Hampton Sides - Hellhound on His Trail - The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. And the International Hunt for His Assassin

Although DeLoach loyally defended the director and daily did his bidding, he had to concede that Hoover was "a man of monstrous ego," 127as he later put it. He was "crotchety, dictatorial, 128at times petulant, and somewhat past his prime." Like MacArthur during the occupation of Japan, DeLoach said, Hoover had made himself "a demigod." In his presence, "you were not so much 129an individual personality as a cog in the vast machinery of the universe he'd created. You existed at his whim, and if he chose to, he could snap his fingers and you'd disappear."

DeLoach had been watching Hoover's "intense animosity" toward King for years. And not only watched: the assistant director had played a direct role in many of the COINTELPRO activities (as the FBI called its various counterintelligence campaigns) against King. DeLoach seemed nearly as shocked by King's sexual escapades as Hoover. "Such behavior," 130DeLoach later wrote, "seemed incongruous in a leader who claimed his authority as a man of God. So extravagant was his promiscuity that some who knew about it questioned his sincerity in professing basic Christian beliefs and in using the black church as the home base of his movement."

Yet DeLoach thought the FBI feud with the civil rights leader had gone too far--he described Hoover's anger as growing "like the biblical mustard seed, 131from a small kernel into a huge living thing that cast an enormous shadow across the landscape." At the very least, he thought, the bureau's war against King was "a public relations disaster of the first order" that would "haunt the FBI for years to come."

IN LATE 1967, as more reports came filtering into the FBI about the planned Poor People's Campaign, Hoover began to chomp at the bit for better intelligence. He wanted new wiretaps placed on the SCLC headquarters in Atlanta. A memo was circulated throughout the FBI hierarchy, discussing the merits of installing taps. "We need this installation," 132the memo said, "to obtain racial intelligence information concerning their plans ... so that appropriate countermeasures can be taken to protect the internal security of the United States."

By late December 1967, a formal request for legal authorization to install telephone wiretaps had reached Deke DeLoach's desk. As usual, it would be his odious task to serve as a buffer between Hoover's FBI and the attorney general. He, for one, was not optimistic about Clark's response. "A.G. will not approve," 133he predicted in a memo, "but believe we should go on record."

On January 2, 1968, the formal request was sent to Clark seeking his legal approval to tap the SCLC offices in Atlanta. "We [must] keep apprised of the strategy and plans of this group," the request argued. "Massive demonstrations could trigger riots which might spread across the Nation."

But just as DeLoach guessed, Clark rejected the request out of hand. "There has not been an adequate 134demonstration of a direct threat to the national security," Clark replied. The attorney general did leave the door slightly ajar for future discussion, however. "Should further evidence be secured of such a threat," he wrote, "or should re-evaluation be desired, please resubmit."

8 A BUGLE VOICE OF VENOM

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

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

For a time, he came to view Wallace activism as his primary occupation. When he applied for a telephone line, Galt told a representative 135of the phone company that he needed to expedite the installation schedule because he was "a campaign worker for George Wallace" and thus depended upon phone service for his job. He became an American Independent Party evangelist--trolling taverns, buttonholing strangers on the street, and beseeching everyone he knew to go down to Wallace headquarters.

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

An unmistakable paramilitary streak ran through the ranks. In one telling anecdote, Carter reports that Tom Turnipseed, a Wallace campaign staffer, flew in from Birmingham to meet with one of the Los Angeles district coordinators and was surprised to hear the man boast that he was going out "on maneuvers" over the weekend. When Turnipseed inquired if he was in the National Guard, the gung-ho coordinator replied, "Naw, we got our own group," and then led Turnipseed out to his car to show him the small arsenal of weapons in his trunk--including a machine gun and two bazookas. Alarmed, Turnipseed asked him what he and his "group" were arming themselves against . The man, thinking the answer rather obvious, said, "The Rockefeller interests 137--you know, the Trilateral Commission."

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

One of the largest and most successful of these political hoedowns was held at a stock car track 138at the edge of Burbank, less than a twenty-minute drive from where Galt lived. A gospel group warmed up the venue, and then, as Wallace arrived in a motorcade, the emcee, a bourbon-swilling actor named Chill Wills, whipped the audience into a howling frenzy. When Wallace took the stage, the volatile crowd erupted in rowdy cheers, shoving, and fistfights.

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