Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. And the International Hunt for His A

He now had to pack for a quick trip to Washington--he was giving an important sermon the next day. When he returned, his time and energies would be focused on one place: Memphis.

AT SHORTLY AFTER eleven o'clock the following morning, King stepped into the grand white pulpit of the Washington National Cathedral. Cloaked in black clerical robes, he seemed to have emerged from the depths of the previous day's despair. He addressed an integrated crowd of more than three thousand worshippers packed inside the vast Gothic hall. A thousand more were gathered on the grounds outside, listening to a public address system. It would be King's last formal sermon.

King spoke in fulminous tones about Vietnam, calling it 'one of the most unjust wars²⁷⁶ in the history of the world.' The conflict has 'strengthened the military-industrial complex, it has strengthened the forces of reaction in our nation, it has played havoc with our domestic destinies, and it has put us in a position of appearing to the world as an arrogant nation.'

The central theme of the sermon was poverty in America--and the moral imperative to address it. 'Ultimately,' he said, 'a great nation is a compassionate nation. But America has not met her obligations to the poor.' He likened poverty in America to 'a monstrous octopus, spreading its nagging, prehensile tentacles.' In recent months, he'd been to Appalachia, he said, and to the ghettos of Newark and Harlem, and to many other impoverished places in America where he'd seen conditions so squalid that 'I must confess I have literally found myself crying.' He told the crowd that in Marks, Mississippi, in the nation's poorest county, he'd seen so much hunger on the faces of sharecroppers there that he concluded something radical had to be done to acquaint the nation's leaders with the ravages of systemic, multigenerational poverty.

'We are coming to Washington in a Poor People's Campaign,' he vowed. He would bring an army of people from all races and backgrounds, people 'who have come to feel that life is a long and desolate corridor with no exit signs, people who have never seen a doctor or a dentist in their lives.' Although King said that the members of his Poor People's Army 'do not seek to tear up Washington,' they will nevertheless engage in what he called 'traumatic nonviolent action.' Fighting would accomplish nothing--not in Memphis, not in Washington, not in Vietnam. 'We must learn to live together as brothers,' he said, 'or we will perish together as fools.' Nothing will ever be done about poverty in America 'until people of goodwill put their hearts and souls in motion.'

Afterward, King held a brief press conference in which he said outright that he could not support President Johnson for reelection. 'I see an alternative²⁷⁷ in Senator McCarthy and Senator Kennedy,' he said, and though he had already privately concluded that Kennedy was the better choice, he stopped short of making an endorsement. As in Memphis, reporters pressed him to make a pronouncement on the prospect for riots over the summer. 'I don't like to predict violence,' King replied, 'but if nothing is done between now and June to raise ghetto hope, I feel this summer will be not only as bad, but worse, than last year.' This would be terrible, not only for the ghettos, but for the very health of American democracy. 'We cannot stand two more summers like last summer without leading inevitably to a rightwing takeover and a fascist state.'

What would it take for you to call off your Poor People's Campaign? one journalist asked. What would Congress or the president have to do?

King said he would gladly cancel the whole demonstration if Congress would adopt the recommendations recently proposed by the Kerner Commission, a bipartisan body that had made a thorough study of the riots in Watts, Newark, Detroit, and other cities. But King saw little cause for optimism. 'I would be glad²⁷⁸ to talk to President Johnson or anyone else,' King said. 'We're always willing to negotiate.'

AT THAT MOMENT, President Johnson was decidedly not in the mood to negotiate with Martin Luther King. Johnson was only a few miles away at the White House, planning an important speech he would give that night on national television. The address was primarily about Vietnam, but Johnson was toying with the idea of tacking on a bombshell at the end. He was thinking about announcing to the nation that he was withdrawing from the 1968 presidential race.

For months, Johnson had been secretly thinking of leaving office at term's end. There were many reasons for this, but the truth was he'd become miserable in the White House. He'd been having nightmares about his health. His Gallup approval rating had plummeted to 36 percent. He had enemies on all sides. Trying to describe the White House mood, Lady Bird Johnson paraphrased Yeats: 'A miasma of trouble hangs over everything.'

Vietnam, the war that King so stridently criticized, lay at the center of Johnson's woes. The quagmire in Southeast Asia had become the president's obsession. It occupied most of his time and energy, and it hogged so much national treasure that he could no longer pursue the Great Society programs he had once doted on. Besieged by war critics, Johnson had become paranoid, distrustful of old friends, imprisoned in the office he once loved.

He wanted out.

'I felt that I was being chased²⁷⁹ on all sides by a giant stampede coming at me from all directions,' he later told the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. 'Rioting blacks, demonstrating students, marching welfare mothers, squawking professors, and hysterical reporters. And then the final straw. The thing I feared from the first day of my Presidency was actually coming true. Robert Kennedy had openly announced his intention to reclaim the throne in the memory of his brother. And the American people, swayed by the magic of the name, were dancing in the streets.'

Relinquishing power went against every grain of Johnson's being. Yet he had a hunch that by stepping down now, he could regain political capital and close out his term with a measure of grace, perhaps devoting his final months to extricating the country from Vietnam. It would be a retreat with honor, a magnanimous exit. His speechwriters composed two endings for that night's speech, and it was up to Johnson to decide which one to use.

The president spent the afternoon and early evening fretting over what to do. By dinnertime, no one, not even Johnson, was certain which ending he would pick. At 9:00, he went on the air. For twenty-five minutes, Johnson spoke of Vietnam and his desire for peace. He was halting the bombing over most of North Vietnam, he said, and was now proposing serious talks with Ho Chi Minh.

Then, with a change in tone that caught millions of viewers off guard, the president stared straight into the teleprompter. 'With the world's hopes²⁸⁰ for peace in the balance every day,' he said, 'I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.'

When the address was over, a euphoric Johnson leaped from his chair and bounded from the Oval Office to be with his family. 'His air was that of a prisoner let free,'²⁸¹ the First Lady wrote. 'We were all fifty pounds lighter and ever so much more lookin' forward to the future.'

The president described his mood this way: 'I never felt so right²⁸² about any decision in my life.'

18 TARGET PRACTICE AT SHILOH

AFTER BUYING THE rifle and scope in Birmingham, Eric Galt returned to his Atlanta rooming house, taking care to keep his new acquisition hidden from other tenants and his landlord. He spent much of his time reading the Atlanta Constitution, which gave extensive coverage to King's troubles in Memphis and reported, on April 1, his vow to return in a few days for a peaceful demonstration down Beale Street.

Suddenly Galt knew where he needed to be. King's frenetic pace, combined with the constant, improvisational changes to his schedule, had made him nearly impossible to track; the peripatetic minister had scarcely been home in Atlanta during the time Galt had been living at the rooming house. But on this occasion the papers had neatly forecast the precise location of King's next appearance--on historic Beale in downtown Memphis--and conveniently gave Galt several days to plan ahead.

'You must have a goal²⁸³ to shoot for, and a straight course to follow,' Dr. Maltz had urged in Psycho-Cybernetics. 'Do the thing and you will have the power.'