Sorry Travis. It was Abbie Hoffman who said it, trying to explain to the idiot judge at the trial of the Chicago 7, that he lived in ‘Woodstock Nation’ in the same way native Americans “carry (their own) nation around in their heads.”
For forty years, I’ve been carrying America around in my head. Not the ‘America’ long-since perverted by the worst impulses of its people, the consumerized, brain-washed Dream Machine where happiness lies just around the corner with the arrival of your new Lexus with onboard GPS, video, wrap-around-sound, and flame-thrower. The other America. The one I got promised.
It’s been noted by more than one close friend that I don’t like to travel. I’ve also been reclusive, often solitary and withdrawn. Maybe so. But the truth, my truth, is that I’ve been on the road for forty years.
Hillary Clinton was on the road herself today, dodging sniper fire in Memphis, trying to snag a few black votes with a speech about Martin Luther King, Jr., whose revolution was, according to her, one of “hearts and minds.”
I won’t be watching the television specials today. I’ve seen what kind of junk is being
coughed-up as “history” by “historians” who haven’t a clue about what actually happened forty years ago. The mass media ‘honor’ King by depicting him as a sort of plastic dashboard saint, remembering his astonishing breakthroughs in the South, his Nobel Prize, maybe mentioning how he went to jail. They freeze-frame him in 1963, his “dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial.
Those who take the trouble to go further, to King’s radical evolution from Selma to the planning for a Poor People’s March On Washington, will find a man whose vision – and perhaps his reach – was certain to have enormous political and economic consequences well beyond civil rights.
To sugar-coat a 1963 version of King is to obscure the reason for, and the perpetrators of, his murder.
In order to understand King, and the seminal events which led from the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 to his killing in Memphis on April 4, 1968, it is essential to recognize the context in which they occurred. This requires an awareness of what professor Peter Dale Scott terms “deep politics.”
During the Kennedy administration, a furious war erupted between Attorney General Robert Kennedy and F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover, whose frequent companions at the Del Mar Racetrack in California included hoodlums and Texas oil billionaires, publicly denied the existence of the mafia; meanwhile, Robert Kennedy had hauled Joe Valachi before a Senate Committee, prosecuted Jimmy Hoffa, and deported Carlos Marcello. Hoover was also pissed-off at the Kennedy Justice Department’s legal actions on behalf of “Freedom riders” and Negroes who tried to register to vote in the South. He blamed the civil rights movement on “Communists” and termed Martin Luther King “the most notorious liar in America.”
As Attorney General, RFK was Hoover’s boss. You may imagine how this went over with Hoover.
Hoover’s tenure as the nation’s top ranked domestic spook had enabled him to amass a treasure trove of blackmail material on politicians of every stripe, and he was not reluctant to use it. But his sly attempts to pressure the Kennedys – he had tapes of JFK enjoying an afternoon or two with a woman not his wife; later, he informed RFK that one of the President’s lovers, Judith Campbell Exner, was also sleeping with a fellow named Sam Giancana – could not force a change in policies at Justice.
In early 1963, Hoover began pressuring Robert Kennedy to authorize wiretaps on Dr. King. This sequence of events is of great importance in understanding not only the reasons for King’s assassination in 1968 but, curiously, also evidence of its authorship.
King, according to Hoover, was consorting with known Communists. Several were among his top advisers. It would be very bad for the country if this were so, Hoover said. He wanted to intercept King’s phone calls. Kennedy said no.
In 1963, serious changes were taking place in Washington. Kennedy had turned decisively away from the Cold War and toward disarmament. He initiated the Test Ban Treaty. He began to plan disengagement from Viet Nam. He sent back-channel emissaries to establish communications with Cuba. In June, at American University, Kennedy spoke movingly of peace, saying of the Soviet Union, “...We all inhabit this small planet, we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children’s futures, and we are all mortal.”
In this context, Hoover pushed harder. The Kennedys were increasingly identified with King and the movement. If it should turn out that King’s politics were infected by hostile ideologies, that could derail the President’s foreign initiatives, including the Test Ban Treaty. Withdrawal from Viet Nam might seem to be appeasement.
Bobby and Jack talked it over. Hoover had already succeeded in planting nasty anti-King stories in major newspapers and magazines. Any future ‘reliable source’ claiming to connect him with Commies was dangerous. The Kennedys needed something to protect themselves if this should happen.
They decided this: give Hoover a one-time telephone tap for a limited time. When it produced nothing, as they expected it to do, not only would it relieve the pressure on King but protect them from the fallout. Under that theory, RFK signed-off on it. It was September, 1963. The President had just completed a Western tour where he spoke of conservation and expanding national parks, and of his vision of peace.
The wiretap was never terminated. Physical surveillance and electronic eavesdropping was instituted on King. By the time Robert Kennedy realized that the F.B.I. had not only continued but enlarged its spying, the President was dead and the former Attorney General was boxed-in: now Hoover could do as he wished. If Kennedy made an issue of it, then the feds would produce his initial authorization.
On the day President Kennedy was killed, Hoover’s first act was to order removal of the red – yes, it was red – telephone from his desk, the direct line RFK had ordered.
With permanent surveillance of King being carried out by America’s secret police, it is safe to say that King’s enemies always knew where he was and what he was up to. By the time of his murder, his own staff had been infiltrated by at least one police agent.
King’s politics by 1967 had very little easy saccharin moralism and plenty of direct action. He’d taken the movement North, to New York and Philadelphia and Chicago, leading marches against segregated housing and the grinding misery and despair inflicted on America’s poor by America’s institutions.
On April 4, 1967, one year to the day before they killed him, Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a rousing anti-war speech at Riverside Church in New York, breaking with the Johnson government over Viet Nam and calling on the country to actively resist it. He’d been under great pressure from others to stay away from the war, stick with civil rights issues; standing against that war was, in 1967, unpopular, and might harm the movement. For King, there was no possible distinction he could draw between the war and human rights.
His own country, he said, was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”
That is not the King they tell us about in school, children.
In the summer of 1967, the nation’s inner cities exploded in anger and violence. King saw that resistence, in order to win, had to be channeled into a politically-powerful force. In conversation with Robert Kennedy, who was himself already under pressure to challenge Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic nomination the following year, King decided to focus on organizing the country’s poor for an occupation of Washington, D.C., to be preceded by a Poor People’s March on the capital. As RFK had observed, it was one thing to extend to someone the right to sit at a lunch counter, but quite another to give that person the wherewithal to pay for the meal. For both men, civil rights was inseparable from economic justice.
Throughout this period of time, King was under constant surveillance. His telephone conversations were trapped and recorded. Transcripts were provided daily to Hoover directly, who enjoyed passing-on little snippets to favorite media hookers and select members of congress.
King’s plans and schedule were known to Hoover and to those with whom he shared the information.
On the second day of King’s stay at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, the two black firemen stationed at a firehouse in visual sight of and in proximinity to the motel were transferred to another locale. The single black police officer patrolling the neighborhood was ordered to take a few days off.
On the third day, three hours before he was to be shot on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine, all police and F.B.I. surveillance of King, including physical surveillance, was suddenly terminated, and all agents, local and federal, were withdrawn from the area around the motel. This is fact.
There’s no space here to delineate the evidence, but there’s plenty of it, including the actual confession of a man, Lloyd Jowers, who owned a bar which backed up to the murder scene, that he’d been paid to hide the real assassination rifle and provide cover for the real shooter. The police actions are documented, as is the alteration of the physical scene itself on the day following, the heavy-handed pressuring of witnesses to change their recollections, the witnesses who saw a man running from the rooming house and said the man was not James Earl Ray. The bullet which shattered King’s jaw did not match the rifle which bore Ray’s fingerprints.
King did not die the victim of a lone-nut racist but of a clear plan carried out by the same production company which had brought us Dallas in 1963 and which would finish things up two months later, in Los Angeles.
To create a false myth about King and the Kennedys, to erase the radical purposes to which they were dedicated by distorting the historical record, is to render meaningless their murders and to blind America to the otherwise quite obvious trail from these killings to today’s military/corporate state and the fear-driven politics we’ve been fed in order to render us silent.
It is impossible to overstate the dangers posed by these three men to the most powerful people in the country. They represented not only the idea but the political reality of two enormous changes: economic justice, and an end to the Cold War (and its colossal budget). In the 1960s, there was a struggle for the very soul of the nation. In that struggle, some people rose to lead toward transformation. With unparalleled power and wealth at stake, with the future of the American empire at stake, do you think that the people who planned and directed the assassinations of foreign leaders would stick at bringing the score back home?
In order to know what we’re up against, it is necessary to understand the real history of the country. We can often tell truth from falsehood, if we only look. It’s the looking that’s hard. You’ve got to be an optimist. You’ve got to believe that you can change things. Because if you can’t, then the truth can fall too damned hard sometimes.
Today, something seems to be happening in America. I’d’ve said it was against the odds; probably it still is. King often remarked that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Forty years since they murdered him. Today, while Hillary Clinton campaigned in Memphis, reminding me a lot of Richard Nixon attending King’s funeral, Barack Obama was in Indiana.
Indiana, where on April 4, 1968, Robert Kennedy spoke in the darkness to thousands of blacks, people waiting to see him and unaware of King’s murder until he’d told them. For slightly under six minutes, he spoke to those assembled of love and compassion, of the suffering he shared. He invited them to work with him “to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of the world.”
It’s been forty years since I’ve been truly hopeful. I saw Obama’s Philadelphia speech. There is no way that speech can be made by anyone other than a giant. We don’t know if he can make it. We don’t know if Hillary will damage him too badly, or if the media will seize upon some tape-looped remark by someone in his life. We don’t know if somebody will try to stir-fry the election returns. We don’t know if anyone – those whose ‘interests’ are threatened by his election or the country’s first successful lone nut since the attempt on McKinley – will entertain more direct and violent measures.
So, yes, when seen through the lens of how American politics works, the odds seem pretty hard. But you can feel it, not only the Obama candidacy but the intention to which it calls us, an electric current of awakening possibility. For a twenty-year-old college student in Pennsylvania, it’s the first time a leader, any leader, has seemed genuine. For a resident of Woodstock Nation who’s carried America around in his head for a very long time, it’s like coming home.
