Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63

by Taylor Branch

Now the Attorney General found it worth paying tribute to Hoover in order to gain a measure of control over King. Here was a man who was boring in on the White House, threatening to transform or destroy its domestic political base, and yet he held no public office, displayed no personal ambitions that could be traded on, succeeded by methods such as going to jail, and thrived on the very upheavals that most unsettled the Administration. These qualities, on top of the prosaic fact that at first sight King would be mistaken for a waiter at most Washington establishments, put him beyond the reach of the Kennedys’ political and social language. With King talking of a demonstration that might turn the capital into a giant Birmingham, Robert Kennedy sought to check his momentum. He would gain a bargaining hold if King admitted that his movement was poisoned. He would gain the upper hand if King conceded to the government the unilateral right to define what was poisonous. But King shrugged off Robert Kennedy too. He kept asking for proof, saying that these terrible spy terms did not ring true of the men he had known so well,