Even on his best day he didnt believe himself worth that much. Or the staggering smear campaign Hoover launched in 1964, aimed at exposing him, as the director put it, as “the most notorious liar in the country” and removing him from “the national picture.” His agents maintained a two-bedroom apartment in Atlanta’s Peach Street Towers filled with surveillance equipment, and kept a man in the place twenty-four hours a day, monitoring every call he made or received. Attorney General Robert Kennedy’d approved the first wiretaps on his home and offices (though not the fourteen microphone surveillances that came later) after his brother, the president, expressed grave concern over the help the SCLC received from Stanley Levison and Hunter Pitts O’Dell. He remembered that conversation well. Kennedy invited him to the White House and during a stroll in the Rose Garden said, “They’re Communists, you’ve got to get rid of them. If they shoot you down, they’ll shoot us down too — so we’re asking that you be careful.” He’d left that meeting convinced that Hoover’s office, not Kennedy’s, was the center of power in Washington. And that office was determined to see him dead.
Having hung up, having forced himself to say, “Thank you for the information,” he closed his workroom door and slumped onto the chair in front of his desk. Suddenly he felt too tired to play with the children. Too tired to move. The call had washed away all his strength. For an instant he felt dizzy and lowered his head onto a pile of week-old letters begging for his attention. He’d faced death so many times before — the bomb that exploded in Room 30, his room at the Gaston Motel during the Birmingham campaign, flashed through his memories. But this? Oh, this new threat was something else. This plan to kill him had been hatched in Imperial, Missouri, at the home of John Sutherland, who was putting up the money. He was a Virginian, a product of military schools and a descendant of the Pilgrims; he stood firmly against the Movement, so much so that he founded the St. Louis Citizens Council and served in an antiblack organization of businessmen called the Southern States Industrial Council. As the agent told it, Sutherland knew an underworld figure named John Kauffmann, a drug dealer and operator of the Bluff Acres Motel, where stolen cars were dropped off occasionally by nickel-and-dime thugs of his acquaintance. One of them was Russel Byers. His brother-in-law John Paul Spica was serving a murder sentence in the Missouri State Penitentiary, sharing a cell with a penny-ante crook named James Earl Ray. Byers, the agent said, made one of his calls on Kauffmann that fall of 1966, and the motel owner asked him if he’d like to make some money. Sure would, Byers said. Then there’s someone, replied Kauffmann, I think you ought to meet.
He drove the car thief to Sutherland’s place. The Virginian met them at the door, wearing a Confederate colonel’s cap. He invited them into his den, festooned with a rug imprinted with the Stars and Bars and a huge Rebel flag on one wall. There, Sutherland informed them he represented a covert southern group with deep pockets. They would pay $50,000 to anyone who killed the “big nigger” from Atlanta. Was he interested? Byers listened politely, then said he needed a while to think aver the offer. There was little chance he would accept, said the agent — Byers knew danger when he saw it — but in the underworld of Kauffmann, Byers’s brother-in-law, and Ray, it was widely known that an open contract had been issued for King’s head.
It was, he knew, only a matter of time before someone collected that bounty. Pushing aside the papers on his desk (his aides told him he’d already generated close to 200,000 pages of documents), he found his pack of cigarettes. He pulled one out, searched his pockets for a matchbook, then lit the cigarette, extinguished the match with his thumb and forefinger, and sat back in his chair. How many days did he have left? Or should he be thinking now in terms of hours? Maybe minutes? What should a man do when at any moment he might be struck down?
He knew.
If he might not see tomorrow, then what he wished for most was to receive forgiveness from those he’d failed, beginning with his children. And his wife. Whatever failures there were in their marriage he blamed on himself, for no man could have asked for a better partner to share his life since 1952. She was pursuing her music career — as a singer of exceptional talent — at the New England Conservatory when they met in Boston. Yes, she’d heard of him before they met, and her impressions were not favorable. In Boston he was known for the brilliant sermons he delivered at local churches, but Coretta had reservations about the Baptist ministers she’d met. They were so … emotional, and she was hoping to align herself with a less fundamental, more liberal approach to religion. Added to that, the stuffiness of so many Baptist ministers bothered her. And wasn’t this M. L. King just a little too popular with the women in town? She’d heard he was brilliant, and had been accepted at Edinburgh University for graduate work (though Yale turned him down); he brought together other students at his place on St. Botolph Street for meetings of what they dubbed “The Dialectical Society,” at which they as well as their professors presented papers. She’d also heard he was playful, a good dancer and a party boy, a tease who dressed to the nines — a real ladies’ man, by most accounts, and Boston’s most eligible young black bachelor. It was with some reservation, then, that she surrendered to the matchmaking of her friend Mary Powell, who was married to the nephew of his former teacher, Benjamin Mays at Morehouse, and ate at the Western Lunch Box, an eatery specializing in down-home cooking, where black students — he among them — gathered to relax and talk. Mary warned him that Coretta might not be religious enough for his temperament, but at that point in his life he was frustrated by the women he was meeting. The woman he hoped to marry, he told Mary, must have four characteristics: character, intelligence, personality, and beauty. Mary, saying nothing, simply gave him Coretta’s phone number.
When he picked her up in his green Chevy on the Huntington Avenue side of the conservatory — she with her coat buttoned to her throat and wearing a scarf, thinking of the struggles and sacrifices that had brought her from a culturally deprived background to Antioch and at last to her training here — her first thought when his car pulled up had been, Oh my God, look what a runt he is. (In point of fact, he was 166½ pounds that year, 66½ inches tall, and had a blood pressure of 134/64.) To her he at first seemed full of the slick, superficial language — the jive — of black men with only one thing on their minds. But no. As they spent time together that afternoon, in the cold rain of a January afternoon, she began to see deeper into his passion for Continental theology and his people’s deliverance. He was working that term, he said, in directed study with Professor DeWolf on a paper he would entitle “Karl Barth’s Conception of God,” and as he discussed his conclusions with her he grew more animated, explaining that Barth’s God was too removed from man, wholly Other, which he found unacceptable; but there was much in so-called crisis theology that, in his view, corrected liberal Protestantism’s sentimentalization of man. They sat in Sharaf’s Restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue, eating a cafeteria-style lunch. He put down his fork and leaned closer toward her, saying, “Maybe man is more a sinner than liberals are willing to admit.” In his paper’s conclusion he planned to question liberalisms naïve, ivory-tower belief in progress. “Instead of assured progress in wisdom and decency man faces the ever-present possibility of swift relapse not merely to animalism but into such calculated cruelty as no other animal can practice.” Talking on, waving his fork then, he watched her closely for her reaction, and was pleased by her attention and her bobbing her head in agreement when he said, “The word sin has to come back into our vocabulary. One hoary meaning of the word is ‘to miss the mark,’ as when an arrow goes astray. I like that. What do you think?”