At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 by Taylor Branch

Author:Taylor Branch
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2007-04-04T07:00:00+00:00

IV

Passion

CHAPTER 33

Spy Visions

December 1966–February 1967

POLITICAL passions tested democracy’s institutional core. In Bond v. Floyd, the Supreme Court weighed the argument by Georgia that criticisms of the Vietnam War, rather than Julian Bond’s color per se, left the state representative-elect short on the sincere character required to take his oath of office. “We are not persuaded,” Chief Justice Warren wrote tartly, “by the state’s attempt to distinguish between an exclusion alleged to be on racial grounds and one alleged to violate the First Amendment.” A unanimous ruling on December 5 ordered Georgia’s House to admit Bond, the twenty-six-year-old former SNCC publicist who had been elected three times but not yet seated. “We’re all disappointed,” said one state official, “that the Georgia legislature will apparently not be allowed to make its own decisions.” Such grumbling marked what might have seemed a remedial lesson for the South, but just then a movement erupted in Washington to expel Representative Adam Clayton Powell. “Fight in Congress to Bar Powell Planned by California Democrat,” announced the New York Times. “Powell’s Just Too Blatant,” a Washington Post headline proclaimed. The powerful chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, while duly elected twelve times from Harlem, had infuriated colleagues with flamboyant displays of “the freeloading available to all and practiced more quietly by many,” reported the Post. “Powell’s creed has been that he can do anything a white man can do.”

By uncanny coincidence, the prolonged feud over FBI surveillance emerged garishly that same week. Thurgood Marshall, Solicitor General of the United States, asked the Supreme Court to vacate the freshly upheld conviction of Joe Schipani of Brooklyn, noting with apology that prosecutors had failed to inform either defense lawyers or judges of evidence obtained from devices installed “by means of trespass,” namely microphone bugs. Because this was the third such case recently discovered, Marshall further advised, the Justice Department would examine past and present federal prosecutions for the taint of undisclosed eavesdropping. “U.S. Reviews Cases in Bugging Quest,” declared the lead front-page story in the Times.

Publicity ruptured the fragile truce covering eighteen months of subterranean maneuver. When outsiders had unearthed FBI bugs, disputes within the government over responsibility had drawn the unusually blunt presidential order to forbid all surreptitious microphones, and compliance became what Katzenbach called “an issue of great emotion” between the FBI and Justice Department: “There was very nearly a threat on the part of the FBI to stop organized crime investigations if they couldn’t have this technique.” FBI Director Hoover claimed broad but vague legal authority. Senator Robert Kennedy reacted viscerally, being vulnerable already because his signature lurked on hundreds of formal requests for less intrusive wiretap surveillances on telephone lines, which did not require break-ins to install. Kennedy insisted that he had not even known of FBI bugs when he was Attorney General, let alone approved them, and warring charges of secret misconduct culminated in a cryptic appeal to his successor and former deputy. “As you know, this is a damn important matter for me,” Kennedy wrote Katzenbach by hand-delivered courier.

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