One of the lawyers in the Fred Hampton civil case reminds of just how bad the FBI Cointelpro program was under J. Edgar Hoover. It snuffed out the life of a young, charismatic Black Panther leader named Fred Hampton – one of the several assassinations of the sixties – and then went on to wipe out the Black Panther Party.
~Jim DiEugenio
The Criterion Collection is quite literally an invaluable asset in the world of modern day DVD releases. Criterion pioneered both the audio commentary track and the use of supplemental features per DVD release. The last film I saw of theirs was the excellent three disc DVD of The Battle of Algiers.
They have now released another valuable production. This one is called The Kennedy Films of Robert Drew and Associates. It consists of four documentary films: Primary, Adventures on the New Frontier, Crisis, and Faces of November. Robert Drew was a reporter and photographer for Time Inc. While on a study break at Harvard he began to explore why documentary films were so dull and uninvolving. When he returned to Time Inc. he began to attempt to break out of the confines that documentary film had slid into.
What Drew wanted to do was to make a revolution in technique. He wished to dump the reliance on narration, on music and slick camera work that consisted largely of long takes or tracking shots. He also wanted to jettison the device of the interview. In fact he wanted the filmmaker to ask no questions of his subjects at all. And further, he did not want to even tell them where to sit while he was filming. This type of documentary film came to be known as cinema verité, or direct cinema. The revolution in documentary style that it created roughly corresponded to the revolution that French feature film directors like Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard had manufactured with the Nouvelle Vague or New Wave.
Drew managed to create a unit at Time Inc. He then brought in other film-makers who shared his same goal: to help perfect this new aesthetic. These men included D. A. Pennebaker, Albert Maysles, and Richard Leacock. To say that they succeeded in their aim does not begin to describe their achievement. Consider some of the films these men were later responsible for: Gimme Shelter, Salesman, Grey Gardens, Don’t’ Look Back, Monterey Pop, The War Room, Startup.com, Ku Klux Klan—Invisible Empire.
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| Robert Drew |
To achieve what they set out to do there were two technical barriers to surmount. First, there had to be smaller cameras so that they could do handheld shots. That is, the camera would not be attached to a tripod, or be placed on a dolly. It was portable and could follow the subject in the shot. Second, there had to be a way to record live dialogue in sync with what the camera was seeing. By early 1960, when Drew made Primary, both those problems had been solved.
At the same time Drew was getting ready to create his revolution in film style, Senator John Kennedy was also about to create a milestone in politics. Prior to 1960 no major candidate for president had decided to lay his claim to the office by running the gamut during the primary season. Kennedy did so out of necessity. He did not have the party standing that his top three opponents—Stuart Symington, Hubert Humphrey, and Lyndon Johnson—commanded. Up until 1960, the way to win the nomination was through currying favor with the party honchos. Both on the national and state level. Kennedy decided he could not win that way. But since he was photogenic, a good speaker, and his father was willing to spend a lot of money, he could win by dominating the primary season.
So Drew approached Kennedy one day as he emerged from his townhouse in Washington. JFK asked him what he wanted. Drew said words to the effect: I want to follow you around during the Wisconsin primary with a movie camera. Kennedy asked him: why should I agree to that? Drew played his ace card. Aware of Kennedy’s writing career and his interest in history, Drew replied because if he did Kennedy would be part of a new kind of history. The candidate thought it over and said that if he did not call Drew tomorrow, then he could do it. JFK didn’t call. Drew then got in contact with Humphrey’s camp and got a similar approval. The four men were allowed to film the last five days of the Wisconsin race.
In fact, they did create something extraordinary. The film Primary is not just exceptional because of its stylistic originality. But in watching we are transported back to what seems like a different universe, one that used to be called retail politicking. In the first scene we see Humphrey emerging from what looks like a corner grocery story, where he could not have been talking to more than 8-9 people. He then shakes hands with someone outside and actually exchanges a few lines of dialogue with him.
We observe both candidates driving down barren country roads and into sparsely populated rural areas—which is where Humphrey was supposed to run strong. We see JFK standing outside a factory gate in the morning with an overcoat, shaking hands with the workers, one of whom doesn’t even look at him. We even see Kennedy signing autographs for young schoolchildren who don’t vote. (When later asked why he did such a thing during a short campaign, Kennedy replied because those kids go home and talk to their parents.) One can argue that this kind of politics does still exist today in the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries. But today even those kinds of events are well planned and then orchestrated for media effect. That was not the case back then. Because both candidates were relying on the local and state representatives to prepare the events. Therefore it was very much a hit and miss process.
The big hit for Kennedy was a large auditorium rally at a Polish Catholic Church in Milwaukee the night before the election. This scene begins with what has now become an iconic shot of JFK. The camera is behind Kennedy: a wide angle shot from behind him and above. We see him go through the crowded entrance to the stage as the crowd applauds and sings “High Hopes”. Acknowledging he was late, Kennedy quips, “You’ve been standing there quite awhile, I’ve been standing for three months.” Some have written that this was a planned shot. In one of the disc supplements, it is revealed that the wide-angle lens was a last minute suggestion, and that the cameraman decided to hold the camera over his head to avoid the crowd. In other words, it was accomplished willy-nilly.
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| Hubert Humphrey during Wisconsin primary |
The film is spotted with various human-interest angles. For example, we watch as Humphrey does a radio interview. During the interview, the host tells the candidate he thinks he will win. After Humphrey leaves the station, the host says that he actually thinks Kennedy will win. During that rally in the church auditorium, Jackie Kennedy addresses the crowd in Polish. The camera focuses on her twisting hands, which reveal her nervousness.
The film concludes with Election Day, April 5th. We first see citizens coming into voting precincts. We watch as they enter booths, and the camera stays on their feet as they vote, commemorating their privacy. We then cut to a hotel room as the Kennedy camp watches the returns on television. Kennedy is relaxed, jacketless, slowly smoking a cigar. The early returns favor Humphrey by a 2-1 margin. But as the city of Milwaukee begins to count its votes, Kennedy makes up the difference and then surpasses his opponent. JFK ended up winning by a 56-44% margin. As he says in the film, the margin of victory was disappointing. It was not the knockout blow he was hoping to deliver in Humphrey’s backyard (Hubert was from Minnesota). Which meant they would have to go through the same exercise again in Illinois and then West Virginia. Humphrey ended up sticking around for another month.
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| Wisconsin primary election day |
This hotel scene achieves the purest form of cinema verité. One really does feel as if one is eavesdropping. First, there does not appear to be any kind of cinematic lighting. Second, the filmmakers placed the tape recorder behind the sofa, and the microphone in the ashtray. Therefore, their presence was eliminated.
The very last scene begins with a close up on a Humphrey for president sticker on the rear bumper of a car as it pulls out and then proceeds down a lonely country road. It’s a nice metaphor for the battle continuing—but the odds now being against Humphrey. The final results of the primary season were that Kennedy garnered nearly 2 million votes, Humphrey about 600,000. Which gave JFK a large advantage in delegates at the Los Angeles convention. One which neither Johnson nor Symington—who both decided to go the traditional back room route—could overcome.
It’s hard to believe, but Primary did not get a wide release in America. Time-Life owned about six TV stations, and that was the extent of its public showing in the USA. Which tells the reader a lot about the sorry domestic distribution of culturally significant films. For, as I have shown, the film constituted an aesthetic revolution depicting a political milestone. For now the primary route would be the way to the White House for both parties. It was not until the film was exhibited in France that it garnered the recognition it deserved.
But a most important person in America did like it. That was President Kennedy. So much so that he agreed to do two more films with Drew. The first one was called Adventures on the New Frontier. Shot in the same cinema verité style, this is a fascinating combination of the Wisconsin primary footage, inauguration day footage, and concludes with a day in the life of President Kennedy. Because of a technical failure, we don’t actually see Kennedy’s inauguration. But we do see conversations about that famous speech between John K. Galbraith and Gov. Mennen Williams of Michigan. This is then followed by a conversation in a car between Galbraith and author John Steinbeck. The latter is fascinating, because these two experienced authors were very much impressed by the style and technique of the actual writing of the speech. And that is what they actually talk about in specifics.
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| During the filming of Adventures on the New Frontier |
Once in office for about six weeks, Kennedy let Drew and his associates film him doing his job in the Oval Office. We see him meeting with John McCloy who he has appointed to do preliminary talks with the Soviets on atomic weapons reduction. He then meets with Arthur Goldberg, his Secretary of Labor. Goldberg had been an attorney for the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and had been influential in the merger of the CIO with the American Federation of Labor. At this time, Kennedy and Goldberg discuss a solution to an airline strike of flight engineers, and also certain strategies to counter unemployment rates. They concentrate on unacceptably high unemployment in West Virginia. Kennedy wants to rush in government surplus food supplies for any family in dire straits. After this, Kennedy meets with his chief economic advisor Walter Heller. The president wants his forecast about the future trends on the unemployment horizon. Heller tells him that unless they take some kind of action, he does not see it improving on its own.
The most fascinating part of this film now follows. First, we see Kennedy working on the creation of the Peace Corps with Williams and Richard Goodwin. Which is logical, considering the fact that the former would helm his Africa policy, and the latter would be his special advisor on Latin America. Kennedy briefly talks about how America had ignored Africa, and in the midst of the decolonization process, he wants those new countries to maintain their independence.
We then watch Williams as he meets with some leaders in the senate, including Al Gore Sr. They advise him to proceed slowly. But Kennedy is worried that if they don’t engage quickly they will be too far behind the pace of change going on right then. (If the reader has acquainted himself with the reviewer’s two essays, “Hammarskjold and Kennedy vs. the Power Elite” and “Dodd and Dulles vs. Kennedy in Africa”, the evidence reveals that Kennedy was correct in his estimate.)
Drew then follows Williams to a meeting in Addis Ababa to meet with various African leaders, including Haile Selassie. While there, Williams made his famous quote. In response to what he saw his function there as, he replied, “What we want for the Africans is what they want for themselves.” This was slightly altered by the press to him saying, “Africa for the Africans.” Since there were still certain white supremacist nations in Africa, countries like England and the Union of South Africa took offense. When Kennedy was asked about this now controversial comment at a Washington press conference, he did not back away from it. He said, “I don’t know who else Africa should be for.”
This film is a good visual bookend to Helen Fuller’s volume, Year of Trial. That valuable work is unfortunately out of print today, although one can still buy it on Amazon and E bay. But Fuller’s work, like this one, was a snapshot of the New Frontier in its first year.
The other request that Drew made was for a film of Kennedy’s administration in a crisis situation. Kennedy liked the idea. He replied that such a film should have been made of Franklin Roosevelt the day after Pearl Harbor. At first, Drew asked to film the deliberations of the ExComm during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But press liaison Pierre Salinger told him that would not be possible due to national security reasons. So in 1963, Kennedy suggested that Drew film what he perceived to be an upcoming showdown with Governor George Wallace of Alabama. Wallace was resisting integrating the University of Alabama, located in Tuscaloosa. This was in spite of a court ruling, based on Brown vs. Board of Education, that had gone against him. Wallace had sworn to defy the court by standing in the “schoolhouse door” in order to block entry of the two students who had been accepted by the university: James Hood and Vivian Malone.
And that was a key point: the university had accepted the two well qualified African-American students. Wallace was literally trying to hold up the court ordered admittance on his own, essentially unilaterally. Learning from what had happened at the University of Mississippi the year before, Wallace understood the political value of making the federal government act against a state governor. He also knew that the media would be out in force for the event. Therefore, there would be millions of people watching it unfold on live television. In its political impact, the confrontation had the potential to catapult Wallace onto the national stage. Which it did.
The Kennedys also learned a lesson from their experience with Governor Ross Barnett at Ole Miss in 1962. They had made a mistake and trusted Barnett’s word about the campus being secure for the entry of James Meredith. Then, when the rioting began, it took too long to get federal troops onto the scene. Two people were killed, and dozens were injured. So this time, Attorney General Robert Kennedy had tried to talk to Wallace on his home turf at the state capital in Montgomery in April and May of 1963. According to the AG, the discussions did not get very far. RFK felt that Wallace was being deliberately obscure in order to hide what he was actually planning to do. (See Robert Kennedy in his own Words, p. 185, edited by Edward Guthman and Jeffrey Shulman)
What made the potential danger more ominous was that Wallace had wired the White House the first week of June. He said that in order to keep the peace, he was bringing along 500 state guardsmen with him on the 11th. That was the date the two students were going to register for the summer session. President Kennedy wired back thanking him for the notice, but he added the only threat of violence came from the governor’s defiance of the Alabama federal court ruling. (Andrew Cohen, Two Days in June, p. 74) By the time of the confrontation, Wallace would have 825 state troopers on campus.
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| RFK getting reports from Alabama |
Robert Drew’s film Crisis begins with a triangularly intercut sequence. We first view Wallace leaving the governor’s mansion in Montgomery by limousine for Tuscaloosa. This is followed by the two students being escorted onto the campus. We then watch Bobby Kennedy in his office getting phone reports as to what is happening in real time. As the scenes shift, the background music modulates from the southern standard “Dixie” to the national standard “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” A nice thematic touch, which accents the threat of military force.
For in light of what happened at Ole Miss, the White House had decided to mass 3,000 troops outside the campus in advance. They were under the command of General Creighton Abrams, who we see in the film on the phone with RFK, and discussing circumstances on the scene with Bobby Kennedy’s deputy Nicolas Katzenbach. For contrary to what some have written, the White House did not know what Wallace would do. And, in fact, during the film one can hear Bobby Kennedy telling his brother that they might have to just push the governor aside. And RFK had mulled over that contingency. All the way down to taking into consideration how many doors were at the entrance and breaking them down. In other words, while shoving Wallace aside, the students could enter the furthest door. But that might have provoked the spark that turned a physical altercation into a riot.
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| Katzenbach confronts Governor Wallace |
As the film shows, the ultimate strategy decided upon was the White House nationalizing the state national guard. But first, Katzenbach approached Wallace without Hood and Malone, who had gone up to their dorm rooms. Katzenbach then asked Wallace to stand aside so the students could register for their classes. Not only did Wallace refuse to do so, he even interrupted Katzenbach as he was speaking. Therefore, Kennedy nationalized the guard. Brigadier General Henry V. Graham, with a motorized detachment of 100 of his 17,000 men, then drove up to the entrance. Graham asked Wallace to stand aside upon the orders of President Kennedy. Realizing he was completely outmanned now, Wallace did so. The students were registered under the guidance of Bobby Kennedy’s lead civil rights lawyer John Doar. Graham and his detachment stayed on campus, in the student’s dorms, for several weeks. On national television that evening, President Kennedy made his epochal speech on the issue of civil rights. The most important and compelling speech on the subject by an American president since Lincoln. Drew intercuts that speech with shots of Wallace, the students, and Bobby Kennedy watching it.
The film ends with an appropriate coda. Katzenbach calls Bobby Kennedy three days later and tells him that another black student had entered the University of Alabama at Huntsville. It happened without any repercussions. Bobby Kennedy then calls JFK and tells him about it. We watch as the Attorney General now leaves his office for the day. The battle over integrated colleges and universities had been won.
But the film depicts an interesting quote by Wallace toward the end, which informs us of the price that had been paid. Due to this piece of televised resistance, Wallace states that the south will decide the next president. This was not technically true in 1964. But Wallace’s prediction did come true in 1968—and beyond. Kennedy’s struggle for civil rights turned the south from a reliable Democratic base for presidential elections to the bastion of future Republican political power. In that way, Crisis is an historically important film.
The fourth film on the DVD set is Faces of November. This is a brief visual reverie depicting the grief which overtook Washington after Kennedy’s assassination. Drew includes here photos of Kennedy’s tomb being visited by the public in the Capitol rotunda, shots of the funeral procession, and Kennedy’s military salute at Arlington.
Criterion made its reputation by the addition of interesting and educational supplements to their DVD packages. They added four of them for this collection. Far and away the most valuable one is a joint interview with former Attorney General Eric Holder and his wife Sharon Malone. Sharon is the sister of the late Vivian Malone who has since passed away. This interview gives us some personal insight into why Vivian did what she did and what gave her the courage to persevere through it. There is also a panel presentation on Primary done in 1998 at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. This includes Leacock, Maysles, Pennebaker and Drew. Something like this will never happen again, since all but Pennebaker have passed away. Finally, there are interviews with authors Andrew Cohen and Richard Reeves. The former offers some insights into the film Crisis, since he used outtakes from the film for his book Two Days in June. Although Reeves is not as offensive as he usually is, still Criterion could have chosen someone else, like say Harris Wofford. Wofford worked for Kennedy in his civil rights division and authored a good book about that struggle called Of Kennedys and Kings.
Overall, this two-disc set is much worth purchasing and watching. How many DVD sets chronicle three history-making events? One dealing with our political system, one dealing with the struggle for American civil rights, and one with a stylistic revolution in film technique. This one does, which makes it unique.
When Mark Lane’s autobiography was published in 2012, I was working on my rewrite of Destiny Betrayed. Right after that, I started in on Reclaiming Parkland. I tried to get someone else to review Citizen Lane, but there were no takers. In retrospect, I am sorry that I could not get anyone interested. And I also understand why no one in the MSM reviewed the book. It is, in quite simple terms, both a marvelous read and an inspiring story.
Too often in the JFK field, we focus solely on the work of the author or essayist on the assassination itself. In my view, this is mistaken. It’s important to me to know who an author is outside of the field. To give one example, Robert Tanenbaum—who wrote the thinly disguised roman a clef about the HSCA, Corruption of Blood—was a graduate of Boalt Hall School of Law. He then became a prosecutor under the legendary New York DA Frank Hogan. He rose to become head of the homicide division. Tanenbaum never lost a felony case in his nearly decade long career in that office. Therefore, he cannot be dismissed as a tin foil capped conspiracy theorist. The late Philip Melanson rose to become the head of the political science department at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. He then built an RFK archives at his university, the best such repository on the east coast. He wrote 12 non-fiction books, including an excellent one on the Secret Service.
In my elegy for the recently deceased Mark Lane, I alluded to some of the things he had accomplished outside the Kennedy assassination field: his work for the alleged killer of Martin Luther King, James Earl Ray; his book on the fey, chaotic Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968; and his prime role in freeing an innocent man from death row, James Richardson. Little did I know how much I was still leaving out. I, and many others, clearly shortchanged the career of a truly remarkable attorney.
I have belatedly read Lane’s autobiography, Citizen Lane. Let me say two things at the outset. Everyone should read this book. It is the testament of a man who dedicated his legal career to a lifelong crusade for the causes he believed in. And, as we will see, Lane did this almost right at the beginning of his career. It is clear that no obituary of Lane came close to doing him justice, because there seemed to be a unified MSM boycott about this book. Without reading it, no one can come close to fairly summarizing his career.
Lane was born in New York in 1927, two years before the stock market crash. His father was a CPA, and his mother was a secretary to a theatrical producer. All three of their children went to college and graduated, which is quite an achievement for that time period. Lane’s older brother became a high school mathematics teacher and a leader of the teachers union in New York. His younger sister became a history professor who eventually took over the Women’s Studies Department at the University of Virginia. She built it from virtually nothing to the point where it had fifty majors, and the areas of concentration were expanded. (See here https://news.virginia.edu/content/ann-j-lane-first-director-women-s-studies-uva-has-died)
After serving in the army in Europe during World War II, Mark Lane returned home and decided to become an attorney. He attended Brooklyn School of Law. It was founded in 1901, and is highly rated today by the National Law Journal. That particular publication rates law schools by return on investment. That is: how many of the graduates sign on with the top law firms in the United States. According to that rubric, Lane’s alma mater is in the top 15% of law academies. But Lane did not intend on cashing in on his law degree.
Lane decided that what he wanted to do was to offer legal services to those who did not have access to them but, in fact, really needed them. So he began as a member of the leftist National Lawyers Guild, and working in an office with the later congressional representative Bella Abzug. Lane started out as little more than a researcher and court stand-in for his boss when he was behind schedule. But one day he happened to walk by a court in session while the great Carol Weiss King, founder of the National Lawyers Guild, was defending a client. Lane heard her say, “Just who does this government think it is that it can violate the law with impunity, that it can traduce the rights of ordinary people, that it can tell us that the law doesn’t count because these are extraordinary times? ” (p. 27)
From that propitious moment on Lane decided he was not going to be a gopher for anyone anymore.
He now set up an office on the second level of an apartment building in Spanish Harlem. Because few other attorneys were there, people began to come to him with their most dire needs. Prior to Lane’s arrival, when there was a gang shooting, the young Latin accused of the crime almost automatically was executed or got life imprisonment. With Lane there this all changed, even in instances when the victim was white and the assailant was Puerto Rican. Lane was one of the first to assail what was called the Special Jury System. (pgs. 43-44) In New York, under these circumstances, the jury master could choose a jury, instead of having one picked at random. Therefore, the accused was not judged by a jury of his peers. Later, Lane was instrumental in getting this system abolished.
Once he developed a higher profile, Lane would set up legal clinics for the public in high school auditoriums. One of his specialties was advising local renters on how to set up tenant councils and, if necessary, conduct rent strikes. (p. 48) He even arranged to have a legal clinic at the offices of the local Hispanic newspaper. With their help, Lane helped save the concept of rent control in New York City. (p. 49)
Lane was also an active member of the National Lawyers Guild. Like many young lawyers in the late forties and fifties, Lane thought the ABA did not take a strong enough stand against Richard Nixon and the House Un-American Activities Committee or the demagogue Joe McCarthy. He volunteered to organize a benefit show for the Guild. When the main targeted performer refused to sign on, Lane went to the blacklisted folk singer Pete Seeger. Seeger invited the jazz artist Sonny Terry. Lane also invited female folk singer Martha Schlamme. Every ticket was sold, with scores of people paying for standing room only. Lane went on to do two more of these shows for Seeger. They went over so well that the young attorney briefly thought of becoming a musical impresario. (p. 36) But, lucky for us, he did not. Lane married the talented and attractive Schlamme, who unfortunately, died of a stroke in 1985.
By this time, the mid fifties, Lane had been in practice for just six years. But yet, his reputation as a champion of lost causes was so prevalent that a young man named Graciliano Acevedo walked into his office one day. He was an escapee from a young adult prison. Except it was not called a prison. It was called Wassaic State School for Mental Defectives. Acevedo began to recite a virtual horror story to the young lawyer. He told him that Wassaic was not really a school. It was a prison camouflaged as a school. Acevedo had been committed there without access to an attorney and not given a hearing or a trial. He did not want to return. He said there was no real schooling going on there, and that the guards were incompetent and sadistic and would beat up some of the prisoners. In fact, one guard actually killed an 18-year-old prisoner. (p. 58)
Lane took Acevedo to a psychiatrist. When his IQ was tested it turned out to be 115. So much for him being a mental defective. Lane decided he was not going to turn him over. He now enlisted two local reporters to his side: Fern Marja and Peter Khiss. Marja ran a three-day series on the abuses of this “school,” which culminated with an editorial plea for it to be cleaned up. Which it was. There was no more solitary confinement, books were now made available, academic tests were now given in Spanish, guards were fired (some were prosecuted), and hundreds of the inmates were released.
It is hard to believe, but at this time, Lane was just 28 years old.
Lane was interested in improving the community he worked in, as were some other talented people. So, through his defense of a parishioner, he met with the famous reverend, Eugene St. Clair Callender. After getting the young man off, he and Callender decided to work on creating a drug treatment center at the Mid-Harlem Community Parish. (p. 79) Once the two men got the center up and running, they passed its management on to one of the former patients. That center ended up treating 25,000 patients. After a meeting with baseball star Jackie Robinson, a company he was affiliated with agreed to hire some of the rehabilitated drug addicts. To culminate their success story, Lane and Callender invited a young rising star of the civil rights movement to come north and speak in Harlem. Martin Luther King spoke in front of the Hotel Theresa in 1957. Lane supplied the power for the sound system through a nearby nightclub run by boxing great Sugar Ray Robinson. (pgs. 86-87)
From social problems, Lane now turned toward the political field. The young attorney did not think the Democratic Party of New York was representing Spanish Harlem anywhere near as well as it should. So Lane decided to organize his own version of the party. He got the backing of Eleanor Roosevelt in this effort. At the beginning, he said that if he won his race for the state legislature, he would only serve one term. He then wanted to pass the seat on to a local Hispanic. With the help of his sister, brother and Eleanor Roosevelt, the Lane campaign registered over four thousand new voters. At the same time he was running for office, he was managing the local campaign of Senator John Kennedy for president.
On Election Day, his backers patrolled the ballot boxes to make sure no one from outside the district tried to vote. Lane won and celebrations broke out. As promised, after he served one term, he passed the seat on to a local Latino community organizer he knew.
At around this time, the early sixties, the struggle for civil rights was heating up to a fever pitch. The election of John Kennedy and the appointment of his brother Robert F. Kennedy as Attorney General, inspired long delayed public demonstrations to attain equality for black Americans. Callender decided to join in one of these actions, the Freedom Riders movement, by sending Lane and local black activist/lawyer Percy Sutton south to join in them. (p. 138)
In Jackson, Mississippi, before they could even participate in the protest, both men were arrested for sitting next to each other at an airport terminal. The charge was disorderly conduct. They were convicted without trial and sentenced to four months in prison. They were released on bail and promptly interviewed by the New York Times and New York Post. (p. 144) After the bad publicity, the two men returned south to stand trial. Wisely, the prosecutor moved for a directed verdict of not guilty.
We now come to a part of Citizen Lane that most of our readership will be partly familiar with. That is, Lane’s writing of his famous National Guardian essay proclaiming doubt about the guilt of Lee Harvey Oswald for the murder of President Kennedy. What inspired Lane to write his essay were the pronouncements of Dallas DA Henry Wade after Oswald had been killed. This was suspicious in itself, since Jack Ruby killed Oswald live on national TV in the basement of City Hall. In spite of that, perhaps because of it, Wade held a press conference and stated that, even though he was dead, and would not have an attorney, or a trial, Oswald was still guilty. (p. 150) Lane studied the charges levied by Wade. He now decided to respond to the DA’s bill of indictment. Although he offered his work to several outlets e.g. The Nation, Look, Life, the Saturday Evening Post, none of them would publish it. Finally, James Aronson of the left leaning National Guardian called. He had heard of the essay through the publishing grapevine. Lane told him he could have it for now, but not to publish it yet. In the meantime, he went to Jimmy Weschler of the New York Post. The Post had helped him with the Wassaic scandal, and covered his political campaign fairly. Weschler turned it down. After final approval for Aronson, it became a mini-sensation. Aronson had to publish several reprints. Weschler never spoke to Lane again. (p. 152)
This essay was not just hugely popular in America, it also began to circulate through Europe and even Japan. Therefore, with the money Aronson made through the $100 dollar sale of the rights from Lane, he arranged a speaking tour abroad for the author. With Lane’s dissident profile rising, the head of the ABA and future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wanted him disciplined because of his defense of Oswald. (p. 155) But Marguerite Oswald had read Lane’s work and wanted him to defend her deceased son, which Lane agreed to do. But the Warren Commission would not tolerate anything like that, by Lane or anyone else. In fact, following through on Powell’s suggestion, Commission Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin filed a complaint with the New York City bar. Lane had to get an attorney to represent him and the complaint was dismissed. (p. 157)
Even though Rankin would not tolerate a formal defense of Oswald before the Warren Commission, Lane now established his Citizens Commission of Inquiry (CCI) to informally investigate the Kennedy case through a wide network of volunteers. Through his lecture tours he raised enough money to fly to Dallas and talk to witnesses. He also rented a theater in New York and began to appear on college campuses. When he was invited to travel to Europe, the American embassies abroad tracked his appearances and tried to talk his backers out of their sponsorships. At one appearance in Vienna, they planted a translator who deliberately misspoke what he was saying. When the crowd started objecting, an American living there took over the duties. (p. 159)
When Lane returned to the States, he tried to get a book published based upon the Warren Report and the accompanying 26 volumes of evidence. But the FBI visited some of the prospective publishers and talked them out of working with Lane. They also visited local talk radio hosts and tried to discourage them from having him on the air. The Bureau then tapped the phones of the CCI so they would know when and where Lane would be traveling in order to investigate the case. He was also placed on the “lookout list” so that when he arrived back from a foreign speaking tour, the FBI would know he had returned.
Because he was working for nothing but expenses, and he had neglected his private law practice for the Kennedy case, Lane was extremely low on funds at this time. Finally, a British publishing house, the Bodley Head, decided to publish his manuscript called Rush to Judgment. A man named Ben Sonnenberg went to the company and volunteered his services to edit the book. When Lane saw his suggestions, he thought they were weird. It later turned out that Sonnenberg was a CIA agent who was relaying information to the Agency about what was in the book. (p. 165)
The book did well in England and the Bodley Head began to look for an American publisher. They contacted Arthur Cohen of Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Cohen was very interested but, probably through Sonnenberg, the CIA found out how explosive the book was. Although it did not implicate them, they tried to talk Cohen out of publishing the book anyway. Cohen told them if they did not leave him alone, he would double the advertising budget. (p. 165) Norman Mailer did a good review of the book in the New York Herald Tribune and the volume became a smashing best seller in America.
Lane began to tour the country from coast to coast as the book caught on like wildfire. In St. Louis, he got a phone caller on a talk show who said he wanted to talk to him offline. He then told him that he needed to talk to him out of the studio. So he directed him to a phone booth nearby. When Lane got there, he now instructed him to go to another phone booth a few miles away. Lane, who had received numerous death threats before was now getting worried. But it turned out that the caller was alerting him to an assassination attempt on his life. He told Lane that this would take place in Chicago, outside of a hotel room he would be staying in and he actually gave him the room number he would be at. He then added that there would be a studio across the street. Lane would cross the street to get there at a precise time, and then there would be an attempt to run him over with a truck. (p. 169) Lane asked him how he knew all of these details. The man said that he had been hired to drive the truck, but he refused to kill an American on American soil. He then added that he would now send a taxi to pick Lane up and return him to his hotel, which he knew the name of. When Lane got to Chicago, all the details the assassin told him were accurate. So he changed his room number, and then arrived at the interview via a circuitous route.
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| Mark Lane appears on Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. Although many people had been skeptical of the Warren Report’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of President Kennedy, Lane’s book Rush to Judgment was the first to lay out the argument seriously. He defends himself ably in this spirited exchange. |
After Rush to Judgment became a national bestseller, documentary film director Emile De Antonio got in contact with him to a do a film based upon the book. So the two traveled to Dallas to interview some witnesses. One of them, Sam Holland, told them that he had been alerted in advance about them coming. And he had also been told by the police not to talk to them. Further, he had been threatened with the loss of his job if he did so. When Lane asked him if those were the circumstances, then why he was talking to him, Holland replied with words that have become hallowed in the annals of JFK assassination literature: “When the time comes that an American sees his president being killed and he can’t tell the truth about it, that’s the time to give the country back to the Indians—if they’ll take it.” As Lane reports, Holland had tears in his eyes as he said this.
I should add one more detail about their work on this film, one that does not come from this book, but from Lane’s 1968 volume A Citizen’s Dissent. While at work on the film, the two struck a deal with CBS to look at their outtakes from their 1964 two-hour special on the Warren Report. The first night they watched five hours of film. They understood it would eventually run to 70 hours—for a two-hour documentary? Lane and De Antonio found something shocking that first night. CBS was, as Lane put it, filming from a script. If any witness diverted from that scenario, the interviewer yelled cut. The witness was then instructed with new information so as to alter their answer for the camera. The witness then gave the revised answer. Only the rehearsed parts were shown to the public. Needless to say, after their first night, CBS called the librarian and said the agreement they had was null and void. (Mark Lane, A Citizen’s Dissent, pgs. 75-79)
While on a speaking tour in northern California in 1968, Lane picked up a magazine and read the story of James Joseph Richardson. Richardson was a resident of Arcadia, Florida, who was charged with killing his seven children with poison. (Citizen Lane, p. 187) Lane happened to have another speaking engagement upcoming in Florida. While there, he found that Richardson had been convicted. Lane got in contact with Richardson’s attorney and then with Richardson. After this he and three of his friends and working associates—Carolyn Mugar, Steve Jaffe and Dick Gregory—conducted an eight-month investigation, after which he published a book about the case called, appropriately, Arcadia. This managed to attract some attention to the case and place some pressure on local officials.
The book strongly suggested that Richardson had been framed and that the local police chief and the DA had cooperated in manufacturing evidence. This turned out to be the case. Lane got TV host David Frost interested in the case and he did a jailhouse interview with Richardson. Dick Gregory got a story in Newsweek. Lane called a press conference on the steps of the state capital after he had acquired a copy of the master case file. These documents proved the accusations he had made in his book. The governor now ordered a special hearing into the case and the new facts were now entered into the record. Janet Reno had been assigned the case as a special prosecutor. Lane was allowed to make his case to vacate the previous judgment. Reno made a short presentation which, in essence, agreed with all the facts Lane had presented. She also agreed the verdict should be vacated. The judge agreed also and Richardson was set free. (pgs. 206-07) Lane later called the day Richardson was freed after 21 years of incarceration the greatest day of his professional life.
Mark Lane (left) with Jane Fonda |
It would seem almost destined that an attorney like Lane would get involved with the long and arduous attempt to end the Vietnam War. Lane did. With actress Jane Fonda and actor Donald Sutherland, he helped arrange the famous Winter Soldier Investigation. This was a three-day conference in Detroit in 1971. It was designed to publicize the atrocities and crimes that the Pentagon had committed in its futile attempt to defeat the Viet Cong and the regular army of North Vietnam. A documentary film was made of the event and the transcript was entered into the Congressional Record by Sen. Mark Hatfield.
Both President Richard Nixon and his assistant Charles Colson despised the conference, as did the Pentagon and the FBI. They therefore began counter measures to neutralize its impact. Lane wrote a book about the subject called Conversations with Americans. Consulting with the Pentagon, New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan wrote an article saying that since some of Lane’s interviewees were not listed in Pentagon records, then the persons must be ersatz. When Lane tried to call Sheehan and enlighten him on this issue, Sheehan never returned his calls. Lane understood that some of the soldiers would not want their actual names entered into the book for fear of retaliation. Therefore, he had entered the real information about the subjects on a chart and given this information to a former lawyer for the Justice Department. (See pages 219-221) Sheehan apparently never wanted this information. And neither does former professor John McAdams because he still runs a link to Sheehan’s false article to discredit Lane.
Neil Sheehan was a former acolyte of Col. John Paul Vann. Vann had been part of the American advisory group that President Kennedy had sent to Vietnam to assist the ARVN. Vann became convinced the war could not be won unless direct American intervention was applied. In this, he was in agreement with New York Times reporter in Vietnam, David Halberstam. Kennedy disliked them both since he had no intention of inserting American combat troops in Indochina. Somehow, 42 years after the fall of Saigon, McAdams still does not understand what made it such a disaster. It was partly because of writers like Sheehan and military men like Vann.
But that is not all Lane did to try and stop the war. He also read up on the laws concerning conscientious objectors and provided counseling to scores of young men who wanted to use that aspect of the law to either avoid service or leave the service. (p. 236) In addition to that, because Lane had achieved a high profile on the war, one day a Vietnamese pilot training in Texas got in contact with him. He said he did not want to be part of these Vietnamese Air Force missions, since most of them targeted civilians. So he asked Lane if he could be granted political asylum in America so as not to go back and do bombing runs. Lane did some work on the issue. He told him that he did not think he would be successful petitioning for asylum in America, but he thought he could do so in Canada. Therefore, along with his lifelong friend Carolyn Mugar, the two set up a kind of underground railroad into Canada. Carolyn would stop her station wagon before the border checkpoint. Lane and the man he calls Tran (along with two other trainees) jumped out of the car and circled around into a snowy, thin forest. After Carolyn passed the border, she then drove along a narrow road to pick up the pair on the Canadian side. Because of its success, Lane duplicated this along with Mugar several times. He later talked to a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman who said that they were on to what he was doing. but they actually were in agreement with him. (p. 283)
One of the most gripping chapters in the book is Lane’s description of his participation in the defense of Russell Means and Dennis Banks of the American Indian Movement (AIM) during the siege at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973. AIM had organized an effort to impeach tribal president Richard Wilson who they felt was a totally corrupt pawn who was actually abusing the tribe. The area was cordoned off with FBI agents and US Marshals. During the siege, several people were shot and at least one disappeared. After the siege was lifted, Banks and Means went on trial for conspiracy and assault. They were defended respectively by Lane and William Kunstler.
The trial began in January of 1974. Lane motioned for a change of venue to St. Paul, Minnesota, which the court granted. It became very obvious early on that the FBI had illegally wiretapped the phone at the reservation and that they had suborned perjury from their star witness. (p. 267) Although one of the jurors became ill before a final verdict was voted on, the judge accepted an acquittal to one charge and threw out the other because of prosecutorial misconduct. That ruling was accepted on appeal.
Most of us know about Lane’s participation in the Martin Luther King case. He and Dick Gregory wrote a good book about the murder of King. It was originally titled Code Name Zorro and then reissued as Murder In Memphis. In this volume, Lane only discusses his work with Grace Stephens. Stephens was at Bessie’s Boarding House with her common law husband, Charlie Stephens, when King was shot. She saw a man run out of the communal bathroom. Yet, she would not say it was James Earl Ray, the accused assassin, even though she was sober and got a good look at him. Charlie was stone drunk at the time and was not a witness to the man running out. He did not even have his glasses on. (p. 290) But since he would say it was Ray, he was used as a witness to extradite the alleged assassin from England.
When Lane started investigating the case, he asked around for Grace. No one knew where she was or why she was never called as a witness. Finally, Lane got some information that she was squirreled away in a sanitarium. He went there and looked for her. When he found her, he sat down next to her, took out a tape recorder, and asked her about the man she saw. She said she did get a good look at him. And when she was shown pictures of Ray, it was not him. Lane left the place and then played the tape on local Memphis radio. He then got a hearing called in order to free Grace Stephens. (p. 294)
In the fall of 1978, Lane was asked by his friend Donald Freed to go to Jonestown in Guyana. James Jones wanted Freed to lecture there on the King case. Freed figured that since Lane knew much more about it than he did, he would let him do the talking. Lane was well received and he was invited back in November. Before he left, he got a call from a congressional lawyer in Washington. He inquired about how many news media would be there, and if the congressional delegations of Leo Ryan and Ed Derwinski would be small. He was assured that there would be no media and that just one assistant would accompany both congressmen. (p. 305) He had inquired about this because he felt that if everything was kept small scale, he could serve as a mediator if Jones got too paranoid about being investigated. Lane was either misinformed or he was lied to on both points.
Jones did feel threatened by the rather large delegation and Lane could not control things. After watching and intervening in a murder attempt on congressman Ryan, Lane advised the representative from northern California to leave the scene. Jones had seen Ryan bloodied and the newsmen were trying to take photos. (p. 310) Lane convinced Ryan to go. He told him he would interview the people his constituents were inquiring about.
After Ryan left for the airport—where he and others would be killed on the tarmac—Lane and the People’s Temple lawyer Charles Garry were placed in a cell. Lane talked to one of his guards and convinced him that he would be the perfect author to tell the truth about the colony. Miraculously, the two lawyers made it through the jungle to Port Kaituma where they were rescued by the military. They then sought refuge in the American Embassy. Lane concludes this chapter by agreeing with most authors: Jonestown was not a mass suicide. It was at least partly a mass murder. (Please read Jim Hougan’s three-part series on Jones to gain some understanding of what really happened at Jonestown http://jimhougan.com/JimJones.html)
As shown in the video clip above, many people know that Mark Lane opposed William F. Buckley on his show Firing Line about the JFK case. What very few people knew, including me, was that Lane also opposed him in court on four counts of defamation. Buckley had sued Willis Carto for libel because he had called him a neo-fascist and a racist. Carto’s first lawyer took a powder on him and so he turned to Lane in desperation: Buckley was requesting $16 million dollars in damages. Even though the judge was clearly biased towards Buckley, Lane did very well. He simply used words that Buckley had written in his own magazine, National Review to show that Buckley had clearly sided with the forces of segregation in the south way past the time when King and Rosa Parks began their campaign to integrate the area. He also showed that Buckley encouraged the prosecution of African American congressman Adam Clayton Powell, and that he was also in favor of the poll tax. The $16 million was reduced to $1,001.00. (pgs. 321-28)
It is also instructive to compare the work Lane did in life with what the counsels of the Warren commission did. Did David Belin ever take on a case of abusive landlords? Did Wesley Liebeler ever hold free legal clinics on how to organize rent strikes? Not to my knowledge.
Two other things I did not know about Lane that are in this book. He successfully argued a case before the Supreme Court against Jack Anderson. This again involved a libel case in which Anderson had libeled Carto. The district judge had thrown the case out. Lane argued it should be reinstated. He won the case and Carto settled for a withdrawal of the charges and a token payment to a charitable cause. (p. 336)
Second, Lane had a radio show. He made an appearance on a radio program in New Jersey in 2004 to talk about the JFK case. He did so well that he was invited back. He was then offered a job five days a week, which he declined. But he agreed to do the show once a week with a co–host. The show was called Lane’s Law and I really wish I had known about it since it sounds very funny. Lane had a great time making fun of pompous fools like Sen. Bill Frist. (p. 346)
When Lane’s sister Anne became ill and had to resign her Department Chair at Virginia, Lane moved to Charlottesville to be close to her. She later recovered and moved to New York to attend her children and grandchildren. Mark decided to stay in Virginia. Coincidentally, all three siblings passed away in a period of four years, from 2012-16.
Unlike what Bob Katz once wrote about him, Mark Lane was not an ambulance chaser. In each high profile case he entered, he was requested to do so: from the JFK case to the Buckley case, and all of them in between, including Wounded Knee and the King case. It is also instructive to compare the work Lane did in life with what the counsels of the Warren commission did. Did David Belin ever take on a case of abusive landlords? Did Wesley Liebeler ever hold free legal clinics on how to organize rent strikes? Not to my knowledge.
Mark Lane was such an effective defense lawyer he could have made millions a la Dick DeGuerin defending the likes of Robert Durst. Instead, he decided to be an attorney for the wretched and the damned. A counsel for the downtrodden and the lost. But they happened to be, like Wounded Knee and the JFK case, just causes. And Lane acquitted himself well, considering the forces arrayed against him. I know of very few lawyers who could have written a book like this one. Lane’s life stands out as a man who did what he could to correct the evil and injustice in the world around him, with no target being too small or too large in that regard. This book stands out like a beacon in the night. It shows both what a citizen should be, and what an attorney can be. Buy it today.
I finally understood the influence and reputation that the late Mark Lane had in America when I arrived in Pittsburgh for the Cyril Wecht Symposium at Duquesne in the fall of 2013. At the airport, I was picked up in a private car and driven to my hotel. The driver asked me what I was in town for. I replied a JFK conference on the 50th Anniversary at Duquesne. He asked me if Mark Lane was going to be there. I said yes he was. He replied that he wrote his first research paper back in college many years ago on the JFK case, and he used a lot of the work of Lane in doing it. He asked me to thank Lane for that inspiration. When I arrived at the hotel, I did see Mark and I conveyed the debt of gratitude from my driver.
After I did so I went up to my room and thought: Geez, there must be literally tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people across America who feel that way about Lane. For the simple reason that Lane was literally the prime mover in the dissent movement against the official version of the Kennedy assassination. Within just three weeks of Kennedy’s death, Lane had issued the first legal arguments against the public stampede to condemn the memory of the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, who had been shot and killed by Jack Ruby while in the custody of the Dallas police. Lane wanted to publish his defendant’s brief in The Nation. But that liberal journal—and several other periodicals– would not accept it. So he went to the even more leftist journal The National Guardian.
At that conference in Pittsburgh, there were a few copies of that original essay on a coffee table. Lane picked one up and said to me, “They had to print several reprints of this issue. They eventually sold a hundred thousand of them.” This was in mid-December of 1963, two weeks after the first meeting of the Warren Commission, when every major media outlet in America was accommodating leaks from people like Jerry Ford, J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles about how compelling the case against Oswald was. But there was Mark Lane, the one attorney standing up for a dead man who was being walked over by every public and private institution in America.
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Marguerite Oswald, mother of the murdered suspect, heard about Lane’s polemic. She wanted him to act as her murdered son’s defense advocate. But the Warren Commission would not allow it. When Lane forwarded his request to the Commission, Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin wired back to him the following message: “The Commission does not believe that it would be useful or desirable to permit an attorney representing Lee Harvey Oswald to have access to the investigative materials within the possession of the Commission or to participate in any hearings to be conducted by the Commission.” (See Lane’s A Citizen’s Dissent, e-book version, Part 2, “The Great Silence.”)
In fact, one of the many travesties of the Commission was that Oswald was not granted counsel throughout the ten-month legal procedure. In that respect, the proceeding was a runaway prosecution. Lane was allowed to appear before the Commission twice, once in March and once in July. These were clearly token, adversarial appearances. In fact, it is hard to find another witness who the Commission treated with such hostility. (Walt Brown, The Warren Omission, pgs. 243-45)
At around this time in 1964, Lane began to be surveilled by the FBI. Because he was doing JFK lectures abroad, he was also placed on the federal government’s “lookout list” for international air travel. Whenever Lane returned from abroad, the FBI was alerted he was back. (See Lane, op. cit) But beyond that, the FBI now began to interview certain radio hosts who had chosen to place Lane on the air. These Bureau visits resulted in Lane being banned from certain media outlets. And the buzz about those visits discouraged other outlets from having him on.
In spite of his other considerable achievements, Mark Lane will be forever linked to the JFK assassination. He was, quite literally, a pioneer, a trailblazer in the wilderness.
But Lane would not let up in his defense of Oswald. He then rented a theater in New York City and began to lecture there regularly, taking apart the evidence presented by the developing official story. With the funds attained by these talks, and his various lectures at home and abroad, Lane set up a Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry to collect evidence ignored by the FBI and the Warren Commission. Lane actually managed to appear on some rather widely distributed talk programs, like the one hosted by Merv Griffin.
He then began writing a book based upon the Warren Report and its accompanying 26 volumes of evidence. He could not find a publisher for his book in America. Therefore, Rush to Judgment was first published in England in 1966. It became so successful that it was later published in the U.S. and became a smashing bestseller. At a lecture at the 40th anniversary of Kennedy’s death, Lane said he later found out that the reason he could not find a domestic publisher was that the FBI was visiting publishing houses and discouraging them from publishing his work.
In 1967, Lane followed Rush to Judgment with a documentary film of the same title. This production was shot by famous film-maker Emile de Antonio. De Antonio made films on several controversial subjects like the demagogue Joseph McCarthy and the Vietnam War. He later said that in his entire career, he never met as many witnesses who were literally afraid for their lives to go on camera. Lane literally had to plead with and cajole people to come out of their homes. A few years after this documentary film, Lane worked on the story for a fictional film about the JFK case called “Executive Action.” That film was released in 1973. It was directed by the veteran David Miller and featured some famous leading actors like Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, and Will Geer.
In 1967, Lane had worked for New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison during his two-year inquiry into the JFK case. Around 1975, after both the revelations of the Church Committee and the ABC showing of the Zapruder film had ignited outrage favoring a new investigation, Lane did two things to further that interest. First, he released a new documentary on the JFK case called “Two Men in Dallas,” featuring local sheriff’s officer Roger Craig. Second, he restarted his grass roots Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry. He used that committee to lobby Congress to pass a resolution to reopen the Kennedy murder case. To put it mildly, Lane did not get along very well with the final Chief Counsel to the House Select Committee on Assassinations Robert Blakey.
In the 1980’s, Lane decided to take on the appeal of a libel verdict against publisher Willis Carto, the Liberty Lobby and their controversial publication Spotlight. In 1981, Liberty Lobby had lost a $650,000 case judgment when Victor Marchetti had written in Spotlight that the CIA had to devise an alibi for their agent Howard Hunt being in Dallas on November 22, 1963. (Lane, Plausible Denial, pgs. 129-32) Through the help of his volunteer network and some fine sleuthing, Lane discovered that such a memo did exist. It had been prepared by CIA counter-intelligence chief James Angleton, and had been seen by journalist Joe Trento. And Trento had actually written about it. (ibid, pgs. 152-55) By his aggressive defense, Lane not only reversed the judgment, he actually convinced some of the jurors that the CIA was involved in the Kennedy assassination. (ibid, pgs. 320-323)
Lane wrote a book on the Howard Hunt case that was published in 1991. Called Plausible Denial, that book also became a best seller. It gave us harsh insights into CIA officers Hunt, Angleton, Richard Helms and David Phillips. Concerning the last, during a debate with Lane, Phillips actually said that when the entire record was declassified, there would be no evidence that Oswald was ever at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. (ibid, pgs. 75-87)
But that still wasn’t enough for Lane. In the new millennium, Lane published his final book on the JFK case called, eponymously, Last Word. In this book, Lane brought out another aspect of the case: the possible complicity of the Secret Service in the assassination. That book was promoted by various video trailers, during which Lane interviewed luminaries like former HSCA Deputy Counsel Robert Tanenbaum, film director Oliver Stone, and former Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden.
But the amazing thing about Lane is that there were still other aspects of his legal career, outside of the JFK case, that I have not even mentioned. For instance, for a time in the seventies, Lane served as attorney for the accused assassin of Martin Luther King, James Earl Ray. He also co-wrote a book on the King case with Dick Gregory called Code Name Zorro. Lane also took on the case of James Richardson. Richardson was a black man in the south who was indicted and convicted of killing his seven children. Through some extraordinary detective work—and with help from Gregory and Garrison assistant Steve Jaffe—Lane had Richardson freed after 21 years of unjust incarceration. He then wrote a book on that case called Arcadia. His book about the riotous—and ruinous—Chicago Democratic convention, called Chicago Eyewitness, makes for an interesting journal. Lane’s reports on this shocking event make it the ultimate crushing of youthful dissent in America and a turning point in history—which it was. In 2012 he summed up his tumultuous career with an autobiography called Citizen Lane. (Visit Lane’s website for information on how to get Lane’s books.)
In spite of his other considerable achievements, Mark Lane will be forever linked to the JFK assassination. He was, quite literally, a pioneer, a trailblazer in the wilderness. In that dark year of 1964 when the Warren Commission was trying to keep everything quiet, while men like FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover were leaking rigged and false evidence to the papers, there was Mark Lane, speaking from his podium each night, to anyone who would listen.. He did this not just because it was his vocation, but because he had personally met President Kennedy when he was running for office in New York. Therefore, he kept up that crusade for the truth about Kennedy’s murder at a very high cost to himself.
As he wrote in his 1968 book A Citizen’s Dissent, he lost his one corporate client over the JFK case. He was then vilified by his opponents who seemed to have easy access to the press, which Lane did not come close to having. Warren Commission junior counsel Wesley Liebeler was actually going to run against him for his state legislative seat. Through it all, through his over more than five decades of dissent against the folly of the Warren Commission, Mark Lane never lost his fighting spirit or his dedication to his cause. He liked to say that the folly of the Commission had led to a national tragedy. Which it did. For both him and all of us.
Lane died at age 89 at his home in Charlottesville, Virginia, May 10. 2016. We are all a bit poorer for his passing. It signifies a milestone. Taps at Reveille.
~ Jim DiEugenio
For more remembrances of Mark Lane from Cyril Wecht, Bob Tanenbaum, Don Freed, Steve Jaffe, David Lifton, Joan Mellen, Joe McBride and John Barbour, listen to the BlackOp Radio installment below:
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Andrew Cohen had a fine idea for a book. How many people realize that John Kennedy’s famous “peace speech” at American University—in which he tried to break the vise-like grip of the Cold War– was followed up the next evening by his nearly as famous address on race. In this one he made the first moral appeal to break the bonds of racism and segregation since Abraham Lincoln. I would be willing to wager that even most informed readers did not recall that the two milestone speeches were made in such close proximity to each other. In fact, this reviewer—who knows a thing or two about Kennedy’s presidency– did not realize the two speeches were delivered within 48 hours of each other. Yet they were.
The first one was delivered at around midday on June 10, 1963. (Click here http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfkamericanuniversityaddress.html) Kennedy’s equally epochal address, making segregation a moral issue, was delivered the following evening at 8 PM in the east. In other words, Kennedy became both the first president to publicly try and soften the grip of the Cold War by proposing rapprochement with the Soviet Union; the next day he was the first president in a century to publicly say America had a serious race problem, and that he was now sending legislation to congress to break the barriers of segregation everywhere. (Click here to read that speech http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfkcivilrights.htm)
But as Cohen points out, it was not just Kennedy’s courage and boldness in addressing these two highly charged issues that make their closeness to each other so remarkable. It is not even the fact that Ted Sorenson was the major wordsmith in crafting each address. What really makes them notable is the fact that they were not just examples of the president using the bully pulpit; they weren’t just speeches. In both cases, Kennedy acted upon the sentiments he was expressing. And he did so with alacrity. By the end of the year, Kennedy had signed onto the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, gotten the Russians to do the same, and shepherded the treaty through congress. By the time of his death, Kennedy had submitted his civil rights bill to the House of Representatives, gotten it through committee, and was arranging for a full vote there. After his assassination, the bill was passed. The first proved that arms control limitations could be negotiated and signed with the Russians. The second began to methodically and legally break the grip of the nearly hundred-year reign of Jim Crow in the south. To my knowledge, no president–before or since–had ever matched such a large domestic landmark with an equally monumental foreign policy landmark in anywhere near such a brief period.
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| Kennedy leaves Hawaii |
Cohen begins the book with a talk President Kennedy gave in Hawaii to a conference of mayors on Sunday, June 9th. It had been his first visit there as president. That little noticed speech was very much about the civil rights struggle. Governor John Burns had declared June 9th President’s Day in the islands. He had hoped Kennedy would make a “policy statement of major significance” during his brief visit there. (Cohen, p. 18) Kennedy did not disappoint the governor.
Kennedy had arrived in Hawaii on Saturday night. Ten thousand jubilant residents greeted him at the airport. On Sunday, he attended mass, and then laid a wreath at the Pearl Harbor memorial. On his way back, over a quarter of a million people stood on either side of his motorcade to cheer him on. Congressman Spark Matsunaga declared that never in the history of the islands “has there been such a reception for anyone, barring none.” (ibid) Not bad for what had been a last minute addition to a western tour culminating in Los Angeles. (ibid, p. 17)
That Sunday, at the Hawaiian Village Hotel, Kennedy addressed what he referred to as a growing national problem. He asked the audience, “The question is whether you and I will do nothing, thereby inviting pressure and increasing tension, and inviting possible violence; or whether you will anticipate these problems and move to fulfill the rights of your Negro citizens in a peaceful and constructive manner.” (ibid, p. 19)
He then moved on more dramatically, “It is clear to me that the time for token moves and talk is past…” He then said that the rights of black Americans are going to be won, “…and that it is our responsibility–yours and mine–to see that they are won in a peaceful and constructive way, and not won in the streets.” (ibid) He then called on the mayors in attendance to begin to form biracial local committees to eliminate all segregation laws, to promote equal opportunity in hiring practices, and to also create high school dropout prevention programs.
He ended his speech with what can only be called a peroration. He said, “Justice cannot wait for too many meetings. It cannot wait for the action of the Congress or the courts. We face a moment of moral and constitutional crisis, and men of generosity and vision must make themselves heard in every section of this country.” (ibid) He then concluded that all men “should be equal in their chance to develop their character, their motivation, and their ability. They should be given a fair chance to develop all the talents that they have, which is a basic assumption and presumption of this democracy of ours.” Cohen deserves credit for pointing out this obscure but powerful and important address. It serves as a neat prelude to his book.
From here, the author moves to the creation of the peace speech delivered the next day at American University. Cohen credits Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins with the originating impetus for Kennedy’s decision to make the speech. Like Jim Douglass, whose JFK and the Unspeakable he does not credit—a point we shall return to later—Cohen notes the role of Cousins in creating a non-official back channel between Kennedy and Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev. This began a month after the Missile Crisis when Cousins alerted the White House that he would be making a journey to the USSR and probably talking to high officials there, including Khrushchev. Kennedy assigned presidential assistant Ralph Dungan to the matter. (Cohen, p. 50) Before Cousins left for Russia in December, Dungan invited him to meet with the president.
Kennedy knew that Cousins had been a lifelong crusader for nuclear arms reduction. So he realized that, in the shadow of the Missile Crisis, the subject would come up when Cousins arrived in Moscow. Kennedy advised Cousins to tell the premier that, “…I don’t think there’s any man in American politics who’s more eager than I am to put Cold War animosities behind us and get down to the hard business of building friendly relations.” (ibid) When Khrushchev heard this from Cousins, he said that if such was the case, then the first thing they should do is to negotiate a treaty limiting nuclear weapons testing. They then should start work on limiting their proliferation.
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| Kennedy at American University |
When Cousins returned to Russia in April of 1963, he brought news that Kennedy would do all he could to get the treaty signed. The Russian premier was ready to sign on to a total test ban if it allowed a minimum amount of on site inspections. Kennedy favored that kind of ban also. But his problem was that he knew he could not get that through the senate, where you needed a two-thirds vote to ratify a treaty. The extremists in America wanted much more inspection. (ibid, p. 51) Therefore, the two men had to settle for a partial ban. This one banned testing in the atmosphere, outer space, and underwater, but still allowed for testing underground. Khrushchev was disappointed in the compromise. Kennedy understood the disappointment. He told Cousins, “He would like to prevent a nuclear war but is under severe pressure from his hard-line crowd, which interprets every move in that direction as appeasement. I’ve got similar problems.” Kennedy then continued in this vein by saying, the lack of progress “gives strength to the hard-line boys…with the result that the hard-liners in the Soviet Union and the United States feed on one another, each using the actions of the other to justify its own position.” (p. 52)
Cousins replied that it was not just the hard-liners in the USSR. The Chinese also felt that Khrushchev’s efforts at conciliation were unrealistic. And that once the negotiations broke down, they thought there would be a move towards closer friendship between China and the USSR. In fact, a delegation from Bejing was scheduled to visit Moscow in June. Kennedy understood this and was worried about it. He saw the test ban as a way to derail it. (ibid)
Cousins told the president that “what was needed was a breathtaking new approach toward the Russian people, calling for an end to the Cold War and a fresh start in American–Russian relationships.” This kind of approach would insinuate that “the old animosities could become the fuse of a holocaust.” Kennedy took all of this in, digested it and understood it. He told the editor to write him a memo on both their meetings and his visit with the Russian premier. Which Cousins did. (ibid, p. 53) Two weeks later, in early May, Ted Sorenson–Kennedy’s main speechwriter–called him to his office. Sorenson told him that Kennedy was going to use some of his arguments and he wanted some more notes. The Kennedy/Cousins connection was the beginning of the American University address.
Sorenson wrote a rough draft first. It was reviewed by National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, Bundy’s assistant Carl Kaysen, fellow speechwriter Arthur Schlesinger, and Adrian Fisher from the Arms Control and Disarmament agency. On June 6th, Sorenson took all the suggestions and turned out a second draft overnight. After another go-round with the same circle he refined it again. On June 7th, he gave that final draft to Kaysen for the necessary security clearances. Kennedy advised Kaysen on this process. When handed the speech, the Chair of the Joint Chiefs, Maxwell Taylor decided not to show it to the other service branch chiefs.
On the return plane ride back from Hawaii, Sorenson showed the speech to Kennedy. JFK suggested some changes but, overall, he liked it. Kennedy also showed the speech to Senator Mike Mansfield and Averill Harriman from the State Department, who he would later choose to negotiate the test ban treaty. (ibid, pgs. 26-27) It was ratified in the senate in late September of 1963 and took effect on October 10th.
After JFK arrived at the White House from Hawaii at a little after nine in the morning, Bobby Kennedy called his brother. He congratulated him on his speech in Hawaii. The Attorney General then asked him when he was speaking at American University. The president replied that it would be at 10:30 that morning. Bobby asked if he could come to the White House after that. He needed to talk to him about the crisis at the University of Alabama.
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| Meridith at Ole Miss |
This is another point that most of us have forgotten about. Sandwiched between these two epochal speeches, a gripping televised drama was playing itself out. The University of Alabama was the last major institution of higher learning in the south to remain segregated. At Ole Miss, the previous year, President Kennedy had to send in federal troops when Governor Ross Barnett had resisted admitting black student James Meredith. During that violent conflict, two people were killed, cars were burned, and federal marshals were pelted with rocks. Barnett resisted even though Meredith’s case had been ruled upon by both a federal appeals court and the U.S. Supreme Court. When he did so, the governor was then found in contempt of court. He was given five days to comply or he would be arrested and fined. The problem for Barnett was that he had proclaimed, “No school will be integrated in Mississippi while I am your governor.” Therefore, the Kennedys and the legal system had to go into high gear to gain entry for Meredith. And because Barnett wanted to satisfy the racist element of the electorate, he resisted until the end. Because of this, violence ensued. RFK later came to the conclusion that if Barnett could not stop Meredith from registering, his fallback plan was to make it appear that only the Kennedys sending in thousands of federal troops made him do so. And for Meredith’s protection, troops stayed on campus for eight months. In other words, as in the Civil War and Reconstruction, the North was occupying the South. Afterwards, Bobby Kennedy understood that this had been Barnett’s plan from the start. (Robert Kennedy in His Own Words, edited by Ed Guthman and Jeffrey Shulman, p. 160)
In Alabama, Governor George Wallace had taken a similar pledge. His was to stand in the schoolhouse door to stop the University of Alabama from being integrated. The last thing the Kennedys wanted was another Ole Miss conflagration. But as with Meredith, two young black students–Vivian Malone and James Hood–had been cleared by the courts to attend the publicly financed state university. In addition to his public pledge, Wallace had made a political calculation after he lost the 1958 race for governor to the rightwing, Klan backed John Patterson. Prior to that loss, Wallace had been–comparatively speaking–rather moderate on civil rights. As both a state representative and circuit judge, he had done things that would not pigeonhole him as a racist, like granting probation to black prisoners.
But after he lost to Patterson he reportedly told aide Seymore Trammell, “Seymore, you know why I lost …..? I was outniggered by John Patterson. And I’ll tell you here and now, I will never be outniggered again.” (Dan Carter, The Politics of Rage, p. 2; this incident is also depicted in John Frankenheimer’s award winning TV film, George Wallace.) In other words, like Barnett, Wallace was putting on what was partly a theatrical performance. He was playing to his constituency. And his constituency was the Democratic Party in Alabama, just as Barnett’s was the Democratic Party in Mississippi. In other words, the Kennedys were bucking up against what was supposed to be their own political colleagues. I wish Cohen had given us a bit of historical background on how this happened. He does not. (Which is a shortcoming of the overall book I will elaborate on later.)
In a nutshell, it was Lincoln, a Republican, who had declared the Emancipation Proclamation. He then passed the Thirteenth Amendment. And it was the Radical Republicans who had then passed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Further, Andrew Johnson, a southerner, had been nearly impeached and removed from office by the Radical Republicans when he resisted their program for military occupied Reconstruction.
Therefore, when the Klan began to organize around the remnants of the Confederacy and the southern army, their natural allies were the local and regional Democrats. To their everlasting shame, those Democrats made a decision based upon nothing but arithmetic–as if the Civil War and its hundreds of thousands of casualties had never happened. They casually and simply added up the number of white residents in the various states and compared them with the number of black residents. Since the former outnumbered the latter by a margin of at least two to one, it was easy to see where political success lay. Therefore, the local Democratic authorities united with the local racist groups and put together what historians today call the Mississippi Plan. In its most extreme form, on the eve of elections, white paramilitary groups would ride on horseback, processional style, through the center of towns and villages carrying torches, with weapons in their saddles. The message was clear: if the newly liberated black slaves tried to vote they would do so at their own risk. And the fact that these processions openly rode through towns certified that the local legal authorities would do nothing about enforcing federal laws, like the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
This was followed by the infamous Compromise of 1877. In that backroom deal, the presidential victory of Democrat Samuel Tilden was negated. Republican Rutherford B. Hayes became president. The Democrats again were practicing arithmetic. In this horse trade, the Republican Hayes and his predecessor President Grant now removed the last northern armies from the south. Reconstruction was now ended. When that occurred, the last Republican governments in the south collapsed. That geographic area now become a bastion of Democratic electoral strength in national elections. It came to be called the Solid South. With these two events, things like the Black Codes now morphed into Jim Crow. Jim Crow then became a systematic and methodical plan of complete segregation. No American president had seriously challenged this system before Kennedy. And since he had spoken out on the issue as a senator and a candidate, he had lost six states in the Solid South in the 1960 election—before he was even inaugurated. Most historians see this as the beginning of the great transformation of the south from a Democratic to a Republican stronghold.
What made it all the worse was that the presidents who should have done something about this appalling situation did little or nothing. That is, the so-called Progressive presidents (Taft, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson), and Democratic liberals like Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman. The last two understood something should be done. But they both made the practical decision that if they acted on the subject in any real or forceful way, the other parts of their political agenda would be torpedoed by the power of the so-called Dixiecrats in the House and especially in the Senate i.e. the southern Democrats who controlled the chairmanships of so many committees in congress. Therefore Roosevelt did as much as he could symbolically by appointing black Americans to his administration. Truman integrated the military services.
But what is the excuse for Dwight Eisenhower? The reason I express the question that way is because he had the sanction of the Supreme Court. In 1954, the Warren Court passed down the Brown vs. Board decision. This crucial case reversed the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson, that had sanctified local Jim Crow laws, and therefore separate facilities were now deemed equal before the law. The Supreme Court had ratified segregation. But the 1954 decision very clearly overturned that case and dictated that the system of segregation should be now taken apart with all due speed. But as many commentators have stated, the Eisenhower/Nixon regime proceeded with the speed of a turtle with arthritis. For instance, Eisenhower’s Justice Department never filed a civil rights case in Mississippi during his entire administration. In the six years after Brown vs. Board, Eisenhower filed a grand total of ten civil rights cases based up on either equal accommodations or voting discrimination. To say this was a snail’s pace is an insult to snails. As many commentators have pointed out, this hesitance was the beginning of Vice President Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy: the deliberate courting of the racist element in the south for political gain. In other words, the Republicans were–not very subtly–reversing the heritage of Lincoln. (The one exception in the six year span was the 1957 crisis at Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas.) Therefore, because of the political calculation of Eisenhower and Nixon, Kennedy had an even more uphill climb in front of him. He had to overcome the nearly one hundred year institutional basis of segregation, which had now become ingrained in southern culture in every way: socially, politically, and psychologically. But further, he had to find a way to get around the Dixiecrat control in congress e.g. Senator James Eastland of Mississippi.
I wish Cohen had detailed some of the above in his text. It would have placed the dramatic reversal President Kennedy was about to enact in a more accurate context.
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| Wallace in Tuscaloosa |
As authors Irving Bernstein, Harry Golden and Harris Wofford have noted, Kennedy understood that there were simply not enough votes in congress to get a civil rights bill enacted his first year. Therefore, in 1961, the White House did what Eisenhower and Nixon had not done. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy concentrated on school integration with the Brown vs. Board decision backing him. (Guthman and Shulman, pgs. 147-48) The Kennedys sent Justice Department officials like Ramsey Clark, Burke Marshall and John Siegenthaler to local districts where they thought black families would have difficulty registering their children in public K-12 schools. As Bernstein notes in Promises Kept, in 1961, Kennedy proceeded to do as much as possible through executive orders in order to build momentum, instead of sustaining a legislative defeat or filibuster. In 1962, the administration did send up a modest voting rights bill. As Bobby Kennedy later said, it went nowhere. It was filibustered and the White House did not have anywhere near the votes to get cloture. (Guthman and Shulman, p. 149) So the White House continued with administrative actions, like local lawsuits under Brown vs. Board and Title III of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, and equal employment through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. With the last, the Kennedys were determined to make sure that companies doing business with the government were active in hiring minority groups.
Then came the Birmingham spectacle, with Sheriff Bull Connor facing off against Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The sight of white firemen slamming black children against buildings with fire hoses, of German Shepherds leaping and biting innocent civilians, of police officers smashing demonstrators’ skulls with billy clubs, these nightly TV images created a sensation. As JFK told his brother and Dr. King, the bill he sent to congress should have been called Bull Connor’s Bill. (Guthman and Shulman p. 171) Washington watched and listened as people in the north were now repulsed by what a century of segregation had done to Americans in the south—even after the Civil War amendments had legally made former slaves equal to whites. Such was simply not the case; not even close. The actions of Ross Barnett in Oxford, and Bull Connor in Birmingham now formed the background for President Kennedy versus Governor Wallace in Tuscaloosa.
Cohen uses what is today a little known source for the backbone of his description of this conflict. The late Robert Drew was a committed documentary film director who was one of the first—along with Emile de Antonio—to make cinema verite films. That is, documentaries that did not use the device of breaking up the action of the story with a posed and well lighted sit down interview with a subject. Drew had previously made the film Primary in this way. That was about the Wisconsin Democratic primary election of 1960, which featured Kennedy against Senator Hubert Humphrey. (The only author in the JFK assassination field who has mentioned that film to any degree is Joseph McBride in his book Into the Nightmare.) Kennedy had seen the film and liked it. He asked Drew what he wanted to do next. Drew said he wanted to make a film about his administration during a particularly stressful period of time. (Cohen, p. 78) They eventually decided upon the racial crisis between Kennedy and Wallace over the integration of the University of Alabama. In addition to filming the Kennedy brothers and the two students, Governor Wallace agreed to allow cameras to follow him around also. The film, naturally entitled Crisis, aired on ABC in the fall of 1963. Its candor created quite a controversy. Two of the points the film makes are that 1.) It was Kennedy who was pushing for sending a civil rights bill to congress ASAP, and 2.) It was RFK who was pushing his brother to make a national speech in primetime before he did that. (Cohen, pgs. 82-83) Cohen not only saw the film, he saw hours of outtakes from it.
The confrontation at the schoolhouse door was weeks in the making. In April, Robert Kennedy had visited Wallace in Birmingham to try and ward off another violent, life threatening spectacle as with Barnett. As Bobby said later, that meeting was “unhelpful….We really didn’t get very far.” (Guthman and Shulman, p. 185) In May, another meeting took place between the AG and Wallace, again with no real result. Wallace was intent on being as unhelpful, and as unpredictable, as possible. Even though the university’s board of trustees wanted to let the students register, since Wallace was the titular head of the board, they could not overrule him. (ibid, p. 187)
To give an example of this, on the evening of Saturday June 8th, Wallace had sent the White House a telegram telling the president that “out of an abundance of caution” he was calling up about 500 state guardsmen. Kennedy replied that he was “gratified by the dedication to law and order expressed in your telegram” informing him of the potential use of the National Guard at Tuscaloosa. But, the president continued, the only foreseeable threat of violence came from Wallace’s “plan to bar physically the admission of Negro students in defiance of the order of the Alabama Federal District Court, and in violation of accepted standards of public conduct.” (Cohen, p. 74) On Tuesday June 11th, Wallace flew from Montgomery to Tuscaloosa. He had a motorcycle escort to the Hotel Stafford where he constructed his headquarters. Wallace was going to make real his promise to stand in the schoolhouse door. The problem for the White House was that the courts had ruled on May 21st that the students had to be enrolled for the summer session, which began on June 11th. (ibid, p. 236)
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| Katzenbach and Wallace |
On the scene, the point man for the White House was Deputy Attorney General Nicolas Katzenbach. He had arrived on Monday, and set up his office on campus. RFK and he had decided that Malone and Hood would not accompany Katzenbach to the gate. Since the two had already been admitted he decided to escort them to their rooms. The problem was the actual registration, which Wallace was holding up. (Cohen, p. 85) The White House had out manned Wallace. President Kennedy had 3,000 soldiers on the scene if Wallace refused to yield, was arrested, and violence broke out. They were under the command of General Creighton Abrams who was in dress clothes so as not to suggest a military commander. Colonel Albert Lingo, Alabama’s director of public safety, raised a force of 825 law enforcement officers.
One of the valuable insights Cohen brings to the fore in his analysis of the Tuscaloosa showdown is the role of Louis Martin Jr. Martin was a longtime reporter and editor for black newspapers like the Chicago Defender. He was recruited into Kennedy’s campaign by his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver. He became one of the president’s main advisors on race issues. And Kennedy consulted with him in the early days of the conflict. (Cohen, p. 226) Kennedy was trying to decide just how wide his civil rights bill should be. He originally wanted a bill that included integration of public accommodations, school desegregation, and voting rights. Some Republicans, like Senator Everett Dirksen, wanted to stop short of privately owned facilities like restaurants. Previously advised by Martin, President Kennedy disagreed with this. Martin had told him the bill had to include all public accommodations or “we’re going to have one hell of a war in this country.” (ibid, p. 227) Therefore, at a private conference with Kennedy, when the Republicans objected to this aspect, Kennedy replied that all restaurants must be integrated. Martin also recommended a billion dollar program for job creation and development of job skills for inner city youth.
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| Katzenbach, LBJ, RFK |
Cohen also deals with the role of Lyndon Johnson in all this. Kennedy included LBJ in a meeting with Republican leaders on Monday, the tenth. And he also describes the long discussion that many authors have mentioned between Sorenson and Johnson from a week before, which was taped by the vice-president. Johnson also recommended that the president get on national television to push the issue. But he was not sure that this was the proper time because, like Larry O’Brien and Ken O’Donnell, Johnson thought that pushing the issue might endanger the rest of Kennedy’s program. (ibid, pgs. 227-29) In light of that, the subtext of Cohen’s work in this regard is that it was really Robert Kennedy who was the driving force in the Wallace crisis and also the speech on race.
The Kennedys had two tactical advantages over the governor. The first was that Frank Rose, the president of the university, was in favor of admitting the students. (ibid, p. 239) Therefore, he was providing the Kennedys with inside information about what Wallace was doing. Secondly, if Wallace resisted admittance, the White House could attempt to nationalize the state national guard. This was the step that the Kennedys realized they had to take before sending in federal troops under Abrams, which the White House always looked upon as a last resort. (ibid, p. 249) With over 300 journalists in attendance from all over the world, and a national TV broadcast, that is the way the conflict played out. President Kennedy made the decision to nationalize the guard. (ibid, p. 267) Therefore Brigadier General Henry V. Graham asked Wallace to step aside upon orders of President Kennedy. Katzenbach and his assistant on civil rights John Doar now had the students registered. Graham and his detachment stayed on campus, actually in the students’ dorms, for protection purposes.
It was with the peaceful conclusion of this conflict that President Kennedy decided to go ahead with the speech that evening. Or as Ted Sorenson later related: as Wallace left the gate, JFK turned to him and said, “I think we’d better give that speech tonight.” The problem was that Sorenson had not prepared a speech. What existed were some notes put together by RFK and the Justice Department. And here, Cohen inserts something that was new for this reviewer: the figure of Richard Yates.
Today, Yates is known as one of the most distinguished novelists of his era. But like many other fiction writers, his fame and recognition only arrived after his death in 1992. While alive, none of his books ever sold more than twelve thousand copies. His most famous novel, Revolutionary Road, was made into a film in 2008 by director Sam Mendes. In 1963, Yates was freelancing as a speechwriter for Bobby Kennedy. Anticipating, and in fact, pushing his brother to make a forceful nationally televised address on race, Bobby had told Yates to prepare a speech on the subject. At the time the speech was telecast, June 11, Yates had only been working for RFK for a couple of weeks. (Cohen, p. 287) On the evening of June 9th, Yates began working on a speech. He completed in two days later, the day JFK went on television. Sorenson did not hand the president a speech until less than an hour before he went before the cameras. As Cohen notes, there is no evidence that Sorenson used the Yates draft in his work. But there is evidence that he used some of the themes that Yates sounded. (ibid, p. 289)
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| JFK Civil Rights Speech June 11, 1963 |
As Cohen notes, Kennedy only had a few minutes to look over the speech before going on camera. He delivered it without a teleprompter. (ibid, p. 331) And he actually extemporized the last four paragraphs. Kennedy chose to accent the events of the day, the showdown with Wallace, as the lead. And he especially wished to highlight the facts that it was an Alabama guardsman who removed Wallace, and it was an Alabama judge who wrote the order to do so. And they did this so that two Alabama citizens could enter the university. Although Cohen includes a neat and incisive summary–impressing the fact that Kennedy was the first president since Lincoln to make race a moral, not a legal issue–I cannot do better than to recommend the reader watch this milestone speech for himself. (http://abcnews.go.com/Archives/video/june-11-1963-jfk-promises-civil-rights-bill-9295675) In my opinion, among Kennedy’s several memorable speeches, it seems to me to be significantly underrated: both as a speech, and as part of the fabric of a dramatic historical revolution. It is almost impossible to imagine Eisenhower or Nixon making such a speech. In fact, as Cohen notes, Martin Luther King was overjoyed after he heard it. He told Walter Fauntroy, a friend he was watching it with, “Walter, can you believe that white man not only stepped up to the plate, he hit it over the fence!” (ibid, p. 339)
But there were some who detested the speech, and the movement that had brought it on. Cohen closes the book proper with the wife of Medgar Evers watching the speech with her children in Jackson, Mississippi. (Cohen, p. 350) She was riveted by the things the president was saying. Evers himself was at a mass meeting at the New Jerusalem Baptist Church. In the very early minutes of June 12th, as he was driving up his driveway, he was shot and killed by Klansmen Byron de La Beckwith. At his second trial for murder, which ended with a hung jury–as did the first–Ross Barnett approached Beckwith at the defense table and shook hands with him, as his wife Myrlie was testifying from the stand. As with the Civil War and Reconstruction, the forces of segregation and Jim Crow were not going down without a fight. De La Beckwith was not convicted for another thirty years.
But it was this speech that really turned the conscience of America. Because it was spoken by a president who was a wealthy white man. Kennedy used it to submit his Civil Rights Bill. Bobby Kennedy attended the funeral of Medgar Evers. After which the president invited Evers’ family to the White House.
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| JFK signs Equal Pay Act with American Association of University Women |
I don’t wish to leave the impression that these two speeches and their immediate background are all the author covers in the book. He also touches on other significant accomplishments during Kennedy’s brief presidency. For example he deals with the Equal Pay Act for women; Kennedy’s very close ties to the labor movement ( as one labor lobbyist noted, “We lived in the White House” p. 113). He also deals with Kennedy’s attempt at stressing physical fitness programs, reforming immigration, and even touches on Kennedy’s attempt to soften the exit of some industries from Indonesia, American industries that President Sukarno had expelled. (p. 310) And the author also notes that Kennedy held a press conference almost every sixteen days. Which is amazing in light of their frequency today.
At the beginning I said that Cohen had a fine idea for a book. And as noted above, the volume has some good (and some new) attributes to it. But ultimately I cannot fully endorse it like I did Robert Rakove’s Kennedy, Johnson and the Nonaligned World, or Philip Muehlenbeck’s Betting on the Africans. There are two reasons for this.
As touched upon previously, Cohen is not really an historian. So unlike Rakove and Muehlenbeck, he does not give you the historical backdrop to either the race issue or the rapprochement with the Soviets issue, which are his two main topics. Above, I tried to barely outline the backdrop to the race issue. The latter is even more complex. And unlike the former, the scholarship in this area—how the Cold War originated and then aggrandized itself—is still growing. Cohen does not even try to map any of this out. To give just one example: it is hard to believe, but you will not see the name of either of the Dulles brothers—neither John Foster, nor Allen—in the entire book. Any true historian—like Rakove or Muehlenbeck, if they had been writing this book– would have included them. In one central aspect, history is finding a through line. That is a combination of balanced background, cause and effect relationships, and, from there, searching for patterns and origins of new behavior and actions. From all this one then finds, as Arthur Schlesinger once said, “currents”. There definitely were shifting currents in JFK’s presidency, especially on these two issues. And if Cohen had done a fuller job as historian, the reader would more fully understand the quantum leap that Kennedy was making in both areas. And why it was so difficult? Along with this failing, there is also a lack of information as to the central mystery: Why, psychologically, did Kennedy do both of these things? Again, the answer to that question is also in the record, but Cohen fails to excavate it for the reader.
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| Kennedy in Dallas |
Because of these shortcomings, it leads to what I believe is the flawed conclusion he makes in his epilogue. Cohen writes there that because of these two speeches, “For the first time in his whiplashed presidency, he came to inhabit his office.” (p. 373) This is echoed on the rear cover: a description reads, that in “Kennedy’s crowded hour, he begins to see things differently.” I could not disagree more. On both points. The reason Kennedy’s early presidency was “whiplashed” was that he was being duped by the CIA over the Bay of Pigs issue, and he was starting a truly revolutionary program in foreign policy. And an only slightly less revolutionary one in domestic policy. There was no way that was going to be easy, especially at the start. Because there was no way the opposition was not going to resist strongly.
On the second point, I would say that Kennedy came to inhabit his office almost immediately. In the sense that he knew what he wanted to accomplish at the start. And he set out to achieve it. The first and, I think, foremost example is one Cohen ignores: the situation in Congo. Again, you will not see the name of Patrice Lumumba in this book. Even though he was a black man striving to free his country from imperialism. Describing that struggle—even briefly—would have highlighted and dramatized the conflict Cohen is describing domestically. I have explained in my review why Kennedy’s bill was not sent up until 1963; it would have been filibustered effectively. The reason the attempt at détente took place in 1963 was due to the Bay of Pigs drama; which as many have noted was due to Allen Dulles misleading President Kennedy. This is called creating a balanced historical backdrop.
Which relates to another failing of the book. Like Thurston Clarke, Cohen is and wants to be an upstanding member of the MSM. He has written for Time, UPI and, since he is a Canadian, the Globe and Mail, which is the USA Today of Canada. He has been described by the New York Times as one of “Canada’s most distinguished authors.” In his book he actually praises Sally Bedell Smith’s Grace and Power as “groundbreaking”. Which is about the last word I would use to describe it. I would call John Newman’s JFK and Vietnam, groundbreaking. I would describe Richard Mahoney’s JFK: Ordeal in Africa as groundbreaking. I would also call Irving Bernstein’s Promises Kept and Donald Gibson’s Battling Wall Street groundbreaking tomes. No surprise, you will not see any of those books in his bibliography. But there you will see Ben Bradlee’s worthless book Conversations with Kennedy, and you will also see the late (and lying) David Heymann’s even more worthless biography of Robert Kennedy. See, real historians like Robert Rakove and Phil Muehlenbeck are academics. They are not part of the MSM propaganda machine. Therefore, they are not beholden to it for favors. Cohen is a part of it. Therefore he dutifully spends a senseless amount of space on Mary Meyer. (Although, thankfully, he does not buy the Timothy Leary aspect of that story.) We are also told—Bradlee like–that Kennedy was endlessly interested in the John Profumo sex scandal in England. The author actually gives space and credibility to Mimi Alford. Even though Australian researcher Greg Parker has shown her story to be, at best, dubious. (Click here http://www.reopenkennedycase.net/reopen-blog/a-storm-in-a-mini-teapot) If you can comprehend it, as with Heymann, even stripper Tempest Storm makes an appearance in Cohen’s pages. What any of this has to do with race relations or nuclear arms control is Cohen’s secret. (Or maybe Tempest Storm’s?)
This is all part of a publishing industry subdivision I have called the “Posthumous Assassination of John F. Kennedy”. It’s a way of demeaning Kennedy’s character and legacy and, as a byproduct, killing off interest in his assassination. As we shall see–and as I mentioned in that essay—Bob Loomis of Random House was one of its ringleaders. (The two-part essay “The Posthumous Assassination of John F. Kennedy” is available on the Probe CD collection, and in the book The Assassinations. Many readers considered it one of the finest essays Probe ever published.)
The problem for Cohen is his book was distributed by a subsidiary of Random House. It was Random House and the notorious Loomis who originated the work of Gerald Posner on the JFK murder. To the point of having CIA asset Loomis actually arrange interviews for Posner with the likes of Yuri Nosenko. (Loomis was in prime position to do that. When I called his office in 1997, his secretary said he was in Washington, since he spent about two days a week there.) As anyone who has followed the Kennedy saga knows, Loomis has been one of the most pernicious behind the scenes operators in the field. Some of his and his company’s clients—besides Posner—have included James Phelan, Sy Hersh, Alford, and Norman Mailer. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pgs. 369-70. See Destiny Betrayed Second Edition, p. 244, for Loomis’ handiwork on the MLK and RFK cases.) And as Sally Bedell Smith herself once admitted—as was the case with Posner—her book was not her idea. It was pushed on her by the bigwigs at Random House—while Loomis was still there. (See SF Gate, May 23, 2004, interview with Carolyne Zinko) Therefore I have little doubt Loomis helped stage interviews for Vanity Fair’s answer to Kitty Kelley. And as we have learned about this cottage industry—with both Kelley and Heymann—some of these “interviews” did not happen. And that is why Smith’s book got such a big sendoff. Just like Loomis gave Posner a huge publicity binge. (Another Loomis client, Robin Moore, had his book, The Hunt for Bin Laden, partly fabricated by a false witness. The fabrication was done with direct authorization by Loomis.) As they say in that industry, you scratch my back and I’ll scratch your book. Cohen wanted to get his ticket punched. So he played the game. No matter how badly it marred his work.
Therefore what could have been an important and sterling volume is seriously compromised with a lot of litter. Instead of being up there with Rakove and Muehlenbeck, it stands a couple of steps downward, with Thurston Clarke’s mixed bag of nuts.
Why You Should Care That Selma Gets LBJ Wrong
by David Kaiser, At: Time
There are two important short sections in The Kennedy Half Century. One occurs at the beginning, the other near the end.
The author, Professor Larry Sabato, works out of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. In his acknowledgements section, Sabato traces his financial backing for this project over the five-year gestation time of the book. Some of his backers include: the Reynolds Foundation, McGuireWoods Consulting, the Hobby Family Foundation, the World Affairs Council of Dallas/Fort Worth, and the president and provost of University of Virginia. It’s with this kind of backing that Sabato was able to do the polling and focus group interviews he did for the volume. Which, to me, is far and away the most valuable part of the tome. His description of these polling results begins on page 406 of the book’s 427 pages of text.
Like the polling cited by Robert Dallek in Camelot’s Court, Sabato’s polling – through the well-respected Hart Research Associates in Washington – discovered that, of the last nine presidents, Kennedy is the most admired. This is remarkable since that time period includes men like Dwight Eisenhower, Bill Clinton, and Ronald Reagan, all of whom served two full terms. Therefore, they had a much longer time period to both pass legislation and plant their imprint on the national consciousness. And again, as with Dallek, the margin by which Kennedy outpaced the others was not really close. (Sabato, p. 406) Further, a remarkable 78% said that Kennedy’s presidency had a profound impact on the United States. When asked to name four lasting achievements of the JFK presidency, two of the four most named issues dealt with civil rights for black Americans (ibid, p. 412). The other two were the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Apollo mission.
Sabato then details what are probably the two most politically charged findings in his polling. An amazing 91% of the respondents said that Kennedy’s murder changed the United Sates a “great deal”. (p. 416) Which is a number so astronomically high that it surprised even this writer. The general reaction described was that a “deep depression set in across the country , as the optimism that had mainly prevailed since the end of World War II seemed to evaporate” (ibid). The final result affirmed what had been, more or less, a constant in the polling since about 1967 and the publicity surrounding the Jim Garrison investigation. A full 75% of the public “reject the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone” (ibid). As Sabato notes this is the same percentage that ABC News polled back in 2003 on the 40th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.
That is significant in and of itself. Why? Because of what has happened in the intervening decade. There has been a steady stream of cable produced television specials – using the same phony methodology of the 2003 Peter Jennings/Gus Russo/Dale Myers fiasco called Beyond Conspiracy – which have tried to use computer simulations to make the impossible Single Bullet Theory palatable. Many of these execrable programs have been aired on Discovery Channel. Several of them have used the auspices of the Sixth Floor Museum. And some of the very worst have used Sixth Floor employee Gary Mack as either a consultant or a host. Like Dale Myers did, many of these programs have actually altered evidence to make the Magic Bullet possible. (CTKA provided one of many exposes on the infamous Myers.) But miraculously, in the face of this incessant drumbeat of propaganda, the American public has said no, we don’t buy the computer simulations. As they say in the tech business, its all GIGO, garbage in, garbage out.
Sabato ends this polling chapter with a summary of Kennedy’s presidency in the following terms. Sabato writes that it was “eye-popping to see and hear the terms of endearment lavished on John Kennedy.” He then writes that Kennedy’s presidency is perceived as “the polar opposite of the very unhappy views they have of the country today. Whereas contemporary America is polarized and divided, Kennedy represents unity and common purpose … as well as a sense of hope, possibility and optimism.” (Sabato, p. 417)
These are quite significant findings. And Sabato is to be congratulated for making them public and employing such a venerated pollster as Peter Hart to attain them. To me, they just about certify all the things that the critical community has been saying about the significance of the Kennedy assassination in the collective unconscious of the American psyche. His murder really was an unprecedented shock to the system. And the fact that Kennedy was perceived as such a breath of fresh air, this made it all the worse as to its impact. This community can certainly cite these results as evidence that our perception of the JFK murder is the right one.
Unfortunately, that is about as far as the kudos go for this book. The rest of the volume is so inferior that it’s almost like Sabato wrote the rest to counteract the results of the polling. Because much of the rest of the work is arranged around two themes. First, JFK really does not deserve all the admiration the public has for him. Second, although the Warren Commission might have made some errors, they got the bottom line correct: Oswald really did kill President Kennedy. Of course, these two concepts were the major ideas behind much of the programming and many of the books released around the 50th anniversary. Therefore, Sabato’s tome is symptomatic of the much larger MSM and Establishment cultural barrage that took hold of the country in preparation for that event.
A good example would be the Tom Brokaw/Gus Russo NBC special which was supposed to be made up of personal reminisces of famous people about November 22, 1963. That turned out to be only a pretext to hook the viewer. The actual program, entitled Where Were You, had the same aims as Sabato’s book. Its true agenda was to deceive the public about who actually killed President Kennedy, and to try and demean his presidency so people would not think any kind of legacy was worth honoring about the man. What else could the show have been about with Brokaw hosting it and Gus Russo as the consultant? Both men have been doing those same things for the last 20 years.
And so with Sabato. According to some CTKA sources at the University of Virginia, Sabato has always strived to get media attention for his Center for Politics. He likes being in front of cameras, no matter what the occasion. He has a rather liberal backing for money for his Center. But, as Mike Swanson notes in the accompanying article, he also knows how to get on television. He knows what feeds the beast of the MSM. Therefore, so as not to seem as big a denialist and cover-up artist as Philip Shenon, he spent some time with Virginia lawyer Dan Alcorn. Alcorn is well versed in the literature of the JFK case. Alcorn knows the many problems with the official story. And he was not shy about telling Sabato about them. Therefore, unlike Shenon, who only spoke to people like Commission lawyer Howard Willens, and took everything Willens said at face value, Sabato displays a bit of sophistication. Not a lot, but a bit. From his polling, he understands that the much larger part of the public does not buy the Warren Commission as any kind of serious fact finding entity. Today, that is simply a dog that will not hunt. Therefore, unlike the preposterous Shenon, he gives some space to some of the problems with the evidence in the JFK case.
There are really three parts to The Kennedy Half Century. There is a discussion of Kennedy’s path to the presidency and what he did in office. Then, there is a discussion of what happened in Dallas and the evidence for and against the Warren Commission verdict. And third, there is a discussion about how the shadow of JFK and the Kennedy family has been cast over subsequent presidents.
As we deal with these three parts, it is important to keep in mind the following facts. Sabato is not a historian. He is a political scientist. And one who is very much in tune with the demands of the MSM. Further, he offered an online course about President Kennedy as a lead up to the release of his book. In the syllabus to that course, he listed a wide variety of sources for the student to read. That list revealed he was aware of the good work which has actually broadened our perspectives on who Kennedy was. One of the things that make his book odd is that, in light of that fact, it is striking that his book has no bibliography. One has to go through his long footnotes section – which often includes more text – to find out his basis for the information in the book. Which is what this reviewer, quite laboriously, did.
As we shall see, there seems to have been a reason for the author to make this odd choice. Because Sabato was selective about the actual texts he used in writing the book. If one compares the volumes he listed for his online course, versus what he used for his book, Sabato appears to have selectively pruned from the former in order to produce a much more MSM friendly product. This made for good public relations for Sabato. Unfortunately, it does not make for good history, or for good scholarship.
Sabato begins his narrative with Kennedy’s trip to Texas in November of 1963. He traces that through to the arrival in Dallas, the shooting in Dealey Plaza, the trip to Parkland Hospital afterwards, and the actual autopsy at Bethesda Medical Center than night. From here he then launches into a retrospective of Kennedy’s political career from about 1956 to 1963. All this takes up about the first 45 pages of the book. And just from reading that far one begins to see that Sabato has an agenda. For instance, there is no mention in the entire text of State Department official Edmund Gullion. Considering the fact that Sabato is a political scientist, that lack is a bit startling. Even Thurston Clarke understood the importance of Kennedy’s meeting with Gullion in Saigon in 1951, and how that meeting changed Kennedy’s consciousness about communism and the Third World. As many authors today have shown, it was this meeting that then caused Kennedy to make several speeches mapping out his differences with Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers. Especially on how hard the United States should press developing countries on being for us or against us on the issue of being non-aligned between east and west during the Cold War. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, pgs. 21-24)
In his further attempt to diminish Kennedy, Sabato gives short shrift to the striking speech Kennedy made in 1957 about the French/Algerian colonial conflict. In fact, he deals with it in about one page. (Sabato, pgs. 42-43) Incredibly, he gives over to John Foster Dulles more space for his critique of the speech than he does to Kennedy’s actual speech! And he badly underplays the opposition to the speech itself. Not just from the Republicans, but also from Democrats like Dean Acheson and Adlai Stevenson. (DiEugenio, p. 26) The opposition of Stevenson is important politically since he was considered in the forefront of the liberal section of the Democratic Party. Further, Sabato never mentions that the vast majority of newspaper editorials lined up against Kennedy on the issue. But finally, by not reproducing the actual text of the speech, Sabato avoids mentioning the most powerful part of the address. One which Kennedy made quite explicit. He was comparing what the United States and France had done in Vietnam with what was now happening in Algeria. By allying itself with a European colonial power, America was playing on the wrong side of history.
Why does Sabato do this tailoring? Because he wants to divorce Kennedy from being a liberal icon. He adds that young people today associate the Kennedy name with liberalism. He writes that it was really the post 1963 Robert Kennedy, and younger brother Teddy “who transformed the family name’s ideology …” (Sabato, p. 41) Well, if you cut out Gullion, eliminate Kennedy’s speeches opposing the Dulles brothers’ foreign policy, excise his interest in the Third World, and significantly curtail his milestone Algeria speech, then yep, you can somehow proffer Kennedy as some kind of a moderate. But that is not writing history. It is practicing a political agenda. It is not scholarship. It is in Edward Luttwak’s phrase, “renting a scholar”.
The other main way that Sabato tries to denude Kennedy’s liberalism here is through another method, one which has been utilized by a queer combination of the regressive right and loopy left. This hoary complaint says that, somehow, President Kennedy was not really concerned about civil rights for black Americans as a senator. He then moved at a glacial pace on the issue once in the White House. I was really sorry to see that Sabato had enlisted in this kind of Fox News distortion of history. But since he does, let us correct the record.
There are three good books on this subject. They are Mr. Kennedy and the Negroes by journalist and author Harry Golden, Of Kennedys and Kings by former senator and Kennedy advisor Harris Wofford, and the classic Promises Kept by the late UCLA professor Irving Bernstein. (It is important to this discussion that I could find no reference to either the first or last book in Sabato’s footnotes.) As many on the right note, Senator Kennedy lined up against most liberals in his party on the processing of the 1957 Civil Rights Act. They did not want the House bill to go the Judiciary Committee. Because it was headed by staunch segregationist James Eastland of Mississippi.
Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson was so apathetic about it that he did not back this move. Kennedy was against it. Not because he was against the overall goal. But because he thought it would create a dangerous precedent in the Senate. One that could be used against liberal Democrats in the future struggle for progressive causes. (Golden, p. 94) Kennedy felt that, if needed, the Democrats could use a discharge petition to yank the bill out of committee and onto the floor for a vote.
Unlike Fox News, Sabato does not further the myth that Kennedy voted against the act. (That myth has been exposed.) On the procedural question, Kennedy wrote a strongly worded letter to a constituent on the point. He wrote that, “I would be the first to sign a discharge petition to bring the civil rights bill to the floor.” (Letter from Kennedy to Alfred Jarrette, August 1, 1957) Kennedy then added that, “I have fought long and consistently for a good civil rights bill. I was one of only 38 senators who voted to retain Title III in the present bill, the section which would extend civil rights to areas other than voting privileges” (ibid).
To his credit, Sabato does note Kennedy’s support for Title III. (Sabato, p. 42) But he does not explain why this was so important. That part of the act allowed the Attorney General to step in almost unilaterally in cases of, not just voting discrimination, but also school desegregation. And it allowed the use of civil actions, which could hurt municipalities in the treasury. This was clearly the most far-ranging clause in the bill. And Kennedy was one of its most ardent proponents. Because now, finally, the federal government could intercede inside the obstructionist state governments. And contrary to what Sabato writes, Kennedy trumpeted Title III at the expense of political capital. Many commentators have noted that Kennedy’s outspoken stance about this aspect of the bill is what began to erode his support in the south. (Golden, p. 95)
In a practical way, what was so important about this as far as civil rights were concerned? Because once Robert Kennedy became Attorney General, the Kennedy brothers began to use that clause in a much more widespread way than Eisenhower ever imagined. But, in keeping with his agenda, Sabato does not tell you this part of the story. On the day Robert Kennedy was confirmed by the senate, Eastland reminded him, “Your predecessor never brought a civil rights case in Mississippi.” (ibid, p. 100) This was true. Eisenhower only used the Title III clause ten times in three years. And two of those cases were filed on the last day of his administration. (ibid, p. 104) The day after Bobby Kennedy was approved, in response to Eastland’s reminder, President Kennedy told his brother, “Get the road maps – and go!” (ibid, p. 100) In other words, start sending investigators into the backwoods of the south and start filing cases.
RFK did just that. In one year, he doubled the number of lawyers in the civil rights section of the department. At the same time he more than doubled the amount of cases Eisenhower had filed. By 1963, the number of lawyers had been nearly quintupled. (ibid, 105) The Attorney General also hired 18 legal interns to search microfilm records for discrepancies in voting statistics in suspect districts. This allowed him to open files on 61 new investigations. That remarkable number was achieved in just one year. (Ibid, p. 105) This had been a preplanned strategy by JFK. In October of 1960, at a meeting of his civil rights campaign advisory board, Kennedy told them this was the method he had decided upon to break the back of voting discrimination in the south. (ibid, p. 139)
These facts blow up the myth that Sabato is trying to propagate about Kennedy and civil rights. But let us go further in order to show just how agenda-driven the author really is.
When Kennedy became president, it was clear that neither the Brown vs. Board decision of 1954, nor the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 were having any strong effect in increasing the black vote in the south. The eight states with the lowest turnout figures in the 1960 election were all in the south. It was obvious that even with those three laws on the books, Eisenhower’s enforcement of them was so lacking in rigor that the southern states felt no real compunction to obey them. And clearly, Eisenhower and Nixon had given those state governments a nod and a wink in this regard. For instance, in 1956 Eisenhower had told a reporter that the Brown vs. Board decision had set back progress in the south at least 15 years. (John Emmet Hughes, The Ordeal of Power, pgs. 200-01) Vice-President Nixon echoed this attitude. He said, “… if the law goes further than public opinion can be brought along to support at a particular time, it may prove to do more harm than good.” (Golden, p. 61)
This was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The law was not going to go very far because, in fact, it was not being supported to any real degree. This created entrenched resistance to a piecemeal approach. In other words, it might take several years to challenge each district in court. What the Kennedys did next was to try and bypass going district by district in their legal actions. They now decided to collect data on whole states to present in court. This is how President Kennedy took on Eastland’s home state in the case of United States vs. Mississippi. President Kennedy was pleased with the approach. Across the Justice Department’s 1962 report, he scrawled “Keep pushing the cases.” (Golden, p. 111)
President Kennedy was also sensitive about the lack of black Americans employed in branches of government, including the armed services. Therefore, he appointed the illustrious civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall to the federal bench in 1961. Through Abraham Bolden we know he didn’t like the fact that there were no black Americans on the White House Secret Service detail. On his inauguration day, he commented to Lyndon Johnson that there were no black Americans in the Coast Guard marching detail. That evening he learned that there had never been a black student at the Coast Guard Academy. This was remedied in 1962. (Bernstein, p. 52) At one of the first Cabinet meetings he noted that there were only ten African American lawyers employed by the federal government. That figure went up by a factor of seven in six months. (Golden, pgs. 114-15)
In March of 1961, just two months after being inaugurated, Kennedy first proposed an executive order decreeing there would be no racial discrimination in hiring by contractors working for the federal government. This was signed into law nine months later. In two years, 1700 complaints were heard. Over 70% of the cases ended with the employer being disciplined. Under Eisenhower, only six such suits were ever brought. (Golden, p. 60)
But Kennedy went further. He got 100 large private corporations to sign onto this agreement voluntarily. He also got 117 labor unions to pledge they would fight for the cause and report hiring discrimination on the job. He then ordered the Labor Department to investigate discrimination in apprenticeship and training programs. (ibid) This attitude, as opposed to the implicit acceptance of the status quo by Eisenhower and Nixon, encouraged thousands of complaints to be filed.
As a result, by 1963 in South Carolina, black Americans were – for the first time – working alongside whites in advanced positions in textile mills. The superintendent explained it in practical economic terms: if the black Americans were not hired, the company would lose government contracts. If that happened, they would have to close their doors. (Helen Fuller, Year of Trial, p. 131) Again, these kinds of acts cost Kennedy plenty of votes in the south. It hurt him because, unlike with Eisenhower, he actually spoke about the problem and then acted independently of the Supreme Court. With Eisenhower and the Little Rock crisis, commentators could blame the federal intervention on Earl Warren. That was not the case with Kennedy and his new measures. Especially since, on May 6, 1961, Robert Kennedy spoke at the University of Georgia’s Law Day. There he announced that, unlike Eisenhower, he would vigorously pursue the implementation of the Brown vs. Board decision.
Like others, Sabato criticizes Kennedy for not issuing an executive order on housing as he did on employment until two years after his election. (Sabato , p. 111) As Fuller made clear in her book, this was because Kennedy thoroughly understood that if he signed it earlier, he could never attain other pieces of legislation that were important to him. The entrenched southern power barons in congress would retaliate. (Fuller, pgs. 37-42) In fact, after he signed the housing bill, Senators John Stennis and Richard Russell voted against his test ban treaty. Another example of this occurred when Kennedy tried to create a new cabinet department, Housing and Urban Development. He announced that African American Robert Weaver would be the Secretary for the new department. The House Rules Committee then rejected the proposal. (Golden, p. 121) These were very real concerns that Kennedy rightfully anticipated.
Robert Kennedy sent a progress report each week to his brother about the court actions in his voting rights cases. At the end of 1962, he told the president it would be all over by 1968. (ibid, p. 131) But something else happened in the meantime. By getting out in front of the issue, and by signing two important executive orders (on employment and housing) President Kennedy was fulfilling the symbolic agreement he had made in the 1960 campaign. This was when he and his brother intervened in the Georgia jail case of Martin Luther King. An incident which Sabato spends about eight words on. (Sabato, p. 70) Through their intervention, King was released from some trumped up charges.
By openly allying himself with King, Kennedy was giving the civil rights movement ballast and hope. After he won the White House, this encouraged the movement leaders to become more active under his presidency than they had ever been before. So now a certain synergy entered into the equation. Something that would not have happened under Eisenhower and Nixon. In fact, Harris Wofford had written a memo to Kennedy in December of 1960 stating the major problem with civil rights had been the fact that there had been no real leadership in the executive branch or congress to supplement the work of the courts.
In that memo, Wofford essentially mapped out the path Kennedy should take. He said that in 1961 there did not seem to be any way to get a real omnibus civil rights law through the senate because of the almost guaranteed filibuster by the southerners. Wofford proposed changing the cloture rules on filibuster to circumvent that tactic. Which is something that Kennedy had mentioned in his above referenced 1957 letter to Alfred Jarrette. In the meantime, Wofford proposed that Kennedy use executive actions to advance the cause.
Kennedy immediately did so by shifting the balance of power on the Commission on Civil Rights. This was a body set up by the 1957 Civil Rights Act. It had the power to launch investigations, hold hearings and make recommendations as far as exposing discriminatory laws went. Eisenhower had made it a rather moderate agency. He manned it with two integrationists, two segregationists, and two middle of the roaders. In March of 1961, Kennedy had an opportunity to make two new appointments. In doing so he tilted the balance toward the integrationists. He furthered this aim by also naming a staff director who was also an integrationist. (Bernstein, pgs. 50-51)
Kennedy also urged a kind of affirmative action program for all the cabinet level departments. He wanted figures on how many black Americans were employed by each department secretary. When the numbers were returned, he made it clear they were not nearly satisfactory. This sent each secretary scrambling to find suitable black employees in order not to be dressed down by the president at the next meeting. (ibid, p. 53) Kennedy also made it clear that he would not attend functions at any institution that practiced segregation. This created a wave of resignations by White House employees from such places like athletic clubs and golf courses. (ibid)
It was against this drastically new backdrop that the civil rights movement now began to truly assert itself e.g. the Freedom Riders, King’s SCLC, James Farmer’s CORE. For instance, James Meredith sent away for his application to the University of Mississippi the day after Kennedy was inaugurated. (Bernstein, p. 76) For as Wofford and Bernstein have written, there was never any doubt that Kennedy would support these groups. (Ibid, p. 65) In fact, the White House arranged financing in some cases for them to launch voter registration drives. It was simply a matter of what tactics would be used. But there was a byproduct to these dramatic confrontations e.g. Nicolas Katzenbach removing George Wallace from the front gate at the University of Alabama, President Kennedy calling out the military to quell the violence over Meredith at Ole Miss, Robert Kennedy ordering 500 marshals into Montgomery to protect the Freedom Riders. That was this: the more these ugly confrontations were televised, the more people outside the south became repelled by the actions of the white southerners. In other words, through television, the incidents had a dual effect: the spectacles began to turn people who had previously been apathetic on the subject into civil rights advocates. In turn, this began to isolate the segregationists of the south. Through that double movement, the balance of power began to shift in congress away from Eastland and toward Kennedy and King.
As Wofford, Robert Kennedy and Bernstein have all noted, the culminating showdown was in Birmingham, Alabama. With a black population of forty per cent, it was probably the most segregated big city in the south. For example, although it was industrialized, less than five per cent of the Hayes Aircraft workforce was black. (ibid, p. 85) The symbol of Birmingham’s unstinting fealty to segregation was Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene “Bull” Connor. Connor was so defiant in the face of Bobby Kennedy’s attempts to integrate the south that he called him a “bobby-soxer” and challenged him to a fistfight. (ibid, p. 86) Because of these factors, the city was a prime target for demonstrations. King had an executive meeting of the SCLC in January of 1963 to plan the assault on Birmingham.
As everyone knows, Connor played into the hands of Kennedy and King. The images captured by TV cameras of Connor unleashing savage police attack dogs, and using powerful fire department hoses against young boys and girls, these were a media sensation. Birmingham became the magazine, newspaper and television capital of America. President Kennedy sent Burke Marshall, head of the civil rights division, to negotiate an agreement to end the violence. Both King and Robert Kennedy called the agreement a great victory. (Bernstein, p. 92)
Comedian/activist Dick Gregory had been in Birmingham from the beginning. On the night after Connor unleashed the German Shepherds and hoses, he returned home. His wife was waiting for him when he arrived after midnight. She told him that President Kennedy had called. He had left a message that he wanted Gregory to call him when he got in. Gregory noted the late hour. His wife replied with, “He said it didn’t matter what time it was.” So Gregory called the White House and Kennedy picked up the phone. He said, “Dick, I need to know everything that happened down there.” Gregory went on for about 10 minutes detailing the whole sorry spectacle. When he was done, Kennedy exclaimed, “We’ve got those bastards now!” Gregory, overcome with emotion, began to weep. (2003 radio interview with Gregory)
After this, Kennedy now wrote his civil rights act, made his memorable national speech the night Medgar Evers was murdered, and supervised – and supplemented with white union members – King’s March on Washington. For all intents and purposes the battle had been won. Because as Kennedy predicted in November of 1963, and as Thurston Clarke proved in his book, the civil rights act was going to pass the next year. As both Johnson and Kennedy understood, the key in the senate was Everett Dirksen, who JFK had good relations with.
Now, anyone looking at the above précis would have to conclude the obvious: Kennedy did more for the civil rights of black Americans in three years than the previous 18 presidents had done in a century. That includes Harry Truman, Franklin Roosevelt and the so-called progressive presidents: Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt and Taft. Sabato, of course, is aware of all this. But because of his agenda, he can’t admit it. In fact, you will see little, if any, of the above in The Kennedy Half Century. Even though it is accepted history. To be frank, I am a little disturbed that I had to dust off my books and consult them to correct Sabato’s Orwellian attempt to turn Kennedy into the equivalent of a Tennessee congressman on civil rights. It’s a similar trick to what Tom Brokaw and Gus Russo did for their tacky TV special. But this is what happens when one deals with the politically charged Kennedy case. It’s simply not enough to distort the facts of his assassination. The attempt at abridgement extends out from his murder, and into his presidency.
As noted, like Robert Dallek, Sabato is intent on denuding Kennedy’s presidency of any real value. So in addition to his misrepresentations on civil rights, the author also goes after the idea that Kennedy was withdrawing from Vietnam at the time of his death. It’s hard to believe that this could be seriously contemplated at this time. But as with Kennedy’s civil rights record, Sabato is not above distorting and simply eliminating aspects of the adduced record in order to achieve his aim. The author is nothing if not Machiavellian.
Sabato begins his discussion of this issue with a usual ploy used by the likes of Chris Mathews. He tries to make the Vietnam issue something ideological. In two ways. He says that liberals have forgotten all the aid the USA gave to Ngo Dien Diem in the way of military hardware, like Green Berets, guns and money. (Sabato, p. 123) That whole concept is simply bogus. All of this material about Kennedy’s approval of military aid to Diem in late 1961 is thoroughly detailed in John Newman’s masterly book JFK and Vietnam. That book was published over 20 years ago. It is a book that many so-called “liberals” use. But Newman is a conservative. Which should demonstrate to everyone but Sabato that people on both sides of the ideological compass can try to seek the truth of a situation when there is no agenda driving them.
The other ideological strophe he uses is a real dandy. He writes that, “Eisenhower had been wary of American involvement in Vietnam, having watched the French get bogged down in Southeast Asia and then withdraw in humiliation in 1954” (ibid). For sheer and utter nonsense, for the utter perversity prize in a book that is full of it, this sentence might take the cake. Sabato can only get away with such baloney because, as noted at the top of Section 3 of this review, he leaves out all the important things in the story pertaining to Kennedy ‘s visit to Vietnam in 1951, his meeting with Edmund Gullion, his altered consciousness about the Third World, and most of all, Operation Vulture. This was the proposed atomic bombardment of Dien Bien Phu by the Dulles brothers and Eisenhower. I don’t see how seriously considering the use of an American air armada to deliver nuclear weapons in order to preserve the last vestiges of European colonial empire qualifies Eisenhower as being “wary of American involvement in Vietnam.” In fact, it’s just the opposite of what Sabato implies. It was Kennedy who protested in public this frightening nightmare scenario of dropping three atomic bombs over a country the USA not even formally at war with.
And make no mistake about just how wrong Sabato is here. Because it was not just in aid of France that Eisenhower was willing to take the final step towards nuclear holocaust. For as Gordon Goldstein notes in his fine book, Lessons in Disaster, President Johnson derived much succor from the fact that Eisenhower supported his escalation in Vietnam each step of the way. Up to and including the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons. (Goldstein, p. 161) In other words, Sabato has the record exactly wrong here about Eisenhower vs. Kennedy and how far each man was willing to go in Vietnam.
Now, Sabato says it took him five years to put together this book. Goldstein’s work was published in 2008. John Prados’ book, Operation Vulture, was published in 2002. In addition to himself, Sabato had his colleague at Virginia, history professor Andrew Bell, help him compose the book. (Sabato, p. xi) And also Sean Lyons, who “supervised a crack team of graduate and undergraduate interns and researchers.” Sabato then goes on to name 28 members of that intern team. So, in all, we are to believe that 31 people missed both the Goldstein book and the Prados book? I don’t think so. Again, as with the civil rights issue, Sabato ignored the factual record because it did not fit into his preconceived agenda.
But that is just the beginning of Sabato mangling the record on Kennedy and Vietnam. Sabato writes that by the autumn of 1963, Kennedy realized his strategy for Vietnam was not working. He writes this in the context of Kennedy’s flexible response concept to communism. (Sabato, p. 123) Now, let us assume Sabato is correct: Kennedy had somehow chosen Vietnam as an anti-communist battleground. That he was employing flexible response, and the first step, sending in more advisers was not working. Would not the next step up the response ladder be sending in combat troops? Why did Kennedy not order them in at this time? Why did he do the opposite, that is sign NSAM 263 which actually ordered all advisers out beginning in December of 1963 and the last ones out in 1965? Sabato cannot even bring himself to type the words “NSAM 263”. So he says this was just a political ploy by Kennedy to get re-elected. He can get away with this because he does not tell the reader about the other part of the plan: the total withdrawal by 1965. (Sabato, p. 126)
But further, Sabato does not tell the reader that today we can pretty much put together the origins of the withdrawal plan. It began way back in early 1962. After Kennedy had agreed to send in more advisers, he sent John Kenneth Galbraith to Saigon to give him a report on conditions there and if further American involvement would help. Predictably, Galbraith came back with a view that increased American involvement would not help Diem. That report was passed on to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Kennedy now told McNamara to begin putting together a plan to wind down the war. The military dragged its feet on this. But at the Sec/Def meeting in May of 1963, the plans were all presented through the assembly of an in country team in Hawaii. McNamara replied that the pace was too slow and it should be speeded up. This was reported back to Kennedy. And this was what Kennedy activated when he signed NSAM 263 in October of 1963. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, pgs. 365-371) Needless to say, Sabato leaves all of this out of his book.
For this and other reasons, both noted and unnoted, as a discussion of Kennedy’s presidency, Sabato’s book is worthless.
As I noted above, Sabato begins his book with Kennedy’s arrival at Love Field in Dallas. At this point of the book, the author simply describes the assassination pretty much as the Warren Commission does. With all the errors of that fraudulent document intact. For example, the author writes that Howard Brennan saw a man with a gun on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. (Sabato, p. 11) In fact, as many authors, including Ian Griggs have noted, it’s highly unlikely that Brennan saw anyone. Sabato describes the entire Truly/Baker/Oswald incident on the second floor lunchroom just as it is in the Warren Report. Again, this is highly suspect today. It has been questioned by some because Baker never mentioned the incident, or Oswald, in his first day affidavit. Even though when he made out the affidavit, Oswald was sitting right across from him in the witness room at Dallas Police headquarters. (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pgs. 192-96) But researcher Sean Murphy has gone beyond that. He argues, with compelling evidence and logic that, at the time of the assassination, Oswald was most likely outside the building. Standing back in the alcove of the Houston street doorway with his sandwich and soda pop. In the Darnell film, this image has been termed “Prayer Man”, because of the position of the subject’s hands in still shots. The man next to this figure, and a step above him, is Wesley Frazier. Needless to say, if this figure is actually Oswald, not only is the Warren Commission shown to be a complete fraud, but also the worst suspicions about Frazier being suborned are also true. (See this discussion of the issue.)
In his discussion of the medical evidence, Sabato has the same problem Philip Shenon did. He doesn’t seem to be aware that what he says contradicts the extant exhibits. For instance, he says that Secret Service agent Emory Roberts saw massive head trauma to Kennedy while taking his body into Parkland Hospital. (Sabato, p. 13) Yet, no photos we have today show such massive head trauma. Two pages later, the author says that Kennedy had one third of his brain blasted away. Well then Larry, why do the photos and the Ida Dox drawings for the HSCA depict an almost totally intact brain? Again, like Shenon, the man doesn’t understand that he is arguing for a case of conspiracy.
Sabato then goes further in this vein. In his brief discussion of CE 399 he allows that it may have been found on Kennedy’s stretcher. And, in fact, it could have been planted. (ibid) But, a few pages later, he says its certain that Oswald killed Officer Tippit. When, in fact, as John Armstrong and Joe McBride have written, it is not even a sure case that Oswald was at the scene of the Tippit murder. And the latest evidence in that case, the so-called “third wallet”, would appear to indicate that he was not there and someone planted that wallet.
As per Oswald’s arrest at the Texas Theater, Sabato recites some of the worst Warren Commission balderdash. Namely that Oswald tried to shoot Officer McDonald. As many authors have proven, not only did this not happen, the FBI proved it could not have happened. (Joseph McBride, Into the Nightmare, pgs. 202-03)
Later on in the book, unlike Shenon, Sabato acknowledges that there are some problems in the evidentiary records. In my e-mail exchange about the book with attorney Dan Alcorn, he revealed that this section probably stems from Sabato’s talks with him. In fact, outside of the chapter on the Hart Research polling, this is probably the best part of the book. Which, as the reader can see, is damning with faint praise.
Sabato includes in this part of the book, the following statement, “…any fair minded observer can conclude that both the Dallas police and, for more important, the federal government botched the most important murder investigation of the twentieth century.” (Sabato, p. 139) Sabato mentions that the Dallas Police did not cordon off the Depository building anywhere near quickly enough. He then says that Oswald should never have been paraded in front of crowds in the DPD headquarters as he was. He notes that the Warren Commission inexplicable failed to interview some important Dealey Plaza witnesses, like Bill and Gayle Newman. (Ibid, p. 140) He admits that Vickie Adams, who went down the stairs of the Depository right after the shooting was treated like a threat to the Commission, not a valuable witness. (ibid, p. 146)
But after this fairly decent Chapter 7, something happens. Sabato seems to understand that he has stepped too close to the precipice. So he steps backward in his next chapter, which is mostly about Oswald. He badly underplays all we know about the man today. Sabato actually seems to buy into the hogwash that Oswald was looking to shoot Richard Nixon. Which is a story that not even the Warren Commission bought into. (Sabato, p. 171) He then adds that Oswald also shot at General Walker. In his footnotes, he bases this on the rifling characteristics of the so-called recovered bullet and how it allegedly matches the Mannlicher Carcano rifle in evidence. What he does not say is that, first, almost all rifle bullets have the same rifling pattern the FBI attributed to the bullet in evidence today. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 80) But second, the bullet in evidence today is not the bullet originally recovered by the Dallas Police. (ibid, p. 76) Apparently, Sabato is desperate to make Oswald into some kind of sociopathic killer. He’s so desperate, he uses phony evidence to do it.
Like Vincent Bugliosi, Sabato is intent on getting the CIA off the hook for any culpability in the JFK case. So, he writes that the Agency as an institution was not involved in the conspiracy. Which is neither here nor there, since no one claims that Director John McCone was involved in the plot. (Sabato, p. 188) But he then writes that, overall, the Agency sent good information to the Warren Commission. Again, this might be true as an overall statement. But it is not true in certain crucial areas of the case. And Sabato cooperates with the Agency in covering up those crucial areas. For instance, in his discussion of the Clinton/Jackson incident, he allows that it may have been David Ferrie with Oswald in the two hamlets. (ibid, p. 176) But he then writes that we don’t know who the third man was. Yes we do. But Sabato does not want to admit to the identification of Clay Shaw since it would lend Jim Garrison too much credibility.
In his discussion of Mexico City, Sabato writes that, “Without question, someone showed up in the Cuban and Russian embassies claiming to be Lee Oswald, but was he actually an Oswald imposter?” (ibid, p. 178) But Sabato does not make clear that almost all the personnel at the Cuban embassy said that the man who visited was not Oswald. Sabato then caps this with a real puzzler. He says that the two differing cables sent from the CIA about Oswald in Mexico – one describing the real Oswald, one describing the famous Mystery Man photo – were likely the result of a mistake. (ibid) He then writes, under a picture of the Mystery Man photo, that some people claim “he was an agent of the eventual assassins, sent to impersonate Oswald.” Where did Sabato get that piece of information? No one I know of has said such a thing. But right after this, Sabato writes that “others say” he was the Russian Yuri Moskalev. Its more than “others say” Larry. That particular piece of information is in the 400 page, thoroughly documented Lopez Report.
Which it does not appear that Sabato has read. For if he had read it, he would have known that the picture of Moskalev should have never been sent in the first place. When investigators Ed Lopez and Dan Hardway interviewed Mexico City CIA officer Anne Goodpasture, the woman who originally sent the picture, she said she sent it because it was the only photo the CIA station had of a non-Latin male entering the Soviet compound on October 1st, the day the CIA says Oswald made a call there. That turned out to be a lie. Because when Lopez and Hardway went through the raw data, they discovered the photo of Moskalev was not taken on October 1st, but on October 2nd. (Lopez Report, p. 139) This makes what Goodpasture did even more suspect. Because if the photo had been taken on October 1st, it could have been a mistake, since Oswald was still allegedly in Mexico City. But that standard did not apply for the next day. Because Oswald was supposed to have left that morning. In other words, why was Goodpasture even looking for photos of Oswald taken that day?
Goodpasture then tried her to conceal her faux pas. She attributed her error about the dates to a misreading of the log sheets. But Lopez and Hardway then found the log sheets. On those sheets, the individual days are marked off in columns separated by red percentage marks! (Lopez Report, p. 140) Because of this fact, Lopez and Hardway found Goodpasture’s excuse about a mistake in days “implausible”. And they found it highly unlikely that she would not know about this error for 13 years. That is until the House Select Committee on Assassinations was formed in 1976. In fact, Goodpasture was lying again. The two dogged investigators found a CIA cable to Mexico City dated 11/23/63. It said that the photo Goodpasture had sent to them was not of Oswald. The cable then requested a recheck of the photos. (Lopez Report, p. 141) When they did the recheck it was discovered that the Agency had other photos of Moskalev taken after October 2. And, in all likelihood, they knew who he was back in October. (Lopez Report, p. 179) In fact, Lopez and Hardway concluded that Goodpasture knew the picture was not Oswald by October 11th. (ibid, p. 159) In other words, when one familiarizes oneself with the primary documents, the possibility that the Mystery man photo was sent in error is all but eliminated.
But there is more in this regard that makes the whole Goodpasture/Mystery Man discussion even more malignant. From his footnotes, it does not appear that Sabato interviewed Lopez or Hardway. If he had interviewed them he would have learned something which he probably would not have put in his book. The two had prepared an indictment of Goodpasture for the Justice Department over her multiple perjuries. In other words, Goodpasture was going to be indicted for lying about Oswald and Mexico City in a murder case. (Author’s interview with Dan Hardway, 10/17/2013) But beyond that, the HSCA had prepared two perjury indictments for Goodpasture’s working colleague David Phillips also. And they were on separate counts. When people lie continually, and they risk being indicted by the Justice Department, it’s usually not because they were in error. Its because they were trying to cover something up. The question then becomes: Why were they covering up?
If Sabato is not adequate with New Orleans or Mexico City, what can one say about his description of Kennedy’s autopsy. He says, “…the autopsy performed at Bethesda Naval Medical Center … was inadequate in some ways.” (Sabato p. 212) Inadequate? Some, like the HSCA’s Dr. Michael Baden, have called it the exemplar for how not to do an autopsy. For example, neither bullet path in Kennedy was dissected. Neither the bullet that entered his back nor the one that entered his skull. Sabato chalks this up to time limitations. (ibid) This is ridiculous since the body was in front of the pathologists for three hours that night. And the supplementary examination of Kennedy’s brain was done on a different day. Further, Sabato tries to imply that the autopsy doctors – Jim Humes, Thornton Boswell, and Pierre Finck – later agreed with the HSCA about the placement of the head wound in the cowlick area. (Sabato, pgs. 214-15) This is simply false. Humes, and Humes alone, agreed with this at his testimony before the public hearings of the HSCA. But two years later, he went back to his original testimony, that the bullet entered at the base of the skull. The other two doctors have never wavered on this point. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 132)
Towards the end of his discussion of the evidence, Sabato begins to side with the official story, all the way down the line. He even tries to explain away the fact that there was no copper found on the curb where a bullet ricocheted and hit bystander Jim Tague. (Sabato,pgs. 221, 508) Yet to anyone who has seen the copper coated, Western Cartridge Company bullets supplied for the Mannlicher Carcano rifle attributed to Oswald, this seems simply impossible.
Chapter 12 culminates Sabato’s six-chapter discussion of the evidence in the JFK case. Predictably, he comes down on the side of the official story. He writes, “There is no reasonable doubt that at least one of John F. Kennedy’s assassins was Lee Harvey Oswald. It may well be that Oswald was the only killer in Dealey Plaza…” (Sabato, p. 248) What he does now is list some of the most questionable and mildewed evidence possible to support that thesis. For instance, he writes that the Mannlicher Carcano was Oswald’s rifle. As several authors have noted, that is no longer a categorical fact. The rifle the Warren Commission says Oswald ordered is not the same rifle the Commission placed into evidence. The Warren Commission had to have known this, but they papered it over. (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pgs. 57-63) Sabato also says that “…the weight of the evidence is overwhelming that Oswald was there in the window and fired the bullets.” Actually, the weight of the evidence says Oswald was not in that window. If he had been, then he would have had to have run down the stairs after the shooting. Depository workers Vickie Adams and Sandra Styles would have seen or heard him. They did not. Again, the Commission had to have known this. And again, they papered it over. (ibid, pgs. 91-95) The Commission’s star witness to place Oswald on the sixth floor, Howard Brennan, is so bad that not only do people question his identification, today people even wonder if he ever actually identified Oswald at a lineup. (ibid, p. 207)
Finally, there is Sabato’s bought and paid for attempt to denigrate the acoustics evidence produced by the HSCA, which indicated more than one assassin, and therefore a conspiracy. Sonalysts is a sound engineering company which does much work for both the media and the government. Suffice it to say, since the HSCA’s verdict of conspiracy was issued in 1979 based on the acoustical record of the Dallas Police motorcycle dictabelt, many government-associated bodies have spent countless hours trying to discredit it. I have no strong feelings about this aspect of the case, since in my view, one can prove conspiracy in the JFK case many other ways. But for Sabato to say that not only were the two teams of professionals that the HSCA employed for this study wrong, but they were amateurish to the point that somehow they did not even know where the recording motorcycle was or was not, or if it was even in Dealey Plaza at the time, well that is a bit wild. But it fits with the book’s agenda.
I don’t consider myself an authority on this aspect of the case. Don Thomas is. I cannot do better in discounting this part of the book than he has already done. I therefore gladly recommend the reader to read his essay on Sabato’s irresponsibility with this evidence.
The last part of the book, Chapters 13 through 20, deals with the shadow cast over later presidents by comparisons with the Kennedys. Although there are some interesting observations in this section, like how Ronald Reagan tried to give himself cover for his supply side tax cut by invoking Kennedy’s name, its really rather unsatisfactory. And that is because, throughout, the very unsteady hand of Larry Sabato is drawing comparisons with his misguided historical compass.
One of the most bizarre statements in this part of the book is when the author says that, since LBJ followed Kennedy, we must give both men credit for not just the civil rights legislation passed in 1964 and 1965, but also for the expansion of the Vietnam War. (Sabato, p. 426) I had to read that statement twice to see if I had misinterpreted it. Unfortunately, I didn’t. I actually think Sabato means it. Which is a bit scary. Because, with the civil rights issue, Johnson was continuing something Kennedy had advocated since, at least, 1957. And, in fact, JFK had largely paved the way for Johnson to come in and sign the 1964 act.
The case with Vietnam is not at all the same. Johnson actually broke with Kennedy’s withdrawal policy, which had been in preparation since 1962. And which Kennedy had explicitly primed through McNamara at the Sec/Def meeting in Hawaii, and then signed into law with NSAM 263. And, in fact, if one consults the latest scholarly books on the subject, e.g. James Blight’s Virtual JFK, one will see documentary evidence that says Johnson knowingly and deliberately reversed Kennedy’s policy. Contrary to what Sabato writes, LBJ thoroughly understood that he was breaking with Kennedy’s withdrawal policy. (Sabato, p. 281) But he did it anyway. Further, he bullied McNamara into now being his point man on an escalation policy. At the same time that he ridiculed Kennedy’s withdrawal plan to the secretary! (Blight, pgs. 304-310) Why should Sabato ask us to give Kennedy equal credit for a policy of his that Johnson had now reversed?
But beyond that, there was a precedent for this in the record. In 1961, President Kennedy sent Vice-President Johnson to Saigon to meet with South Vietnam’s leader, Ngo Dinh Diem. Even at this early date, Johnson was in consultations with the Pentagon and being advised the USA had to escalate the war. When he met with Diem, with one of the generals he had talked to previously in the room, he told him he probably needed American combat troops to win the war. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, p. 72) This was not in line with Kennedy’s policy. In 1961, JFK turned down no less than nine requests to send combat troops to Vietnam. (Gordon Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, pgs. 53-66) And we know what happened afterwards. In less than three months, Johnson signed NSAM 288. These were plans for a massive air war over Vietnam. In other words, something Kennedy never even contemplated in three years, Johnson had signed off on in three months. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 369) No surprise, NSAM 288 is not even mentioned by Sabato.
Sabato goes even further in this regard. He makes the argument, similar to one in David Halberstam’s obsolete book The Best and the Brightest, that somehow there was a consensus within America for Johnson to escalate the war. That somehow, this was pre-ordained and that the Vietnam War was part of some kind of inevitable, tragic arc. As Fredrik Logevall demonstrated in his book, Choosing War, this is simply not the case. Johnson could have gotten out in 1964. In fact, LBJ was encouraged by some powerful and important people, like Walter Lippman, to do just that. He ignored that advice. (Blight, p. 240) As Logevall demonstrates in detail, from almost the week he became president, to the spring of 1965, Johnson essentially planned for America’s direct intervention in Vietnam. As Logevall further demonstrates, but which Sabato tries to imply, Robert Kennedy had nothing to do with any of it. (Sabato, p. 279)
Just how obsessed was Johnson with presenting a unified front in his escalation plan? When Vice-President Hubert Humphrey suggested a rather mild alternative – negotiating with North Vietnam – Johnson banned him from meetings and placed him under surveillance. (Blight, pgs. 188-89) I would like to hear Sabato say that Kennedy would have done the same.
Near the end, the Sabato can’t control himself. And now his true agenda becomes manifest. He actually says that President Obama is well to the left of President Kennedy. (Sabato, p. 339) Which is such a ludicrous statement that it could only be designed to get him on television. Since only the likes of Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather could listen to such nonsense without laughing. In my book Destiny Betrayed, and further in my speech at Cyril Wecht’s Passing the Torch conference in Pittsburgh, I demonstrated in depth and detail where Kennedy had consciously and deliberately altered the Eisenhower/Dulles foreign policy. That previous policy was based on a globalist view of American imperialism, especially in the Third World. Kennedy’s overall view of this matter was different. Kennedy was much more of a nationalist who was willing to accept non-aligned countries e.g. Indonesia, Laos, Congo, Egypt, Brazil. Therefore, once he took office, there was a clear demarcation and overturning of previous policy. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, pgs. 28-33) This had been in the making for years, since Kennedy’s foreign policy ideas can be traced back to his meeting with State Department official Edmund Gullion in Saigon in 1951. (ibid, p. 21)
The problem that many people have with Obama is that there has been no real reversal in foreign policy from his horrendous predecessor. Or if there has, it has been rather minimal. On the domestic side, because he took office in time of economic emergency, Obama had an opportunity to actually launch a Second New Deal. To put it mildly, he did not. That he was not going to do so was pretty much a given once one saw who he was placing into positions of power on his economics team e.g. Lawrence Summers. Kennedy’s chief economic adviser, Walter Heller, was a Keynesian. I doubt very much that Heller would have been satisfied with what Summers and Tim Geithner proposed to get the USA out of the greatest economic debacle since 1929. In fact, their anemic proposals are a large reason we are still mired in what Paul Krugman has called The Great Recession. Recall, Kennedy thought the Eisenhower recession was unacceptable. In fact, one can argue that the Obama/Geithner/Summers plan essentially preserved the nutty supply-side theories Ronald Reagan, which were adapted from Milton Friedman. Friedman was a man who Heller used to make fun of. And it was Friedman’s ideas, as implemented by Reagan, that caused the great and permanent transfer of wealth from the middle class to the upper classes in America.
So when Sabato ends his book by saying there really was no Kennedy legacy, this tells us more about him than it tells us about Kennedy. If there was no lasting legacy, it was because that legacy was crushed. This was begun by Johnson’s reversal of Kennedy’s foreign policy in several places, like Indonesia and Congo. Another place would be Kennedy’s back channel with Fidel Castro. Sabato doesn’t mention these, so he can act as if they did not exist. Secondly, Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War began the economic stagflation which afflicted the economy for well over a decade. In fact, it was the wrenching of that stagflation out of the economy by Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker under President Carter that contributed to the coming of Ronald Reagan.
The other factor that brought on Reagan was Carter’s coziness with the Shah of Iran. Once Carter appointed Zbigniew Brzezinski as his National Security Advisor, this automatically brought Carter closer to David Rockefeller. Rockefeller was a friend of the Shah’s since his bank housed much of Iran’s money. As Donald Gibson has pointed out, Kennedy was opposed to the globalist designs of David Rockefeller. (Battling Wall Street, pgs. 73-74) And as James Bill notes in his book The Eagle and the Lion, the Kennedy brothers were much opposed to the Shah’s regime. Therefore, because of the Carter/Brzezinski/Rockefeller axis, once the Shah was overthrown, and the fundamentalist Islamic forces took power, America became their target. This was something which Kennedy warned about as far back as his great Algeria speech in 1957. All of this crucial data is quite naturally ignored by Sabato and his team of 31. But you can read about it here.
Except for where he notes some of the problems with the JFK assassination’s evidentiary record, this book is pretty much not just without distinction, but so agenda driven as to be misleading. On the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s murder, we needed a lot better. As Mike Swanson notes, Sabato got his MSM appearances. But the rest of us needed a book that told us much more about John Kennedy, and much less about Larry Sabato.
Has anyone ever been more conscious, from birth to death, of his coming murder? Malcolm X saw his own violent death in advance just as clearly as his mother Louise Little saw the imminence of his father’s death, on that afternoon in 1931 when her husband Earl left their house and began walking up the road toward East Lansing, Michigan.
“If I take the kind of things in which I believe, then add to that the kind of temperament that I have, plus the one hundred percent dedication I have to whatever I believe in … These ingredients would make it just about impossible for me to die of old age.”
“It was then,” Malcolm says in his autobiography, “that my mother had this vision. She had always been a strange woman in this sense, and had always had a strong intuition of things about to happen. And most of her children are the same way, I think. When something is about to happen, I can feel something, sense something.”1
His mother rushed out on the porch screaming. She ran across the yard into the road shouting, “Early! Early!” Earl turned around. He saw her, waved, and kept on going.
That night Malcolm awakened to the sound of his mother’s screaming again. The police were in the living room. They took his mother to the hospital, where his father had already bled to death. His body had been almost cut in two by a streetcar. Earl Little had been an organizer for Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association, the largest black nationalist movement in American history. Malcolm was told by blacks in Lansing that his father had been attacked by the white racist Black Legion. They put his body on the tracks for a streetcar to run over.
Malcolm believed that four of his father’s six brothers were also killed by white men. Thus the pattern of his own life seemed clear. “It has always been my belief,” he told his co-author Alex Haley, “that I, too, will die by violence. I have done all that I can to be prepared.”2 Malcolm prepared for death by living the truth so deeply that it hastened death. This is the theme of Malcolm X’s autobiography. “To come right down to it,” Malcolm said to Alex Haley, “if I take the kind of things in which I believe, then add to that the kind of temperament that I have, plus the one hundred percent dedication I have to whatever I believe in … These ingredients would make it just about impossible for me to die of old age.”3
As the story neared its end, with Malcolm more and more totally surrounded by forces that wanted him dead, he no longer saw himself as among the living. “Each day I live as if I am already dead … I do not expect to live long enough to read this book in its finished form.”4 And he was right: he died in Harlem on the same day he had originally intended to visit Alex Haley in upstate New York to read the final manuscript.
The assassination of Malcolm X on February 21, 1965, at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City was carried out through the collaboration of three circles of power: the Nation of Islam (NOI), the New York Police Department (NYPD), and U.S. intelligence agencies. Malcolm was, as he knew, surrounded at the end by all three of these circles. In terms of their visibility to him and their relationship to one another, the circles were concentric. The Nation of Islam was the nearest ring around Malcolm, the less visible NYPD was next, and the FBI and CIA were in the outermost shadows. The involvement of these three power circles in Malcolm’s murder becomes apparent if we trace his pilgrimage of truth through his interactions with all three of them.
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| Malcolm X and Alex Haley |
In writing this essay, I have been guided especially by the works of five authors. The first three are Karl Evanzz, Zak Kondo, and Louis Lomax. Washington Post online editor Karl Evanzz is the author of The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X5 and The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad.6 Evanzz’s two books complement each other brilliantly in presenting a full picture of Malcolm’s assassination, the first emphasizing the U.S. government’s responsibility and the second, that of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. Zak A. Kondo, a professor at Bowie State College, does it all in one book, Conspiracys: Unravelling the Assassination of Malcolm X,7 which follows an unusual (though strangely accurate) title with a complex analysis of the three murderous circles: NOI, NYPD, and U.S. spy agencies. His self-published, out-of-print book that is almost impossible to find has 1266 endnotes, all of which deserve to be read. Then there is Louis Lomax’s To Kill a Black Man,8 first published in 1968, two years before Lomax’s own death in a car accident. As both a faithful friend to Malcolm and a writer wired to what was happening, Lomax already pointed to a solution of Malcolm’s assassination.9 I said I have five guides. The last two are Malcolm X and the man who lived to tell his tale, Alex Haley.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X is the transforming work of both. Haley in his epilogue hints at what Malcolm in his last days realized and was on the verge of shouting—that it was the government, not Elijah Muhammad, and Malcolm’s African connection, not his NOI rejection, that were the primary agent and motivation behind the plot. Malcolm is the ultimate guide to understanding his own murder.
In a memorandum, written four years after Malcolm’s death, the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Chicago office stated that:
Over the years, considerable thought has been given and action taken with Bureau’s approval, relating to methods through which the NOI, could be discredited in the eyes of the general black populace. … Or through which factionalism among the leadership could be created … Factional disputes have been developed—the most notable being MALCOLM X LITTLE.10
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| Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad |
The FBI developed the factional dispute that led to Malcolm’s death by first placing at least one of its people high within the Chicago headquarters of the Nation of Islam. Its infiltrator then worked to widen a division between Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X. To the FBI’s alarm, this process was inadvertently described, and the FBI man identified, in the 1964 book When The Word Is Given, written by Louis Lomax.
In the paragraph that gave away the FBI’s game, Lomax began by observing that Elijah Muhammad had moved from Chicago to Phoenix, Arizona, for the sake of his health. Lomax then described a significant shift of power. Elijah he said had delegated to his Chicago office not only the NOI’s finances and administration, but also “the responsibility for turning out the movement’s publications and over-all statements,” thus taking away from Malcolm X his critical control over the NOI’s flow of information.
“at one time carried some of these responsibilities, particularly the publishing of the Muslim newspaper..,. And many observers thought they saw an intra-organizational fight when these responsibilities were taken from him and given to Chicago.11
The thing that dismayed the FBI most was the paragraph’s final sentence, which disclosed a hidden factor in this abrupt transfer of power away from Malcolm. The sentence stated that “this decision by Muhammad was made possible because John X, a former FBI agent and perhaps the best administrative brain in the movement, was shifted from New York to Chicago.12
Lomax’s sentence about “John X, a former FBI agent” set off alarm bells in FBI counterintelligence, especially in the office of William C. Sullivan. Assistant FBI Director Sullivan was in charge of the illegal Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) designed to develop a “factional dispute” between Elijah and Malcolm. Sullivan was a high-level commander of covert action. Among his projects was an all-out FBI campaign “aimed at neutralizing [Dr. Martin Luther] King as an effective Negro leader,” as Sullivan put it in a December 1963 memorandum.13
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| COINTELPRO chief William C. Sullivan |
On March 20, 1964, COINTELPRO chief Sullivan was alerted by an “airtel” from the FBI’s Seattle field office to the objectionable passage in When The Word Is Given.14 The hardcover edition of the book had been published in late 1963, only a few months before what Sullivan must have regarded as a COINTELPRO success story, Malcolm’s March 8, 1964 announcement of his split with Elijah Muhammad. The problem was that to a discerning reader of both the Lomax paragraph and the news of the split, the FBI could be recognized as a key disruptive factor.
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| John X Ali Simmons announcing Malcolm X suspension from the Nation of Islam |
An FBI official recommended in a memorandum to Sullivan that “the New York Office should be instructed to contact Lomax to advise him concerning the inaccurate statement contained in this book regarding [John X Ali] Simmons. … And that he be instructed to have this statement removed from any future printings of the book.”15 FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover added his personal “OK” to this recornmendation.16 Lomax, however, ignored the FBI’s pressure as well as John Ali’s anger at his having made the statement. He never retracted it. In his later book, To Kill a Black Man, he repeated it, and said that John Ali knew it was true.17 In the six years leading to his death, Lomax never clarified what he meant by the term “former FBI agent.” He may have been giving Ali the benefit of a doubt as to his having severed his FBI connection by the time Lomax mentioned it in 1964. In any case, the FBI had other informants in the Nation of Islam to take his place.
Wallace Muhammad, Elijah Muhammad’s independent-minded son, also believed that FBI informants were manipulating NOI headquarters at the time Malcolm and Elijah became antagonists:
The FBI had key persons in the national staff, at least one or two maybe. They were preparing for the death of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad [in terms of determining his successor]. I believe that the members of the Nation of Islam were influenced to do the things that they were doing not just by the national staff and my father but also by the intelligence department.18
Wallace Muhammad was in a position to know at first hand the FBI’s process of working with NOI informants. The FBI considered him one of them. Karl Evanzz, in researching his biography of Elijah Muhammad entitled The Messenger, discovered from FBI documents that in addition to John Ali, at least three other people were regarded by FBI agents as “reliable sources” close to Muhammad. The first man was Abdul Basit Naeem, a Pakistani journalist who served as an NOI publicist. Then there is Hassan Sharrieff, Elijah Muhammad’s grandson and Wallace Muhammad. Evanzz concludes that the FBI thought “Wallace and Hassan fit the bill because they had provided the Bureau with information it considered crucial to inciting violence between Muhammad’s camp and Malcolm X.”19 Wallace’s and Hassan’s reasons for talking with the FBI seem to have been simply to seek protection from members of their own family, who threatened to kill them for going against Elijah. The FBI then recycled their information for its own use in plotting against Malcolm and Elijah.
“I believe that the members of the Nation of Islam were influenced to do the things that they were doing not just by the national staff and my father but also by the intelligence department.” ~Wallace Muhammad
It was Louis Lomax’s revelation of the FBI’s covert process within the NOI that so concerned the Bureau. Lomax’s statement had given his readers a glimpse into a critical part of the FBI’s COINTELPRO strategy to divide and destroy the Nation of Islam, thereby silencing as well its most powerful voice, Malcolm X.
FBI documents show that the Bureau had been monitoring Malcolm X as far back as 1950, when he was still in prison.20 The Bureau began to focus special attention on Malcolm in the late ’50s, when it realized he had become Elijah Muhammad’s intermediary to foreign revolutionaries. From Malcolm’s Harlem base of operations as the minister of the NOI’s Temple Number Seven, he was meeting regularly at the United Nations with Third World diplomats. In 1957 Malcolm met in Harlem with visiting Indonesian President Achmed Sukarno, whom the CIA had targeted for removal from power. Sukarno was extremely impressed by Malcolm.21 As early as eight years before Malcolm’s death, the FBI and CIA were watching the subversive international connections Malcolm was making.
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| Abdul Basit Naeem |
In 1957 when Malcolm X was becoming the NOI’s diplomat to Third World leaders, Abdul Basit Naeem was developing into Elijah Muhammad’s public relations man in the same direction.22 Naeem was a Pakistani journalist living at the time in Brooklyn. His first project with Elijah was a 1957 booklet that combined international Islamic affairs with coverage of the Nation of Islam.23 Evanzz discovered that Abdul Basit Naeem became extremely cooperative. Not only was he cooperative with the FBI but also with the New York Police Department’s intelligence unit, “BOSSI” (the acronym for Bureau of Special Service and Investigation).24 BOSSI would later succeed in planting one of its cover operatives in Malcolm’s own security team. The FBI and BOSSI would prove to be linking agencies in the chain of events leading up to Malcolm’s assassination.
At this time Malcolm had also become the apparent successor to Elijah Muhammad, who then loved and respected his greatest disciple more than he did his own sons. Accordingly, the FBI’s Chicago field office, which was monitoring all of Elijah’s communications, told J. Edgar Hoover in January 1958 that Malcolm had become Elijah’s heir apparent.25 Evanzz has described the impact of this revelation on the FBI’s COINTELPRO section:
The secret to disabling the [NOI] movement, therefore, lay in neutralizing Malcolm X.26
Evanzz suggests the FBI began its neutralizing of Malcolm in 1957 by utilizing a police force with which it worked closely on counterintelligence, the New York Police Department.
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| Malcolm in NYC (1957) “No man should have that much power” |
The NYPD was already in conflict with Malcolm. In April 1957 in Harlem, white policemen brutally beat a Black Muslim, Johnson X Hinton, who had dared question their beating another man. The police arrested the badly injured Hinton and took him to the 28th Precinct Station on 123rd Street. When the station was confronted by a menacing but disciplined crowd, Malcolm X demanded on their behalf that Hinton be hospitalized. The police finally agreed, and were shocked by Malcolm’s dispersal of the 2,600 people with a simple wave of his hand. They concluded with alarm that he had the power to start as well as stop a riot. The city and police also had to pay Hinton $70,000 as a result of an NOI lawsuit.27 A police inspector who witnessed Malcolm’s dispersal of the crowd said, “No man should have that much power.”28
On May 24, 1958, four months after Hoover was told that Malcolm was Elijah’s successor, two NYPD detectives and a federal postal inspector invaded the Queens apartment house in which Malcolm and his wife, Betty Shabazz, lived in one of the three apartments. They shared the house with two other NOI couples, including John X Ali and his wife, Minnie Ali. In 1958, John Ali was not only the secretary of Malcolm’s Mosque Number Seven but also his top advisor, his close friend, and his housemate.29
Brandishing a warrant for a postal fraud suspect who did not live there, the detectives barged into the house and ran directly to Malcolm’s office on the second floor. They fired several shots into it. Fortunately Malcolm was away from the house, but the bullets narrowly missed the terrified women and children in the next room. One detective arrested Betty Shabazz, who was pregnant, and Minnie Ali. He threatened to throw the women down the stairs if they didn’t move faster. The detectives, on the first floor, were confronted and beaten by a crowd of angry neighbors. Police reinforcements arrested six people, including Betty Shabazz and Minnie Ali, who were charged with assaulting the two detectives.30
In response to the attack, an enraged Malcolm X employed a brilliant media strategy against the NYPD that he would develop later against the U.S. government. To expose this case of New York police brutality against blacks, he drew on the support of his new friends at the United Nations. Malcolm wrote an open letter to New York City Mayor Robert Wagner in which he promised to shame the city unless it redressed the grievance:
Outraged Muslims of the African Asian World join us in calling for an immediate investigation by your office into the insane conduct of irresponsible white police officers … Representatives of Afro-Asian nations and their press attachés have been besieging the Muslims for more details of the case.31
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| Betty Shabazz |
In their March 1959 trial that lasted two weeks, the longest assault trial in the city’s history, Betty Shabazz, Minnie Ali, and the other defendants were all found not guilty by a Queens jury. They filed a $24 million suit that was settled out of court.32
In a first effort to kill or intimidate Malcolm X, the New York Police Department (and perhaps the FBI as instigator) had failed. As in the beating of Hinton, the NYPD was once again discredited by Malcolm. Both the FBI and the city police had come to regard Malcolm increasingly as their enemy. It may also have been through the pressures of this ordeal that the FBI succeeded in establishing its covert relationship with John Ali. At the time Malcolm was unaware of any such development. To Elijah Muhammad he recommended his friend John Ali for the next position he would hold as national secretary in Chicago of the Nation of Islam.
By 1963 conflicts between Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X were becoming obvious. When Louis Lomax had the courage to ask Malcolm about a news report of a minor difference between himself and Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm denied it:
It’s a lie. Any article that says there is a ‘minor’ difference between Mr. Muhammad and me is a lie. How could there be any difference between The Messenger and me? I am his slave, his servant and his son. He is the leader, the only spokesman for the Black Muslims.33
As Malcolm knew, the news report was understated. There were more differences than one between “leader” and “servant,” and they were becoming major. A root conflict was the question of activism. During the creative turmoil of the Civil Rights Movement, more and more black people were heard questioning the Nation of Islam’s inactivity. They would say, “Those Muslims talk tough, but they never do anything, unless somebody bothers Muslims.”34 Malcolm cited this common complaint to Alex Haley, because he agreed with it. He was pushing for the NOI to become more involved. Elijah Muhammad was committed, however, to a non-engagement policy.
While continuing his response to Lomax’s vexing question, Malcolm resorted to NOI theology to admit that there was in fact a difference:
But I will tell you this, the Messenger has seen God. He was with Allah and was given divine patience with the devil. He is willing to wait for Allah to deal with this devil. Well, sir, the rest of us Black Muslims have not seen God, we don’t have this gift of divine patience with the devil. The younger Black Muslims want to see some action.35
A second difference between Malcolm and Elijah arose from Malcolm’s increasing celebrity status. Although Malcolm always prefaced his public statements with “The Honorable Elijah Muhammad says,” it was Malcolm who more often proclaimed the word and gained the greater public attention. Elijah Muhammad coined a tricky formula to reassure Malcolm that this was what he wanted: “Because if you are well known, it will make me better known.”36 But in the same breath, the Messenger warned Malcolm that he would then become hated, “because usually people get jealous of public figures.”37 Malcolm later observed dryly that nothing Mr. Muhammad had ever said to him was more prophetic.38
Malcolm’s rise in prominence as NOI spokesperson, while Elijah Muhammad retreated to Arizona for his health, caused a backlash in Chicago headquarters. When John Ali was appointed to National Secretary, the office was managed by members of Elijah’s family. It was already becoming notorious for its wealth and corruption at the expense of NOI members. In the name of Elijah, John Ali and the Muhammad family hierarchy moved to consolidate their power over Malcolm’s. Herbert Muhammad, Elijah’s son, had become the publisher of the Nation’s newspaper, Muhammad Speaks. He ordered that as little as possible be printed about Malcolm and finally nothing at all.39 With Elijah’s consent from Arizona, Malcolm was being edged out of the picture.
The most serious conflict between the two men occurred when Malcolm became more conscious of rumors concerning his mentor’s affairs with young women. Malcolm conferred with a trusted friend, Wallace Muhammad. Wallace said the rumors were true. Malcolm spoke with three of Elijah Muhammad’s former secretaries. They said Elijah had fathered their children. They also said, as Malcolm related in the autobiography,
Elijah Muhammad had told them I was the best, the greatest minister he ever had, but that someday I would leave him, turn against him—so I was ‘dangerous.’ I learned from these former secretaries of Mr. Muhammad that while he was praising me to my face, he was tearing me apart behind my back.40
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| Wallace W.D. Muhammad with Malcolm X |
All these developments were being monitored closely by the FBI through its electronic surveillance and undercover informants. The Bureau’s COINTELPRO was also using covert action to destroy Elijah Muhammad in a way it would develop even further against Martin Luther King Jr. On May 22, 1960, Assistant FBI Director Cartha DeLoach approved the sending of a fake letter on Elijah’s infidelities to his wife, Clara Muhammad, and to NOI ministers.41 The rumors Malcolm heard were being spread by the FBI.
On July 31, 1962, COINTELPRO director William C. Sullivan approved another scheme whereby phony letters on Elijah’s philandering would be mailed to Clara Muhammad and “selected individuals.” He cautioned the Chicago Special Agent in Charge: “These letters should be mailed at staggered intervals using care to prevent any possibility of tracing the mailing back to the FBI.”42 While Malcolm X was investigating the secretaries’ charges against Elijah Muhammad, the FBI was trying to deepen his and the Messenger’s differences so as to finalize their split, assuming at the time that their divorce would weaken the power of both men.
“It doesn’t take hate to make a man firm in his convictions. There are many areas to which you wouldn’t give information and it wouldn’t be because of hate. It would be your intelligence and ideals.”
Malcolm struggled to remain loyal to the spiritual leader who had redeemed him from his own depths in prison, but it was only a matter of time before the two men would split over all these issues. The occasion for their break was John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Elijah Muhammad ordered his ministers to refrain from commenting on it. On December 1, 1963, after a speech Malcolm gave in New York City, he was asked his opinion on the President’s murder. He later described his response:
Without a second thought, I said what I honestly felt—that it was, as I saw it, a case of ‘the chickens coming home to roost.’ I said that the hate in white men had not stopped with the killing of defenseless black people, but that hate, allowed to spread unchecked, finally had struck down this country’s Chief of State. I said it was the same thing as had happened with Medgar Evers, with Patrice Lumumba, with Madame Nhu’s husband.43
On the day he saw the headlines on Malcolm’s remark, Elijah Muhammad told his chief minister he would have to silence him for the next 90 days to disassociate the Nation from his blunder. Malcolm said he would submit completely to the discipline. The FBI saw this period as its golden opportunity.
Two FBI agents visited Malcolm on February 4, 1964.44 Malcolm knew they were coming. He had a tape recorder hidden under the sofa in his living room, and recorded the conversation.
The agents admitted that the FBI had chosen that particular time to contact Malcolm because of his suspension by Elijah Muhammad. They hoped that bitterness on Malcolm’s part might move him to become an informant. Such bitterness was understandable, they said sympathetically. The agents even handed Malcolm a facile rationalization for cooperating in their undercover crime of undermining Elijah, while compromising him:
It would not be illogical for someone to have spent so many years doing something, then being suspended.45
Malcolm: No, it should make one stronger. It should make him realize that law applies to the law enforcer as well as those who are under the enforcement of the enforcer.46
After failing to get anywhere with Malcolm, one of the agents said, “You have the privilege [of not giving the FBI information]. That is very good. You are not alone. We talk to people every day who hate the Government or hate the FBI.” Then he added, with a stab at bribing Malcolm, “That is why they pay money, you know.”47
Malcolm ignored the bribe and went to the heart of the question: “That is not hate, it is incorrect to clarify that as hate. It doesn’t take hate to make a man firm in his convictions. There are many areas to which you wouldn’t give information and it wouldn’t be because of hate. It would be your intelligence and ideals.”48
Malcolm had learned that he was forbidden by Elijah Muhammad even to teach in his own Mosque Number Seven, and that the Nation had announced further that he would be reinstated “if he submits.” The impression was being given that he had rebelled.
Looking back at the announcement, he said to Haley, “I hadn’t hustled in the streets for nothing. I knew when I was being set up.”49 Malcolm realized the ground was being laid by NOI headquarters to keep him suspended indefinitely. A deeper realization came when one of his Mosque Seven officials began telling the men in the mosque that if they knew what Malcolm had done, they’d kill him themselves. “As any official in the Nation of Islam would instantly have known, any death-talk for me could have been approved of, if not actually initiated, by only one man.”50 Malcolm knew that Elijah Muhammad, the spiritual father whom he had revered and served for 12 years, had now sanctioned his murder.
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| Captain Joseph X Gravitts (to the left of Elijah Muhammad) |
Then came a first death plot. One of Malcolm’s own Mosque Seven officials, Captain Joseph X Gravitts, following higher orders, told an assistant to Malcolm to wire his car to explode when he started the engine. The man refused the assignment, told Malcolm of the plot, and saved his life.51 He also freed Malcolm from his attachment to the Nation of Islam. Malcolm was forced to recognize that the NOI’s hierarchy and structure, extending right down into his own mosque, was committed to killing him. He could already see a first ring of death encircling him, comprised of the organization he had developed to serve Elijah Muhammad. From that point on, Malcolm said, he “went few places without constant awareness that any number of my former brothers felt they would make heroes of themselves in the Nation of Islam if they killed me.”52
On March 8, 1964, with less than a year to live, Malcolm X announced his departure from the Nation of Islam. He said he was organizing a new movement because the NOI had “gone as far as it can.” He was “prepared to cooperate in local civil-rights actions in the South and elsewhere. “53 Malcolm also passed out copies of a telegram he had sent to Elijah Muhammad, in which he stated:
Despite what has been said by the press, I have never spoken one word of criticism to them about your family … 54
In spite of everything, Malcolm was trying not to split the NOI, and therefore muffled his criticisms of Elijah Muhammad.
Two days later, the Nation of Islam sent Malcolm a certified letter telling him and his family to move out of their seven-room house in East Elmhurst, Queens. The Elmhurst house had been home for Malcolm, Betty Shabazz, and their growing family (now with four daughters) since the early days of their marriage when Malcolm and Betty were in the house with John and Minnie Ali. One month after the certified letter, the secretary of Malcolm’s old Mosque Number Seven filed suit in a Queens civil court to have Malcolm and his family evicted. Malcolm would fight for the legal right to stay in the only home he had to pass on to his wife and children, especially since he might soon be killed by the same forces trying to take their house away.55
On March 12, Malcolm held a press conference in New York and said internal differences within the Nation had forced him out of it. He was now founding a new mosque in New York City, Muslim Mosque, Inc. With a conscious effort to avoid repeating the mistakes of Elijah Muhammad, he said in his “Declaration of Independence” that he was a firm believer in Islam but had no special credentials:
I do not pretend to be a divine man, but I do believe in divine guidance, divine power, and in the fulfillment of divine prophecy. I am not educated, nor am I an expert in any particular field—but I am sincere, and my sincerity is my credentials.56
He opened (wide) the door to working with other black leaders, with whom he had traded criticisms, most notably with Martin Luther King Jr. “As of this minute, I’ve forgotten everything bad that the other leaders have said about me, and I pray they can also forget the many bad things I’ve said about them.”57 He then immediately chased King away by saying black people should begin to form rifle clubs to defend their lives and property.
He concluded:
We should be peaceful, law-abiding—but the time has come for the American Negro to fight back in self-defense whenever and wherever he is being unjustly and unlawfully attacked. If the government thinks I am wrong for saying this, then let the government start doing its job.58
Malcolm was aware that the government might think it was its job to silence him.
Much more threatening to the government than Malcolm’s rifle clubs, which never got off the ground, was the visionary campaign he then initiated to bring U.S. violations of African-Americans’ rights before the court of world opinion in the United Nations. In his April 3, 1964, speech in Cleveland, “The Ballot or the Bullet,” Malcolm began to articulate his international vision:
We need to expand the civil-rights struggle to a higher level—to the level of human rights. Whenever you are in a civil-rights struggle, whether you know it or not, you are confining yourself to the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam … Civil rights comes within the domestic affairs of this country. All of our African brothers and our Asian brothers and our Latin-American brothers cannot open their mouths and interfere in the domestic affairs of the United States. … But the United Nations has what’s known as the charter of human rights, it has a committee that deals in human rights … When you expand the civil-rights struggle to the level of human rights, you can then take the case of the black man in this country before the nations in the UN. You can take it before the General Assembly. You can take Uncle Sam before a world court. But the only level you can do it on is the level of human rights.59
In the spring of 1964, Malcolm X had come up with a strategy to internationalize the Civil Rights Movement by re-defining it as a Human Rights Movement, then enlisting the support of African states. Malcolm would proclaim to the day of his death the nation-transcending word of human rights, not civil rights, for all African-Americans. He would also organize a series of African leaders to work together and make that word flesh in the General Assembly of the United Nations. In breaking his bonds to Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm had freed himself to unite African and African-American perspectives in an international coalition for change. For the rest of his life, he was on fire with energy to create that working partnership spanning two continents.
In breaking his bonds to Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm had freed himself to unite African and African-American perspectives in an international coalition for change.
The FBI began to realize it had made a major miscalculation. Its COINTELPRO that helped precipitate the divorce between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad had, it turned out, liberated Malcolm for a much larger mission than anything he could conceivably have accomplished under Elijah Muhammad. He was suddenly stepping onto an international stage in what could become an unwelcome scenario to the U.S. government. Nevertheless, the Chicago NOI connections that the Bureau had made so carefully in John Ali and other informants could still salvage the COINTELPRO goal of neutralizing Malcolm. Since Malcolm had “rebelled” against Elijah and Chicago, he could now, with Chicago’s help, be forced into silence forever.
The FBI had a second, growing concern. Despite Malcolm’s offputting talk of rifle clubs, his evolving strategy for an international ballot, not the bullet, was catching the attention of a potential ally whose power went far beyond that of Elijah Muhammad: Martin Luther King Jr.
Malcolm and Martin met for the first and only time in the nation’s capital on March 26, 1964. They had both been listening to the Senate’s debate on civil rights legislation. Afterwards they shook hands warmly, spoke together, and were interviewed. He grinned and said he was there to remind the white man of the alternative to Dr. King. King offered a militant alternative of his own, saying that if the Senate kept on talking and doing nothing, a “creative direct action program” would start. If the Civil Rights Act were not passed, he warned, “our nation is in for a dark night of social disruption.”60
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| Malcolm and Martin (March 26, 1964) |
Although Malcolm and Martin would continue to differ sharply on nonviolence and would never even see each other again in the 11 months Malcolm had left, there was clearly an engaging harmony between the two leaders standing side by side on the Capitol steps. Given Malcolm’s escalation of civil rights to human rights and King’s emphasis upon ever more disruptive, massive civil disobedience, their prophetic visions were becoming more compatible, even complementary. The FBI and CIA, studying the words and pictures of that D.C. encounter in their midst, could hardly have failed to recognize a threat to the status quo. If Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. were to join efforts, they could ignite an explosive force for change in the American system. The FBI and CIA had to face a question paralleling that of the New York police who had witnessed Malcolm’s crowd dispersal. Should any two men have that kind of power against the system?
On the same day Malcolm and Martin shook hands in Washington, the FBI’s NOI connections were proving to be an effective part of an action in Chicago to further isolate Malcolm, setting him up for his murder.
Philbert X Little, Malcolm’s brother, was Elijah Muhammad’s minister in Lansing, Michigan. The Messenger and his NOI managers ordered Philbert to report to Chicago, where they arranged a press conference for him on March 26 of 1964. John Ali then handed Philbert a prepared statement. Ali told Philbert to read it to the media. Philbert had never seen the text before. As he read it for the first time (aloud and in a monotone) he heard himself denouncing Malcolm in terms that threatened Malcolm’s converts from the Nation of Islam.
I see where the reckless efforts of my brother Malcolm will cause many of our unsuspecting people, who listen and follow him, unnecessary loss of blood and life.61 … the great mental illness which beset my mother whom I love and one of my brothers … may now have taken another victim … my brother Malcolm.62
Malcolm responded to the news of his brother’s apparent attack on him by saying,
We’ve been good friends all our lives. He has a job he needs; that’s why he said what he did … I know for a fact that they flew him in from Lansing, put a script in his hand and told him to read it.63
Philbert himself confirmed years later that “the purpose of making that statement was to fortify the Muslims. That’s why I was brought to Chicago. When I got ready to make my statement, John Ali put a paper in front of me and told me I should read that. So I read the statement that was very negative for my mother. And it was negative against Malcolm. I wouldn’t have read it over the air, you see, if I had looked at it. I asked John Ali about it and he says, ‘That’s just a statement that was prepared for you to read.’ He said, ‘I know the Messenger will be very pleased with the way you read it,’ and that was it.”64
The vision to which Malcolm X was converted by his experience at Mecca determined the way in which he would meet his death. He called that vision ‘brotherhood’.
Elijah Muhammad’s vengeance toward Malcolm was still being fueled by the FBI’s COINTELPRO. At the time of “Philbert’s statement,” the FBI sent Elijah one of its fake letters complaining about his relationships with his secretaries. The letter succeeded in making Elijah suspect Malcolm had written it. On April 4, 1964 an FBI electronic bug recorded Elijah telling one of his ministers, who had also received a copy of the letter, that the presumed writer Malcolm “is like Judas at the Last Supper.”65
In recognition that his 12 years proclaiming the word of Elijah Muhammad had left him poorly prepared for his new mosque’s ministry, Malcolm decided to re-discover Islam by making his pilgrimage to Mecca.
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| Malcolm at Mecca (1964) |
In a life of changes, Malcolm’s most fundamental change began at Mecca. At the conclusion of his pilgrimage, he was asked by other Muslims what it was about the Hajj that had most impressed him. He surprised them by saying nothing of the holy sites or the rituals but extolling instead the multi-racial community he had experienced.
“The brotherhood!” he said, “The people of all races, colors, from all over the world coming together as one! It has proved to me the power of the One God.”66
The vision to which Malcolm X was converted by his experience at Mecca determined the way in which he would meet his death. He called that vision “brotherhood.” Had he lived a while longer, he would have added “and sisterhood.” In his final months, Malcolm also began to change noticeably in his recognition of women’s rights and leadership roles. His conversion at Mecca was to a vision of human unity under one God. From that point on, his consciousness of one human family, in the sight of one God, sharpened his perceptions, deepened his courage, and opened his soul to whatever further changes Allah had in store for him. Consistent with all those changes, Malcolm’s experience of the truth of brotherhood radicalized still more his resistance to racism. His conversion to human unity was not to a phony blindness to the reality of prejudice, but on the contrary, to a greater understanding of its evil in God’s presence. He was even more determined to confront it truthfully. Concluding his answer to his fellow pilgrims on his Hajj, Malcolm returned to his lifelong focus on racism, set now in the context of the experience he had at Mecca of his total acceptance by pilgrims of all colors.
“To me,” he said, “the earth’s most explosive and pernicious evil is racism, the inability of God’s creatures to live as One, especially in the Western world.” 67
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| Malcolm & Kwame Nkrumah; with Prince Faisal |
Following his pilgrimage to Mecca, Malcolm met with two influential heads of state, Prince Faisal of Arabia and President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. They acknowledged Malcolm as a respected leader of black Americans, who now represented also a true Islam. Prince Faisal of oil-rich Arabia made Malcolm a guest of the state. Ghana’s anti-colonialist Kwame Nkrumah, a leader of newly independent African states, told his African-American visitor something Malcolm said he would never forget:
Brother, it is now or never the hour of the knife, the break with the past, the major operation.68
Nkrumah’s sense of the hour of the knife was right, but his hope that it would be a knife of freedom cutting through a history of oppression would go unfulfilled. Only nine months later, Malcolm would be murdered.
A year after that, Nkrumah, upon publishing his book Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, dedicated to “the Freedom Fighters of Africa, living and dead,” would be overthrown by a CIA-backed coup.69
“The case to be presented to the world organization … would compel the United States Government to face the same charges as South Africa and Rhodesia.”
Malcolm also visited Egypt, Lebanon, Nigeria, Liberia, Senegal, Morocco, and Algeria. Upon his return to the U.S. on May 21, 1964, the New York Times published an article on his trip that further alerted intelligence agencies to Malcolm’s quest for a UN case against the U.S. Malcolm told reporters he had “received pledges of support from some new African nations for charges of discrimination against the United States in the United Nations.”
“The case to be presented to the world organization,” he asserted, “would compel the United States Government to face the same charges as South Africa and Rhodesia.”70
While Malcolm was working abroad to put the U.S. on trial at the UN, the New York Police Department was infiltrating his new Muslim Mosque with its elite intelligence unit, the Bureau of Special Service and Investigation (BOSSI). To the cold warriors in the ’60s who knew enough beneath the surface to know at all about BOSSI, the NYPD’s undercover force was regarded as “the little FBI and the little CIA.” The accolade reflected the fact that the information gathered by BOSSI’s spies was passed on regularly to federal intelligence agencies.71
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| BOSSI operative Tony Ulasewicz |
The BOSSI men who ran the deep cover operation in Muslim Mosque were detectives Tony Ulasewicz and Teddy Theologes. Four years after Tony Ulasewicz’s undercover work on Malcolm X, “Tony U,” as he was known, would retire from the NYPD to go to work as President Richard Nixon’s private detective. He would then take part in a series of covert activities that would be brought to light in the Senate Watergate Hearings and memorialized in his own book, The President’s Private Eye,72 which is also a valuable resource on BOSSI. Both in his book and his life, Tony U moves with ease between the overlapping undercover worlds of the New York Police Department, federal intelligence agencies, and the White House. In the BOSSI chain of command, Tony U was a field commander. He had to keep his operators’ identities totally secret as he ran their surveillance and probes of various sixties organizations ranging from the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) to the American Nazi Party. Equally important, he had to keep his own behind-the-scenes identity completely separate from theirs, with his name never linked to the report of any agent of his. Otherwise he might be called to testify in court, opening up an operation, an event to be avoided at all costs.73 Tony U’s deep cover men were therefore, in the last analysis, on their own.
Teddy Theologes acted in the BOSSI command, in Tony U’s words, “as a cross between a drill sergeant and a priest.”74 Reflecting on his career decades later in an interview, Theologes said some of the BOSSI deep cover recruits “needed constant attention. I would have to sit down with them, and almost be a father, brother, psychiatrist, and doctor.75 From the standpoint of agents risking their lives who knew their superiors would never admit to knowing them, the need for such a relationship can be understood.
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| Gene Roberts |
On April 17, 1964, four days after Malcolm left New York on his pilgrimage to Mecca, Ulasewicz and Theologes sent their newly sworn-in, 25-year-old, black detective Gene Roberts on his undercover journey into the Muslim Mosque, Inc. Gene Roberts had just completed four years in the Navy. Roberts was interviewed by Tony Ulasewicz and Teddy Theologes when he passed the police exam. He was asked to become a deep cover agent in a militant organization under Malcolm X. Roberts had heard of Malcolm X but knew little about him. As a military man, he accepted the order to infiltrate Malcolm’s group without questioning it. On April 17, he was sworn in as a police officer and given his badge. A few hours later, Teddy Theologes took the badge away from him. He was on his own. Then his BOSSI superiors sent Roberts out on his mission in Harlem.76
Gene Roberts has described how he proceeded step by step into becoming one of Malcolm’s bodyguards:
Basically they said, go up to 125th Street—where Malcolm had his headquarters—and get involved. And that’s what I did. I ended up getting involved in a couple of riots. The main thing was I was there. I met members of his organization. They accepted me. My cover was I worked for a bank. I told them about my martial arts experience, so I became one of Malcolm’s security people. When he came back from Mecca and Africa, I went wherever he went, as long as it was in the city.77
Since he was supposedly a bank worker, Roberts followed a schedule of typing up his BOSSI reports, at his Bronx home during the day. He typed reports on what he had learned by being “Brother Gene” with Malcolm and his community during the night.78 As Roberts suspected and would later confirm, he was not the only BOSSI agent in the group, although he had gained the greatest access to Malcolm. When Ulasewicz and Theologes received his and other deep cover dispatches, they passed them up the line to BOSSI Supervisor Barney Mulligan. It was Lieutenant Mulligan’s responsibility to file all the undercover information (without ever identifying the informants) at BOSSI headquarters. While there, BOSSI’s secret fruit was shared generously with the FBI.
On May 23, 1964, Louis Lomax and Malcolm X took part in a friendly debate at the Chicago Civic Opera House. As Lomax began his opening speech and looked down from the stage, he was struck with fear. For there in the audience staring back up at him was John Ali, accompanied by a group of NOI men who were being deployed at strategic locations in the hall.79 Ali had become the nemesis of Lomax as well as Malcolm because of Lomax’s having written about Ali’s FBI connection. Malcolm’s, Ali’s, and Lomax’s lives were intertwined. When John Ali was Malcolm’s top advisor and housemate, he had arranged the first meeting between Malcolm and Lomax. The three men had then worked together on the first issues of the NOI newspaper. When Malcolm’s and Ali’s home was invaded by the New York police, Louis Lomax had written the most thorough story on it.80
In his Chicago speech, given only two days after his return from Mecca and Africa, Malcolm sounded open to white people as well as blacks, as impassioned as ever, and in the terms he used, even radically patriotic:
My pilgrimage to Mecca … served to convince me that perhaps American whites can be cured of the rampant racism which is consuming them and about to destroy this country. In the future, I intend to be careful not to sentence anyone who has not been proven guilty.
I am not a racist and do not subscribe to any of the tenets of racism. In all honesty and sincerity it can be stated that I wish nothing but freedom, justice and equality: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—for all people. My first concern is with the group of people to which I belong, the Afro-Americans, for we, more than any other people, are deprived of these inalienable rights.81
However, in his post-Mecca life, this radically open Malcolm X was once again a target, as he and Lomax could see when they looked down into the eyes of John Ali and his companions. At the debate’s conclusion, Malcolm and Lomax departed from the rear of the hall under a heavy Chicago police escort.82 It was one in a series of occasions when Malcolm would gladly accept the protection of a local police department that was genuinely concerned about his safety.
Also near the end of May 1964, the five men who would kill Malcolm X in the Audubon Ballroom nine months later came together for the first time. We know the story, thanks to the confession of the only one of the five who would ever go to jail for the crime, Talmadge Hayer. According to Hayer’s affidavit, sworn to in prison in 1978 to exonerate two wrongly convicted co-defendants,83 it all began when he was walking down the street one day in Paterson, New Jersey. A car pulled up beside him. Inside it were two men who, like Hayer, belonged to the Nation of Islam’s Mosque Number 25 in Newark—Benjamin Thomas and Leon Davis, known to Hayer as Brothers Ben and Lee. They asked Hayer to get in the car so they could talk. “Both of these men,” he said, “knew that I had a great love, respect, and admiration for the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.”84
While the three men drove around Paterson, Hayer learned from Thomas and Davis that “word was out that Malcolm X should be killed.” Hayer said in his confession he didn’t know who had passed that word on, but he thought Ben knew. He in fact had good grounds for thinking Ben knew, inasmuch as Benjamin Thomas was the assistant secretary of the Newark Mosque and knew well the NOI chain of command. Hayer also said it was Ben who had spoken first to Leon, before the two of them spoke with him. After hearing from them how Malcolm X was spewing blasphemies against Mr. Muhammad, he said what they wanted to hear, “It’s just bad, man, something’s got to be done,”85 and agreed to take part in the plot.
As Hayer told Malcolm biographer Peter Goldman in a prison interview,
I didn’t ask a whole lot of questions as to who’s giving us instructions and who’s telling us what, because it just wasn’t a thing like that, man. I thought that somebody was giving instructions: ‘Brothers, you got to move on this situation.’ But I felt we was in accord. We just knew what had to be done.86
Thomas, Davis, and Hayer soon got together with two more members of the Newark Mosque who also knew what had to be done, William X and Wilbur X. As male members of the Nation of Islam, all five men belonged to the Fruit of Islam (FOI), a paramilitary training unit.87 FOI training was meant ideally for self-defense. However, with its combination of discipline, obedience, and unquestioning loyalty to the Messenger, it had degenerated into an enforcement agency for the will of Elijah Muhammad and the NOI hierarchy. Malcolm X, with his certain knowledge that FOI teams like the five men in Newark were being organized to kill him, said sharply in a June 26, 1964, telegram to Elijah Muhammad:
Students of the Black Muslim Movement, know that no member of the Fruit of Islam will ever initiate an act of violence unless the order is first given by you. … No matter how much you stay in the background and stir others up to do your murderous dirty work, any bloodshed committed by Muslim against Muslim will compel the writers of history to declare you guilty not only of adultery and deceit, but also of Murder.88
In his affidavit, Talmadge Hayer said the five men from the Newark Mosque began meeting to decide how to carry out the killing. Sometimes, he said, they would just drive around in a car for hours talking about it.89 Since Malcolm was on the verge of making another even longer trip to Africa, they would have to bide their time. In the meantime, there were other killing teams who were united in the same purpose. Several would almost succeed. But in the end, it would be the five Newark plotters who would finally do what had to be done at the Audubon Ballroom.
It is a temptation to sentimentalize Malcolm, but Malcolm did not sentimentalize himself. He knew what he was capable of doing, what he had done, and what he had trained the Fruit of Islam to do. They were now prepared to do it, as he knew, to him.
On June 13, 1964, the NOI’s suit to force Malcolm and his family out of the East Elmhurst house began to be heard in Queens Civil Court. The courtroom was divided into two hostile camps, Malcolm’s supporters and the NOI contingent. At this point the police department clearly acknowledged in action the immediate danger to Malcolm’s life. It had 32 uniformed and plainclothes officers present, “surrounding him so impermeably,” as reporter Peter Goldman put it, “that he could barely be seen from the gallery.”90 Some of the press remained skeptical of the threat to Malcolm. He insisted to reporters that he knew the NOI men were capable of murder “because I taught them.”91
This statement that Malcolm repeated about his NOI past was apparently no exaggeration. Dr. Alauddin Shabazz, who was ordained by Malcolm as an NOI minister, told me in an interview: “Malcolm had had people killed. When Malcolm found a guy in the nation who was an agent, Malcolm didn’t hesitate to do something to him. I have seen Malcolm take a hammer and knock out the bottom bridges of a guy’s teeth.
[An undercover police agent] was once caught setting up an [electronic] bug in the wall of the office. Malcolm was questioning him. And Malcolm had a funny way of questioning people. He would stand with his back to you, like he didn’t want to look at your disgusting face—if he thought you were doing something to aid BOSSI or the agencies. And this guy had been caught. Malcolm turned around. He had a hammer on the desk. He turned around with the hammer and hit him in the face. I was there. It was in the early ’60s.92
It is a temptation to sentimentalize Malcolm, but Malcolm did not sentimentalize himself. He knew what he was capable of doing, what he had done, and what he had trained the Fruit of Islam to do. They were now prepared to do it, as he knew, to him.
The Queens eviction hearing was especially significant for what Malcolm chose to reveal during his June 16 testimony: “[T]hat the Honorable Elijah Muhammad had taken on nine wives.”93 At about the same time as Malcolm made the issue public, one of Elijah Muhammad’s sons made a statement that was in effect a warrant for Malcolm’s death. It was prompted by a phone call from someone claiming to be “Malcolm.” This person told the NOI that Elijah Muhammad would be killed while giving his speech the following day.94 In response to this provocation (in conflict with the real Malcolm’s pleas to his followers to avoid a confrontation), Elijah Muhammad Jr. told a meeting of the Fruit of Islam at a New York armory:
That house is ours, and the nigger don’t want to give it up. Well, all you have to do is go out there and clap on the walls until the walls come tumbling down, and then cut the nigger’s tongue out and put it in an envelope and send it to me, and I’ll stamp it approved and give it to the Messenger.95
The judge would rule three months later that the house belonged to the Nation of Islam, and that Malcolm and his family had to leave. Malcolm appealed, which delayed the eviction until the final week of his life.
On June 27, 1964, the FBI wiretapped a phone call in which Malcolm X asked an unidentified woman (an office worker … Betty Shabazz?) if Martin Luther King’s attorney Clarence Jones had called him.96 The woman said, yes, she had a message from Jones asking Malcolm to call him back. The reason Jones wanted to speak with Malcolm, she said, was “that Rev. King would like to meet as soon as possible on the idea of getting a human rights declaration.” She then emphasized to Malcolm, “He is quite interested.”97
However, in the 12 short days left before Malcolm departed again for Africa, he and King were not able to arrange a meeting to explore their mutual interest in a human rights declaration. Nor would they ever manage to see each other again in the three months remaining in Malcolm’s life once he returned to the U.S., though they would just miss doing so in Selma, Alabama. Nevertheless, through its electronic surveillance of both men, the FBI knew that Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. were hoping to connect on the human rights issue that could put the U.S. on trial in the United Nations.
On June 28, 1964, Malcolm announced his formation of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), with its headquarters at the Theresa Hotel in Harlem. Whereas the Muslim Mosque, Inc. was faith-oriented, the OAAU would be politically oriented.98 The OAAU would be patterned after the letter and spirit of the Organization of African Unity established by African heads of state the year before at their meeting in Ethiopia. The OAAU’s founding statement emphasized that “the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Constitution of the U.S.A. and the Bill of Rights are the principles in which we believe.”99 The intended outreach of Malcolm’s organization was transcontinental, including “all people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere, as well as our brothers and sisters on the African continent.”100 Yet the organizing would also be local and civic:
The Organization of Afro-American Unity will organize the Afro-American community block by block to make the community aware of its power and potential; we will start immediately a voter registration drive to make every unregistered voter in the Afro-American community an independent voter.101
Thanks to Mecca, Malcolm had broken free from his old allegiance to Elijah Muhammad’s idea of a separate black state. He was now organizing an international campaign for Afro-American liberation based on the principles of the U.S. Constitution and the UN Charter. He had become a faith-based organizer on an international scale. His OAAU founding statement, while consistent with the Civil Rights Movement, took the struggle into a new arena, the United Nations. Malcolm would now seek further support for his UN human rights campaign by a July-November barnstorming trip through Africa.
In addition to NYPD and FBI surveillance, the Central Intelligence Agency was also following Malcolm. The Agency knew Malcolm planned to appeal to African leaders at the second conference of the Organization of African Unity (OAU).
At 11:37 p.m., on July 3, 1964, Malcolm phoned the New York Police Department to report that “two Black Muslims were waiting at his home to harm him. … But he sped off when they approached his car.”102 Malcolm knew the name of one of the two men, and gave it to the police.103
The NYPD refused to believe Malcolm. They passed on their official skepticism in a July 4 teletype to the FBI: “Police believed complaint on an attempt on Malcolm’s life was a publicity stunt by Malcolm.”104 By its phone tap, the FBI had heard Malcolm make his report at the same time the NYPD did. The Bureau summarized the event with its own judgment on Malcolm: “Information [on 7/4/64] that MALCOLM and his followers were attempting to make a big issue out of the reported attempt on Macolrn’s life in order to get the Negro people to support him.105
Thus began the official NYPD and FBI line that Malcolm was fabricating attempts on his life for the sake of publicity. This disclaimer would be made publicly by the NYPD in the week before Malcolm’s murder, in an effort to justify the withdrawal of police protection at the time of escalating threats on his life.
On July 9, Malcolm departed from New York on the African trip that would consume four and a half of the remaining seven and a half months of his life. It was to be the final, most ambitious project of his short life. As his plane lifted off from JFK Airport on its way to Cairo, Malcolm was happily unaware of what John Ali was saying that same night on a Chicago call-in radio program:
Malcolm X probably fears for his safety because he is the one who opposes the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. The Holy Koran, the book of the Muslims, says “seek out the hypocrites and wherever you find them, weed them out.” … There were people who hated Kennedy so much that they assassinated him—white people. And there were white people who loved him so much they would have killed for him. You will find the same thing true of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad … I predict that anyone who opposes the Honorable Elijah Muhammad puts their life in jeopardy … 106
“… after every one of my trips abroad, America’s rulers see me as being more and more dangerous. That’s why I feel in my bones the plots to kill me have already been hatched in high places. The triggermen will only be doing what they were paid to do.”
In addition to NYPD and FBI surveillance, the Central Intelligence Agency was also following Malcolm. The Agency knew Malcolm planned to appeal to African leaders at the second conference of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), which he was attending in Cairo in July as an honored observer. No other American was allowed in the door. In a July 10 CIA memorandum, an informant stated that Malcolm X was “transporting material dealing with the ill treatment of the Negro in the United States. He intends to make such material available to the OAU in an effort to embarrass the United States.”107
In Cairo, Malcolm was constantly aware of agents following him. They made their presence obvious in an effort to intimidate him. Then on July 23, as Malcolm prepared to present his UN appeal to Africa’s leaders, he was poisoned. He described the experience later to a friend:
I was having dinner at the Nile Hilton with a friend named Milton Henry and a group of others, when two things happened simultaneously. I felt a pain in my stomach and, in a flash, I realized that I’d seen the waiter who served me before. He looked South American, and I’d seen him in New York. The poison bit into me like teeth. It was strong stuff. They rushed me to the hospital just in time to pump the stuff out of my stomach. The doctor told Milton that there was a toxic substance in my food. When the Egyptians who were with me looked for the waiter who had served me, he had vanished. I know that our Muslims don’t have the resources to finance a worldwide spy network.108
The friend who witnessed this event, Detroit civil rights attorney Milton Henry, warned Malcolm that his UN campaign could mean his death. Henry later felt in retrospect that it did: “In formulating this policy, in hitting the nerve center of America, he also signed his own death warrant.”109 Malcolm, being Malcolm, recognized the truth of Henry’s warning, and went right on ahead with his campaign.
At the OAU conference, Malcolm submitted an impassioned, eight-page memorandum urging the leaders of Africa to recognize African-Americans’ problems as their problems and to indict the U.S. at the UN:
Your problems will never be fully solved until and unless ours are solved. You will never be fully respected until and unless we are also respected. You will never be recognized as free human beings until and unless we are also recognized and treated as human beings. Our problem is your problem. It is not a Negro problem, nor an American problem. This is a world problem, a problem for humanity. It is not a problem of civil rights but a problem of human rights. In the interests of world peace and security, we beseech the heads of the independent African states to recommend an immediate investigation into our problem by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.110
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| Malcolm at OAU |
Malcolm was encouraged by the response he received from the OAU. Although the resolution the conference passed in support of the African-American struggle used only moderate language, Malcolm told Henry that several delegates had promised him their official support in bringing up the issue legally at the United Nations.111
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| OAU Founders |
Malcolm then built on the foundations he had laid at the African summit. For four months he criss-crossed Africa, holding follow-up meetings with the leaders who encouraged him most in Cairo. He held long discussions with President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, President Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Prime Minister Milton Obote of Uganda, President Azikiwe of Nigeria, President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Prime Minister Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria, and President Sekou Toure of Guinea.112 There were other African heads of state Malcolm talked with, he said, “whose names I can’t mention.”113 At the height of the Cold War, Malcolm X had gained access to Africa’s most revolutionary leaders on a politically explosive issue.
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| The neutralist leaders (Nehru, Nkrumah, Nasser, Sukarno, Tito) |
Reflecting on these meetings, Malcolm told a friend in London shortly before his death,
Those talks broadened my outlook and made it crystal clear to me that I had to look at the struggle in America’s ghettos against the background of a worldwide struggle of oppressed peoples. That’s why, after every one of my trips abroad, America’s rulers see me as being more and more dangerous. That’s why I feel in my bones the plots to kill me have already been hatched in high places. The triggermen will only be doing what they were paid to do.114
U.S. intelligence agencies were in fact monitoring Malcolm’s campaign in Africa with increasing concern. The officials to whom they reported these developments began to express their alarm publicly. As a New York Times article, written in Washington revealed on August 13, 1964, “The State Department and the Justice Department have begun to take an interest in Malcolm X’s campaign to convince African states to raise the question of persecution of American Negroes at the United Nations.”
After recapitulating Malcolm’s appeal to the 33 OAU heads of state, the Times article stated:
[Washington] officials said that if Malcolm succeeded in convincing just one African Government to bring up the charge at the United Nations, the United States Government would be faced with a touchy problem. The United States, officials here believe, would find itself in the same category as South Africa, Hungary, and other countries whose domestic politics have become debating issues at the United Nations. The issue, officials say, would be of service to critics of the United States, Communist and non-Communist, and contribute to the undermining of the position the United States has asserted for itself as the leader of the West in the advocacy of human rights.115
The Times reported that Malcolm had written a friend from Cairo that he did indeed have several promises of support from African states in bringing the issue before the United Nations. According to another diplomatic source, Malcolm had not been successful, “but the report was not documented and officials here today conceded the possibility that Malcolm might have succeeded.”116
The article also said somewhat ominously;
Although the State Department’s interest in Malcolm’s activities in Africa is obvious, that of the Justice Department is shrouded in discretion. Malcolm is regarded as an implacable leader with deep roots in the Negro submerged classes.
“[He] has, for all practical purposes, renounced his U.S. citizenship.” ~ Benjamin H. Read, assistant to Dean Rusk, insisting the CIA investigate Malcolm X
These two sentences, which were removed from the article in the national edition of the Times,117 where an oblique reference to concerns about Malcolm then being expressed not only by the State and Justice Departments but also by the CIA, FBI, and the Johnson White House. These concerns are revealed by a memorandum, written two days before the Times article, addressed to the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans (covert action) Richard Helms. As researchers know, the desk of Richard Helms—a key player in CIA assassination plots—was perhaps the most dangerous place possible for a report on a perceived security risk to end up. According to the August 11, 1964, CIA memorandum to Helms, the Agency claimed it had learned from an informant that Malcolm X and “extremist groups” were being funded by African states in fomenting recent riots in the U.S. The State Department, the CIA memo continued, “considered the matter one of sufficient importance to discuss with President Johnson who, in turn, asked Mr. J. Edgar Hoover to secure any further information which he might be able to develop.”118
As Malcolm analyst Karl Evanzz has noted,
In fact, the CIA knew the allegations were groundless. In an FBI memorandum dated July 25, a copy of which was sent to [the CIA’s] Clandestine Services, an agent specifically stated that the informant’ said he didn’t mean to imply that Africans were financing Malcolm X.119
The CIA’s August 11 memo also stated that Benjamin H. Read, an assistant to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, wanted the CIA to probe both Malcolm X’s domestic activities and “travels in Africa” to determine “what political or financial support he may be picking up along the way.” The CIA memo’s author had told Read, coyly, in response that “there were certain inhibitions concerning our activities with respect to citizens of the United States.” Read had overridden the objection, insisting the CIA act because, “after all, Malcolm X has, for all practical purposes, renounced his U.S. citizenship.”120
As of no later than August 11, 1964 (and perhaps before), the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans had been authorized to act on Malcolm X. Malcolm was perceived, for all practical purposes, to have renounced his U.S. citizenship and to have become a touchy problem to the U.S. government if he gained so much as one African state’s support for his UN petition. Malcolm had not read any such CIA documents on himself, but he had seen the August 13 Times article. He could read his future between its lines, just as Milton Henry had already done in terms of the sensitivity of Malcolm’s UN campaign.
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| John Lewis |
John Lewis, a leader in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) who would go on to become a member of Congress, was then touring Africa to connect with the freedom movement there. Lewis and the SNCC friends who were with him knew all too well that Malcolm was also in Africa. As soon as they met anyone in Africa, the first question they would inevitably be asked was: “What’s your organization’s relationship with Malcolm’s?”121 The men discovered that no one would listen to them if they were seen as being any less revolutionary than Malcolm, who seemed to have taken all of Africa by storm. On his return to the U.S. Lewis wrote in a SNCC report: “Malcolm’s impact on Africa was just fantastic. In every country he was known and served as the main criteria for categorizing other Afro-Americans and their political views.”122
Lewis was startled to run into Malcolm in a café in Nairobi, Kenya, as he had thought Malcolm was traveling in a different part of Africa at the time. Malcolm, recognizing Lewis, smiled and asked what he was doing there. Reflecting on their encounter in his memoir, Walking With the Wind, Lewis thought Malcolm was very hopeful from the overwhelming reception he had received in Africa “by blacks, whites, Asians and Arabs alike.” It “had pushed him toward believing that people could come together.”123
However, something else Malcolm shared with the SNCC group “was a certainty that he was being watched, that he was being followed … In a calm, measured way he was convinced that somebody wanted him killed.”124 John Lewis’ meeting with Malcolm in Kenya would be the last time he would see him alive.
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| Louis Farrakhan (1965) |
Malcolm kept extending his stay in Africa. He had planned to be away six weeks. After 18 weeks abroad, he finally flew back to New York on November 24, 1964. He was confronted, soon after his return, with a December 4 issue of Muhammad Speaks. The issue featured an attack upon him by Minister Louis X, of the NOI’s Boston mosque. Louis X had not long before been a friend and devoted disciple to Malcolm. Now calling Malcolm “an international hobo,” Louis X made a statement against Malcolm that would haunt the speaker for the rest of his life, under his better-known name, Minister Louis Farrakhan:
The die is set, and Malcolm shall not escape, especially after such evil, foolish talk about his benefactor, Elijah Muhammad, in trying to rob him of the divine glory which Allah had bestowed upon him. Such a man as Malcolm is worthy of death, and would have met with death if it had not been for Muhammad’s confidence in Allah for victory over his enemies.125
Louis Farrakhan has never admitted to having participated in the plot to kill Malcolm. He has acknowledged from 1985 on that his above words “were like fuel on a fire” and “helped create the atmosphere” that moved others to kill Malcolm. Farrakhan made essentially the same carefully worded statement to four interviewers: Tony Brown in 1985, Spike Lee in 1992, Barbara Walters on 20/20 in 1993, and Mike Wallace on 6o Minutes in 2000. His words to Spike Lee were: “I helped contribute to the atmosphere that led to the assassination of Malcolm X.”126
His clearest statement on Malcolm’s murder may be at question. In a 1993 speech to his NOI congregation, Minister Farrakhan, referring to Malcolm, asked bluntly, “And if we dealt with him like a nation deals with a traitor, what the hell business is it of yours?”127
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| Alex Quaison-Sackey |
The timing of Malcolm’s late November return to the U.S. seemed providential in terms of his work at the United Nations. On December 1, his close friend, Alex Quaison-Sackey of Ghana, was elected President of the UN General Assembly. Following Malcolm’s lead, Quaison-Sackey was becoming increasingly outspoken against U.S. policies. Quaison-Sackey gave Malcolm’s human rights campaign a further boost by arranging for him to open an office at the UN in the area that was used by provisional governments.128
The FBI’s New York field office pointed out to J. Edgar Hoover in a December 3 memo the alarming facts that Malcolm X and newly elected UN leader Quaison-Sackey had been friends for four years, and that they had also met several times recently. The New York office, which worked closely with the NYPD’s undercover BOSSI unit, suggested to Hoover “that additional coverage of [Malcolm X’s] activities is desirable particularly since he intends to have the Negro question brought before the United Nations (UN).”129
During December’s UN debate on the Congo, Malcolm’s influence began to be heard in the speeches of African leaders. For example, Louis Lansana Beavogui, Guinea’s foreign minister, asked why “so-called civilized governments” had not spoken out against “the thousands of Congolese citizens murdered by the South Africans, the Belgians, and the [anti-Castro] Cuban refugee adventurers. Is this because the Congolese citizens had dark skins just like the colored United States citizens murdered in Mississippi?”130
In a January 2, 1965, article, the New York Times described the Malcolm X impetus behind this challenging turn in African attitudes. It noted that the policy proposed by Malcolm that “linked the fate of the new African states with that of American Negroes” was being adopted by African governments. The article said, “the African move profoundly disturbed the American authorities, who gave the impression that they had been caught off-guard.”131
Those working behind the scenes were not caught off guard, however, as the knowledgeable author of the article, M.S. Handler, was quick to suggest. Handler had also written the August 13 Times piece from Washington. He went on to repeat what he had reported then, that “early last August the State Department and Justice Department began to take an interest in Malcolm’s activities in North Africa”—accompanied, as we know, by a parallel interest and stepped-up actions by the CIA and FBI. Handler traced the heightened government interest to Malcolm’s opening “his campaign to internationalize the American Negro problem at the second meeting of the 33 heads of independent African states in Cairo, which convened July 17.”132
When the January 2 Times article appeared, Malcolm had seven weeks left to live. Much of the remaining time was devoted to his constant speaking trips throughout the U.S., up to Canada, and over to Europe. Malcolm lived each day, hour, and minute as if it were his last, for he knew how committed the forces tracking him were to killing him. Within the U.S., Fruit of Islam killing squads were waiting for him at every stop. Malcolm knew it was only a matter of time.
On January 28, 1965, Malcolm flew to Los Angeles to meet with attorney Gladys Towles Root and two former NOI secretaries who were filing paternity suits against Elijah Muhammad.133 Malcolm felt personally responsible for having put the two women in a position of vulnerability to Elijah Muhammad. He told a friend, “My teachings converted these women to Elijah Muhammad. I opened their mind for him to reach in and take advantage of them.”134 He had come to Los Angeles, in preparation for testimony in support of the women, “to undo what I did to them by exposing them to this man.”135
From the time Malcolm arrived at the Los Angeles Airport in mid-afternoon until his departure the next morning, he was trailed by the Nation of Islam. The two friends who met him, Hakim A. Jamal and Edmund Bradley, had alerted airport security to a possible NOI attack. As Jamal and Bradley waited at the gate, they noticed a black man seated behind them inconspicuously reading a newspaper. The man was John Ali. Although Malcolm’s Los Angeles trip had been a closely held secret, someone monitoring his conversations was feeding the information to Ali. Malcolm’s arrival gate was switched at the last moment, and security police rushed him and his companions safely through the airport to a car.136
At his Statler Hilton Hotel, Malcolm repeatedly had to run a gauntlet of menacing NOI men stationed in the lobby. Bradley saw John Ali and the leaders of an NOI mosque in Los Angeles get out of a car in front of the hotel. Malcolm, Jamal, and Bradley left quickly in their own car to meet with the two secretaries and attorney Root. When Bradley drove Malcolm back to the airport in the morning, two carloads of NOI teams started to pull alongside their car. Malcolm picked up Bradley’s cane and stuck it out a window like a rifle. The two cars fell back. Police waiting at the airport escorted Malcolm safely to his plane.137
During his next three days in Chicago, Malcolm was under the steady guard of the Chicago police. He was also under the watchful eyes of 15 NOI men who lingered at the entrance to his hotel. In their presence, Malcolm whispered to a Chicago police detective, “Those are all Black Muslims. At least two of them I recognize as being from New York. Elijah seems to know every move I make.”138 Malcolm would realize later that it had to be someone more powerful than Elijah who was making it possible for his troops to always be one step ahead of Malcolm.
Malcolm testified before the Illinois Attorney General, who was investigating the Nation of Islam. The next day in a television interview, Malcolm described efforts to kill him. He said he had a letter on his desk identifying the persons assigned to kill him.139 He was accompanied everywhere by the Chicago police, who finally took him back safely to O’Hare Airport for his flight to New York.
Later that week, Malcolm X once again almost connected with Martin Luther King Jr. The place was Selma, Alabama. The date was February 4, 1965, 17 days before Malcolm’s death, and three years and two months before Martin’s.
The night before, Malcolm had spoken to 3000 students at Tuskegee Institute, 75 miles from Selma. Many of the students invited Malcolm to join them in the next day’s demonstration at Selma, where more than 3,400 arrests had already been made in the course of voter registration marches.
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| Malcolm at Selma AL with Coretta Scott King |
Malcolm’s sudden arrival in Selma on the morning of February 4 panicked the leaders of Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The younger SNCC radicals were urging that Malcolm be allowed to speak to the crowd gathering in the Brown Chapel AME Church for the demonstration. However, the SCLC ministers didn’t even have the voice of Martin Luther King, who was in a Selma jail, to balance the fiery oratory of Malcolm, who they feared would spark a riot. As Malcolm listened in bemusement to what he might be permitted to say, he commented, “Nobody puts words in my mouth.”140 They finally decided to let Malcolm speak, but called in Coretta King to talk after him and put out the fire. Mrs. King was instead inspired by Malcolm to see a transforming hope of convergence between him and her husband.
In his talk, Malcolm widened the scene of struggle from Selma to the world. He told the crowd that civil rights were human rights, and that the U.S. government by failing to uphold their rights was thereby in violation of the United Nations Charter. Standing in the pulpit, pointing his right index finger at the demonstrators, he said they should “wire Secretary General U. Thant of the United Nations and charge the federal government of this country, behind Lyndon B. Johnson, with being derelict in its duty to protect the human rights of 22 million Black people.”141 He prayed that God would bless them in everything that they did, and “that all the fear that has ever been in your heart will be taken out.”142
Coretta King followed Malcolm with a short, inspirational talk on nonviolence. He sat behind her, listening intently. When Coretta and Malcolm spoke together afterwards, he gave her a message for Martin. She was impressed by the gentle way in which he said,
Mrs. King, will you tell Dr. King that I had planned to visit with him in jail? I won’t get a chance now because I’ve got to leave to get to New York in time to catch a plane for London, where I’m to address the African Students’ Conference. I want Dr. King to know that I didn’t come to Selma to make his job difficult. I really did come thinking that I could make it easier. If the white people realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King.143
She thanked Malcolm, and said she would convey his words to Martin. She did so at the Selma jail that day. She said later that by the time Malcolm was killed, two and a half weeks later, she and Martin had reassessed their feelings toward him:
We realized that since he had been to Mecca and had broken with Elijah Muhammad, he was moving away from hatred toward internationalism and against exploitation.144
As the FBI and CIA knew by their close monitoring of both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, the two catalysts of supposedly opposite revolutions were pondering cooperation.
A highly placed North African diplomat … told Norden that his country’s intelligence apparatus “had been quietly informed by the French Department of Alien Documentation and Counter-Espionage that the CIA planned Malcolm’s murder, and France feared he might be liquidated on its soil.”
After Malcolm’s trip to London, on February 9 he flew to Paris for another speaking engagement. At Orly Airport, French police surrounded him and said he was barred from entering the country. Malcolm’s speech, authorities felt, threatened to provoke “demonstrations that would trouble the public order.”145 He turned around and flew back to London.
Malcolm was shocked. He had thought France one of Europe’s most liberal countries. He had also visited and spoken there three months before without a problem. At first he felt the U.S. State Department must have been responsible for the French decision. However, his exclusion had come from a government whose president, De Gaulle, did not ordinarily cave in to U.S. pressures. Malcolm continued to puzzle over his refusal by France. The day before his death, he would tell Alex Haley that he’d begun to realize that what happened to him in France was a clue to his impending murder.
Malcolm’s intuition was right. A journalist who investigated Malcolm’s death, Eric Norden, was given an answer to the French puzzle in April 1965. A highly placed North African diplomat, who insisted on anonymity, told Norden that his country’s intelligence apparatus “had been quietly informed by the French Department of Alien Documentation and Counter-Espionage that the CIA planned Malcolm’s murder, and France feared he might be liquidated on its soil.”146
France had passed on its knowledge of the CIA plot against Malcolm to the diplomat’s country because Malcolm had also visited it. He might have chosen to fly there after being barred from France. The French were warning them that the CIA might kill him within their borders, scapegoating them. The North African diplomat who gave Norden this chilling information then said, “Your CIA is beginning to murder its own citizens now.”147
It is probably safe to say that, even under the Freedom of Information Act, no one will ever be handed a government document that states U.S. intelligence agencies assassinated Malcolm X. However, we do have a document that states U.S. intelligence agencies (which have assassinated other leaders) were given detailed information of Malcolm’s itinerary for his February 1965 trip to England and France. On February 4, 1965, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sent a confidential memorandum detailing Malcolm’s travel plans to the CIA Director, the Deputy Director of Plans (the CIA office under which Cold War assassinations were carried out), the Army’s Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, the Director of Naval Intelligence, the Chief of the Air Force Counterintelligence Division, an office in London whose name was so sensitive that it was deleted from the document and another such office in Paris.148 At the same time, the CIA was reportedly planning to murder Malcolm and his travels to England and France were being tracked by practically the entire U.S. intelligence network.
While Malcolm was being barred from France for reasons unknown to him, back in the U.S. the NOI newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, was announcing Elijah Muhammad’s final judgment on Malcolm. The paper’s propaganda barrage seemed like a preamble to Malcolm’s assassination. Abdul Basit Naeem, the FBI’s second reliable informant in the NOI’s inner circle, wrote anti-Malcolm articles in the February 5, 12, and 19 issues, culminating in his “Hypocrites Cannot Alter Muhammad’s Divine Destiny.”149 FBI asset Naeem seemed to be laying a foundation for a divine judgment on Malcolm. Elijah himself wrote in the February 12 issue that “Malcolm—the Chief Hypocrite—was beyond the point of no return.” He added what would soon prove to be true, that he “would no longer have to suffer Malcolm’s attacks.”150 Naeem’s and Muhammad’s articles proclaiming the end of Malcolm were like divine prophecies in the hands of their readers during the final week of Malcolm’s life.
On Saturday afternoon, February 13, 1965, Malcolm flew back from London to New York to face an eviction from his home. The Queens Civil Court had already ordered him and his family to vacate their house in East Elmhurst. Malcolm had filed an appeal that was due to be heard on Monday the 15th.151 At 2:45 a.m. on Sunday the 14th, as Malcolm and his family were sleeping, the house was firebombed. Bottles of gasoline with fuses had been thrown through the front windows, setting the house ablaze. Malcolm staggered into consciousness. He rushed Betty, who was six months pregnant with twins, and their four daughters through the kitchen door. They all escaped into the 20-degree February night. Had it not been for the failure of one poorly aimed firebomb, the entire family could have burned to death. The apparent pattern of the thrown Molotov cocktails was to block every exit. One, however, glanced off the window of three of Malcolm’s daughters’ bedroom. It burned out harmlessly in the grass.152
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| After firebombing of Malcolm’s house in Queens |
After the fire department extinguished the blaze, a deputy police inspector and a deputy fire inspector opened an investigation by questioning Malcolm in a police squad car. Malcolm’s friend and co-worker Earl Grant was present also. Grant said the officers “asked Malcolm how could anyone else but him have burned his house.”153 This began the charges, soon to be made public, that Malcolm had started the fire to get publicity. It is significant to say that the first move in this game was made by a police and fire inspector. The allegation that Malcolm had tried to burn down his house to gain sympathetic headlines would be used in the press to discredit him and disparage threats to his life in the days leading up to his assassination.
On Monday the NOI’s Captain of Mosque Seven, Joseph X, began the public attack by telling reporters he believed Malcolm had set off the firebombs himself “to get publicity” and sympathy.154 Joseph X was the same Mosque Seven official who, the year before, in the first NOI plot on Malcolm’s life, had ordered an assistant to wire Malcolm’s car to explode.155 He was also later identified to Karl Evanzz by former members of his mosque as being part of the team of assassins who had actually firebombed Malcolm’s home.156 When Spike Lee was so bold as to ask Joseph X (then Yusuf Shah) in a 1992 interview who bombed Malcolm’s house, he replied, “What do you want me to say? … that was the parsonage. Malcolm didn’t think so, but John Ali and I had the deeds … [The house got bombed] by some mysterious people.”157 However, before he died in 1993, Captain Joseph finally admitted he participated in the firebombing of the Malcolm X home.158
Two days after the firebombing, police detectives who were investigating it told the media that a whisky bottle containing gasoline had been found “intact and upright on top of a baby dresser” in the house.159 The obvious implication was that Malcolm was the source of the bottle of gasoline. The detectives did not mention that it was Betty Shabazz who, on returning to the gutted house to salvage belongings, had found the bottle on her baby’s dresser. She had pointed it out to firemen. How had it gotten there?
Malcolm had been saying, “My house was bombed by the Black Muslim movement upon the orders of Elijah Muhammad.”160 When Betty discovered the bottle of gasoline on the dresser and the police raised it publicly, she and Malcolm knew the plot went beyond the NOI to include the police. A coordinated effort was being made by the police and the NOI to scapegoat them. They were being set up for something worse. In such a scheme, it was the police, not the NOI, who ran the show. And who was it who ran the police’s show? Betty said, “Only someone in the uniform of a fireman or a policeman could have planted the bottle of gasoline on my baby’s dresser. It was to make it appear as if we had bombed our own home.”161
“That was a bad scene, brother. The sickness and madness of those days—I’m glad to be free of them. It’s a time for martyrs now. And if I’m to be one, it will be in the cause of brotherhood. That’s the only thing that can save this country.”
On Wednesday, Malcolm received a confirmation of this scenario. After a speaking engagement in Rochester, he met an African-American fire marshal, Vincent Canty, at the Rochester Airport. Canty told Malcolm that a fireman had set the bottle of gasoline on the dresser. Malcolm made Canty’s revelation public at a press conference the following afternoon. He demanded an investigation by the FBI into a conspiracy “entered into at the local level between some police, some firemen, and some press to cover up for Elijah and his followers to give the public the impression that we set the house on fire ourselves.”162 At the same press conference Malcolm said he had sent a telegram to the Secretary of State insisting on an investigation to determine why the American embassy did not intervene when he, while in possession of an American passport, was denied entry into France.163
It sounds as if Malcolm X was seeing conspiracies everywhere. In fact even Malcolm, who was moving quickly toward enlightenment, was being naïve to see them on such a small scale. He was naïve, first of all, to think the planting of the bottle of gasoline was only a conspiracy entered into at the local level, or to think the FBI, of all people, would be of any help in investigating it. And little did he know that his American passport belonged to a man whom the State Department had turned over the previous summer to the CIA because “Malcolm X has, for all practical purposes, renounced his U.S. citizenship.”164 As a U.S. citizen insisting on his rights, Malcolm X was in reality a man without a country, about to be gunned down in a conspiracy that went beyond anyone’s imagination except those who were controlling it.
Malcolm concluded his Thursday afternoon press conference by stating, “The police in this country know what is going on—this conspiracy leads to my death.”165 Malcolm did know what was going on. He had simply not yet connected all the dots.
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| Audubon Ballroom |
In the meantime, a dry run of Malcolm’s assassination had already occurred at the Audubon Ballroom. This was witnessed by the WPM BOSSI infiltrator, Gene Roberts, who was Malcolm’s security guard. By this time, Roberts had also become Malcolm’s friend and admirer. He was taking his role as Malcolm’s bodyguard more seriously than his BOSSI superiors had wanted.
On the night of the dry run, Monday, February 15, Malcolm spoke to 700 people at the Audubon Ballroom. Many years later, Gene Roberts described what was for him the most significant part of the evening:
I was part of what we call “the front rostrum guard.” We stood in front of the stage. If anybody tried to get to Malcolm, we’d take them out or whatever. I’m on Malcolm’s right. … There’s a noise in the middle of the audience. There’s a young individual walking down the aisle. I moved toward him, and he sat down. Then everything was back to normal. But I’m saying, “I don’t like this.” I just had a bad gut feeling.166
Roberts had seen a preview of what would happen the following Sunday: a fake disruption in the audience designed to draw everyone’s attention, then a movement elsewhere toward Malcolm which on Sunday would include three shooters firing simultaneously.
Malcolm’s own reaction to the dry run can be found in a published transcript of his Monday night talk:
What’s up? [Commotion in audience.] Okay. Y’all sit down and be cool. [Laughter] Just sit down and be cool.167
Roberts said he called his supervisors when the Monday meeting was over:
I says, “Listen. I just saw the dry run on Malcolm’s life.” I told them I felt like it was going to happen at the meeting [scheduled for the Audubon Ballroom] the following Sunday. I told them if it’s going to happen, it’s going to go down Sunday. And they said, okay, we’ll pass it on.168
What they did with it I don’t know … I don’t think they really cared.169
Roberts also said Malcolm’s own security people got together with him in the middle of the week to prepare for the Sunday meeting at the Audubon:
A lot of his other people said, “Can we carry guns?” He said, “No!” He was emphatic about that. He said, “No!” Then there was [the question], “Can we search?” He said, “No way.” Again he was emphatic—no searching. So that was the way it went.170
On Friday February 19, Malcolm dropped in unexpectedly at the home of his friend, Life photographer Gordon Parks. Malcolm was in a reflective mood. The two men talked of Malcolm’s years with the Nation of Islam, which Parks had helped photograph. Malcolm began to recall the vicious violence he had taken part in (that Alauddin Shabazz described to me). Malcolm said,
That was a bad scene, brother. The sickness and madness of those days—I’m glad to be free of them. It’s a time for martyrs now. And if I’m to be one, it will be in the cause of brotherhood. That’s the only thing that can save this country. I’ve learned it the hard way—but I’ve learned it. And that’s the significant thing.171
Describing this last meeting with Malcolm, Parks said he was struck by the change in the Malcolm he had known: “He was caught, it seemed, in a new idealism. And, as time bore out, he had given me the essence of what was to have been his brotherhood speech—the one his killers silenced. It was this intentness on brotherhood that cost him his life. For Malcolm, over the objections of his bodyguards, was to rule against anyone being searched before entering the hall that fateful day: ‘We don’t want people feeling uneasy,’ he said. ‘We must create an image that makes people feel at home.’”172
“You don’t offer somebody like that protection.” ~NYPD headquarters officer
Malcolm’s final edicts against guns on his bodyguards (not obeyed by all of them), and against searching at the Audubon’s door because it made people uneasy, have been lumped together with the NYPD’s claim that Malcolm refused police protection. It is important to examine this claim, as well as any evidence to the contrary.
The NYPD process had begun, the police told author Peter Goldman, with BOSSI intelligence analysts recognizing the truth of what their sources were telling them: a serious attempt was about to be made on Malcolm’s life. Accordingly, the BOSSI analysts drew up a scenario—essentially for their own protection, not Malcolm’s. What they knew, first of all, was that they didn’t want to protect Malcolm. “The guy had a bad sheet,” as one headquarters officer put it to Goldman, “You don’t offer somebody like that protection.”173 Nevertheless, following a prudent game plan, they formally offered Malcolm protection, assuming he would almost certainly have to refuse it for political reasons. As a BOSSI man told Goldman, “Representatives of the New York police department made three approaches during the final two weeks to Malcolm or to men presumed to speak for him and offered to put him under round-the-clock guard. These offers were made formally and before witnesses. In each case, also following the BOSS[I] scenario, Malcolm or his people refused. The refusals were duly noted in the Malcolm File. “As far as I was concerned,” the man from BOSSI told Goldman, “that took us off the hook.”174
These carefully witnessed offers of protection protected the NYPD. Thus Deputy Police Commissioner Walter Arm could say in the wake of the assassination, with “proof” if anyone wanted it, that Malcolm had refused the department’s offer to protect him.175 Alex Haley wrote, however, that he knew from many of Malcolm’s associates that during the week before his death, “Malcolm X complained repeatedly that the police would not take his requests for protection seriously.”176 As we have seen, Malcolm had in fact welcomed the protection of the Los Angeles and Chicago police, who only a few days before spirited him through airports and shielded him from assaults. He evidently thought the New York Police Department had a similar responsibility. So did BOSSI undercover agent Gene Roberts, who warned his superiors of precisely what to expect, and when and where to expect it—and expected them to prevent a killing. It didn’t happen.
Assuming the police did speak “to Malcolm or to men presumed to speak for him,” their offer may have been made to individuals who they could count on to say no in Malcolm’s name. They could also have made the offer to Malcolm in such a way as to guarantee his refusal. The police’s self-confessed purpose in any case, was not to protect “a guy with a bad sheet” but simply to take them “off the hook.”
The most serious argument against the police’s claim that they were even minimally serious in wanting to protect Malcolm is their behavior in response to the firebombing. The police were complicit in the planting of the bottle of gasoline on the dresser. They then used that planted evidence to scapegoat Malcolm for the firebombing of his own home. Far from wanting to protect Malcolm, those in command of the NYPD were evidently in league with the other forces seeking his death.
The assassination of Malcolm X on Sunday afternoon, February 21, 1965, at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem proceeded like an execution, for that is what it was. As we have already seen from the Hoover memorandum, of February 4, 1965, Malcolm, on his trip to England and France, was being followed by an intelligence network. A network that included the FBI, the CIA Director, the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans (read covert action and assassinations), the Army’s Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, the Director of Naval Intelligence, the Chief of the Air Force Counterintelligence Division and two foreign offices too sensitive to be identified. These were the chickens Malcolm was talking about in his JFK comment that launched him into independence from Elijah Muhammad. Now after Malcolm’s pilgrimage to Mecca and revolutionary Africa, the same chickens were coming home to roost for him.
Malcolm realized, as he said to Alex Haley, that the NOI was now serving as a proxy, much like how the CIA used the Mafia as their go-between in the attempted killing of Castro and furnished plausible deniability and a showy scapegoat. In what appears to have been a COINTELPRO or perhaps joint FBI-CIA operation, the Nation of Islam was being used as a religious Mafia.
BOSSI’s young black infiltrator, Gene Roberts, was caught in the middle of this covertly managed execution. Roberts had been won over by Malcolm. “I learned to love the man; respect him,” Roberts said to a reporter in the ’80s long after it was all over. “I think he was a good person.”177
For the rest of his life, Roberts would recall that Sunday again and again. It began with a conflict he had with his wife over Malcolm. While Roberts was at home putting on his new gray suit for his Audubon guard duty, Joan Roberts told him she was going to the meeting too. He argued no, the department wouldn’t like it. Joan wouldn’t give ground. She had never seen Malcolm X speak. She was curious. Gene finally gave in. But he told her to at least keep a low profile, and to take a seat in the back. She chose a seat in the front of the ballroom, next to some reporters.178
Malcolm had stayed over Saturday night at the New York Hilton Hotel in Manhattan. Soon after he checked in, three black men asked for his room number. Hotel security was alerted, and focused its attention on Malcolm’s 12th floor. On Sunday morning, he was awakened by the phone, which rang at exactly eight o’clock. What he identified as a white man’s voice said, “Wake up, brother,” and hung up. Malcolm felt it was a veiled message from a system larger than the NOI, telling him that today would be the day. He had been feeling that already.179
He spoke on the phone with his sister, Ella, in Boston. His last words to her were:
“You pray for me, Ella, because I firmly believe now I need it more than I’ve ever needed it before. So you ask Allah to guide me, because I feel they may have me doomed for this day.”
“Not this day,” Ella protested.
“Yes, this day,” Malcolm said.180
He also phoned Betty and asked if she could come to the meeting that afternoon with all four children. She said she would.
As we know from Talmadge Hayer’s confession, the five men from Newark’s Mosque Number 25 had checked out the floor plan of the Audubon Ballroom at a dance held there on Saturday night. We also know that John Ali was in town. As he had been at the LA airport three weeks previous, as he had been shortly after at the LA hotel, now John Ali was in New York on the weekend of Malcolm’s murder. At this time, Hayer states the final assassination plans were being laid.
According to information that briefly surfaced at the 1966 trial of Hayer and his two co-defendants, John Ali “had come in from Chicago on February 19th, checked into the Americana Hotel in midtown Manhattan and checked out on the evening of February 21st.” (Goldman, p. 314, NY Times 3/3/66, p. 24) According to this testimony, Ali arrived just in time for the final rehearsal in advance of the murder.
A confidential March 3, 1966 FBI report bolsters the testimony. An FBI memo from the Special Agent in Charge (SAC), New York, to the Director, cites a witness whose name has been deleted as saying, “John Ali met with Hayer the night before Malcolm X was killed.” (Hayer denied this to Peter Goldman, per Goldman p. 432) The FBI reports say that the state never called this witness because the witness was later arrested for theft. Yet a criminal background presented no barrier to the state’s calling of other witnesses. More probable is the fact that for people in the know, an Ali-Hayer meeting on the eve of the murder would have been explosive. It could very possibly mean that Hayer and his cohorts were being controlled by an agent of the Bureau. It is not surprising that an FBI document would back the state’s judgment in passing over a witness who would open up that door to the FBI. After that all-too-brief opening at the trial, the state shut all further federal government connections to the murder.
Malcolm realized the overall dynamics of a police operation without being aware of the details. He said repeatedly during his final week that he knew the Nation of Islam was full of police. So even when he was emphasizing initially that the Black Muslims were to blame for bombing his house, he was not excluding the NYPD or federal agencies that were complicit with them. Because he knew the NOI was riddled with agents, Malcolm understood that it was their controllers who really held the keys to his life. It was not the NOI that was directing a plot, which included planting a bottle of gasoline in his fire-gutted house. He referred to this directly in a speech of February 15th:
Don’t you think that anything is going down that [the police] don’t know about. The only thing that goes down is what they want to go down, and what they don’t want to go down they don’t let go down.
Malcolm realized, as he said to Alex Haley, that the NOI was now serving as a proxy, much like how the CIA used the Mafia as their go-between in the attempted killing of Castro and furnished plausible deniability and a showy scapegoat. In what appears to have been a COINTELPRO or perhaps joint FBI-CIA operation, the Nation of Islam was being used as a religious Mafia.
On Sunday afternoon, they carried out the strategy they had drawn up. If there was searching at the door, they would turn around and leave. Because there was no search, the men went in with their guns under their coats. Talmadge Hayer and Leon Davis sat down in the front row on the left side. Hayer had a .45 automatic, Leon a Luger. William X and Benjamin Thomas sat a few rows behind them. William X was carrying a sawed-off, double-barrel shotgun under his coat. Ben Thomas, sitting beside him, did not have a shooting role. Thomas was the group’s organizer. As the assistant secretary to the Newark mosque, he was also their sanctioning authority. Seated near the rear of the ballroom was Wilbur X, who would create the diversion to start the action. Wilbur would pretend someone was picking his pocket, then would throw a smoke bomb. The three shooters would fire, and everyone would run for the street. Their car was parked a few blocks away, on a street headed for the George Washington Bridge. Thanks to the absence of police, four of the five men would escape safely. They would never spend a day in jail for killing Malcolm.181
“[T]he more I keep thinking about this thing, the things that have been happening lately, I’m not all that sure it’s the Muslims. I know what they can do, and what they can’t, and they can’t do some of the stuff recently going on. … the more I keep thinking about what happened to me in France, I think I’m going to quit saying it’s the Muslims.”
Malcolm had said on the previous Tuesday to his friend and aide James Shabazz, “I have been marked for death in the next five days. I have the names of five Black Muslims who have been asked to kill me. I will announce them at the [Sunday] meeting.”182 As he waited to be introduced on Sunday afternoon, Malcolm had the names of his five assassins written on a piece of paper in his pocket.
Before walking out on the stage, Malcolm told his assistants that he was going to stop saying it was the Muslims. Things had been happening that went beyond what they could do.183 He also said he was going to tell the black man to stop fighting himself. That was a part of the white man’s strategy, to keep the black man fighting each other. “I’m not fighting anyone, that’s not what we’re here for.”184
Gene Roberts had been a part of the afternoon’s first rostrum security, during a preliminary speech by Malcolm’s assistant, Benjamin Goodman. When Roberts was relieved of his duty, he sat down in the back of the ballroom. Benjamin Goodman introduced Malcolm to the audience of 400 people as “a man who would give his life for you.”
After receiving a long standing ovation, Malcolm greeted everyone—including the five assassins he assumed were present—with “As-salaam alaikum.” (“Peace be with you.”) The response came back, “Wa-laikum salaam.” (“And with you peace.”)
Wilbur began his ploy by yelling at the man seated next to him, “Get your hand out of my pocket, man!”
Malcolm responded to the sounds of a beginning fight by stepping out from behind the podium and walking to the front of the stage, thus making himself a perfect target. An audio cassette was found with him saying, just before the shots, “Now, now, brothers, break it up. Hold it, hold it, hold it … “185
Gene Roberts, recognizing the same diversion he’d seen the Tuesday before, stood up and started down the aisle. Ahead of him, William X began moving toward Malcolm. Wilbur ignited the smoke bomb in the rear, creating a panic in the crowd. At a distance of 15 feet from Malcolm, William X fired the shotgun in a roar, hitting Malcolm with a dozen buckshot pellets that made a circle on his chest. The shotgun roared again. Hayer and Davis were standing and firing their pistols again and again at Malcolm’s body lying on the stage.186 Then they were all running for the street.
Gene Roberts picked up a chair. Hayer looked at him, aimed, and fired his .45. The bullet pierced Roberts’ suit coat, missing his body. He threw the chair at Hayer, knocking him down. Hayer got up limping. Another security guard shot Hayer in his left thigh. Hayer kept on limping, hopping, and made it out the front door. A crowd encircled him, and began beating him.
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| Thomas Hagan AKA Talmadge Hayer apprehended |
Thomas Hoy was the only police officer stationed outside the ballroom. He managed to pull Hayer away from the crowd. A police car cruising by stopped. Sergeant Alvin Aronoff and patrolman Louis Angelos helped Hoy save Hayer’s life by pushing him into the car. They took him to the Wadsworth Avenue Police Station.187 Roberts had gone up on the stage. He found Malcolm still had a pulse. Roberts began giving Malcolm mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, trying to revive him. Malcolm died on the stage.188
Over the next 24 hours, Gene Roberts went through a series of BOSSI debriefings on the assassination. His superiors were incredulous at his attempt to save Malcolm’s life on the stage. “What did you do that for?” he was asked.
And I told them, Roberts said, “Well, I’m a cop. And this is what cops are supposed to do—save people.”189
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| Gene Roberts: “This is what cops are supposed to do—save people.” |
When Malcolm was shot, Joan Roberts had gone to Betty Shabazz, who had thrown her body over her children. Joan tried to hold her. Betty struggled to get free, throwing Joan against the wall, and ran to Malcolm’s side. Gene eventually helped Joan, who was shaken, to a taxicab.190
Gene Roberts was the precursor to Marrell McCullough in the assassination of Martin Luther King. In a famous photo, McCullough can be seen with a stricken look kneeling over King’s body on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, April 4, 1968. McCullough belonged to a Memphis black power youth group working with King. He was the first person to reach him after he was shot. Unknown to King’s associates for another decade, Marrell McCullough was also a deep cover operative for the Memphis Police Department.191
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| The LIFE issue on the assassination of Malcolm X |
Talmadge Hayer, Norman Butler, and Thomas Johnson were tried for Malcolm’s murder from January 21 to March 11, 1966. Butler and Johnson were two well-known New York “enforcers” for the Nation of Islam whom the police had picked up in the week following the assassination. A series of shaky witnesses, several contradicting their own grand jury testimony, testified to having seen Butler and Johnson take part in the murder. Butler and Johnson claimed they hadn’t even been in the Audubon Ballroom that afternoon. Butler had three supporting witnesses and Johnson two, to their each having been at home during the shooting. In the years to come, many of Malcolm’s people would emphasize that Butler and Johnson as well-known local NOI enforcers would have been quickly identified and watched closely had they entered the ballroom that day. They simply weren’t there. Talmadge Hayer agreed. In the trial’s most dramatic moments, Hayer took the stand, confessed his own participation in the assassination, and said Butler and Johnson had nothing to do with it. However, because Hayer refused to identify his real co-conspirators, his testimony was discredited. All three men were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Hayer’s more detailed 1978 confession, naming the other four men in his group, was too late to help Butler and Johnson. They each served more than 20 years. The only man who has ever confessed to the murder of Malcolm X, Talmadge Hayer (who has become Mujahid Abdul Halim), has also made another confession:
I remember some of the ministers used to say that time reveals all things. Malcolm used to say it himself—time will tell. And for the longest time, I always thought that time would tell what that man was saying was wrong. Well, time has told. Time has told that a lot of things he said was true.192
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| Benjamin Goodman Karim |
Benjamin Goodman, in a 1978 affidavit supporting Butler and Johnson’s innocence, provided an insight into the coercion of trial witnesses. Goodman said that in 1965, he was summoned to a New York police station where detectives questioned him about Butler and Johnson. When he told the detectives repeatedly that Butler and Johnson had not been in the Audubon Ballroom that afternoon, the detectives became angry. Later in 1965, Goodman was summoned to another interview, this time from assistant District Attorney Stern. Goodman told them that:
I knew Butler and Johnson, they had not been present at the ballroom that day, and that I had not seen the actual shooting. When I said this, Mr. Stern became angry and said that he knew I had previously said that I had seen the shooting through an open dressing room door. This was not true and I had never said this to anyone. In his anger, Mr. Stern threatened me and asked me, have you ever been to jail? How would you like to go to jail?
Goodman was not called to testify at the trial.193
Besides Hayer, the most significant trial witness was black police officer Gilbert Henry. Before the prosecution could get him off the stand, Henry revealed the strange way the NYPD had deployed its forces on February 21st. Henry said he had been stationed in the Ballroom’s Rose Room that afternoon, at a distance from Malcolm’s location in the main auditorium. He and his partner, Patrolman John Carroll, had been given specific instructions by their superior officer, Sergeant Devaney, “to remain where [they] would not be seen.” If anything happened, Patrolman Henry was to call for help on a walkie-talkie the two men had with them. It was connected with another walkie-talkie held by an officer at the Presbyterian Medical Center on the other side of the street. When Henry heard shots, he tried calling on the walkie-talkie but got no response. He then ran into the main auditorium, but was too late to see anyone with a gun. He said he saw no other uniformed officers in the auditorium.194
Malcolm’s unofficial photographer, Robert Haggins, was one of the witnesses never called in the trial who could have testified farther to the odd behavior of the police that afternoon. Haggins told Spike Lee he had seen the anteroom of the ballroom filled with police: “If I took a guess, I’d say 25. It was filled with cops. Cops who must’ve waited until after he was shot to file into the ballroom.”195
Earl Grant saw the police come in. He said that about 15 minutes after Malcolm was shot, “a most incredible scene took place. Into the hall sauntered about a dozen policemen. They were strolling at about the pace one would expect of them if they were patrolling a quiet park. They did not seem to be at all excited or concerned about the circumstances.
I could hardly believe my eyes. Here were New York City policemen, entering a room from which at least a dozen shots had been heard, and yet not one of them had his gun out! As a matter of absolute fact, some of them even had their hands in their pockets.”196
The best witness we have to the assassination of Malcolm X remains Malcolm X, as recorded by Alex Haley.
On Saturday afternoon, February 20, 24 hours before he would walk to the podium of the Audubon Ballroom, Malcolm phoned Alex Haley at his home in upstate New York. It was to be their last conversation. Malcolm ended it with what Haley, in his epilogue to the autobiography, calls a “digression.” Malcolm was speaking of his impending murder:
I’m going to tell you something, brother—the more I keep thinking about this thing, the things that have been happening lately, I’m not all that sure it’s the Muslims. I know what they can do, and what they can’t, and they can’t do some of the stuff recently going on. Now, I’m going to tell you, the more I keep thinking about what happened to me in France, I think I’m going to quit saying it’s the Muslims.197
Malcolm had one final thought. In the last sentence he would ever say to Alex Haley—which Haley describes as “an odd, abrupt change of subject”—Malcolm said why he thought he was about to be killed:
You know, I’m glad I’ve been the first to establish official ties between Afro-Americans and our blood brothers in Africa.198
He then said good-bye and hung up.
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| Nasser and Nkrumah |
In the midst of his African campaign the previous August, Malcolm had sent a letter from Cairo to friends in Harlem that foreshadowed his last words to Alex Haley. One month after he was poisoned at the Nile Hilton, Malcolm wrote:
You must realize that what I am trying to do is very dangerous because it is a direct threat to the entire international system of racist exploitation…. Therefore, if I die or am killed before making it back to the States, you can rest assured that what I’ve already set in motion will never be stopped … Our problem has been internationalized.199
At the time Malcolm wrote this letter, his friend and ally Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser was taking with extreme seriousness the ongoing threat to Malcolm’s life from U.S. intelligence agencies. He had two Egyptian security men posted outside Malcolm’s hotel room door at all times.200
Alex Haley, a great author who gave Malcolm a prose platform from which he could address the world, buried in his epilogue what may have been the most significant words Malcolm ever said to him. Malcolm’s “digression” was a revelation, which he would share also with his assistants on Sunday afternoon, and his “change of subject” a coherent climax to his life. Malcolm was willing to give his life for the sake of a unity between Africans and African-Americans that he hoped would change the course of history. In his final year, Malcolm had become a witness to the truth he had experienced in his pilgrimage to Mecca—that all of humankind was one family of brothers and sisters under Allah. But he radically focused that truth on Africa and America. Africa was where our one family had begun, and America where much of it had been sent into slavery. He envisioned and was organizing a mutually supportive African-American movement for human rights on both continents. “But,” as Malcolm said 12 days before his death to a friend in London, “the chances are that they will get me the way they got [Congo’s revolutionary leader Patrice] Lumumba before he reached the running stage.”201 Malcolm was right. And in his final words to Alex Haley, he had already solved the crime of his murder a day before it happened.
“Muslims don’t carry guns.” (Malcolm X to Charles Kenyatta, shortly before his death)
Near the end of his life, Malcolm began to think about guns as a question of faith. In his last week, he see-sawed between wanting to apply for a permit to carry a pistol and wanting to confront his killers with no guns on either himself or his followers. He ended by choosing no guns. It seemed a strange final decision for Black America’s most articulate advocate of armed self-defense. Why did Malcolm take such a stand at the hour of his death?
Malcolm’s co-worker, Charles 37X Kenyatta, has told a revealing story about the man whose life was one continuous turn toward the truth as he saw it. Charles said he and Malcolm were riding in a taxicab to the Chicago airport. They suddenly realized they were being taken instead into the stockyards. The driver had a sinister purpose of his own. Charles, however, had a pistol. He used it to make the driver stop the cab and get out. Charles and Malcolm drove quickly to the airport, and got on their plane.
Malcolm then told Charles he had lost his religion. Three decades after Malcolm’s death, Charles Kenyatta continued to puzzle over his teacher’s strange words. Malcolm said to him: “Muslims don’t carry guns.”202
As a deep believer in Islam, Malcolm chose to die as a martyr. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, and a wave of suicide bombers in Israel, Americans have tended to think of the Islamic concept of martyrdom as counter-violent. That was not, however the kind of martyr that Malcolm told Gordon Parks he wanted to be. Nor was it what he learned from the Islamic tradition he embraced on his pilgrimage to Mecca. In response to his assassins, whose identity he said he knew in advance, Malcolm gave his life to Allah “in the cause of brotherhood,” without trying to snatch away the lives of those taking his own.
He also chose not to go into exile to avoid martyrdom. 12 days before his death, Malcolm listened patiently in a London hotel room, while a friend, Guyan writer Jan Carew, summoned every word at his command to persuade Malcolm not to return to the United States and almost certain death. Carew even invoked the authority of their ancestral spirit world, “the ghosts in our blood,” against the folly of martyrdom.
Those ancestral spirits whisper warnings, whenever we’re about to do something reckless or foolhardy. Right now they should be whispering to you that, perhaps, surviving for our cause is more important then dying for it.203
Malcolm answered:
The spirit world’s fine but I want our folk to be free in the world of the living.204
And the unspoken thought: So for the sake of the living, I’ll live the truth freely and openly all the way, regardless of the consequences.
In Malcolm’s eyes, that was freedom. By living and speaking freely, Malcolm denied to the system that assassinated him the victory of taking away his life. He instead gave it freely in the cause of brotherhood and sisterhood. “It’s a time for martyrs now,” as he told Gordon Parks, “And if I’m to be one, it will be in the cause of brotherhood. That’s the only thing that can save this country.”
In his final days, Malcolm transformed the death by violence that had haunted him all his life. Recognizing its imminence, he embraced it in terms of his faith. He did so in a way that was in tension with some of his own public rhetoric. Although Malcolm continued to insist vehemently right up to his death on armed self-defense as a fundamental right for black people and for all other people as well, he died without wanting his followers to resort to that right for himself. In a life of profound changes, Malcolm’s ultimate choice of how he wanted to die, nonviolently in the cause of brotherhood, was perhaps the most remarkable change of all.
A “martyr” is literally a witness. Malcolm’s final action, in stepping forward to reconcile two brothers in a fight, made him not only a target for murder but also a witness to brotherhood.
As he said to us all, “As-salaam alaikum.”
1. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley (New York: Ballantine Books, 1973), p. 9.
2. Ibid., p. 2.
3. Ibid., p. 378.
4. Ibid., p. 381.
5. Karl Evanzz, The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992).
6. Karl Evanzz, The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad (New York: Pantheon, 1999).
7. Zak A. Kondo, Conspiracys: Unravelling the Assassination of Malcolm X (Washington: Nubia Press, 1993).
8. Louis Lomax, To Kill a Black Man (Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1987). Although we have reached different conclusions on the conspiracy to kill Malcolm X, I want to acknowledge the help of a sixth author. In both his book, The Death and Life of Malcolm X (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, second edition, 1979) and the kind interview he gave me, Peter Goldman has been a great resource and source of encouragement. His book provides dimensions of both the death and life that remain indispensable for a pilgrim into either.
9. Evanzz underlines Lomax’s importance in The Judas Factor p. xxiv. Lomax also had early insights into the murder of the second subject of his book, Martin Luther King Jr.
10. Memorandum from SAC [Special Agent in Charge], Chicago, to Director, FBI, 1/22169, page 1; in Petition to the Black Caucus, U.S. House of Representatives, of Muhammad Abdul Aziz (Norman 3X Butler) and Khalil Islam (Thomas 15X Johnson), April, 30, 1979; in the Walter E. Fauntroy Papers, Gelman Library, George Washington University.
11. Louis E. Lomax, When the Word Is Given (New York: Signet Books, 1964), p. 82.
12. Ibid.
13. Memorandum from William Sullivan to Alan Belmont, December 24, 1963. Church Committee Final Report, Book III, p. 134.
14. FBI HQ file on Lomax. Evanzz, Judas, p. 198.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Lomax, To Kill, p. 199.
18. Author’s interview with Wallace Muhammad, now W. D. Mohammed, August 2, 1999.
19. Evanzz, Messenger, p. 317.
20. Malcolm X scholar Zak Kondo obtained a March 16, 1954, Detroit FBI Report, captioned MALCOLM K. LITTLE, which cites from a 1950 prison letter written by Malcolm. Fonda, pp. 42, 292 endnote 847.
21. Messenger, p. 183.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., p. 557 endnote 39. Evanzz speculates that Abdul Basin Naeem may have been pressured to cooperate with the FBI and BOSSI due to his immigrant status. Ibid.
25. FBI HQ file on Elijah Muhammad; FBI NY file on Malcolm X; cited by Evanzz, Messenger, p. 186.
26. Ibid., p. 187.
27. Goldman, pp. 55-59. Judas, pp. 70-71.
28. Autobiography, p. 309.
29. To Kill, p. 103,
30. Messenger, pp. 187-88.
31. Cited by Evanzz, Ibid., p. 188.
32.Messenger, p. 192. Judas, p. 73.
33. Lomax, When the Word, p. 179.
34. Autobiography, p. 289.
35. When the Word, Ibid.
36. Autobiography, p. 265.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., p. 292.
40. Ibid., p. 297.
41. FBI HQ file on Elijah Muhammad, section 5, memo dated May 20, 1960; approved by Cartha DeLoach, May 22, 1960. Cited by Evann, Messenger, p. 218.
42. FBI HQ file on Elijah Muhammad. Ibid., pp. 249-50.
43. Autobiography, p. 301.
44. John Henrik Clarke, who published a transcript of the conversation, “A Visit from the FBI,” in Malcolm X: The Man and His Times (New York: Macmillan, 1975), pages 182-204, wrote in a footnote on page 182 that it happened on May 29, 1964. That date is too late, given the references in the conversation to the Clay-Liston fight in Florida as a future event. Clayborne Carson in Malcolm X: The FBI File (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1993), pages 252-53, presents an FBI document that indicates the visit took place on February 4, 1964.
45. Clarke, p. 195.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid., p. 202.
48. Ibid., pp. 202-3.
49. Autobiography, p. 302.
50. Ibid., p. 303.
51. Ibid., pp. 308-9. Kondo, p. 73.
52. Autobiography, p. 316.
53. Malcolm X Speaks, edited by George Breitman (New York: Pathfinder, 1990), p. 18.
54. Kondo, pp. 63, 259 endnote 375.
55. Goldman, pp. 159-60, 191.
56. Malcolm X, “A Declaration of Conscience,” March 12, 1964; Malcolm X Speaks, p. 20.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid., p. 22.
59. Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet,” April 3, 1964; Malcolm X Speaks, pp. 34-35.
60. Judas, pp. 226-27.
61. Cited by Evanzz, Judas, p. 225.
62. Ibid.
63. Messenger, p. 292.
64. Abdul Aziz Omar, formerly Philbert X Little; in William Strickland, Malcolm X: Make It Plain (New York: Viking, 1994), p. 174.
65. FBI HQ file on Elijah Muhammad, memo dated April 12, 1964; cited by Evanzz, Messenger, pp. 292-93.
66. Autobiography, p. 338.
67. Ibid.
68. Malcolm told Julian Mayfield and Leslie Lacy what Nkrumah had said. Leslie Alexander Lacy, “African Responses to Malcolm X,” in Black Fire, edited by Leroi Jones and Larry Neal (New York: William Morrow, 1968), p. 32.
69. 12 years after Kwame Nkrumah’s overthrow, Seymour Hersh reported the CIA’s involvement in the coup in a New York Times article based on a brief description in a book by ex-CIA agent John Stockwell and confirming interviews by “first-hand intelligence sources.” Seymour M. Hersh, “C.I.A. Said to Have Aided Plotters Who Overthrew Nkrumah in Ghana,” New York Times (May 9, 1978), p. 6. John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies (New York: W W Norton, 1978), p. 160 footnote.
70. “Malcolm Says He is Backed Abroad,” New York Times (May 22, 1964), p. 22.
71. Frank Donner, Protectors of Privilege (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 155.
72. Tony Ulasewicz with Stuart A. McKeever, The President’s Private Eye (Westport, Connecticut: MACSAM Publishing, 1990), p. 145.
73. Ibid., p. 151.
74. Ibid.
75. Author’s interview with Teddy Theologes, June 29, 2000.
76. Elaine Rivera, “Out of the Shadows: The Man Who Spied on Malcolm X,” Newsday (July 23, 1989).
77. Author’s interview with Gene Roberts, July 7, 2000.
78. Rivera, Ibid.
79. To Kill, pp. 198-99.
80. Ibid., p. 199.
81. Malcolm X Speaks, pp. 58-59.
82. To Kill, p. 200,
83. Talmadge Hayer filed two affidavits on Malcolm’s murder, the first in November 1977, and the second in February 1978. It is the second, which goes into greater detail, that is cited here. Both affidavits are in Petition to the Black Caucus. Michael Friedly includes them as an appendix in his book, Malcolm X: The Assassination (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992), pp. 215-18.
84. Ibid.
85. Peter Goldman, The Death and Life of Malcolm X (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, second edition, 1979), p. 416.
86. Ibid.
87. Evanzz, Messenger, p. 96.
88. Malcolm’s telegram to Elijah Muhammad was published as an open letter in the June 26, 1964, edition of the New York Post. Cited by Kondo, pp. 74 and 269 endnote 467.
89. Hayer affidavit, Ibid.
90. Goldman, p. 195.
91. Ibid.
92. Author’s interview with Dr. Alauddin Shabazz, January 8, 1999.
93. Goldman, p. 19S.
94. Kondo, p. 147. Kondo hypothesizes that this provocative June 1964 phone call to the NOI was from an FBI or BOSSI provocateur, which would be consistent with the FBI’s COINTELPRO to keep Elijah and Malcolm at each other’s throats.
95. Goldman, p. 414; Kondo, p. 147.
96. The FBI transcript of the June 27, 1964 phone conversation is on page 480 of Malcolm X: The FBI File.
97. Ibid.
98. Judas, p. 241.
99. “Statement of Basic Aims and Objectives of the Organization of Afro-American Unity,” appendix in George Breitman, The Last Year of Malcolm X (New York: Pathfinder, 1989), p. 106.
100. Ibid.
101. Ibid., p. 109.
102. Kondo, pp. 43 and 239 endnote 249; citing FBI document.
103. Ibid., endnote 250; citing FBI document.
104. Malcolm X: The FBI File, p. 482.
105. Ibid.
106. John Ali was interviewed by Wesley South on the Chicago radio program Hotline on July 9, 1964. Ali’s analogies to JFK’s assassination, cited by Evanzz in The Judas Factor (pp. 247-48), were in response to a caller who “asked Ali whether it was true that the Black Muslims were trying to assassinate Malcolm X.” Ibid., p. 247. Ali also used espionage analogies, comparing Malcolm to Benedict Arnold and to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed on the grounds that they handed over U.S. nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Ibid.
107. Cited by Evanzz, Judas, pp. 249-50.
108. Jan Carew, Ghosts in Our Blood (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1994), p. 39.
109. Eric Norden, “The Assassination of Malcolm X,” Hustler (December 1978), p. 98.
110. “Appeal to African Heads of State,” Malcolm X Speaks, pp. 75-77.
111. Ibid., p. 84.
112. “There’s A Worldwide Revolution Going On,” Malcolm X: The Last Speeches, edited by Bruce Perry (New York: Pathfinder, 1989), p. 116. Carew, Ghosts, p. 83.
113. Carew, Ibid.
114. Ibid., p. 115.
115. M. S. Handler, “Malcolm X Seeks U.N. Negro Debate,” New York Times (August 13, 1964), p. 22.
116. Ibid.
117. The missing sentences are included in the citation of the original Times article on page 86 of Malcolm X Speaks.
118. August 11, 1964, CIA memorandum for Deputy Director of Plans, titled “ACTIVITIES OF MALCOLM POSSIBLE INVOLVEMENT OF AFRICAN NATIONS IN U.S. CIVIL DISTURBANCES,” cited by both Kondo, pp. 49 and 242 endnote 280, and Evanzz, Judas, p. 254.
119. Evanzz’s citation of FBI HQ file on Malcolm X, Ibid.
120. Judas, p. 254.
121. John Lewis, Walking With the Wind (New York: Simon 8c Schuster, 1998), p. 286.
122. Malcolm X Speaks, p. 85.
123. Lewis, p. 287.
124. Ibid., p. 288.
125. Louis X, “Boston Minister Tells of Messenger Muhammad’s Biggest Hypocrite,” Muhammad Speaks (December 4, 1964), p. 11. Kondo, p. 159. Goldman, pp. 247-48. Cited also on Tony Brown’s Journal, “What Did Farrakhan Say and When Did He Say It?” (Spring 2000).
126. Spike Lee, By Any Means Necessary: The Trials and Tribulations of the Making of Malcolm X (New York: Hyperion, 1992), p. 56. Farrakhan’s statements to Tony Brown, Barbara Walters, and Mike Wallace are included in “What Did Farrakhan Say …?”
127. “What Did Farrakhan Say …?”
128. Messenger, p. 293,
129. Judas, pp. 263-64.
130. Judas, p. 267.
131. M. S. Handler, “Malcolm X Cites Role in U.N. Fight,” New York Times (January 2, 1965), p. 6.
132. Ibid.
133. Malcolm X: The FBI File, p, 81.
134. Hakim A. Jarnal, From the Dead Level (London: Andre Deutsch, 1971), p. 223.
135. Ibid.
136. Ibid., pp. 212-15, 228-29.
137. Haley, p. 425.
138. Ibid.
139. Ibid.
140. Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), p. 578.
141. Malcolm X, The Final Speeches: February 1965 (New York: Pathfinder, 1992), p. 26.
142. Ibid., p. 28.
143. Coretta Scott King, My Life With Martin Luther King, Jr.; revised edition (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), p. 238.
144. Ibid., p. 240,
145. Goldman, p. 254.
146. Eric Norden, “The Murder of Malcolm X,” The Realist (February 1967), p. 12.
147. Ibid.
148. J. Edgar Hoover’s February 4, 1965, memorandum read: “… Information has been received that Malcolm Little plans to travel to England and France during the early part of February. He will reportedly depart this country on February 5, 1965, and will return about February 11, 1965. In this connection, there is enclosed one copy of a memorandum dated February 1, 1965, at New York, which contains available information of the subject’s contemplated travel.” Kondo, pp. 271-72 endnote 491. In addition to the intelligence agencies I have noted, Hoover’s memorandum was also sent to the Assistant Attorney General, the Acting Attorney General, and the Foreign Liaison Unit. Ibid.
149. Kondo, p. 162.
150. Ibid.
151. Kondo, p. 76. Goldman, p. 263.
152. Goldman, p. 262. Judas, pp. 289-90. Kondo, p. 76. M.X. Handler, “Malcolm X Flees Firebomb Attack,” New York Times (February 15, 1965), p. 1. Malcolm X, Final Speeches, pp. 133-34.
153. Earl Grant, “The Last Days of Malcolm X,” Malcolm X: The Man and His Times, edited by John Henrik Clarke (NewYork: Macmillan, 1975), p. 86.
154. “Malcolm Accuses Muslims of Blaze; They Point to Him,” New York Times (February 16, 1965), p. 18.
155. Autobiography, pp. 308-9. Kondo, p, 73,
156. Messenger, pp. 318-19.
157. Lee, p. 63.
158. On Brother Minister: The Assassination of Malcolm X, a 1997 film directed by Jack Baxter and Jefri Aallmuhammed.
159. “Bottle of Gasoline Found on a Dresser in Malcolm X Home,” New York Times (February 17, 1965), p. 34.
160. He said this, for example, on Monday night, February 15, 1965, in his talk at the Audubon Ballroom, “There’s a Worldwide Revolution Going On.” Final Speeches, p. 124.
161. Norden, “Murder,” p. 12,
162. In his statement to the press, February 18, 1965, “We Are Demanding an Investigation,” Final Speeches, p. 179.
163. Ibid.
164. See endnote 118.
165. Norden, “Murder,” p. 12.
166. Author’s interview with Gene Roberts, July 7, 2000.
167. “There’s a Worldwide Revolution Going On,” Final Speeches, p. 123.
168. Author’s interview.
169. Gene Roberts to Elaine Rivera on his efforts to tell his BOSSI supervisors about the dry run. Rivera, “Out of the Shadows.”
170. Author’s interview.
171. Gordon Parks, “I was a Zombie Then—Like All [Black] Muslims, I Was Hypnotized,” Life (March 5, 1965), p. 28.
172. Ibid.
173. Goldman, p. 261,
174. Ibid., p. 262.
175. Haley, p. 438.
176. Ibid.
177. Rivera, “Out of the Shadows.”
178. Ibid.
179. Haley, p. 431. Grant, “The Last Days,” p. 92.
180. Norden, “The Murder,” p, 13.
181. Talmadge Hayer amplified his written confession, with further details that are included here, in an interview on Tony Brown’s Journal, “Malcolm and Elijah,” February 21, 1982. Cited by Kondo, pp, 169-70.
182. Haley, p. 428. Judas, pp. xiii, 293.
183. Haley, p. 433.
184. Ibid.
185. Kondo, p. xviii.
186. Goldman, p. 274.
187. Several witnesses claim two suspects were arrested by the police. Omar Ahmed, who was on Malcolm’s guard detail at the time, thought there were two men arrested outside of the ballroom. Interview by Kondo, p. 84. Earl Grant makes the same claim in “The Last Days of Malcolm X,” p, 99.
The New York Herald Tribune‘s early edition of February 22, 1965, reported two arrests. Its article said that one suspect, Hayer, was “taken to Bellevue Prison Ward and was sealed off by a dozen policemen. The other suspect was taken to the Wadsworth Avenue precinct, where the city’s top policemen immediately converged and began one of the heaviest homicide investigations this city has ever seen.” New York Herald Tribune (February 22, 1965; city edition) article by Jimmy Breslin, “Police Rescue Two Suspects”; cited by Kondo, p. 83. The Tribune‘s late city editions make no mention of the second suspect. Ibid. The New York Times in its early and late city editions follows the same pattern. Kondo, Ibid.
Peter Goldman explains the inconsistencies in terms of separate debriefings of Thomas Hoy and Alvin Aronoff: “Hoy and Aronoff were debriefed separately at the time, Hoy at the scene and Aronoff at the stationhouse, and the early editions of the next day’s papers reported that there had been two arrests. The two policemen, as it developed, were talking about the same man …” Goldman, p. 276.
When Alex Haley wrote his 1965 ‘Epilogue” to the Autobiography, he was still raising the possibility of two arrested suspects and the hope of identifying the second. Haley, p. 438.
188. Author’s interview.
189. From Gene Roberts interview in Brother Minister.
190. Rivera, “Out of the Shadows.”
191. William F. Pepper, Orders to Kill (New York; Carroll & Graf, 1995), pp. 129-30. Pepper identifies McCullough as being at the same time a member of Army intelligence. Ibid., p. 443.
192. Kondo, p. 202.
193. Benjamin Goodman Affidavit, May 19, 1978; in Petition to Black Caucus.
194. Herman Porter, “The Trial,” in The Assassination of Malcolm X, edited by Malik Miah (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1988), p. 93. Norden, “The Murder,” p. 14. William M. Kunstler’s December 19, 1977, deposition in Petition to the Black Caucus, pp. 25-26.
195. Lee, p. 42,
196. Grant, p. 96.
197. Haley, pp. 430-31.
198. Ibid., p. 431.
199. Malcolm X, “A Letter from Cairo,” By Any Means Necessary (New York: Pathfinder, 1991), p. 110.
200. David DuBois to Spike Lee; in Lee, p. 38.
201. Carew, p. 36.
202. Charles 37X Kenyatta in Brother Minister.
203. Carew, p. 57.
204. Ibid.
Has anyone ever been more conscious, from birth to death, of his coming murder? Malcolm X saw his own violent death in advance just as clearly as his mother Louise Little saw the imminence of his father’s death, on that afternoon in 1931 when her husband Earl left their house and began walking up the road toward East Lansing, Michigan.
“If I take the kind of things in which I believe, then add to that the kind of temperament that I have, plus the one hundred percent dedication I have to whatever I believe in … These ingredients would make it just about impossible for me to die of old age.”
“It was then,” Malcolm says in his autobiography, “that my mother had this vision. She had always been a strange woman in this sense, and had always had a strong intuition of things about to happen. And most of her children are the same way, I think. When something is about to happen, I can feel something, sense something.”1
His mother rushed out on the porch screaming. She ran across the yard into the road shouting, “Early! Early!” Earl turned around. He saw her, waved, and kept on going.
That night Malcolm awakened to the sound of his mother’s screaming again. The police were in the living room. They took his mother to the hospital, where his father had already bled to death. His body had been almost cut in two by a streetcar. Earl Little had been an organizer for Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association, the largest black nationalist movement in American history. Malcolm was told by blacks in Lansing that his father had been attacked by the white racist Black Legion. They put his body on the tracks for a streetcar to run over.
Malcolm believed that four of his father’s six brothers were also killed by white men. Thus the pattern of his own life seemed clear. “It has always been my belief,” he told his co-author Alex Haley, “that I, too, will die by violence. I have done all that I can to be prepared.”2 Malcolm prepared for death by living the truth so deeply that it hastened death. This is the theme of Malcolm X’s autobiography. “To come right down to it,” Malcolm said to Alex Haley, “if I take the kind of things in which I believe, then add to that the kind of temperament that I have, plus the one hundred percent dedication I have to whatever I believe in … These ingredients would make it just about impossible for me to die of old age.”3
As the story neared its end, with Malcolm more and more totally surrounded by forces that wanted him dead, he no longer saw himself as among the living. “Each day I live as if I am already dead … I do not expect to live long enough to read this book in its finished form.”4 And he was right: he died in Harlem on the same day he had originally intended to visit Alex Haley in upstate New York to read the final manuscript.
The assassination of Malcolm X on February 21, 1965, at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City was carried out through the collaboration of three circles of power: the Nation of Islam (NOI), the New York Police Department (NYPD), and U.S. intelligence agencies. Malcolm was, as he knew, surrounded at the end by all three of these circles. In terms of their visibility to him and their relationship to one another, the circles were concentric. The Nation of Islam was the nearest ring around Malcolm, the less visible NYPD was next, and the FBI and CIA were in the outermost shadows. The involvement of these three power circles in Malcolm’s murder becomes apparent if we trace his pilgrimage of truth through his interactions with all three of them.
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| Malcolm X and Alex Haley |
In writing this essay, I have been guided especially by the works of five authors. The first three are Karl Evanzz, Zak Kondo, and Louis Lomax. Washington Post online editor Karl Evanzz is the author of The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X5 and The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad.6 Evanzz’s two books complement each other brilliantly in presenting a full picture of Malcolm’s assassination, the first emphasizing the U.S. government’s responsibility and the second, that of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. Zak A. Kondo, a professor at Bowie State College, does it all in one book, Conspiracys: Unravelling the Assassination of Malcolm X,7 which follows an unusual (though strangely accurate) title with a complex analysis of the three murderous circles: NOI, NYPD, and U.S. spy agencies. His self-published, out-of-print book that is almost impossible to find has 1266 endnotes, all of which deserve to be read. Then there is Louis Lomax’s To Kill a Black Man,8 first published in 1968, two years before Lomax’s own death in a car accident. As both a faithful friend to Malcolm and a writer wired to what was happening, Lomax already pointed to a solution of Malcolm’s assassination.9 I said I have five guides. The last two are Malcolm X and the man who lived to tell his tale, Alex Haley.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X is the transforming work of both. Haley in his epilogue hints at what Malcolm in his last days realized and was on the verge of shouting—that it was the government, not Elijah Muhammad, and Malcolm’s African connection, not his NOI rejection, that were the primary agent and motivation behind the plot. Malcolm is the ultimate guide to understanding his own murder.
In a memorandum, written four years after Malcolm’s death, the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Chicago office stated that:
Over the years, considerable thought has been given and action taken with Bureau’s approval, relating to methods through which the NOI, could be discredited in the eyes of the general black populace. … Or through which factionalism among the leadership could be created … Factional disputes have been developed—the most notable being MALCOLM X LITTLE.10
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| Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad |
The FBI developed the factional dispute that led to Malcolm’s death by first placing at least one of its people high within the Chicago headquarters of the Nation of Islam. Its infiltrator then worked to widen a division between Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X. To the FBI’s alarm, this process was inadvertently described, and the FBI man identified, in the 1964 book When The Word Is Given, written by Louis Lomax.
In the paragraph that gave away the FBI’s game, Lomax began by observing that Elijah Muhammad had moved from Chicago to Phoenix, Arizona, for the sake of his health. Lomax then described a significant shift of power. Elijah he said had delegated to his Chicago office not only the NOI’s finances and administration, but also “the responsibility for turning out the movement’s publications and over-all statements,” thus taking away from Malcolm X his critical control over the NOI’s flow of information.
“at one time carried some of these responsibilities, particularly the publishing of the Muslim newspaper..,. And many observers thought they saw an intra-organizational fight when these responsibilities were taken from him and given to Chicago.11
The thing that dismayed the FBI most was the paragraph’s final sentence, which disclosed a hidden factor in this abrupt transfer of power away from Malcolm. The sentence stated that “this decision by Muhammad was made possible because John X, a former FBI agent and perhaps the best administrative brain in the movement, was shifted from New York to Chicago.12
Lomax’s sentence about “John X, a former FBI agent” set off alarm bells in FBI counterintelligence, especially in the office of William C. Sullivan. Assistant FBI Director Sullivan was in charge of the illegal Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) designed to develop a “factional dispute” between Elijah and Malcolm. Sullivan was a high-level commander of covert action. Among his projects was an all-out FBI campaign “aimed at neutralizing [Dr. Martin Luther] King as an effective Negro leader,” as Sullivan put it in a December 1963 memorandum.13
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| COINTELPRO chief William C. Sullivan |
On March 20, 1964, COINTELPRO chief Sullivan was alerted by an “airtel” from the FBI’s Seattle field office to the objectionable passage in When The Word Is Given.14 The hardcover edition of the book had been published in late 1963, only a few months before what Sullivan must have regarded as a COINTELPRO success story, Malcolm’s March 8, 1964 announcement of his split with Elijah Muhammad. The problem was that to a discerning reader of both the Lomax paragraph and the news of the split, the FBI could be recognized as a key disruptive factor.
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| John X Ali Simmons announcing Malcolm X suspension from the Nation of Islam |
An FBI official recommended in a memorandum to Sullivan that “the New York Office should be instructed to contact Lomax to advise him concerning the inaccurate statement contained in this book regarding [John X Ali] Simmons. … And that he be instructed to have this statement removed from any future printings of the book.”15 FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover added his personal “OK” to this recornmendation.16 Lomax, however, ignored the FBI’s pressure as well as John Ali’s anger at his having made the statement. He never retracted it. In his later book, To Kill a Black Man, he repeated it, and said that John Ali knew it was true.17 In the six years leading to his death, Lomax never clarified what he meant by the term “former FBI agent.” He may have been giving Ali the benefit of a doubt as to his having severed his FBI connection by the time Lomax mentioned it in 1964. In any case, the FBI had other informants in the Nation of Islam to take his place.
Wallace Muhammad, Elijah Muhammad’s independent-minded son, also believed that FBI informants were manipulating NOI headquarters at the time Malcolm and Elijah became antagonists:
The FBI had key persons in the national staff, at least one or two maybe. They were preparing for the death of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad [in terms of determining his successor]. I believe that the members of the Nation of Islam were influenced to do the things that they were doing not just by the national staff and my father but also by the intelligence department.18
Wallace Muhammad was in a position to know at first hand the FBI’s process of working with NOI informants. The FBI considered him one of them. Karl Evanzz, in researching his biography of Elijah Muhammad entitled The Messenger, discovered from FBI documents that in addition to John Ali, at least three other people were regarded by FBI agents as “reliable sources” close to Muhammad. The first man was Abdul Basit Naeem, a Pakistani journalist who served as an NOI publicist. Then there is Hassan Sharrieff, Elijah Muhammad’s grandson and Wallace Muhammad. Evanzz concludes that the FBI thought “Wallace and Hassan fit the bill because they had provided the Bureau with information it considered crucial to inciting violence between Muhammad’s camp and Malcolm X.”19 Wallace’s and Hassan’s reasons for talking with the FBI seem to have been simply to seek protection from members of their own family, who threatened to kill them for going against Elijah. The FBI then recycled their information for its own use in plotting against Malcolm and Elijah.
“I believe that the members of the Nation of Islam were influenced to do the things that they were doing not just by the national staff and my father but also by the intelligence department.” ~Wallace Muhammad
It was Louis Lomax’s revelation of the FBI’s covert process within the NOI that so concerned the Bureau. Lomax’s statement had given his readers a glimpse into a critical part of the FBI’s COINTELPRO strategy to divide and destroy the Nation of Islam, thereby silencing as well its most powerful voice, Malcolm X.
FBI documents show that the Bureau had been monitoring Malcolm X as far back as 1950, when he was still in prison.20 The Bureau began to focus special attention on Malcolm in the late ’50s, when it realized he had become Elijah Muhammad’s intermediary to foreign revolutionaries. From Malcolm’s Harlem base of operations as the minister of the NOI’s Temple Number Seven, he was meeting regularly at the United Nations with Third World diplomats. In 1957 Malcolm met in Harlem with visiting Indonesian President Achmed Sukarno, whom the CIA had targeted for removal from power. Sukarno was extremely impressed by Malcolm.21 As early as eight years before Malcolm’s death, the FBI and CIA were watching the subversive international connections Malcolm was making.
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| Abdul Basit Naeem |
In 1957 when Malcolm X was becoming the NOI’s diplomat to Third World leaders, Abdul Basit Naeem was developing into Elijah Muhammad’s public relations man in the same direction.22 Naeem was a Pakistani journalist living at the time in Brooklyn. His first project with Elijah was a 1957 booklet that combined international Islamic affairs with coverage of the Nation of Islam.23 Evanzz discovered that Abdul Basit Naeem became extremely cooperative. Not only was he cooperative with the FBI but also with the New York Police Department’s intelligence unit, “BOSSI” (the acronym for Bureau of Special Service and Investigation).24 BOSSI would later succeed in planting one of its cover operatives in Malcolm’s own security team. The FBI and BOSSI would prove to be linking agencies in the chain of events leading up to Malcolm’s assassination.
At this time Malcolm had also become the apparent successor to Elijah Muhammad, who then loved and respected his greatest disciple more than he did his own sons. Accordingly, the FBI’s Chicago field office, which was monitoring all of Elijah’s communications, told J. Edgar Hoover in January 1958 that Malcolm had become Elijah’s heir apparent.25 Evanzz has described the impact of this revelation on the FBI’s COINTELPRO section:
The secret to disabling the [NOI] movement, therefore, lay in neutralizing Malcolm X.26
Evanzz suggests the FBI began its neutralizing of Malcolm in 1957 by utilizing a police force with which it worked closely on counterintelligence, the New York Police Department.
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| Malcolm in NYC (1957) “No man should have that much power” |
The NYPD was already in conflict with Malcolm. In April 1957 in Harlem, white policemen brutally beat a Black Muslim, Johnson X Hinton, who had dared question their beating another man. The police arrested the badly injured Hinton and took him to the 28th Precinct Station on 123rd Street. When the station was confronted by a menacing but disciplined crowd, Malcolm X demanded on their behalf that Hinton be hospitalized. The police finally agreed, and were shocked by Malcolm’s dispersal of the 2,600 people with a simple wave of his hand. They concluded with alarm that he had the power to start as well as stop a riot. The city and police also had to pay Hinton $70,000 as a result of an NOI lawsuit.27 A police inspector who witnessed Malcolm’s dispersal of the crowd said, “No man should have that much power.”28
On May 24, 1958, four months after Hoover was told that Malcolm was Elijah’s successor, two NYPD detectives and a federal postal inspector invaded the Queens apartment house in which Malcolm and his wife, Betty Shabazz, lived in one of the three apartments. They shared the house with two other NOI couples, including John X Ali and his wife, Minnie Ali. In 1958, John Ali was not only the secretary of Malcolm’s Mosque Number Seven but also his top advisor, his close friend, and his housemate.29
Brandishing a warrant for a postal fraud suspect who did not live there, the detectives barged into the house and ran directly to Malcolm’s office on the second floor. They fired several shots into it. Fortunately Malcolm was away from the house, but the bullets narrowly missed the terrified women and children in the next room. One detective arrested Betty Shabazz, who was pregnant, and Minnie Ali. He threatened to throw the women down the stairs if they didn’t move faster. The detectives, on the first floor, were confronted and beaten by a crowd of angry neighbors. Police reinforcements arrested six people, including Betty Shabazz and Minnie Ali, who were charged with assaulting the two detectives.30
In response to the attack, an enraged Malcolm X employed a brilliant media strategy against the NYPD that he would develop later against the U.S. government. To expose this case of New York police brutality against blacks, he drew on the support of his new friends at the United Nations. Malcolm wrote an open letter to New York City Mayor Robert Wagner in which he promised to shame the city unless it redressed the grievance:
Outraged Muslims of the African Asian World join us in calling for an immediate investigation by your office into the insane conduct of irresponsible white police officers … Representatives of Afro-Asian nations and their press attachés have been besieging the Muslims for more details of the case.31
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| Betty Shabazz |
In their March 1959 trial that lasted two weeks, the longest assault trial in the city’s history, Betty Shabazz, Minnie Ali, and the other defendants were all found not guilty by a Queens jury. They filed a $24 million suit that was settled out of court.32
In a first effort to kill or intimidate Malcolm X, the New York Police Department (and perhaps the FBI as instigator) had failed. As in the beating of Hinton, the NYPD was once again discredited by Malcolm. Both the FBI and the city police had come to regard Malcolm increasingly as their enemy. It may also have been through the pressures of this ordeal that the FBI succeeded in establishing its covert relationship with John Ali. At the time Malcolm was unaware of any such development. To Elijah Muhammad he recommended his friend John Ali for the next position he would hold as national secretary in Chicago of the Nation of Islam.
By 1963 conflicts between Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X were becoming obvious. When Louis Lomax had the courage to ask Malcolm about a news report of a minor difference between himself and Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm denied it:
It’s a lie. Any article that says there is a ‘minor’ difference between Mr. Muhammad and me is a lie. How could there be any difference between The Messenger and me? I am his slave, his servant and his son. He is the leader, the only spokesman for the Black Muslims.33
As Malcolm knew, the news report was understated. There were more differences than one between “leader” and “servant,” and they were becoming major. A root conflict was the question of activism. During the creative turmoil of the Civil Rights Movement, more and more black people were heard questioning the Nation of Islam’s inactivity. They would say, “Those Muslims talk tough, but they never do anything, unless somebody bothers Muslims.”34 Malcolm cited this common complaint to Alex Haley, because he agreed with it. He was pushing for the NOI to become more involved. Elijah Muhammad was committed, however, to a non-engagement policy.
While continuing his response to Lomax’s vexing question, Malcolm resorted to NOI theology to admit that there was in fact a difference:
But I will tell you this, the Messenger has seen God. He was with Allah and was given divine patience with the devil. He is willing to wait for Allah to deal with this devil. Well, sir, the rest of us Black Muslims have not seen God, we don’t have this gift of divine patience with the devil. The younger Black Muslims want to see some action.35
A second difference between Malcolm and Elijah arose from Malcolm’s increasing celebrity status. Although Malcolm always prefaced his public statements with “The Honorable Elijah Muhammad says,” it was Malcolm who more often proclaimed the word and gained the greater public attention. Elijah Muhammad coined a tricky formula to reassure Malcolm that this was what he wanted: “Because if you are well known, it will make me better known.”36 But in the same breath, the Messenger warned Malcolm that he would then become hated, “because usually people get jealous of public figures.”37 Malcolm later observed dryly that nothing Mr. Muhammad had ever said to him was more prophetic.38
Malcolm’s rise in prominence as NOI spokesperson, while Elijah Muhammad retreated to Arizona for his health, caused a backlash in Chicago headquarters. When John Ali was appointed to National Secretary, the office was managed by members of Elijah’s family. It was already becoming notorious for its wealth and corruption at the expense of NOI members. In the name of Elijah, John Ali and the Muhammad family hierarchy moved to consolidate their power over Malcolm’s. Herbert Muhammad, Elijah’s son, had become the publisher of the Nation’s newspaper, Muhammad Speaks. He ordered that as little as possible be printed about Malcolm and finally nothing at all.39 With Elijah’s consent from Arizona, Malcolm was being edged out of the picture.
The most serious conflict between the two men occurred when Malcolm became more conscious of rumors concerning his mentor’s affairs with young women. Malcolm conferred with a trusted friend, Wallace Muhammad. Wallace said the rumors were true. Malcolm spoke with three of Elijah Muhammad’s former secretaries. They said Elijah had fathered their children. They also said, as Malcolm related in the autobiography,
Elijah Muhammad had told them I was the best, the greatest minister he ever had, but that someday I would leave him, turn against him—so I was ‘dangerous.’ I learned from these former secretaries of Mr. Muhammad that while he was praising me to my face, he was tearing me apart behind my back.40
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| Wallace W.D. Muhammad with Malcolm X |
All these developments were being monitored closely by the FBI through its electronic surveillance and undercover informants. The Bureau’s COINTELPRO was also using covert action to destroy Elijah Muhammad in a way it would develop even further against Martin Luther King Jr. On May 22, 1960, Assistant FBI Director Cartha DeLoach approved the sending of a fake letter on Elijah’s infidelities to his wife, Clara Muhammad, and to NOI ministers.41 The rumors Malcolm heard were being spread by the FBI.
On July 31, 1962, COINTELPRO director William C. Sullivan approved another scheme whereby phony letters on Elijah’s philandering would be mailed to Clara Muhammad and “selected individuals.” He cautioned the Chicago Special Agent in Charge: “These letters should be mailed at staggered intervals using care to prevent any possibility of tracing the mailing back to the FBI.”42 While Malcolm X was investigating the secretaries’ charges against Elijah Muhammad, the FBI was trying to deepen his and the Messenger’s differences so as to finalize their split, assuming at the time that their divorce would weaken the power of both men.
“It doesn’t take hate to make a man firm in his convictions. There are many areas to which you wouldn’t give information and it wouldn’t be because of hate. It would be your intelligence and ideals.”
Malcolm struggled to remain loyal to the spiritual leader who had redeemed him from his own depths in prison, but it was only a matter of time before the two men would split over all these issues. The occasion for their break was John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Elijah Muhammad ordered his ministers to refrain from commenting on it. On December 1, 1963, after a speech Malcolm gave in New York City, he was asked his opinion on the President’s murder. He later described his response:
Without a second thought, I said what I honestly felt—that it was, as I saw it, a case of ‘the chickens coming home to roost.’ I said that the hate in white men had not stopped with the killing of defenseless black people, but that hate, allowed to spread unchecked, finally had struck down this country’s Chief of State. I said it was the same thing as had happened with Medgar Evers, with Patrice Lumumba, with Madame Nhu’s husband.43
On the day he saw the headlines on Malcolm’s remark, Elijah Muhammad told his chief minister he would have to silence him for the next 90 days to disassociate the Nation from his blunder. Malcolm said he would submit completely to the discipline. The FBI saw this period as its golden opportunity.
Two FBI agents visited Malcolm on February 4, 1964.44 Malcolm knew they were coming. He had a tape recorder hidden under the sofa in his living room, and recorded the conversation.
The agents admitted that the FBI had chosen that particular time to contact Malcolm because of his suspension by Elijah Muhammad. They hoped that bitterness on Malcolm’s part might move him to become an informant. Such bitterness was understandable, they said sympathetically. The agents even handed Malcolm a facile rationalization for cooperating in their undercover crime of undermining Elijah, while compromising him:
It would not be illogical for someone to have spent so many years doing something, then being suspended.45
Malcolm: No, it should make one stronger. It should make him realize that law applies to the law enforcer as well as those who are under the enforcement of the enforcer.46
After failing to get anywhere with Malcolm, one of the agents said, “You have the privilege [of not giving the FBI information]. That is very good. You are not alone. We talk to people every day who hate the Government or hate the FBI.” Then he added, with a stab at bribing Malcolm, “That is why they pay money, you know.”47
Malcolm ignored the bribe and went to the heart of the question: “That is not hate, it is incorrect to clarify that as hate. It doesn’t take hate to make a man firm in his convictions. There are many areas to which you wouldn’t give information and it wouldn’t be because of hate. It would be your intelligence and ideals.”48
Malcolm had learned that he was forbidden by Elijah Muhammad even to teach in his own Mosque Number Seven, and that the Nation had announced further that he would be reinstated “if he submits.” The impression was being given that he had rebelled.
Looking back at the announcement, he said to Haley, “I hadn’t hustled in the streets for nothing. I knew when I was being set up.”49 Malcolm realized the ground was being laid by NOI headquarters to keep him suspended indefinitely. A deeper realization came when one of his Mosque Seven officials began telling the men in the mosque that if they knew what Malcolm had done, they’d kill him themselves. “As any official in the Nation of Islam would instantly have known, any death-talk for me could have been approved of, if not actually initiated, by only one man.”50 Malcolm knew that Elijah Muhammad, the spiritual father whom he had revered and served for 12 years, had now sanctioned his murder.
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| Captain Joseph X Gravitts (to the left of Elijah Muhammad) |
Then came a first death plot. One of Malcolm’s own Mosque Seven officials, Captain Joseph X Gravitts, following higher orders, told an assistant to Malcolm to wire his car to explode when he started the engine. The man refused the assignment, told Malcolm of the plot, and saved his life.51 He also freed Malcolm from his attachment to the Nation of Islam. Malcolm was forced to recognize that the NOI’s hierarchy and structure, extending right down into his own mosque, was committed to killing him. He could already see a first ring of death encircling him, comprised of the organization he had developed to serve Elijah Muhammad. From that point on, Malcolm said, he “went few places without constant awareness that any number of my former brothers felt they would make heroes of themselves in the Nation of Islam if they killed me.”52
On March 8, 1964, with less than a year to live, Malcolm X announced his departure from the Nation of Islam. He said he was organizing a new movement because the NOI had “gone as far as it can.” He was “prepared to cooperate in local civil-rights actions in the South and elsewhere. “53 Malcolm also passed out copies of a telegram he had sent to Elijah Muhammad, in which he stated:
Despite what has been said by the press, I have never spoken one word of criticism to them about your family … 54
In spite of everything, Malcolm was trying not to split the NOI, and therefore muffled his criticisms of Elijah Muhammad.
Two days later, the Nation of Islam sent Malcolm a certified letter telling him and his family to move out of their seven-room house in East Elmhurst, Queens. The Elmhurst house had been home for Malcolm, Betty Shabazz, and their growing family (now with four daughters) since the early days of their marriage when Malcolm and Betty were in the house with John and Minnie Ali. One month after the certified letter, the secretary of Malcolm’s old Mosque Number Seven filed suit in a Queens civil court to have Malcolm and his family evicted. Malcolm would fight for the legal right to stay in the only home he had to pass on to his wife and children, especially since he might soon be killed by the same forces trying to take their house away.55
On March 12, Malcolm held a press conference in New York and said internal differences within the Nation had forced him out of it. He was now founding a new mosque in New York City, Muslim Mosque, Inc. With a conscious effort to avoid repeating the mistakes of Elijah Muhammad, he said in his “Declaration of Independence” that he was a firm believer in Islam but had no special credentials:
I do not pretend to be a divine man, but I do believe in divine guidance, divine power, and in the fulfillment of divine prophecy. I am not educated, nor am I an expert in any particular field—but I am sincere, and my sincerity is my credentials.56
He opened (wide) the door to working with other black leaders, with whom he had traded criticisms, most notably with Martin Luther King Jr. “As of this minute, I’ve forgotten everything bad that the other leaders have said about me, and I pray they can also forget the many bad things I’ve said about them.”57 He then immediately chased King away by saying black people should begin to form rifle clubs to defend their lives and property.
He concluded:
We should be peaceful, law-abiding—but the time has come for the American Negro to fight back in self-defense whenever and wherever he is being unjustly and unlawfully attacked. If the government thinks I am wrong for saying this, then let the government start doing its job.58
Malcolm was aware that the government might think it was its job to silence him.
Much more threatening to the government than Malcolm’s rifle clubs, which never got off the ground, was the visionary campaign he then initiated to bring U.S. violations of African-Americans’ rights before the court of world opinion in the United Nations. In his April 3, 1964, speech in Cleveland, “The Ballot or the Bullet,” Malcolm began to articulate his international vision:
We need to expand the civil-rights struggle to a higher level—to the level of human rights. Whenever you are in a civil-rights struggle, whether you know it or not, you are confining yourself to the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam … Civil rights comes within the domestic affairs of this country. All of our African brothers and our Asian brothers and our Latin-American brothers cannot open their mouths and interfere in the domestic affairs of the United States. … But the United Nations has what’s known as the charter of human rights, it has a committee that deals in human rights … When you expand the civil-rights struggle to the level of human rights, you can then take the case of the black man in this country before the nations in the UN. You can take it before the General Assembly. You can take Uncle Sam before a world court. But the only level you can do it on is the level of human rights.59
In the spring of 1964, Malcolm X had come up with a strategy to internationalize the Civil Rights Movement by re-defining it as a Human Rights Movement, then enlisting the support of African states. Malcolm would proclaim to the day of his death the nation-transcending word of human rights, not civil rights, for all African-Americans. He would also organize a series of African leaders to work together and make that word flesh in the General Assembly of the United Nations. In breaking his bonds to Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm had freed himself to unite African and African-American perspectives in an international coalition for change. For the rest of his life, he was on fire with energy to create that working partnership spanning two continents.
In breaking his bonds to Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm had freed himself to unite African and African-American perspectives in an international coalition for change.
The FBI began to realize it had made a major miscalculation. Its COINTELPRO that helped precipitate the divorce between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad had, it turned out, liberated Malcolm for a much larger mission than anything he could conceivably have accomplished under Elijah Muhammad. He was suddenly stepping onto an international stage in what could become an unwelcome scenario to the U.S. government. Nevertheless, the Chicago NOI connections that the Bureau had made so carefully in John Ali and other informants could still salvage the COINTELPRO goal of neutralizing Malcolm. Since Malcolm had “rebelled” against Elijah and Chicago, he could now, with Chicago’s help, be forced into silence forever.
The FBI had a second, growing concern. Despite Malcolm’s offputting talk of rifle clubs, his evolving strategy for an international ballot, not the bullet, was catching the attention of a potential ally whose power went far beyond that of Elijah Muhammad: Martin Luther King Jr.
Malcolm and Martin met for the first and only time in the nation’s capital on March 26, 1964. They had both been listening to the Senate’s debate on civil rights legislation. Afterwards they shook hands warmly, spoke together, and were interviewed. He grinned and said he was there to remind the white man of the alternative to Dr. King. King offered a militant alternative of his own, saying that if the Senate kept on talking and doing nothing, a “creative direct action program” would start. If the Civil Rights Act were not passed, he warned, “our nation is in for a dark night of social disruption.”60
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| Malcolm and Martin (March 26, 1964) |
Although Malcolm and Martin would continue to differ sharply on nonviolence and would never even see each other again in the 11 months Malcolm had left, there was clearly an engaging harmony between the two leaders standing side by side on the Capitol steps. Given Malcolm’s escalation of civil rights to human rights and King’s emphasis upon ever more disruptive, massive civil disobedience, their prophetic visions were becoming more compatible, even complementary. The FBI and CIA, studying the words and pictures of that D.C. encounter in their midst, could hardly have failed to recognize a threat to the status quo. If Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. were to join efforts, they could ignite an explosive force for change in the American system. The FBI and CIA had to face a question paralleling that of the New York police who had witnessed Malcolm’s crowd dispersal. Should any two men have that kind of power against the system?
On the same day Malcolm and Martin shook hands in Washington, the FBI’s NOI connections were proving to be an effective part of an action in Chicago to further isolate Malcolm, setting him up for his murder.
Philbert X Little, Malcolm’s brother, was Elijah Muhammad’s minister in Lansing, Michigan. The Messenger and his NOI managers ordered Philbert to report to Chicago, where they arranged a press conference for him on March 26 of 1964. John Ali then handed Philbert a prepared statement. Ali told Philbert to read it to the media. Philbert had never seen the text before. As he read it for the first time (aloud and in a monotone) he heard himself denouncing Malcolm in terms that threatened Malcolm’s converts from the Nation of Islam.
I see where the reckless efforts of my brother Malcolm will cause many of our unsuspecting people, who listen and follow him, unnecessary loss of blood and life.61 … the great mental illness which beset my mother whom I love and one of my brothers … may now have taken another victim … my brother Malcolm.62
Malcolm responded to the news of his brother’s apparent attack on him by saying,
We’ve been good friends all our lives. He has a job he needs; that’s why he said what he did … I know for a fact that they flew him in from Lansing, put a script in his hand and told him to read it.63
Philbert himself confirmed years later that “the purpose of making that statement was to fortify the Muslims. That’s why I was brought to Chicago. When I got ready to make my statement, John Ali put a paper in front of me and told me I should read that. So I read the statement that was very negative for my mother. And it was negative against Malcolm. I wouldn’t have read it over the air, you see, if I had looked at it. I asked John Ali about it and he says, ‘That’s just a statement that was prepared for you to read.’ He said, ‘I know the Messenger will be very pleased with the way you read it,’ and that was it.”64
The vision to which Malcolm X was converted by his experience at Mecca determined the way in which he would meet his death. He called that vision ‘brotherhood’.
Elijah Muhammad’s vengeance toward Malcolm was still being fueled by the FBI’s COINTELPRO. At the time of “Philbert’s statement,” the FBI sent Elijah one of its fake letters complaining about his relationships with his secretaries. The letter succeeded in making Elijah suspect Malcolm had written it. On April 4, 1964 an FBI electronic bug recorded Elijah telling one of his ministers, who had also received a copy of the letter, that the presumed writer Malcolm “is like Judas at the Last Supper.”65
In recognition that his 12 years proclaiming the word of Elijah Muhammad had left him poorly prepared for his new mosque’s ministry, Malcolm decided to re-discover Islam by making his pilgrimage to Mecca.
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| Malcolm at Mecca (1964) |
In a life of changes, Malcolm’s most fundamental change began at Mecca. At the conclusion of his pilgrimage, he was asked by other Muslims what it was about the Hajj that had most impressed him. He surprised them by saying nothing of the holy sites or the rituals but extolling instead the multi-racial community he had experienced.
“The brotherhood!” he said, “The people of all races, colors, from all over the world coming together as one! It has proved to me the power of the One God.”66
The vision to which Malcolm X was converted by his experience at Mecca determined the way in which he would meet his death. He called that vision “brotherhood.” Had he lived a while longer, he would have added “and sisterhood.” In his final months, Malcolm also began to change noticeably in his recognition of women’s rights and leadership roles. His conversion at Mecca was to a vision of human unity under one God. From that point on, his consciousness of one human family, in the sight of one God, sharpened his perceptions, deepened his courage, and opened his soul to whatever further changes Allah had in store for him. Consistent with all those changes, Malcolm’s experience of the truth of brotherhood radicalized still more his resistance to racism. His conversion to human unity was not to a phony blindness to the reality of prejudice, but on the contrary, to a greater understanding of its evil in God’s presence. He was even more determined to confront it truthfully. Concluding his answer to his fellow pilgrims on his Hajj, Malcolm returned to his lifelong focus on racism, set now in the context of the experience he had at Mecca of his total acceptance by pilgrims of all colors.
“To me,” he said, “the earth’s most explosive and pernicious evil is racism, the inability of God’s creatures to live as One, especially in the Western world.” 67
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| Malcolm & Kwame Nkrumah; with Prince Faisal |
Following his pilgrimage to Mecca, Malcolm met with two influential heads of state, Prince Faisal of Arabia and President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. They acknowledged Malcolm as a respected leader of black Americans, who now represented also a true Islam. Prince Faisal of oil-rich Arabia made Malcolm a guest of the state. Ghana’s anti-colonialist Kwame Nkrumah, a leader of newly independent African states, told his African-American visitor something Malcolm said he would never forget:
Brother, it is now or never the hour of the knife, the break with the past, the major operation.68
Nkrumah’s sense of the hour of the knife was right, but his hope that it would be a knife of freedom cutting through a history of oppression would go unfulfilled. Only nine months later, Malcolm would be murdered.
A year after that, Nkrumah, upon publishing his book Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, dedicated to “the Freedom Fighters of Africa, living and dead,” would be overthrown by a CIA-backed coup.69
“The case to be presented to the world organization … would compel the United States Government to face the same charges as South Africa and Rhodesia.”
Malcolm also visited Egypt, Lebanon, Nigeria, Liberia, Senegal, Morocco, and Algeria. Upon his return to the U.S. on May 21, 1964, the New York Times published an article on his trip that further alerted intelligence agencies to Malcolm’s quest for a UN case against the U.S. Malcolm told reporters he had “received pledges of support from some new African nations for charges of discrimination against the United States in the United Nations.”
“The case to be presented to the world organization,” he asserted, “would compel the United States Government to face the same charges as South Africa and Rhodesia.”70
While Malcolm was working abroad to put the U.S. on trial at the UN, the New York Police Department was infiltrating his new Muslim Mosque with its elite intelligence unit, the Bureau of Special Service and Investigation (BOSSI). To the cold warriors in the ’60s who knew enough beneath the surface to know at all about BOSSI, the NYPD’s undercover force was regarded as “the little FBI and the little CIA.” The accolade reflected the fact that the information gathered by BOSSI’s spies was passed on regularly to federal intelligence agencies.71
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| BOSSI operative Tony Ulasewicz |
The BOSSI men who ran the deep cover operation in Muslim Mosque were detectives Tony Ulasewicz and Teddy Theologes. Four years after Tony Ulasewicz’s undercover work on Malcolm X, “Tony U,” as he was known, would retire from the NYPD to go to work as President Richard Nixon’s private detective. He would then take part in a series of covert activities that would be brought to light in the Senate Watergate Hearings and memorialized in his own book, The President’s Private Eye,72 which is also a valuable resource on BOSSI. Both in his book and his life, Tony U moves with ease between the overlapping undercover worlds of the New York Police Department, federal intelligence agencies, and the White House. In the BOSSI chain of command, Tony U was a field commander. He had to keep his operators’ identities totally secret as he ran their surveillance and probes of various sixties organizations ranging from the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) to the American Nazi Party. Equally important, he had to keep his own behind-the-scenes identity completely separate from theirs, with his name never linked to the report of any agent of his. Otherwise he might be called to testify in court, opening up an operation, an event to be avoided at all costs.73 Tony U’s deep cover men were therefore, in the last analysis, on their own.
Teddy Theologes acted in the BOSSI command, in Tony U’s words, “as a cross between a drill sergeant and a priest.”74 Reflecting on his career decades later in an interview, Theologes said some of the BOSSI deep cover recruits “needed constant attention. I would have to sit down with them, and almost be a father, brother, psychiatrist, and doctor.75 From the standpoint of agents risking their lives who knew their superiors would never admit to knowing them, the need for such a relationship can be understood.
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| Gene Roberts |
On April 17, 1964, four days after Malcolm left New York on his pilgrimage to Mecca, Ulasewicz and Theologes sent their newly sworn-in, 25-year-old, black detective Gene Roberts on his undercover journey into the Muslim Mosque, Inc. Gene Roberts had just completed four years in the Navy. Roberts was interviewed by Tony Ulasewicz and Teddy Theologes when he passed the police exam. He was asked to become a deep cover agent in a militant organization under Malcolm X. Roberts had heard of Malcolm X but knew little about him. As a military man, he accepted the order to infiltrate Malcolm’s group without questioning it. On April 17, he was sworn in as a police officer and given his badge. A few hours later, Teddy Theologes took the badge away from him. He was on his own. Then his BOSSI superiors sent Roberts out on his mission in Harlem.76
Gene Roberts has described how he proceeded step by step into becoming one of Malcolm’s bodyguards:
Basically they said, go up to 125th Street—where Malcolm had his headquarters—and get involved. And that’s what I did. I ended up getting involved in a couple of riots. The main thing was I was there. I met members of his organization. They accepted me. My cover was I worked for a bank. I told them about my martial arts experience, so I became one of Malcolm’s security people. When he came back from Mecca and Africa, I went wherever he went, as long as it was in the city.77
Since he was supposedly a bank worker, Roberts followed a schedule of typing up his BOSSI reports, at his Bronx home during the day. He typed reports on what he had learned by being “Brother Gene” with Malcolm and his community during the night.78 As Roberts suspected and would later confirm, he was not the only BOSSI agent in the group, although he had gained the greatest access to Malcolm. When Ulasewicz and Theologes received his and other deep cover dispatches, they passed them up the line to BOSSI Supervisor Barney Mulligan. It was Lieutenant Mulligan’s responsibility to file all the undercover information (without ever identifying the informants) at BOSSI headquarters. While there, BOSSI’s secret fruit was shared generously with the FBI.
On May 23, 1964, Louis Lomax and Malcolm X took part in a friendly debate at the Chicago Civic Opera House. As Lomax began his opening speech and looked down from the stage, he was struck with fear. For there in the audience staring back up at him was John Ali, accompanied by a group of NOI men who were being deployed at strategic locations in the hall.79 Ali had become the nemesis of Lomax as well as Malcolm because of Lomax’s having written about Ali’s FBI connection. Malcolm’s, Ali’s, and Lomax’s lives were intertwined. When John Ali was Malcolm’s top advisor and housemate, he had arranged the first meeting between Malcolm and Lomax. The three men had then worked together on the first issues of the NOI newspaper. When Malcolm’s and Ali’s home was invaded by the New York police, Louis Lomax had written the most thorough story on it.80
In his Chicago speech, given only two days after his return from Mecca and Africa, Malcolm sounded open to white people as well as blacks, as impassioned as ever, and in the terms he used, even radically patriotic:
My pilgrimage to Mecca … served to convince me that perhaps American whites can be cured of the rampant racism which is consuming them and about to destroy this country. In the future, I intend to be careful not to sentence anyone who has not been proven guilty.
I am not a racist and do not subscribe to any of the tenets of racism. In all honesty and sincerity it can be stated that I wish nothing but freedom, justice and equality: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—for all people. My first concern is with the group of people to which I belong, the Afro-Americans, for we, more than any other people, are deprived of these inalienable rights.81
However, in his post-Mecca life, this radically open Malcolm X was once again a target, as he and Lomax could see when they looked down into the eyes of John Ali and his companions. At the debate’s conclusion, Malcolm and Lomax departed from the rear of the hall under a heavy Chicago police escort.82 It was one in a series of occasions when Malcolm would gladly accept the protection of a local police department that was genuinely concerned about his safety.
Also near the end of May 1964, the five men who would kill Malcolm X in the Audubon Ballroom nine months later came together for the first time. We know the story, thanks to the confession of the only one of the five who would ever go to jail for the crime, Talmadge Hayer. According to Hayer’s affidavit, sworn to in prison in 1978 to exonerate two wrongly convicted co-defendants,83 it all began when he was walking down the street one day in Paterson, New Jersey. A car pulled up beside him. Inside it were two men who, like Hayer, belonged to the Nation of Islam’s Mosque Number 25 in Newark—Benjamin Thomas and Leon Davis, known to Hayer as Brothers Ben and Lee. They asked Hayer to get in the car so they could talk. “Both of these men,” he said, “knew that I had a great love, respect, and admiration for the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.”84
While the three men drove around Paterson, Hayer learned from Thomas and Davis that “word was out that Malcolm X should be killed.” Hayer said in his confession he didn’t know who had passed that word on, but he thought Ben knew. He in fact had good grounds for thinking Ben knew, inasmuch as Benjamin Thomas was the assistant secretary of the Newark Mosque and knew well the NOI chain of command. Hayer also said it was Ben who had spoken first to Leon, before the two of them spoke with him. After hearing from them how Malcolm X was spewing blasphemies against Mr. Muhammad, he said what they wanted to hear, “It’s just bad, man, something’s got to be done,”85 and agreed to take part in the plot.
As Hayer told Malcolm biographer Peter Goldman in a prison interview,
I didn’t ask a whole lot of questions as to who’s giving us instructions and who’s telling us what, because it just wasn’t a thing like that, man. I thought that somebody was giving instructions: ‘Brothers, you got to move on this situation.’ But I felt we was in accord. We just knew what had to be done.86
Thomas, Davis, and Hayer soon got together with two more members of the Newark Mosque who also knew what had to be done, William X and Wilbur X. As male members of the Nation of Islam, all five men belonged to the Fruit of Islam (FOI), a paramilitary training unit.87 FOI training was meant ideally for self-defense. However, with its combination of discipline, obedience, and unquestioning loyalty to the Messenger, it had degenerated into an enforcement agency for the will of Elijah Muhammad and the NOI hierarchy. Malcolm X, with his certain knowledge that FOI teams like the five men in Newark were being organized to kill him, said sharply in a June 26, 1964, telegram to Elijah Muhammad:
Students of the Black Muslim Movement, know that no member of the Fruit of Islam will ever initiate an act of violence unless the order is first given by you. … No matter how much you stay in the background and stir others up to do your murderous dirty work, any bloodshed committed by Muslim against Muslim will compel the writers of history to declare you guilty not only of adultery and deceit, but also of Murder.88
In his affidavit, Talmadge Hayer said the five men from the Newark Mosque began meeting to decide how to carry out the killing. Sometimes, he said, they would just drive around in a car for hours talking about it.89 Since Malcolm was on the verge of making another even longer trip to Africa, they would have to bide their time. In the meantime, there were other killing teams who were united in the same purpose. Several would almost succeed. But in the end, it would be the five Newark plotters who would finally do what had to be done at the Audubon Ballroom.
It is a temptation to sentimentalize Malcolm, but Malcolm did not sentimentalize himself. He knew what he was capable of doing, what he had done, and what he had trained the Fruit of Islam to do. They were now prepared to do it, as he knew, to him.
On June 13, 1964, the NOI’s suit to force Malcolm and his family out of the East Elmhurst house began to be heard in Queens Civil Court. The courtroom was divided into two hostile camps, Malcolm’s supporters and the NOI contingent. At this point the police department clearly acknowledged in action the immediate danger to Malcolm’s life. It had 32 uniformed and plainclothes officers present, “surrounding him so impermeably,” as reporter Peter Goldman put it, “that he could barely be seen from the gallery.”90 Some of the press remained skeptical of the threat to Malcolm. He insisted to reporters that he knew the NOI men were capable of murder “because I taught them.”91
This statement that Malcolm repeated about his NOI past was apparently no exaggeration. Dr. Alauddin Shabazz, who was ordained by Malcolm as an NOI minister, told me in an interview: “Malcolm had had people killed. When Malcolm found a guy in the nation who was an agent, Malcolm didn’t hesitate to do something to him. I have seen Malcolm take a hammer and knock out the bottom bridges of a guy’s teeth.
[An undercover police agent] was once caught setting up an [electronic] bug in the wall of the office. Malcolm was questioning him. And Malcolm had a funny way of questioning people. He would stand with his back to you, like he didn’t want to look at your disgusting face—if he thought you were doing something to aid BOSSI or the agencies. And this guy had been caught. Malcolm turned around. He had a hammer on the desk. He turned around with the hammer and hit him in the face. I was there. It was in the early ’60s.92
It is a temptation to sentimentalize Malcolm, but Malcolm did not sentimentalize himself. He knew what he was capable of doing, what he had done, and what he had trained the Fruit of Islam to do. They were now prepared to do it, as he knew, to him.
The Queens eviction hearing was especially significant for what Malcolm chose to reveal during his June 16 testimony: “[T]hat the Honorable Elijah Muhammad had taken on nine wives.”93 At about the same time as Malcolm made the issue public, one of Elijah Muhammad’s sons made a statement that was in effect a warrant for Malcolm’s death. It was prompted by a phone call from someone claiming to be “Malcolm.” This person told the NOI that Elijah Muhammad would be killed while giving his speech the following day.94 In response to this provocation (in conflict with the real Malcolm’s pleas to his followers to avoid a confrontation), Elijah Muhammad Jr. told a meeting of the Fruit of Islam at a New York armory:
That house is ours, and the nigger don’t want to give it up. Well, all you have to do is go out there and clap on the walls until the walls come tumbling down, and then cut the nigger’s tongue out and put it in an envelope and send it to me, and I’ll stamp it approved and give it to the Messenger.95
The judge would rule three months later that the house belonged to the Nation of Islam, and that Malcolm and his family had to leave. Malcolm appealed, which delayed the eviction until the final week of his life.
On June 27, 1964, the FBI wiretapped a phone call in which Malcolm X asked an unidentified woman (an office worker … Betty Shabazz?) if Martin Luther King’s attorney Clarence Jones had called him.96 The woman said, yes, she had a message from Jones asking Malcolm to call him back. The reason Jones wanted to speak with Malcolm, she said, was “that Rev. King would like to meet as soon as possible on the idea of getting a human rights declaration.” She then emphasized to Malcolm, “He is quite interested.”97
However, in the 12 short days left before Malcolm departed again for Africa, he and King were not able to arrange a meeting to explore their mutual interest in a human rights declaration. Nor would they ever manage to see each other again in the three months remaining in Malcolm’s life once he returned to the U.S., though they would just miss doing so in Selma, Alabama. Nevertheless, through its electronic surveillance of both men, the FBI knew that Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. were hoping to connect on the human rights issue that could put the U.S. on trial in the United Nations.
On June 28, 1964, Malcolm announced his formation of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), with its headquarters at the Theresa Hotel in Harlem. Whereas the Muslim Mosque, Inc. was faith-oriented, the OAAU would be politically oriented.98 The OAAU would be patterned after the letter and spirit of the Organization of African Unity established by African heads of state the year before at their meeting in Ethiopia. The OAAU’s founding statement emphasized that “the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Constitution of the U.S.A. and the Bill of Rights are the principles in which we believe.”99 The intended outreach of Malcolm’s organization was transcontinental, including “all people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere, as well as our brothers and sisters on the African continent.”100 Yet the organizing would also be local and civic:
The Organization of Afro-American Unity will organize the Afro-American community block by block to make the community aware of its power and potential; we will start immediately a voter registration drive to make every unregistered voter in the Afro-American community an independent voter.101
Thanks to Mecca, Malcolm had broken free from his old allegiance to Elijah Muhammad’s idea of a separate black state. He was now organizing an international campaign for Afro-American liberation based on the principles of the U.S. Constitution and the UN Charter. He had become a faith-based organizer on an international scale. His OAAU founding statement, while consistent with the Civil Rights Movement, took the struggle into a new arena, the United Nations. Malcolm would now seek further support for his UN human rights campaign by a July-November barnstorming trip through Africa.
In addition to NYPD and FBI surveillance, the Central Intelligence Agency was also following Malcolm. The Agency knew Malcolm planned to appeal to African leaders at the second conference of the Organization of African Unity (OAU).
At 11:37 p.m., on July 3, 1964, Malcolm phoned the New York Police Department to report that “two Black Muslims were waiting at his home to harm him. … But he sped off when they approached his car.”102 Malcolm knew the name of one of the two men, and gave it to the police.103
The NYPD refused to believe Malcolm. They passed on their official skepticism in a July 4 teletype to the FBI: “Police believed complaint on an attempt on Malcolm’s life was a publicity stunt by Malcolm.”104 By its phone tap, the FBI had heard Malcolm make his report at the same time the NYPD did. The Bureau summarized the event with its own judgment on Malcolm: “Information [on 7/4/64] that MALCOLM and his followers were attempting to make a big issue out of the reported attempt on Macolrn’s life in order to get the Negro people to support him.105
Thus began the official NYPD and FBI line that Malcolm was fabricating attempts on his life for the sake of publicity. This disclaimer would be made publicly by the NYPD in the week before Malcolm’s murder, in an effort to justify the withdrawal of police protection at the time of escalating threats on his life.
On July 9, Malcolm departed from New York on the African trip that would consume four and a half of the remaining seven and a half months of his life. It was to be the final, most ambitious project of his short life. As his plane lifted off from JFK Airport on its way to Cairo, Malcolm was happily unaware of what John Ali was saying that same night on a Chicago call-in radio program:
Malcolm X probably fears for his safety because he is the one who opposes the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. The Holy Koran, the book of the Muslims, says “seek out the hypocrites and wherever you find them, weed them out.” … There were people who hated Kennedy so much that they assassinated him—white people. And there were white people who loved him so much they would have killed for him. You will find the same thing true of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad … I predict that anyone who opposes the Honorable Elijah Muhammad puts their life in jeopardy … 106
“… after every one of my trips abroad, America’s rulers see me as being more and more dangerous. That’s why I feel in my bones the plots to kill me have already been hatched in high places. The triggermen will only be doing what they were paid to do.”
In addition to NYPD and FBI surveillance, the Central Intelligence Agency was also following Malcolm. The Agency knew Malcolm planned to appeal to African leaders at the second conference of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), which he was attending in Cairo in July as an honored observer. No other American was allowed in the door. In a July 10 CIA memorandum, an informant stated that Malcolm X was “transporting material dealing with the ill treatment of the Negro in the United States. He intends to make such material available to the OAU in an effort to embarrass the United States.”107
In Cairo, Malcolm was constantly aware of agents following him. They made their presence obvious in an effort to intimidate him. Then on July 23, as Malcolm prepared to present his UN appeal to Africa’s leaders, he was poisoned. He described the experience later to a friend:
I was having dinner at the Nile Hilton with a friend named Milton Henry and a group of others, when two things happened simultaneously. I felt a pain in my stomach and, in a flash, I realized that I’d seen the waiter who served me before. He looked South American, and I’d seen him in New York. The poison bit into me like teeth. It was strong stuff. They rushed me to the hospital just in time to pump the stuff out of my stomach. The doctor told Milton that there was a toxic substance in my food. When the Egyptians who were with me looked for the waiter who had served me, he had vanished. I know that our Muslims don’t have the resources to finance a worldwide spy network.108
The friend who witnessed this event, Detroit civil rights attorney Milton Henry, warned Malcolm that his UN campaign could mean his death. Henry later felt in retrospect that it did: “In formulating this policy, in hitting the nerve center of America, he also signed his own death warrant.”109 Malcolm, being Malcolm, recognized the truth of Henry’s warning, and went right on ahead with his campaign.
At the OAU conference, Malcolm submitted an impassioned, eight-page memorandum urging the leaders of Africa to recognize African-Americans’ problems as their problems and to indict the U.S. at the UN:
Your problems will never be fully solved until and unless ours are solved. You will never be fully respected until and unless we are also respected. You will never be recognized as free human beings until and unless we are also recognized and treated as human beings. Our problem is your problem. It is not a Negro problem, nor an American problem. This is a world problem, a problem for humanity. It is not a problem of civil rights but a problem of human rights. In the interests of world peace and security, we beseech the heads of the independent African states to recommend an immediate investigation into our problem by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.110
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| Malcolm at OAU |
Malcolm was encouraged by the response he received from the OAU. Although the resolution the conference passed in support of the African-American struggle used only moderate language, Malcolm told Henry that several delegates had promised him their official support in bringing up the issue legally at the United Nations.111
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| OAU Founders |
Malcolm then built on the foundations he had laid at the African summit. For four months he criss-crossed Africa, holding follow-up meetings with the leaders who encouraged him most in Cairo. He held long discussions with President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, President Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Prime Minister Milton Obote of Uganda, President Azikiwe of Nigeria, President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Prime Minister Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria, and President Sekou Toure of Guinea.112 There were other African heads of state Malcolm talked with, he said, “whose names I can’t mention.”113 At the height of the Cold War, Malcolm X had gained access to Africa’s most revolutionary leaders on a politically explosive issue.
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| The neutralist leaders (Nehru, Nkrumah, Nasser, Sukarno, Tito) |
Reflecting on these meetings, Malcolm told a friend in London shortly before his death,
Those talks broadened my outlook and made it crystal clear to me that I had to look at the struggle in America’s ghettos against the background of a worldwide struggle of oppressed peoples. That’s why, after every one of my trips abroad, America’s rulers see me as being more and more dangerous. That’s why I feel in my bones the plots to kill me have already been hatched in high places. The triggermen will only be doing what they were paid to do.114
U.S. intelligence agencies were in fact monitoring Malcolm’s campaign in Africa with increasing concern. The officials to whom they reported these developments began to express their alarm publicly. As a New York Times article, written in Washington revealed on August 13, 1964, “The State Department and the Justice Department have begun to take an interest in Malcolm X’s campaign to convince African states to raise the question of persecution of American Negroes at the United Nations.”
After recapitulating Malcolm’s appeal to the 33 OAU heads of state, the Times article stated:
[Washington] officials said that if Malcolm succeeded in convincing just one African Government to bring up the charge at the United Nations, the United States Government would be faced with a touchy problem. The United States, officials here believe, would find itself in the same category as South Africa, Hungary, and other countries whose domestic politics have become debating issues at the United Nations. The issue, officials say, would be of service to critics of the United States, Communist and non-Communist, and contribute to the undermining of the position the United States has asserted for itself as the leader of the West in the advocacy of human rights.115
The Times reported that Malcolm had written a friend from Cairo that he did indeed have several promises of support from African states in bringing the issue before the United Nations. According to another diplomatic source, Malcolm had not been successful, “but the report was not documented and officials here today conceded the possibility that Malcolm might have succeeded.”116
The article also said somewhat ominously;
Although the State Department’s interest in Malcolm’s activities in Africa is obvious, that of the Justice Department is shrouded in discretion. Malcolm is regarded as an implacable leader with deep roots in the Negro submerged classes.
“[He] has, for all practical purposes, renounced his U.S. citizenship.” ~ Benjamin H. Read, assistant to Dean Rusk, insisting the CIA investigate Malcolm X
These two sentences, which were removed from the article in the national edition of the Times,117 where an oblique reference to concerns about Malcolm then being expressed not only by the State and Justice Departments but also by the CIA, FBI, and the Johnson White House. These concerns are revealed by a memorandum, written two days before the Times article, addressed to the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans (covert action) Richard Helms. As researchers know, the desk of Richard Helms—a key player in CIA assassination plots—was perhaps the most dangerous place possible for a report on a perceived security risk to end up. According to the August 11, 1964, CIA memorandum to Helms, the Agency claimed it had learned from an informant that Malcolm X and “extremist groups” were being funded by African states in fomenting recent riots in the U.S. The State Department, the CIA memo continued, “considered the matter one of sufficient importance to discuss with President Johnson who, in turn, asked Mr. J. Edgar Hoover to secure any further information which he might be able to develop.”118
As Malcolm analyst Karl Evanzz has noted,
In fact, the CIA knew the allegations were groundless. In an FBI memorandum dated July 25, a copy of which was sent to [the CIA’s] Clandestine Services, an agent specifically stated that the informant’ said he didn’t mean to imply that Africans were financing Malcolm X.119
The CIA’s August 11 memo also stated that Benjamin H. Read, an assistant to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, wanted the CIA to probe both Malcolm X’s domestic activities and “travels in Africa” to determine “what political or financial support he may be picking up along the way.” The CIA memo’s author had told Read, coyly, in response that “there were certain inhibitions concerning our activities with respect to citizens of the United States.” Read had overridden the objection, insisting the CIA act because, “after all, Malcolm X has, for all practical purposes, renounced his U.S. citizenship.”120
As of no later than August 11, 1964 (and perhaps before), the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans had been authorized to act on Malcolm X. Malcolm was perceived, for all practical purposes, to have renounced his U.S. citizenship and to have become a touchy problem to the U.S. government if he gained so much as one African state’s support for his UN petition. Malcolm had not read any such CIA documents on himself, but he had seen the August 13 Times article. He could read his future between its lines, just as Milton Henry had already done in terms of the sensitivity of Malcolm’s UN campaign.
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| John Lewis |
John Lewis, a leader in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) who would go on to become a member of Congress, was then touring Africa to connect with the freedom movement there. Lewis and the SNCC friends who were with him knew all too well that Malcolm was also in Africa. As soon as they met anyone in Africa, the first question they would inevitably be asked was: “What’s your organization’s relationship with Malcolm’s?”121 The men discovered that no one would listen to them if they were seen as being any less revolutionary than Malcolm, who seemed to have taken all of Africa by storm. On his return to the U.S. Lewis wrote in a SNCC report: “Malcolm’s impact on Africa was just fantastic. In every country he was known and served as the main criteria for categorizing other Afro-Americans and their political views.”122
Lewis was startled to run into Malcolm in a café in Nairobi, Kenya, as he had thought Malcolm was traveling in a different part of Africa at the time. Malcolm, recognizing Lewis, smiled and asked what he was doing there. Reflecting on their encounter in his memoir, Walking With the Wind, Lewis thought Malcolm was very hopeful from the overwhelming reception he had received in Africa “by blacks, whites, Asians and Arabs alike.” It “had pushed him toward believing that people could come together.”123
However, something else Malcolm shared with the SNCC group “was a certainty that he was being watched, that he was being followed … In a calm, measured way he was convinced that somebody wanted him killed.”124 John Lewis’ meeting with Malcolm in Kenya would be the last time he would see him alive.
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| Louis Farrakhan (1965) |
Malcolm kept extending his stay in Africa. He had planned to be away six weeks. After 18 weeks abroad, he finally flew back to New York on November 24, 1964. He was confronted, soon after his return, with a December 4 issue of Muhammad Speaks. The issue featured an attack upon him by Minister Louis X, of the NOI’s Boston mosque. Louis X had not long before been a friend and devoted disciple to Malcolm. Now calling Malcolm “an international hobo,” Louis X made a statement against Malcolm that would haunt the speaker for the rest of his life, under his better-known name, Minister Louis Farrakhan:
The die is set, and Malcolm shall not escape, especially after such evil, foolish talk about his benefactor, Elijah Muhammad, in trying to rob him of the divine glory which Allah had bestowed upon him. Such a man as Malcolm is worthy of death, and would have met with death if it had not been for Muhammad’s confidence in Allah for victory over his enemies.125
Louis Farrakhan has never admitted to having participated in the plot to kill Malcolm. He has acknowledged from 1985 on that his above words “were like fuel on a fire” and “helped create the atmosphere” that moved others to kill Malcolm. Farrakhan made essentially the same carefully worded statement to four interviewers: Tony Brown in 1985, Spike Lee in 1992, Barbara Walters on 20/20 in 1993, and Mike Wallace on 6o Minutes in 2000. His words to Spike Lee were: “I helped contribute to the atmosphere that led to the assassination of Malcolm X.”126
His clearest statement on Malcolm’s murder may be at question. In a 1993 speech to his NOI congregation, Minister Farrakhan, referring to Malcolm, asked bluntly, “And if we dealt with him like a nation deals with a traitor, what the hell business is it of yours?”127
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| Alex Quaison-Sackey |
The timing of Malcolm’s late November return to the U.S. seemed providential in terms of his work at the United Nations. On December 1, his close friend, Alex Quaison-Sackey of Ghana, was elected President of the UN General Assembly. Following Malcolm’s lead, Quaison-Sackey was becoming increasingly outspoken against U.S. policies. Quaison-Sackey gave Malcolm’s human rights campaign a further boost by arranging for him to open an office at the UN in the area that was used by provisional governments.128
The FBI’s New York field office pointed out to J. Edgar Hoover in a December 3 memo the alarming facts that Malcolm X and newly elected UN leader Quaison-Sackey had been friends for four years, and that they had also met several times recently. The New York office, which worked closely with the NYPD’s undercover BOSSI unit, suggested to Hoover “that additional coverage of [Malcolm X’s] activities is desirable particularly since he intends to have the Negro question brought before the United Nations (UN).”129
During December’s UN debate on the Congo, Malcolm’s influence began to be heard in the speeches of African leaders. For example, Louis Lansana Beavogui, Guinea’s foreign minister, asked why “so-called civilized governments” had not spoken out against “the thousands of Congolese citizens murdered by the South Africans, the Belgians, and the [anti-Castro] Cuban refugee adventurers. Is this because the Congolese citizens had dark skins just like the colored United States citizens murdered in Mississippi?”130
In a January 2, 1965, article, the New York Times described the Malcolm X impetus behind this challenging turn in African attitudes. It noted that the policy proposed by Malcolm that “linked the fate of the new African states with that of American Negroes” was being adopted by African governments. The article said, “the African move profoundly disturbed the American authorities, who gave the impression that they had been caught off-guard.”131
Those working behind the scenes were not caught off guard, however, as the knowledgeable author of the article, M.S. Handler, was quick to suggest. Handler had also written the August 13 Times piece from Washington. He went on to repeat what he had reported then, that “early last August the State Department and Justice Department began to take an interest in Malcolm’s activities in North Africa”—accompanied, as we know, by a parallel interest and stepped-up actions by the CIA and FBI. Handler traced the heightened government interest to Malcolm’s opening “his campaign to internationalize the American Negro problem at the second meeting of the 33 heads of independent African states in Cairo, which convened July 17.”132
When the January 2 Times article appeared, Malcolm had seven weeks left to live. Much of the remaining time was devoted to his constant speaking trips throughout the U.S., up to Canada, and over to Europe. Malcolm lived each day, hour, and minute as if it were his last, for he knew how committed the forces tracking him were to killing him. Within the U.S., Fruit of Islam killing squads were waiting for him at every stop. Malcolm knew it was only a matter of time.
On January 28, 1965, Malcolm flew to Los Angeles to meet with attorney Gladys Towles Root and two former NOI secretaries who were filing paternity suits against Elijah Muhammad.133 Malcolm felt personally responsible for having put the two women in a position of vulnerability to Elijah Muhammad. He told a friend, “My teachings converted these women to Elijah Muhammad. I opened their mind for him to reach in and take advantage of them.”134 He had come to Los Angeles, in preparation for testimony in support of the women, “to undo what I did to them by exposing them to this man.”135
From the time Malcolm arrived at the Los Angeles Airport in mid-afternoon until his departure the next morning, he was trailed by the Nation of Islam. The two friends who met him, Hakim A. Jamal and Edmund Bradley, had alerted airport security to a possible NOI attack. As Jamal and Bradley waited at the gate, they noticed a black man seated behind them inconspicuously reading a newspaper. The man was John Ali. Although Malcolm’s Los Angeles trip had been a closely held secret, someone monitoring his conversations was feeding the information to Ali. Malcolm’s arrival gate was switched at the last moment, and security police rushed him and his companions safely through the airport to a car.136
At his Statler Hilton Hotel, Malcolm repeatedly had to run a gauntlet of menacing NOI men stationed in the lobby. Bradley saw John Ali and the leaders of an NOI mosque in Los Angeles get out of a car in front of the hotel. Malcolm, Jamal, and Bradley left quickly in their own car to meet with the two secretaries and attorney Root. When Bradley drove Malcolm back to the airport in the morning, two carloads of NOI teams started to pull alongside their car. Malcolm picked up Bradley’s cane and stuck it out a window like a rifle. The two cars fell back. Police waiting at the airport escorted Malcolm safely to his plane.137
During his next three days in Chicago, Malcolm was under the steady guard of the Chicago police. He was also under the watchful eyes of 15 NOI men who lingered at the entrance to his hotel. In their presence, Malcolm whispered to a Chicago police detective, “Those are all Black Muslims. At least two of them I recognize as being from New York. Elijah seems to know every move I make.”138 Malcolm would realize later that it had to be someone more powerful than Elijah who was making it possible for his troops to always be one step ahead of Malcolm.
Malcolm testified before the Illinois Attorney General, who was investigating the Nation of Islam. The next day in a television interview, Malcolm described efforts to kill him. He said he had a letter on his desk identifying the persons assigned to kill him.139 He was accompanied everywhere by the Chicago police, who finally took him back safely to O’Hare Airport for his flight to New York.
Later that week, Malcolm X once again almost connected with Martin Luther King Jr. The place was Selma, Alabama. The date was February 4, 1965, 17 days before Malcolm’s death, and three years and two months before Martin’s.
The night before, Malcolm had spoken to 3000 students at Tuskegee Institute, 75 miles from Selma. Many of the students invited Malcolm to join them in the next day’s demonstration at Selma, where more than 3,400 arrests had already been made in the course of voter registration marches.
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| Malcolm at Selma AL with Coretta Scott King |
Malcolm’s sudden arrival in Selma on the morning of February 4 panicked the leaders of Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The younger SNCC radicals were urging that Malcolm be allowed to speak to the crowd gathering in the Brown Chapel AME Church for the demonstration. However, the SCLC ministers didn’t even have the voice of Martin Luther King, who was in a Selma jail, to balance the fiery oratory of Malcolm, who they feared would spark a riot. As Malcolm listened in bemusement to what he might be permitted to say, he commented, “Nobody puts words in my mouth.”140 They finally decided to let Malcolm speak, but called in Coretta King to talk after him and put out the fire. Mrs. King was instead inspired by Malcolm to see a transforming hope of convergence between him and her husband.
In his talk, Malcolm widened the scene of struggle from Selma to the world. He told the crowd that civil rights were human rights, and that the U.S. government by failing to uphold their rights was thereby in violation of the United Nations Charter. Standing in the pulpit, pointing his right index finger at the demonstrators, he said they should “wire Secretary General U. Thant of the United Nations and charge the federal government of this country, behind Lyndon B. Johnson, with being derelict in its duty to protect the human rights of 22 million Black people.”141 He prayed that God would bless them in everything that they did, and “that all the fear that has ever been in your heart will be taken out.”142
Coretta King followed Malcolm with a short, inspirational talk on nonviolence. He sat behind her, listening intently. When Coretta and Malcolm spoke together afterwards, he gave her a message for Martin. She was impressed by the gentle way in which he said,
Mrs. King, will you tell Dr. King that I had planned to visit with him in jail? I won’t get a chance now because I’ve got to leave to get to New York in time to catch a plane for London, where I’m to address the African Students’ Conference. I want Dr. King to know that I didn’t come to Selma to make his job difficult. I really did come thinking that I could make it easier. If the white people realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King.143
She thanked Malcolm, and said she would convey his words to Martin. She did so at the Selma jail that day. She said later that by the time Malcolm was killed, two and a half weeks later, she and Martin had reassessed their feelings toward him:
We realized that since he had been to Mecca and had broken with Elijah Muhammad, he was moving away from hatred toward internationalism and against exploitation.144
As the FBI and CIA knew by their close monitoring of both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, the two catalysts of supposedly opposite revolutions were pondering cooperation.
A highly placed North African diplomat … told Norden that his country’s intelligence apparatus “had been quietly informed by the French Department of Alien Documentation and Counter-Espionage that the CIA planned Malcolm’s murder, and France feared he might be liquidated on its soil.”
After Malcolm’s trip to London, on February 9 he flew to Paris for another speaking engagement. At Orly Airport, French police surrounded him and said he was barred from entering the country. Malcolm’s speech, authorities felt, threatened to provoke “demonstrations that would trouble the public order.”145 He turned around and flew back to London.
Malcolm was shocked. He had thought France one of Europe’s most liberal countries. He had also visited and spoken there three months before without a problem. At first he felt the U.S. State Department must have been responsible for the French decision. However, his exclusion had come from a government whose president, De Gaulle, did not ordinarily cave in to U.S. pressures. Malcolm continued to puzzle over his refusal by France. The day before his death, he would tell Alex Haley that he’d begun to realize that what happened to him in France was a clue to his impending murder.
Malcolm’s intuition was right. A journalist who investigated Malcolm’s death, Eric Norden, was given an answer to the French puzzle in April 1965. A highly placed North African diplomat, who insisted on anonymity, told Norden that his country’s intelligence apparatus “had been quietly informed by the French Department of Alien Documentation and Counter-Espionage that the CIA planned Malcolm’s murder, and France feared he might be liquidated on its soil.”146
France had passed on its knowledge of the CIA plot against Malcolm to the diplomat’s country because Malcolm had also visited it. He might have chosen to fly there after being barred from France. The French were warning them that the CIA might kill him within their borders, scapegoating them. The North African diplomat who gave Norden this chilling information then said, “Your CIA is beginning to murder its own citizens now.”147
It is probably safe to say that, even under the Freedom of Information Act, no one will ever be handed a government document that states U.S. intelligence agencies assassinated Malcolm X. However, we do have a document that states U.S. intelligence agencies (which have assassinated other leaders) were given detailed information of Malcolm’s itinerary for his February 1965 trip to England and France. On February 4, 1965, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sent a confidential memorandum detailing Malcolm’s travel plans to the CIA Director, the Deputy Director of Plans (the CIA office under which Cold War assassinations were carried out), the Army’s Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, the Director of Naval Intelligence, the Chief of the Air Force Counterintelligence Division, an office in London whose name was so sensitive that it was deleted from the document and another such office in Paris.148 At the same time, the CIA was reportedly planning to murder Malcolm and his travels to England and France were being tracked by practically the entire U.S. intelligence network.
While Malcolm was being barred from France for reasons unknown to him, back in the U.S. the NOI newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, was announcing Elijah Muhammad’s final judgment on Malcolm. The paper’s propaganda barrage seemed like a preamble to Malcolm’s assassination. Abdul Basit Naeem, the FBI’s second reliable informant in the NOI’s inner circle, wrote anti-Malcolm articles in the February 5, 12, and 19 issues, culminating in his “Hypocrites Cannot Alter Muhammad’s Divine Destiny.”149 FBI asset Naeem seemed to be laying a foundation for a divine judgment on Malcolm. Elijah himself wrote in the February 12 issue that “Malcolm—the Chief Hypocrite—was beyond the point of no return.” He added what would soon prove to be true, that he “would no longer have to suffer Malcolm’s attacks.”150 Naeem’s and Muhammad’s articles proclaiming the end of Malcolm were like divine prophecies in the hands of their readers during the final week of Malcolm’s life.
On Saturday afternoon, February 13, 1965, Malcolm flew back from London to New York to face an eviction from his home. The Queens Civil Court had already ordered him and his family to vacate their house in East Elmhurst. Malcolm had filed an appeal that was due to be heard on Monday the 15th.151 At 2:45 a.m. on Sunday the 14th, as Malcolm and his family were sleeping, the house was firebombed. Bottles of gasoline with fuses had been thrown through the front windows, setting the house ablaze. Malcolm staggered into consciousness. He rushed Betty, who was six months pregnant with twins, and their four daughters through the kitchen door. They all escaped into the 20-degree February night. Had it not been for the failure of one poorly aimed firebomb, the entire family could have burned to death. The apparent pattern of the thrown Molotov cocktails was to block every exit. One, however, glanced off the window of three of Malcolm’s daughters’ bedroom. It burned out harmlessly in the grass.152
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| After firebombing of Malcolm’s house in Queens |
After the fire department extinguished the blaze, a deputy police inspector and a deputy fire inspector opened an investigation by questioning Malcolm in a police squad car. Malcolm’s friend and co-worker Earl Grant was present also. Grant said the officers “asked Malcolm how could anyone else but him have burned his house.”153 This began the charges, soon to be made public, that Malcolm had started the fire to get publicity. It is significant to say that the first move in this game was made by a police and fire inspector. The allegation that Malcolm had tried to burn down his house to gain sympathetic headlines would be used in the press to discredit him and disparage threats to his life in the days leading up to his assassination.
On Monday the NOI’s Captain of Mosque Seven, Joseph X, began the public attack by telling reporters he believed Malcolm had set off the firebombs himself “to get publicity” and sympathy.154 Joseph X was the same Mosque Seven official who, the year before, in the first NOI plot on Malcolm’s life, had ordered an assistant to wire Malcolm’s car to explode.155 He was also later identified to Karl Evanzz by former members of his mosque as being part of the team of assassins who had actually firebombed Malcolm’s home.156 When Spike Lee was so bold as to ask Joseph X (then Yusuf Shah) in a 1992 interview who bombed Malcolm’s house, he replied, “What do you want me to say? … that was the parsonage. Malcolm didn’t think so, but John Ali and I had the deeds … [The house got bombed] by some mysterious people.”157 However, before he died in 1993, Captain Joseph finally admitted he participated in the firebombing of the Malcolm X home.158
Two days after the firebombing, police detectives who were investigating it told the media that a whisky bottle containing gasoline had been found “intact and upright on top of a baby dresser” in the house.159 The obvious implication was that Malcolm was the source of the bottle of gasoline. The detectives did not mention that it was Betty Shabazz who, on returning to the gutted house to salvage belongings, had found the bottle on her baby’s dresser. She had pointed it out to firemen. How had it gotten there?
Malcolm had been saying, “My house was bombed by the Black Muslim movement upon the orders of Elijah Muhammad.”160 When Betty discovered the bottle of gasoline on the dresser and the police raised it publicly, she and Malcolm knew the plot went beyond the NOI to include the police. A coordinated effort was being made by the police and the NOI to scapegoat them. They were being set up for something worse. In such a scheme, it was the police, not the NOI, who ran the show. And who was it who ran the police’s show? Betty said, “Only someone in the uniform of a fireman or a policeman could have planted the bottle of gasoline on my baby’s dresser. It was to make it appear as if we had bombed our own home.”161
“That was a bad scene, brother. The sickness and madness of those days—I’m glad to be free of them. It’s a time for martyrs now. And if I’m to be one, it will be in the cause of brotherhood. That’s the only thing that can save this country.”
On Wednesday, Malcolm received a confirmation of this scenario. After a speaking engagement in Rochester, he met an African-American fire marshal, Vincent Canty, at the Rochester Airport. Canty told Malcolm that a fireman had set the bottle of gasoline on the dresser. Malcolm made Canty’s revelation public at a press conference the following afternoon. He demanded an investigation by the FBI into a conspiracy “entered into at the local level between some police, some firemen, and some press to cover up for Elijah and his followers to give the public the impression that we set the house on fire ourselves.”162 At the same press conference Malcolm said he had sent a telegram to the Secretary of State insisting on an investigation to determine why the American embassy did not intervene when he, while in possession of an American passport, was denied entry into France.163
It sounds as if Malcolm X was seeing conspiracies everywhere. In fact even Malcolm, who was moving quickly toward enlightenment, was being naïve to see them on such a small scale. He was naïve, first of all, to think the planting of the bottle of gasoline was only a conspiracy entered into at the local level, or to think the FBI, of all people, would be of any help in investigating it. And little did he know that his American passport belonged to a man whom the State Department had turned over the previous summer to the CIA because “Malcolm X has, for all practical purposes, renounced his U.S. citizenship.”164 As a U.S. citizen insisting on his rights, Malcolm X was in reality a man without a country, about to be gunned down in a conspiracy that went beyond anyone’s imagination except those who were controlling it.
Malcolm concluded his Thursday afternoon press conference by stating, “The police in this country know what is going on—this conspiracy leads to my death.”165 Malcolm did know what was going on. He had simply not yet connected all the dots.
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| Audubon Ballroom |
In the meantime, a dry run of Malcolm’s assassination had already occurred at the Audubon Ballroom. This was witnessed by the WPM BOSSI infiltrator, Gene Roberts, who was Malcolm’s security guard. By this time, Roberts had also become Malcolm’s friend and admirer. He was taking his role as Malcolm’s bodyguard more seriously than his BOSSI superiors had wanted.
On the night of the dry run, Monday, February 15, Malcolm spoke to 700 people at the Audubon Ballroom. Many years later, Gene Roberts described what was for him the most significant part of the evening:
I was part of what we call “the front rostrum guard.” We stood in front of the stage. If anybody tried to get to Malcolm, we’d take them out or whatever. I’m on Malcolm’s right. … There’s a noise in the middle of the audience. There’s a young individual walking down the aisle. I moved toward him, and he sat down. Then everything was back to normal. But I’m saying, “I don’t like this.” I just had a bad gut feeling.166
Roberts had seen a preview of what would happen the following Sunday: a fake disruption in the audience designed to draw everyone’s attention, then a movement elsewhere toward Malcolm which on Sunday would include three shooters firing simultaneously.
Malcolm’s own reaction to the dry run can be found in a published transcript of his Monday night talk:
What’s up? [Commotion in audience.] Okay. Y’all sit down and be cool. [Laughter] Just sit down and be cool.167
Roberts said he called his supervisors when the Monday meeting was over:
I says, “Listen. I just saw the dry run on Malcolm’s life.” I told them I felt like it was going to happen at the meeting [scheduled for the Audubon Ballroom] the following Sunday. I told them if it’s going to happen, it’s going to go down Sunday. And they said, okay, we’ll pass it on.168
What they did with it I don’t know … I don’t think they really cared.169
Roberts also said Malcolm’s own security people got together with him in the middle of the week to prepare for the Sunday meeting at the Audubon:
A lot of his other people said, “Can we carry guns?” He said, “No!” He was emphatic about that. He said, “No!” Then there was [the question], “Can we search?” He said, “No way.” Again he was emphatic—no searching. So that was the way it went.170
On Friday February 19, Malcolm dropped in unexpectedly at the home of his friend, Life photographer Gordon Parks. Malcolm was in a reflective mood. The two men talked of Malcolm’s years with the Nation of Islam, which Parks had helped photograph. Malcolm began to recall the vicious violence he had taken part in (that Alauddin Shabazz described to me). Malcolm said,
That was a bad scene, brother. The sickness and madness of those days—I’m glad to be free of them. It’s a time for martyrs now. And if I’m to be one, it will be in the cause of brotherhood. That’s the only thing that can save this country. I’ve learned it the hard way—but I’ve learned it. And that’s the significant thing.171
Describing this last meeting with Malcolm, Parks said he was struck by the change in the Malcolm he had known: “He was caught, it seemed, in a new idealism. And, as time bore out, he had given me the essence of what was to have been his brotherhood speech—the one his killers silenced. It was this intentness on brotherhood that cost him his life. For Malcolm, over the objections of his bodyguards, was to rule against anyone being searched before entering the hall that fateful day: ‘We don’t want people feeling uneasy,’ he said. ‘We must create an image that makes people feel at home.’”172
“You don’t offer somebody like that protection.” ~NYPD headquarters officer
Malcolm’s final edicts against guns on his bodyguards (not obeyed by all of them), and against searching at the Audubon’s door because it made people uneasy, have been lumped together with the NYPD’s claim that Malcolm refused police protection. It is important to examine this claim, as well as any evidence to the contrary.
The NYPD process had begun, the police told author Peter Goldman, with BOSSI intelligence analysts recognizing the truth of what their sources were telling them: a serious attempt was about to be made on Malcolm’s life. Accordingly, the BOSSI analysts drew up a scenario—essentially for their own protection, not Malcolm’s. What they knew, first of all, was that they didn’t want to protect Malcolm. “The guy had a bad sheet,” as one headquarters officer put it to Goldman, “You don’t offer somebody like that protection.”173 Nevertheless, following a prudent game plan, they formally offered Malcolm protection, assuming he would almost certainly have to refuse it for political reasons. As a BOSSI man told Goldman, “Representatives of the New York police department made three approaches during the final two weeks to Malcolm or to men presumed to speak for him and offered to put him under round-the-clock guard. These offers were made formally and before witnesses. In each case, also following the BOSS[I] scenario, Malcolm or his people refused. The refusals were duly noted in the Malcolm File. “As far as I was concerned,” the man from BOSSI told Goldman, “that took us off the hook.”174
These carefully witnessed offers of protection protected the NYPD. Thus Deputy Police Commissioner Walter Arm could say in the wake of the assassination, with “proof” if anyone wanted it, that Malcolm had refused the department’s offer to protect him.175 Alex Haley wrote, however, that he knew from many of Malcolm’s associates that during the week before his death, “Malcolm X complained repeatedly that the police would not take his requests for protection seriously.”176 As we have seen, Malcolm had in fact welcomed the protection of the Los Angeles and Chicago police, who only a few days before spirited him through airports and shielded him from assaults. He evidently thought the New York Police Department had a similar responsibility. So did BOSSI undercover agent Gene Roberts, who warned his superiors of precisely what to expect, and when and where to expect it—and expected them to prevent a killing. It didn’t happen.
Assuming the police did speak “to Malcolm or to men presumed to speak for him,” their offer may have been made to individuals who they could count on to say no in Malcolm’s name. They could also have made the offer to Malcolm in such a way as to guarantee his refusal. The police’s self-confessed purpose in any case, was not to protect “a guy with a bad sheet” but simply to take them “off the hook.”
The most serious argument against the police’s claim that they were even minimally serious in wanting to protect Malcolm is their behavior in response to the firebombing. The police were complicit in the planting of the bottle of gasoline on the dresser. They then used that planted evidence to scapegoat Malcolm for the firebombing of his own home. Far from wanting to protect Malcolm, those in command of the NYPD were evidently in league with the other forces seeking his death.
The assassination of Malcolm X on Sunday afternoon, February 21, 1965, at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem proceeded like an execution, for that is what it was. As we have already seen from the Hoover memorandum, of February 4, 1965, Malcolm, on his trip to England and France, was being followed by an intelligence network. A network that included the FBI, the CIA Director, the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans (read covert action and assassinations), the Army’s Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, the Director of Naval Intelligence, the Chief of the Air Force Counterintelligence Division and two foreign offices too sensitive to be identified. These were the chickens Malcolm was talking about in his JFK comment that launched him into independence from Elijah Muhammad. Now after Malcolm’s pilgrimage to Mecca and revolutionary Africa, the same chickens were coming home to roost for him.
Malcolm realized, as he said to Alex Haley, that the NOI was now serving as a proxy, much like how the CIA used the Mafia as their go-between in the attempted killing of Castro and furnished plausible deniability and a showy scapegoat. In what appears to have been a COINTELPRO or perhaps joint FBI-CIA operation, the Nation of Islam was being used as a religious Mafia.
BOSSI’s young black infiltrator, Gene Roberts, was caught in the middle of this covertly managed execution. Roberts had been won over by Malcolm. “I learned to love the man; respect him,” Roberts said to a reporter in the ’80s long after it was all over. “I think he was a good person.”177
For the rest of his life, Roberts would recall that Sunday again and again. It began with a conflict he had with his wife over Malcolm. While Roberts was at home putting on his new gray suit for his Audubon guard duty, Joan Roberts told him she was going to the meeting too. He argued no, the department wouldn’t like it. Joan wouldn’t give ground. She had never seen Malcolm X speak. She was curious. Gene finally gave in. But he told her to at least keep a low profile, and to take a seat in the back. She chose a seat in the front of the ballroom, next to some reporters.178
Malcolm had stayed over Saturday night at the New York Hilton Hotel in Manhattan. Soon after he checked in, three black men asked for his room number. Hotel security was alerted, and focused its attention on Malcolm’s 12th floor. On Sunday morning, he was awakened by the phone, which rang at exactly eight o’clock. What he identified as a white man’s voice said, “Wake up, brother,” and hung up. Malcolm felt it was a veiled message from a system larger than the NOI, telling him that today would be the day. He had been feeling that already.179
He spoke on the phone with his sister, Ella, in Boston. His last words to her were:
“You pray for me, Ella, because I firmly believe now I need it more than I’ve ever needed it before. So you ask Allah to guide me, because I feel they may have me doomed for this day.”
“Not this day,” Ella protested.
“Yes, this day,” Malcolm said.180
He also phoned Betty and asked if she could come to the meeting that afternoon with all four children. She said she would.
As we know from Talmadge Hayer’s confession, the five men from Newark’s Mosque Number 25 had checked out the floor plan of the Audubon Ballroom at a dance held there on Saturday night. We also know that John Ali was in town. As he had been at the LA airport three weeks previous, as he had been shortly after at the LA hotel, now John Ali was in New York on the weekend of Malcolm’s murder. At this time, Hayer states the final assassination plans were being laid.
According to information that briefly surfaced at the 1966 trial of Hayer and his two co-defendants, John Ali “had come in from Chicago on February 19th, checked into the Americana Hotel in midtown Manhattan and checked out on the evening of February 21st.” (Goldman, p. 314, NY Times 3/3/66, p. 24) According to this testimony, Ali arrived just in time for the final rehearsal in advance of the murder.
A confidential March 3, 1966 FBI report bolsters the testimony. An FBI memo from the Special Agent in Charge (SAC), New York, to the Director, cites a witness whose name has been deleted as saying, “John Ali met with Hayer the night before Malcolm X was killed.” (Hayer denied this to Peter Goldman, per Goldman p. 432) The FBI reports say that the state never called this witness because the witness was later arrested for theft. Yet a criminal background presented no barrier to the state’s calling of other witnesses. More probable is the fact that for people in the know, an Ali-Hayer meeting on the eve of the murder would have been explosive. It could very possibly mean that Hayer and his cohorts were being controlled by an agent of the Bureau. It is not surprising that an FBI document would back the state’s judgment in passing over a witness who would open up that door to the FBI. After that all-too-brief opening at the trial, the state shut all further federal government connections to the murder.
Malcolm realized the overall dynamics of a police operation without being aware of the details. He said repeatedly during his final week that he knew the Nation of Islam was full of police. So even when he was emphasizing initially that the Black Muslims were to blame for bombing his house, he was not excluding the NYPD or federal agencies that were complicit with them. Because he knew the NOI was riddled with agents, Malcolm understood that it was their controllers who really held the keys to his life. It was not the NOI that was directing a plot, which included planting a bottle of gasoline in his fire-gutted house. He referred to this directly in a speech of February 15th:
Don’t you think that anything is going down that [the police] don’t know about. The only thing that goes down is what they want to go down, and what they don’t want to go down they don’t let go down.
Malcolm realized, as he said to Alex Haley, that the NOI was now serving as a proxy, much like how the CIA used the Mafia as their go-between in the attempted killing of Castro and furnished plausible deniability and a showy scapegoat. In what appears to have been a COINTELPRO or perhaps joint FBI-CIA operation, the Nation of Islam was being used as a religious Mafia.
On Sunday afternoon, they carried out the strategy they had drawn up. If there was searching at the door, they would turn around and leave. Because there was no search, the men went in with their guns under their coats. Talmadge Hayer and Leon Davis sat down in the front row on the left side. Hayer had a .45 automatic, Leon a Luger. William X and Benjamin Thomas sat a few rows behind them. William X was carrying a sawed-off, double-barrel shotgun under his coat. Ben Thomas, sitting beside him, did not have a shooting role. Thomas was the group’s organizer. As the assistant secretary to the Newark mosque, he was also their sanctioning authority. Seated near the rear of the ballroom was Wilbur X, who would create the diversion to start the action. Wilbur would pretend someone was picking his pocket, then would throw a smoke bomb. The three shooters would fire, and everyone would run for the street. Their car was parked a few blocks away, on a street headed for the George Washington Bridge. Thanks to the absence of police, four of the five men would escape safely. They would never spend a day in jail for killing Malcolm.181
“[T]he more I keep thinking about this thing, the things that have been happening lately, I’m not all that sure it’s the Muslims. I know what they can do, and what they can’t, and they can’t do some of the stuff recently going on. … the more I keep thinking about what happened to me in France, I think I’m going to quit saying it’s the Muslims.”
Malcolm had said on the previous Tuesday to his friend and aide James Shabazz, “I have been marked for death in the next five days. I have the names of five Black Muslims who have been asked to kill me. I will announce them at the [Sunday] meeting.”182 As he waited to be introduced on Sunday afternoon, Malcolm had the names of his five assassins written on a piece of paper in his pocket.
Before walking out on the stage, Malcolm told his assistants that he was going to stop saying it was the Muslims. Things had been happening that went beyond what they could do.183 He also said he was going to tell the black man to stop fighting himself. That was a part of the white man’s strategy, to keep the black man fighting each other. “I’m not fighting anyone, that’s not what we’re here for.”184
Gene Roberts had been a part of the afternoon’s first rostrum security, during a preliminary speech by Malcolm’s assistant, Benjamin Goodman. When Roberts was relieved of his duty, he sat down in the back of the ballroom. Benjamin Goodman introduced Malcolm to the audience of 400 people as “a man who would give his life for you.”
After receiving a long standing ovation, Malcolm greeted everyone—including the five assassins he assumed were present—with “As-salaam alaikum.” (“Peace be with you.”) The response came back, “Wa-laikum salaam.” (“And with you peace.”)
Wilbur began his ploy by yelling at the man seated next to him, “Get your hand out of my pocket, man!”
Malcolm responded to the sounds of a beginning fight by stepping out from behind the podium and walking to the front of the stage, thus making himself a perfect target. An audio cassette was found with him saying, just before the shots, “Now, now, brothers, break it up. Hold it, hold it, hold it … “185
Gene Roberts, recognizing the same diversion he’d seen the Tuesday before, stood up and started down the aisle. Ahead of him, William X began moving toward Malcolm. Wilbur ignited the smoke bomb in the rear, creating a panic in the crowd. At a distance of 15 feet from Malcolm, William X fired the shotgun in a roar, hitting Malcolm with a dozen buckshot pellets that made a circle on his chest. The shotgun roared again. Hayer and Davis were standing and firing their pistols again and again at Malcolm’s body lying on the stage.186 Then they were all running for the street.
Gene Roberts picked up a chair. Hayer looked at him, aimed, and fired his .45. The bullet pierced Roberts’ suit coat, missing his body. He threw the chair at Hayer, knocking him down. Hayer got up limping. Another security guard shot Hayer in his left thigh. Hayer kept on limping, hopping, and made it out the front door. A crowd encircled him, and began beating him.
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| Thomas Hagan AKA Talmadge Hayer apprehended |
Thomas Hoy was the only police officer stationed outside the ballroom. He managed to pull Hayer away from the crowd. A police car cruising by stopped. Sergeant Alvin Aronoff and patrolman Louis Angelos helped Hoy save Hayer’s life by pushing him into the car. They took him to the Wadsworth Avenue Police Station.187 Roberts had gone up on the stage. He found Malcolm still had a pulse. Roberts began giving Malcolm mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, trying to revive him. Malcolm died on the stage.188
Over the next 24 hours, Gene Roberts went through a series of BOSSI debriefings on the assassination. His superiors were incredulous at his attempt to save Malcolm’s life on the stage. “What did you do that for?” he was asked.
And I told them, Roberts said, “Well, I’m a cop. And this is what cops are supposed to do—save people.”189
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| Gene Roberts: “This is what cops are supposed to do—save people.” |
When Malcolm was shot, Joan Roberts had gone to Betty Shabazz, who had thrown her body over her children. Joan tried to hold her. Betty struggled to get free, throwing Joan against the wall, and ran to Malcolm’s side. Gene eventually helped Joan, who was shaken, to a taxicab.190
Gene Roberts was the precursor to Marrell McCullough in the assassination of Martin Luther King. In a famous photo, McCullough can be seen with a stricken look kneeling over King’s body on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, April 4, 1968. McCullough belonged to a Memphis black power youth group working with King. He was the first person to reach him after he was shot. Unknown to King’s associates for another decade, Marrell McCullough was also a deep cover operative for the Memphis Police Department.191
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| The LIFE issue on the assassination of Malcolm X |
Talmadge Hayer, Norman Butler, and Thomas Johnson were tried for Malcolm’s murder from January 21 to March 11, 1966. Butler and Johnson were two well-known New York “enforcers” for the Nation of Islam whom the police had picked up in the week following the assassination. A series of shaky witnesses, several contradicting their own grand jury testimony, testified to having seen Butler and Johnson take part in the murder. Butler and Johnson claimed they hadn’t even been in the Audubon Ballroom that afternoon. Butler had three supporting witnesses and Johnson two, to their each having been at home during the shooting. In the years to come, many of Malcolm’s people would emphasize that Butler and Johnson as well-known local NOI enforcers would have been quickly identified and watched closely had they entered the ballroom that day. They simply weren’t there. Talmadge Hayer agreed. In the trial’s most dramatic moments, Hayer took the stand, confessed his own participation in the assassination, and said Butler and Johnson had nothing to do with it. However, because Hayer refused to identify his real co-conspirators, his testimony was discredited. All three men were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Hayer’s more detailed 1978 confession, naming the other four men in his group, was too late to help Butler and Johnson. They each served more than 20 years. The only man who has ever confessed to the murder of Malcolm X, Talmadge Hayer (who has become Mujahid Abdul Halim), has also made another confession:
I remember some of the ministers used to say that time reveals all things. Malcolm used to say it himself—time will tell. And for the longest time, I always thought that time would tell what that man was saying was wrong. Well, time has told. Time has told that a lot of things he said was true.192
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| Benjamin Goodman Karim |
Benjamin Goodman, in a 1978 affidavit supporting Butler and Johnson’s innocence, provided an insight into the coercion of trial witnesses. Goodman said that in 1965, he was summoned to a New York police station where detectives questioned him about Butler and Johnson. When he told the detectives repeatedly that Butler and Johnson had not been in the Audubon Ballroom that afternoon, the detectives became angry. Later in 1965, Goodman was summoned to another interview, this time from assistant District Attorney Stern. Goodman told them that:
I knew Butler and Johnson, they had not been present at the ballroom that day, and that I had not seen the actual shooting. When I said this, Mr. Stern became angry and said that he knew I had previously said that I had seen the shooting through an open dressing room door. This was not true and I had never said this to anyone. In his anger, Mr. Stern threatened me and asked me, have you ever been to jail? How would you like to go to jail?
Goodman was not called to testify at the trial.193
Besides Hayer, the most significant trial witness was black police officer Gilbert Henry. Before the prosecution could get him off the stand, Henry revealed the strange way the NYPD had deployed its forces on February 21st. Henry said he had been stationed in the Ballroom’s Rose Room that afternoon, at a distance from Malcolm’s location in the main auditorium. He and his partner, Patrolman John Carroll, had been given specific instructions by their superior officer, Sergeant Devaney, “to remain where [they] would not be seen.” If anything happened, Patrolman Henry was to call for help on a walkie-talkie the two men had with them. It was connected with another walkie-talkie held by an officer at the Presbyterian Medical Center on the other side of the street. When Henry heard shots, he tried calling on the walkie-talkie but got no response. He then ran into the main auditorium, but was too late to see anyone with a gun. He said he saw no other uniformed officers in the auditorium.194
Malcolm’s unofficial photographer, Robert Haggins, was one of the witnesses never called in the trial who could have testified farther to the odd behavior of the police that afternoon. Haggins told Spike Lee he had seen the anteroom of the ballroom filled with police: “If I took a guess, I’d say 25. It was filled with cops. Cops who must’ve waited until after he was shot to file into the ballroom.”195
Earl Grant saw the police come in. He said that about 15 minutes after Malcolm was shot, “a most incredible scene took place. Into the hall sauntered about a dozen policemen. They were strolling at about the pace one would expect of them if they were patrolling a quiet park. They did not seem to be at all excited or concerned about the circumstances.
I could hardly believe my eyes. Here were New York City policemen, entering a room from which at least a dozen shots had been heard, and yet not one of them had his gun out! As a matter of absolute fact, some of them even had their hands in their pockets.”196
The best witness we have to the assassination of Malcolm X remains Malcolm X, as recorded by Alex Haley.
On Saturday afternoon, February 20, 24 hours before he would walk to the podium of the Audubon Ballroom, Malcolm phoned Alex Haley at his home in upstate New York. It was to be their last conversation. Malcolm ended it with what Haley, in his epilogue to the autobiography, calls a “digression.” Malcolm was speaking of his impending murder:
I’m going to tell you something, brother—the more I keep thinking about this thing, the things that have been happening lately, I’m not all that sure it’s the Muslims. I know what they can do, and what they can’t, and they can’t do some of the stuff recently going on. Now, I’m going to tell you, the more I keep thinking about what happened to me in France, I think I’m going to quit saying it’s the Muslims.197
Malcolm had one final thought. In the last sentence he would ever say to Alex Haley—which Haley describes as “an odd, abrupt change of subject”—Malcolm said why he thought he was about to be killed:
You know, I’m glad I’ve been the first to establish official ties between Afro-Americans and our blood brothers in Africa.198
He then said good-bye and hung up.
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| Nasser and Nkrumah |
In the midst of his African campaign the previous August, Malcolm had sent a letter from Cairo to friends in Harlem that foreshadowed his last words to Alex Haley. One month after he was poisoned at the Nile Hilton, Malcolm wrote:
You must realize that what I am trying to do is very dangerous because it is a direct threat to the entire international system of racist exploitation…. Therefore, if I die or am killed before making it back to the States, you can rest assured that what I’ve already set in motion will never be stopped … Our problem has been internationalized.199
At the time Malcolm wrote this letter, his friend and ally Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser was taking with extreme seriousness the ongoing threat to Malcolm’s life from U.S. intelligence agencies. He had two Egyptian security men posted outside Malcolm’s hotel room door at all times.200
Alex Haley, a great author who gave Malcolm a prose platform from which he could address the world, buried in his epilogue what may have been the most significant words Malcolm ever said to him. Malcolm’s “digression” was a revelation, which he would share also with his assistants on Sunday afternoon, and his “change of subject” a coherent climax to his life. Malcolm was willing to give his life for the sake of a unity between Africans and African-Americans that he hoped would change the course of history. In his final year, Malcolm had become a witness to the truth he had experienced in his pilgrimage to Mecca—that all of humankind was one family of brothers and sisters under Allah. But he radically focused that truth on Africa and America. Africa was where our one family had begun, and America where much of it had been sent into slavery. He envisioned and was organizing a mutually supportive African-American movement for human rights on both continents. “But,” as Malcolm said 12 days before his death to a friend in London, “the chances are that they will get me the way they got [Congo’s revolutionary leader Patrice] Lumumba before he reached the running stage.”201 Malcolm was right. And in his final words to Alex Haley, he had already solved the crime of his murder a day before it happened.
“Muslims don’t carry guns.” (Malcolm X to Charles Kenyatta, shortly before his death)
Near the end of his life, Malcolm began to think about guns as a question of faith. In his last week, he see-sawed between wanting to apply for a permit to carry a pistol and wanting to confront his killers with no guns on either himself or his followers. He ended by choosing no guns. It seemed a strange final decision for Black America’s most articulate advocate of armed self-defense. Why did Malcolm take such a stand at the hour of his death?
Malcolm’s co-worker, Charles 37X Kenyatta, has told a revealing story about the man whose life was one continuous turn toward the truth as he saw it. Charles said he and Malcolm were riding in a taxicab to the Chicago airport. They suddenly realized they were being taken instead into the stockyards. The driver had a sinister purpose of his own. Charles, however, had a pistol. He used it to make the driver stop the cab and get out. Charles and Malcolm drove quickly to the airport, and got on their plane.
Malcolm then told Charles he had lost his religion. Three decades after Malcolm’s death, Charles Kenyatta continued to puzzle over his teacher’s strange words. Malcolm said to him: “Muslims don’t carry guns.”202
As a deep believer in Islam, Malcolm chose to die as a martyr. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, and a wave of suicide bombers in Israel, Americans have tended to think of the Islamic concept of martyrdom as counter-violent. That was not, however the kind of martyr that Malcolm told Gordon Parks he wanted to be. Nor was it what he learned from the Islamic tradition he embraced on his pilgrimage to Mecca. In response to his assassins, whose identity he said he knew in advance, Malcolm gave his life to Allah “in the cause of brotherhood,” without trying to snatch away the lives of those taking his own.
He also chose not to go into exile to avoid martyrdom. 12 days before his death, Malcolm listened patiently in a London hotel room, while a friend, Guyan writer Jan Carew, summoned every word at his command to persuade Malcolm not to return to the United States and almost certain death. Carew even invoked the authority of their ancestral spirit world, “the ghosts in our blood,” against the folly of martyrdom.
Those ancestral spirits whisper warnings, whenever we’re about to do something reckless or foolhardy. Right now they should be whispering to you that, perhaps, surviving for our cause is more important then dying for it.203
Malcolm answered:
The spirit world’s fine but I want our folk to be free in the world of the living.204
And the unspoken thought: So for the sake of the living, I’ll live the truth freely and openly all the way, regardless of the consequences.
In Malcolm’s eyes, that was freedom. By living and speaking freely, Malcolm denied to the system that assassinated him the victory of taking away his life. He instead gave it freely in the cause of brotherhood and sisterhood. “It’s a time for martyrs now,” as he told Gordon Parks, “And if I’m to be one, it will be in the cause of brotherhood. That’s the only thing that can save this country.”
In his final days, Malcolm transformed the death by violence that had haunted him all his life. Recognizing its imminence, he embraced it in terms of his faith. He did so in a way that was in tension with some of his own public rhetoric. Although Malcolm continued to insist vehemently right up to his death on armed self-defense as a fundamental right for black people and for all other people as well, he died without wanting his followers to resort to that right for himself. In a life of profound changes, Malcolm’s ultimate choice of how he wanted to die, nonviolently in the cause of brotherhood, was perhaps the most remarkable change of all.
A “martyr” is literally a witness. Malcolm’s final action, in stepping forward to reconcile two brothers in a fight, made him not only a target for murder but also a witness to brotherhood.
As he said to us all, “As-salaam alaikum.”
1. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley (New York: Ballantine Books, 1973), p. 9.
2. Ibid., p. 2.
3. Ibid., p. 378.
4. Ibid., p. 381.
5. Karl Evanzz, The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992).
6. Karl Evanzz, The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad (New York: Pantheon, 1999).
7. Zak A. Kondo, Conspiracys: Unravelling the Assassination of Malcolm X (Washington: Nubia Press, 1993).
8. Louis Lomax, To Kill a Black Man (Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1987). Although we have reached different conclusions on the conspiracy to kill Malcolm X, I want to acknowledge the help of a sixth author. In both his book, The Death and Life of Malcolm X (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, second edition, 1979) and the kind interview he gave me, Peter Goldman has been a great resource and source of encouragement. His book provides dimensions of both the death and life that remain indispensable for a pilgrim into either.
9. Evanzz underlines Lomax’s importance in The Judas Factor p. xxiv. Lomax also had early insights into the murder of the second subject of his book, Martin Luther King Jr.
10. Memorandum from SAC [Special Agent in Charge], Chicago, to Director, FBI, 1/22169, page 1; in Petition to the Black Caucus, U.S. House of Representatives, of Muhammad Abdul Aziz (Norman 3X Butler) and Khalil Islam (Thomas 15X Johnson), April, 30, 1979; in the Walter E. Fauntroy Papers, Gelman Library, George Washington University.
11. Louis E. Lomax, When the Word Is Given (New York: Signet Books, 1964), p. 82.
12. Ibid.
13. Memorandum from William Sullivan to Alan Belmont, December 24, 1963. Church Committee Final Report, Book III, p. 134.
14. FBI HQ file on Lomax. Evanzz, Judas, p. 198.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Lomax, To Kill, p. 199.
18. Author’s interview with Wallace Muhammad, now W. D. Mohammed, August 2, 1999.
19. Evanzz, Messenger, p. 317.
20. Malcolm X scholar Zak Kondo obtained a March 16, 1954, Detroit FBI Report, captioned MALCOLM K. LITTLE, which cites from a 1950 prison letter written by Malcolm. Fonda, pp. 42, 292 endnote 847.
21. Messenger, p. 183.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., p. 557 endnote 39. Evanzz speculates that Abdul Basin Naeem may have been pressured to cooperate with the FBI and BOSSI due to his immigrant status. Ibid.
25. FBI HQ file on Elijah Muhammad; FBI NY file on Malcolm X; cited by Evanzz, Messenger, p. 186.
26. Ibid., p. 187.
27. Goldman, pp. 55-59. Judas, pp. 70-71.
28. Autobiography, p. 309.
29. To Kill, p. 103,
30. Messenger, pp. 187-88.
31. Cited by Evanzz, Ibid., p. 188.
32.Messenger, p. 192. Judas, p. 73.
33. Lomax, When the Word, p. 179.
34. Autobiography, p. 289.
35. When the Word, Ibid.
36. Autobiography, p. 265.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., p. 292.
40. Ibid., p. 297.
41. FBI HQ file on Elijah Muhammad, section 5, memo dated May 20, 1960; approved by Cartha DeLoach, May 22, 1960. Cited by Evann, Messenger, p. 218.
42. FBI HQ file on Elijah Muhammad. Ibid., pp. 249-50.
43. Autobiography, p. 301.
44. John Henrik Clarke, who published a transcript of the conversation, “A Visit from the FBI,” in Malcolm X: The Man and His Times (New York: Macmillan, 1975), pages 182-204, wrote in a footnote on page 182 that it happened on May 29, 1964. That date is too late, given the references in the conversation to the Clay-Liston fight in Florida as a future event. Clayborne Carson in Malcolm X: The FBI File (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1993), pages 252-53, presents an FBI document that indicates the visit took place on February 4, 1964.
45. Clarke, p. 195.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid., p. 202.
48. Ibid., pp. 202-3.
49. Autobiography, p. 302.
50. Ibid., p. 303.
51. Ibid., pp. 308-9. Kondo, p. 73.
52. Autobiography, p. 316.
53. Malcolm X Speaks, edited by George Breitman (New York: Pathfinder, 1990), p. 18.
54. Kondo, pp. 63, 259 endnote 375.
55. Goldman, pp. 159-60, 191.
56. Malcolm X, “A Declaration of Conscience,” March 12, 1964; Malcolm X Speaks, p. 20.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid., p. 22.
59. Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet,” April 3, 1964; Malcolm X Speaks, pp. 34-35.
60. Judas, pp. 226-27.
61. Cited by Evanzz, Judas, p. 225.
62. Ibid.
63. Messenger, p. 292.
64. Abdul Aziz Omar, formerly Philbert X Little; in William Strickland, Malcolm X: Make It Plain (New York: Viking, 1994), p. 174.
65. FBI HQ file on Elijah Muhammad, memo dated April 12, 1964; cited by Evanzz, Messenger, pp. 292-93.
66. Autobiography, p. 338.
67. Ibid.
68. Malcolm told Julian Mayfield and Leslie Lacy what Nkrumah had said. Leslie Alexander Lacy, “African Responses to Malcolm X,” in Black Fire, edited by Leroi Jones and Larry Neal (New York: William Morrow, 1968), p. 32.
69. 12 years after Kwame Nkrumah’s overthrow, Seymour Hersh reported the CIA’s involvement in the coup in a New York Times article based on a brief description in a book by ex-CIA agent John Stockwell and confirming interviews by “first-hand intelligence sources.” Seymour M. Hersh, “C.I.A. Said to Have Aided Plotters Who Overthrew Nkrumah in Ghana,” New York Times (May 9, 1978), p. 6. John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies (New York: W W Norton, 1978), p. 160 footnote.
70. “Malcolm Says He is Backed Abroad,” New York Times (May 22, 1964), p. 22.
71. Frank Donner, Protectors of Privilege (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 155.
72. Tony Ulasewicz with Stuart A. McKeever, The President’s Private Eye (Westport, Connecticut: MACSAM Publishing, 1990), p. 145.
73. Ibid., p. 151.
74. Ibid.
75. Author’s interview with Teddy Theologes, June 29, 2000.
76. Elaine Rivera, “Out of the Shadows: The Man Who Spied on Malcolm X,” Newsday (July 23, 1989).
77. Author’s interview with Gene Roberts, July 7, 2000.
78. Rivera, Ibid.
79. To Kill, pp. 198-99.
80. Ibid., p. 199.
81. Malcolm X Speaks, pp. 58-59.
82. To Kill, p. 200,
83. Talmadge Hayer filed two affidavits on Malcolm’s murder, the first in November 1977, and the second in February 1978. It is the second, which goes into greater detail, that is cited here. Both affidavits are in Petition to the Black Caucus. Michael Friedly includes them as an appendix in his book, Malcolm X: The Assassination (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992), pp. 215-18.
84. Ibid.
85. Peter Goldman, The Death and Life of Malcolm X (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, second edition, 1979), p. 416.
86. Ibid.
87. Evanzz, Messenger, p. 96.
88. Malcolm’s telegram to Elijah Muhammad was published as an open letter in the June 26, 1964, edition of the New York Post. Cited by Kondo, pp. 74 and 269 endnote 467.
89. Hayer affidavit, Ibid.
90. Goldman, p. 195.
91. Ibid.
92. Author’s interview with Dr. Alauddin Shabazz, January 8, 1999.
93. Goldman, p. 19S.
94. Kondo, p. 147. Kondo hypothesizes that this provocative June 1964 phone call to the NOI was from an FBI or BOSSI provocateur, which would be consistent with the FBI’s COINTELPRO to keep Elijah and Malcolm at each other’s throats.
95. Goldman, p. 414; Kondo, p. 147.
96. The FBI transcript of the June 27, 1964 phone conversation is on page 480 of Malcolm X: The FBI File.
97. Ibid.
98. Judas, p. 241.
99. “Statement of Basic Aims and Objectives of the Organization of Afro-American Unity,” appendix in George Breitman, The Last Year of Malcolm X (New York: Pathfinder, 1989), p. 106.
100. Ibid.
101. Ibid., p. 109.
102. Kondo, pp. 43 and 239 endnote 249; citing FBI document.
103. Ibid., endnote 250; citing FBI document.
104. Malcolm X: The FBI File, p. 482.
105. Ibid.
106. John Ali was interviewed by Wesley South on the Chicago radio program Hotline on July 9, 1964. Ali’s analogies to JFK’s assassination, cited by Evanzz in The Judas Factor (pp. 247-48), were in response to a caller who “asked Ali whether it was true that the Black Muslims were trying to assassinate Malcolm X.” Ibid., p. 247. Ali also used espionage analogies, comparing Malcolm to Benedict Arnold and to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed on the grounds that they handed over U.S. nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Ibid.
107. Cited by Evanzz, Judas, pp. 249-50.
108. Jan Carew, Ghosts in Our Blood (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1994), p. 39.
109. Eric Norden, “The Assassination of Malcolm X,” Hustler (December 1978), p. 98.
110. “Appeal to African Heads of State,” Malcolm X Speaks, pp. 75-77.
111. Ibid., p. 84.
112. “There’s A Worldwide Revolution Going On,” Malcolm X: The Last Speeches, edited by Bruce Perry (New York: Pathfinder, 1989), p. 116. Carew, Ghosts, p. 83.
113. Carew, Ibid.
114. Ibid., p. 115.
115. M. S. Handler, “Malcolm X Seeks U.N. Negro Debate,” New York Times (August 13, 1964), p. 22.
116. Ibid.
117. The missing sentences are included in the citation of the original Times article on page 86 of Malcolm X Speaks.
118. August 11, 1964, CIA memorandum for Deputy Director of Plans, titled “ACTIVITIES OF MALCOLM POSSIBLE INVOLVEMENT OF AFRICAN NATIONS IN U.S. CIVIL DISTURBANCES,” cited by both Kondo, pp. 49 and 242 endnote 280, and Evanzz, Judas, p. 254.
119. Evanzz’s citation of FBI HQ file on Malcolm X, Ibid.
120. Judas, p. 254.
121. John Lewis, Walking With the Wind (New York: Simon 8c Schuster, 1998), p. 286.
122. Malcolm X Speaks, p. 85.
123. Lewis, p. 287.
124. Ibid., p. 288.
125. Louis X, “Boston Minister Tells of Messenger Muhammad’s Biggest Hypocrite,” Muhammad Speaks (December 4, 1964), p. 11. Kondo, p. 159. Goldman, pp. 247-48. Cited also on Tony Brown’s Journal, “What Did Farrakhan Say and When Did He Say It?” (Spring 2000).
126. Spike Lee, By Any Means Necessary: The Trials and Tribulations of the Making of Malcolm X (New York: Hyperion, 1992), p. 56. Farrakhan’s statements to Tony Brown, Barbara Walters, and Mike Wallace are included in “What Did Farrakhan Say …?”
127. “What Did Farrakhan Say …?”
128. Messenger, p. 293,
129. Judas, pp. 263-64.
130. Judas, p. 267.
131. M. S. Handler, “Malcolm X Cites Role in U.N. Fight,” New York Times (January 2, 1965), p. 6.
132. Ibid.
133. Malcolm X: The FBI File, p, 81.
134. Hakim A. Jarnal, From the Dead Level (London: Andre Deutsch, 1971), p. 223.
135. Ibid.
136. Ibid., pp. 212-15, 228-29.
137. Haley, p. 425.
138. Ibid.
139. Ibid.
140. Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), p. 578.
141. Malcolm X, The Final Speeches: February 1965 (New York: Pathfinder, 1992), p. 26.
142. Ibid., p. 28.
143. Coretta Scott King, My Life With Martin Luther King, Jr.; revised edition (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), p. 238.
144. Ibid., p. 240,
145. Goldman, p. 254.
146. Eric Norden, “The Murder of Malcolm X,” The Realist (February 1967), p. 12.
147. Ibid.
148. J. Edgar Hoover’s February 4, 1965, memorandum read: “… Information has been received that Malcolm Little plans to travel to England and France during the early part of February. He will reportedly depart this country on February 5, 1965, and will return about February 11, 1965. In this connection, there is enclosed one copy of a memorandum dated February 1, 1965, at New York, which contains available information of the subject’s contemplated travel.” Kondo, pp. 271-72 endnote 491. In addition to the intelligence agencies I have noted, Hoover’s memorandum was also sent to the Assistant Attorney General, the Acting Attorney General, and the Foreign Liaison Unit. Ibid.
149. Kondo, p. 162.
150. Ibid.
151. Kondo, p. 76. Goldman, p. 263.
152. Goldman, p. 262. Judas, pp. 289-90. Kondo, p. 76. M.X. Handler, “Malcolm X Flees Firebomb Attack,” New York Times (February 15, 1965), p. 1. Malcolm X, Final Speeches, pp. 133-34.
153. Earl Grant, “The Last Days of Malcolm X,” Malcolm X: The Man and His Times, edited by John Henrik Clarke (NewYork: Macmillan, 1975), p. 86.
154. “Malcolm Accuses Muslims of Blaze; They Point to Him,” New York Times (February 16, 1965), p. 18.
155. Autobiography, pp. 308-9. Kondo, p, 73,
156. Messenger, pp. 318-19.
157. Lee, p. 63.
158. On Brother Minister: The Assassination of Malcolm X, a 1997 film directed by Jack Baxter and Jefri Aallmuhammed.
159. “Bottle of Gasoline Found on a Dresser in Malcolm X Home,” New York Times (February 17, 1965), p. 34.
160. He said this, for example, on Monday night, February 15, 1965, in his talk at the Audubon Ballroom, “There’s a Worldwide Revolution Going On.” Final Speeches, p. 124.
161. Norden, “Murder,” p. 12,
162. In his statement to the press, February 18, 1965, “We Are Demanding an Investigation,” Final Speeches, p. 179.
163. Ibid.
164. See endnote 118.
165. Norden, “Murder,” p. 12.
166. Author’s interview with Gene Roberts, July 7, 2000.
167. “There’s a Worldwide Revolution Going On,” Final Speeches, p. 123.
168. Author’s interview.
169. Gene Roberts to Elaine Rivera on his efforts to tell his BOSSI supervisors about the dry run. Rivera, “Out of the Shadows.”
170. Author’s interview.
171. Gordon Parks, “I was a Zombie Then—Like All [Black] Muslims, I Was Hypnotized,” Life (March 5, 1965), p. 28.
172. Ibid.
173. Goldman, p. 261,
174. Ibid., p. 262.
175. Haley, p. 438.
176. Ibid.
177. Rivera, “Out of the Shadows.”
178. Ibid.
179. Haley, p. 431. Grant, “The Last Days,” p. 92.
180. Norden, “The Murder,” p, 13.
181. Talmadge Hayer amplified his written confession, with further details that are included here, in an interview on Tony Brown’s Journal, “Malcolm and Elijah,” February 21, 1982. Cited by Kondo, pp, 169-70.
182. Haley, p. 428. Judas, pp. xiii, 293.
183. Haley, p. 433.
184. Ibid.
185. Kondo, p. xviii.
186. Goldman, p. 274.
187. Several witnesses claim two suspects were arrested by the police. Omar Ahmed, who was on Malcolm’s guard detail at the time, thought there were two men arrested outside of the ballroom. Interview by Kondo, p. 84. Earl Grant makes the same claim in “The Last Days of Malcolm X,” p, 99.
The New York Herald Tribune‘s early edition of February 22, 1965, reported two arrests. Its article said that one suspect, Hayer, was “taken to Bellevue Prison Ward and was sealed off by a dozen policemen. The other suspect was taken to the Wadsworth Avenue precinct, where the city’s top policemen immediately converged and began one of the heaviest homicide investigations this city has ever seen.” New York Herald Tribune (February 22, 1965; city edition) article by Jimmy Breslin, “Police Rescue Two Suspects”; cited by Kondo, p. 83. The Tribune‘s late city editions make no mention of the second suspect. Ibid. The New York Times in its early and late city editions follows the same pattern. Kondo, Ibid.
Peter Goldman explains the inconsistencies in terms of separate debriefings of Thomas Hoy and Alvin Aronoff: “Hoy and Aronoff were debriefed separately at the time, Hoy at the scene and Aronoff at the stationhouse, and the early editions of the next day’s papers reported that there had been two arrests. The two policemen, as it developed, were talking about the same man …” Goldman, p. 276.
When Alex Haley wrote his 1965 ‘Epilogue” to the Autobiography, he was still raising the possibility of two arrested suspects and the hope of identifying the second. Haley, p. 438.
188. Author’s interview.
189. From Gene Roberts interview in Brother Minister.
190. Rivera, “Out of the Shadows.”
191. William F. Pepper, Orders to Kill (New York; Carroll & Graf, 1995), pp. 129-30. Pepper identifies McCullough as being at the same time a member of Army intelligence. Ibid., p. 443.
192. Kondo, p. 202.
193. Benjamin Goodman Affidavit, May 19, 1978; in Petition to Black Caucus.
194. Herman Porter, “The Trial,” in The Assassination of Malcolm X, edited by Malik Miah (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1988), p. 93. Norden, “The Murder,” p. 14. William M. Kunstler’s December 19, 1977, deposition in Petition to the Black Caucus, pp. 25-26.
195. Lee, p. 42,
196. Grant, p. 96.
197. Haley, pp. 430-31.
198. Ibid., p. 431.
199. Malcolm X, “A Letter from Cairo,” By Any Means Necessary (New York: Pathfinder, 1991), p. 110.
200. David DuBois to Spike Lee; in Lee, p. 38.
201. Carew, p. 36.
202. Charles 37X Kenyatta in Brother Minister.
203. Carew, p. 57.
204. Ibid.
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