Texas conservatives have left the Democrats and joined the Republicans. And they love Senator Goldwater.’ Barry Goldwater was a right-wing Republican who wanted to scrap social security and drop nuclear bombs on Vietnam. ‘If Barry runs for president, he’s going to take Texas.’
Another aide said: ‘We need the President to go down there and romance those shit-kickers.’
‘He will,’ said Dennis. ‘And Jackie’s going with him.’
‘When?’
‘They’re going to Houston on the twenty-first of November,’ Dennis replied. ‘And then, the next day, they’ll go to Dallas.’