Hellhound on His Trail Read online

  But just as DeLoach guessed, Clark rejected the request out of hand. "There has not been an adequate134 demonstration of a direct threat to the national security," Clark replied. The attorney general did leave the door slightly ajar for future discussion, however. "Should further evidence be secured of such a threat," he wrote, "or should re-evaluation be desired, please resubmit."

  8 A BUGLE VOICE OF VENOM

  WHILE ERIC GALT was living in Los Angeles, one other passion, aside from rumba dancing, bartending, and hypnotism, absorbed much of his time and imagination: he became infatuated with the Wallace campaign.

  Ever since Wallace announced his intention to run for the White House, Galt had followed the candidate with quickening interest. In November 1967, shortly after he arrived in Los Angeles from Puerto Vallarta, Eric Galt volunteered at Wallace headquarters in North Hollywood and did what he could to help the campaign gather the required sixty-six thousand signatures for the primary ballot.

  For a time, he came to view Wallace activism as his primary occupation. When he applied for a telephone line, Galt told a representative135 of the phone company that he needed to expedite the installation schedule because he was "a campaign worker for George Wallace" and thus depended upon phone service for his job. He became an American Independent Party evangelist--trolling taverns, buttonholing strangers on the street, and beseeching everyone he knew to go down to Wallace headquarters.

  The grunts who volunteered for the Wallace campaign in Los Angeles were an odd assortment of mavericks, xenophobes, drifters, seekers, ultra-right-wingers, hard-core racists, libertarian dreamers--and outright lunatics. As a largely improvisational enterprise, the Wallace movement had to rely on the energies of eccentric foot soldiers who seemed to come out of the woodwork and could not be properly canvassed--if organizers were disposed to canvass them at all. One of the head Wallace coordinators admitted that the lion's share of the work in California was being done by what he described as "half-wits" and "kooks." As the biographer Dan Carter put it in his excellent life of Wallace, The Politics of Rage, "Several recruits,136 who recounted grim warnings of Communist conspiracies and the dangers of water fluoridation, seemed more like mental outpatients than political activists."

  An unmistakable paramilitary streak ran through the ranks. In one telling anecdote, Carter reports that Tom Turnipseed, a Wallace campaign staffer, flew in from Birmingham to meet with one of the Los Angeles district coordinators and was surprised to hear the man boast that he was going out "on maneuvers" over the weekend. When Turnipseed inquired if he was in the National Guard, the gung-ho coordinator replied, "Naw, we got our own group," and then led Turnipseed out to his car to show him the small arsenal of weapons in his trunk--including a machine gun and two bazookas. Alarmed, Turnipseed asked him what he and his "group" were arming themselves against. The man, thinking the answer rather obvious, said, "The Rockefeller interests137--you know, the Trilateral Commission."

  These were the kinds of people Eric Galt found himself working with in late 1967, and though he did not fraternize with them much, he seemed to fit right in with this loose confederacy of misfits. As a volunteer, Galt almost certainly attended some of the Wallace rallies held around Los Angeles. Held in strip mall parking lots, Elks halls, or county fairgrounds, these homespun entertainments were heavily attended by longshoremen and factory workers and truck drivers, many of them the children of Okies who had moved to California during the years of the dust bowl. They were God-fearing, hardworking folk, Wallace liked to say, people who "love country music and come into fierce contact with life."

  One of the largest and most successful of these political hoedowns was held at a stock car track138 at the edge of Burbank, less than a twenty-minute drive from where Galt lived. A gospel group warmed up the venue, and then, as Wallace arrived in a motorcade, the emcee, a bourbon-swilling actor named Chill Wills, whipped the audience into a howling frenzy. When Wallace took the stage, the volatile crowd erupted in rowdy cheers, shoving, and fistfights.

  Wallace seemed to draw strength from the restiveness in the air. "He has a bugle voice of venom,"139 a commentator from the New Republic wrote, "and a gut knowledge of the prejudices of his audience." A Newsweek correspondent covering the Wallace rallies, noting "the heat, the rebel yells,140 the flags waving," and the legions of "psychologically threadbare" supporters, declared that Wallace "speaks to the unease everyone senses in America."

  TO THE CORE of his angry soul, Eric Galt identified with Wallace's rants against big government, his championing of the workingman, his jeremiads on the spread of Communism. He even identified with the governor's Alabama roots--Galt had lived for a brief time in Birmingham in 1967, and his Mustang still bore Alabama plates, which sported the state nickname, HEART OF DIXIE.

  What Galt found most appealing about Wallace, though, was the governor's stance as an unapologetic segregationist. Wallace's rhetoric powerfully articulated Galt's own smoldering prejudices. Although Galt was not politically sophisticated, he was a newspaper reader and something of a radio and television news junkie. His politics were composed of many inchoate gripes and grievances. On most topics he might best be described as a reactionary--he was, for example, drawn to the positions of the John Birch Society, to which he wrote letters, though never formally joined.

  By late 1967, Galt had begun to gravitate toward stark positions on racial politics. He became intrigued by Ian Smith's white supremacist regime in Rhodesia. In Puerto Vallarta he had bought a copy of U.S. News & World Report in which he found an advertisement soliciting immigrants for Rhodesia. The idea appealed to him so much that on December 28, 1967, he wrote to the American-Southern Africa Council141 in Washington, D.C., to inquire about relocating to Salisbury.

  "My reason for writing is that I am considering immigrating to Rhodesia," Galt said in his letter, noting that representatives from the John Birch Society had referred him to the council. "I would appreciate any information you could give me." Not only did Galt hope to gain citizenship in Rhodesia; he was such an ardent believer in the cause of white rule and racial apartheid that he planned, as he later put it, to "serve two or three years in one of them mercenary armies" in southern Africa. While living in Los Angeles, he wrote to the president of the California chapter of the Friends of Rhodesia142--an organization dedicated to improving relations with the United States--raising still more questions about immigration and inquiring about how he might subscribe to a pro-Ian Smith journal titled Rhodesian Commentary.

  Galt was apparently also an occasional reader of the Thunderbolt,143 a hate rag published out of Birmingham by the virulently segregationist National States Rights Party. Galt was enamored of the party chairman, a flamboyant, outrageous race baiter named Jesse Benjamin Stoner. Born at the foot of Tennessee's Lookout Mountain, a Klansman since his teens, J. B. Stoner believed, literally, that Anglo-Saxons were God's chosen people. Among his more memorable statements, Stoner called Hitler "too moderate," referred to blacks as "an extension of the ape family," and said that "being a Jew should be a crime punishable by death." Lyndon Johnson, Stoner said, "was the biggest nigger lover in the United States."

  All of this wasn't just talk: J. B. Stoner was a lawyer who had successfully defended Klansmen and was suspected by the FBI of direct involvement in at least a dozen bombings of synagogues and black churches throughout the South (in fact, he would be convicted years later of conspiracy in a Birmingham church-bombing case). The chief of the Atlanta police said about Stoner in 1964: "Invariably the bastard144 is in the general area when a bomb goes off."

  A confirmed bachelor who had a speech impediment and walked with a limp from childhood polio, Stoner was given to wearing polka-dot bow ties and displaying the banner of the National States Rights Party--a Nazi thunderbolt, adapted from Hitler's Waffen-SS, emblazoned on the Confederate battle flag. According to the historian Dan Carter, a distinct strain of homoerotic camp ran through the NSRP membership. At least one party stalwart, an archly effeminate organiz
er145 known as Captain X, wore jodhpurs and jackboots with stiletto heels; on at least one occasion in 1964 an undercover Birmingham Police Department detective observed Captain X sashaying about the party's headquarters, heavily made up in mascara and rouge--and smacking a riding crop.

  The Thunderbolt, the National States Rights Party's monthly newsletter with a circulation of about forty thousand die-hard readers, railed with predictable regularity against King and called Wallace's presidential campaign "the last chance146 for the white voter." Among other things, the Thunderbolt called for the execution of Supreme Court justices and advocated the mass expulsion of all American blacks to Africa. Galt apparently loved reading Stoner's screeds in the Thunderbolt and repeated his trademark zingers: like Stoner, Galt took to calling King "Martin Luther Coon," and even pasted the racist sobriquet147 on the back of a console television he kept in his room in Los Angeles.

  HAVING LONG MARINATED in this genre of hate literature, Galt's prejudices sometimes took on an edge of violence in Los Angeles. One night in December, Galt was having a drink at a dive called the Rabbit's Foot Club at 5623 Hollywood Boulevard, where girls danced in nightly floor shows. It was, according to one journalist who went there, "a murky, jukebox-riven hole in the wall148 for lonely people with modest means." A regular at the Rabbit's Foot for weeks, Galt usually drank alone, but lately he had been "preaching Wallace for President" to anyone who'd listen, according to the bartender James Morison. Another regular at the Rabbit's Foot remembered Galt as "a moody fellow from Alabama"149 who drank vodka and preferred the stool closest to the door. He told people he was a businessman, and that he'd just come back from Mexico after spending a few years running a bar down there. For added credibility, he'd toss out a few expressions in Spanish.

  On this particular night in December, a young woman named Pat Goodsell150--reportedly one of the floor-show dancers--was sitting next to Galt at the Rabbit's Foot bar, engaged in harmless conversation with several other regulars about the state of the world, when the subject turned to the Deep South after someone noticed the Alabama tags on Galt's Mustang outside. "I don't understand the way you treat Negroes," Pat Goodsell said to Galt. She only ribbed him at first, but when he dug in and tried to defend Wallace's home state, she pressed the matter. "Why don't you give them their rights?" she asked.

  At this, Galt grew incensed, and the others in the bar could feel the tension rising. It was a side of this seeming wallflower they'd never seen before. He said to Goodsell, "What do you know about it--you ever been to Alabama?"

  Suddenly Galt sprang from his stool, clutched Goodsell by the hand, and yanked her off her stool. It almost seemed as though he were spoiling for a fistfight.

  Then he started berating her, his voice rising to a queer, high register. "Well," he shouted, "since you love coloreds so much, I'll just take you right on over to Watts and drop you off down there. We'll see how much you like it!"

  When he stormed out of the Rabbit's Foot, two men followed him from the bar, one black and one white. Outside, they picked a fight--"they jumped me," Galt later put it--and wrested his suit coat and watch from him. "To get away from them," Galt said, "I picked up a brick and hit the nigger in the head."

  Galt sprinted to his car with the intention of grabbing his Liberty Chief .38 revolver under the seat, but only then did he realize the real trouble he was in: the Mustang was locked and his keys were in his stolen coat, as was his wallet, which contained his Alabama driver's license and about sixty bucks. Although his apartment wasn't far away, he didn't dare head home, for fear that his two attackers would return and steal his car. So he spent the whole night crouching in the shadows of the Rabbit's Foot, holding vigil over the Mustang.

  In the morning he found a locksmith who made a new key. (Although he was taking a locksmithing correspondence course, his skills were not yet up to snuff.) Then Galt placed a long-distance call to the authorities at the motor vehicle division in Alabama and, for a nominal fee, arranged for a new license to be sent to him in Los Angeles, marked "General Delivery."

  9 RED CARNATIONS

  "DID YOU GET them?" Martin Luther King asked his wife over the telephone from his office. "Did you get the flowers?"151

  It was wintertime, and King was about to go away on one of his many trips. Coretta Scott King, his wife of fifteen years, was recuperating from a recent hysterectomy after a tumor was discovered in her abdomen. Knowing that she felt tender and vulnerable, he was moved to send her flowers, through an Atlanta florist delivery service. The gift arrived at the King home, a modest split-level at 234 Sunset, nestled among red clay hills in the Vine City section of Atlanta, not far from King's alma mater, Morehouse. The house was sparsely furnished, with a few heirloom pieces and a portrait of Gandhi on the wall.

  The flowers were carnations, a shock of deep red. "They're very beautiful," Coretta said. "And they're ... artificial."

  Over the years, King had given Coretta flowers countless times, but never fake ones. She was not miffed or insulted by the choice--merely puzzled. "Why?" she asked.

  There was a long pause. Then King said, "I wanted to give you something that would last. Something you could always keep."

  Coretta thought that her husband was "a guilt-ridden man."152 He felt unqualified in his role as a symbol, as the representative of black America. "He never felt he was adequate to his position," she wrote. King often said he was "mystified" by his own career, from the moment he was catapulted onto the world stage as one of the architects of the Montgomery campaign against segregated seating on city buses. But in recent years the movement had truly consumed him, taken him far from his wife and family, and left him feeling more regretful than ever. He was married to the movement. "Tonight I have taken a vow,"153 King once told an SCLC audience. "I, Martin Luther King, take thee, nonviolence, to be my wedded wife."

  That winter, just after Christmas, he sat Coretta down and confessed to her154 about one of his several mistresses--the most important one, the one he had grown closest to. She was an alumna of Fisk University in Nashville, a dignified lady who now lived in Los Angeles and was married to a prominent black dentist. The affair had lasted for years, and King made no promises that it was over. King did not tell her about the other women in his life--the mistress in Louisville, the one in Atlanta, and other women of lesser consequence. In his sermons, he hinted at his failings with increasing frequency. "Each of us is two selves,"155 he once told his congregation. The "great burden of life is to always try to keep that higher self in command."

  His confession must have devastated Coretta, and yet she must have suspected something for a long time. They'd been growing apart for years, and the tensions were palpable. "That poor man156 was so harassed at home," said one SCLC member. "Had the man lived, the marriage wouldn't have survived. Coretta King was most certainly a widow long before Dr. King died."

  King's affairs and escapades were only one source of their marital stress. Coretta was unhappy in her role as a traditional housewife, stuck at home with their four children while her husband lived in the international spotlight. She rarely got to use her considerable gifts--as a singer and speaker--for the good of the movement. The fact was King wanted her at home. He was a traditionalist, some might say a chauvinist, but he also feared what would happen to the children if they were both killed. "Martin had, all through his life, an ambivalent attitude157 toward the role of women," Coretta later said. "On the one hand, he believed that women are just as intelligent and capable as men and that they should hold positions of authority and influence ... But when it came to his own situation, he thought in terms of his wife being a homemaker and a mother for his children. He was very definite that he would expect whoever he married to be home waiting for him."

  Like most married couples, they argued about money. When they met at Boston University in the early 1950s, King was a bit of a dandy--he lived in a swell apartment, drove a nice car, wore immaculate clothes. Now King was all but an ascetic. His salary as co-pastor of
Ebenezer Baptist Church was only six thousand dollars a year, and he drew no stipend from the SCLC. Much to Coretta's chagrin, he donated nearly all his other income to the movement--his speaking fees, his grants, even his fifty-four thousand dollars from the Nobel Prize. They almost never went out together and rarely took vacations. Through most of their married life they'd lived in a small rented house, had no servants, and drove only one car. The place on Sunset was a recent acquisition, and it was very basic indeed. "There was nothing fashionable158 about his neighborhood," Andrew Young said. "It was all but a slum." Coretta was irritated that King had not set aside money for an education fund for their children. He hadn't even written a will. "I won't have any money159 to leave behind," King said in a sermon at Ebenezer Baptist. "I won't have the fine and luxurious things to leave behind. I just want to leave a committed life behind."

  King once said that his weaknesses "are not in the area of coveting wealth. My wife knows this well. In fact, she feels that I overdo it." He knew that Coretta would have liked some of the finer things of life--and that, too, was a source of abiding guilt.

  Ever since King struck upon the Poor People's Campaign, Coretta noticed a change in her husband, a frantic urgency, as he flew about the country. "We had a sense of fate160 closing in," she later wrote. "It seemed almost as if there were great forces driving him. He worked as if it was to be his final assignment."

  In those last months, she often recalled how her husband had reacted to the news, in 1963, of President Kennedy's assassination. He stared at the television screen and said, matter-of-factly, "This is what will happen to me."161 Coretta said nothing in reply. She had no words of solace for him. She did not say, "It won't happen to you." Even then, she felt he was right.