Posthumous Pillory

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The Doctors. Only toward the end of his career, Williams feels, did King fully understand the realities of power ir America and begin to take the steps that would have made him a truly effective leader by seeking to unite the nation's poor across class and color lines against the Viet Nam War. This idea Williams argues, so threatened the hegemony of the white power structure group that it decided that King must be destroyed.

King unwittingly provided the noose. Suspecting that some of his associates had Communist connections, the FBI began tapping King's telephone and bugging his hotel rooms in 1963. From a security viewpoint, the wiretaps uncovered nothing. They established no links between King and the Communists. But, Williams reports, they did turn up an astonishing amount of information about King's extensive and vigorous sexual activities. (According to one of Williams' sources, identified only as Person B, "Martin and the rest of them had a code. A very attractive woman was called 'Doctor.' I forget the other names for women not so attractive." Williams' informant was a "Doctor.")

Private Detail. Most newspapers ignored the rumors and leaks to them of King's extramarital activities, but their existence undermined King's effectiveness just the same. The effect, says Williams, was one of slow political assassination; King was spared it only by the bullet of James Earl Ray.

Williams has the correct outline of the FBI tape story. What he does not have is precisely what happened at the celebrated meeting between FBI Director Hoover and King in 1964. Hoover, TIME learned, explained to King just what damaging private detail he had on the tapes and lectured him that his morals should be those befitting a Nobel prizewinner. He also suggested that King should tone down his criticism of the FBI. King took the advice. His decline in black esteem followed, a decline scathingly narrated by Williams.

Williams' anger over the slow progress of the fight for equality is more understandable than some of his charges. His depiction of "white power" as "a marsh underfoot for anyone not white . . . treacherous and deadly" is, of course, wildly exaggerated. Far more serious, King himself was less a victim than he was a victor. His leadership brought conscience and cohesion to the cause of black equality, while his faith in the tenets upon which the country was founded forced Americans to recognize the equity of his demands and Congress to take action to meet them.

King's compromises were not capitulations, but sane and sound recognition of the way progress historically has been wrung from the American system. He may have failed to reach his ultimate goal. But by serving as the catalyst in the formation of a truly national civil rights movement, he laid the groundwork for its possible success in the future.