All mixed up on Martin Luther King

ALL MIXED UP ON MARTIN LUTHER KING

IF YOU WANT to see an exercise in thoughtcontrol, consider the matter of the Reverend Martin Luther King and his increasingly publicized womanizing. I have been writing about Dr. King since 1955 and have not once mentioned the matter of the sex tapes (I wrote in favor of a national holiday in his honor), but too much--defined as the recent treatment of them in Time magazine and elsewhere--is too much. What is scandalous, we are led to believe, is exclusively the tapes' existence and the uses to which they were put by the FBI. What we are not permitted to meditate is whether the subject matter of those tapes was scandalous.

Mr. Jack White of Time mag, discussinga new book about Dr. King by David Garrow of New York's City College, writes about the "danger' King runs "of being transformed from a flesh-and-blood hero to a gauzy legend.' The author's punch is quickly telegraphed: An ordained minister who is married and faithful to his wife suffers the hazard of becoming a "gauzy legend.' One is best rescued from such an awful fate by having numerous sexual affairs in numerous motels, including a liaison of long standing that "increasingly became the emotional centerpiece' of his life. The reviewer goes on: The book "sheds a revealing new light on King's human side' --regular philandering--"and on the vicious secret pressures he faced from the FBI. The complex and convincing portrait . . . describes how the bureau under J. Edgar Hoover tried to blackmail and intimidate King with tapes of his sexual encounters and how it attempted to discredit him by spreading reports about his love life after he refused to break off his friendship with a suspected Communist agent.'

The story is that Dr. King was close toa suspected Communist, and President Kennedy drew him to one side at a White House function and warned him that if the civil-rights movement got entangled with the Communist movement, it would suffer. King did not suspend his contacts with the suspect, quite the contrary: He was introduced to and admitted into his entourage yet another Communist suspect. At which point Robert Kennedy "reluctantly'--we are not told by the reviewer how that reluctance was expressed--"acceded to Hoover's plea to bug King's hotel rooms. That . . . provided a lode of scandalous data about King's philandering. The FBI wasted no time in circulating gamy samples of the recordings to government officials, friendly journalists, and even King's wife in an attempt to persuade King to withdraw from an active role in the movement.'

There is a whole lot set up in these sentences,which amounts to thought control in the grand manner. We need to begin by asking, Why were the data "scandalous'? Presumably because the American public does not approve of philandering, especially by ministers of the Gospel. Sinclair Lewis wrote a novel introducing a name into the permanent literature of hypocrisy: Elmer Gantry. He was the fundamentalist minister who preached during the day and fornicated during the night. But we had just been warned against King's being made a "gauzy legend,' from which he is now rescued by being shown to have been, instead, a "flesh-and-blood hero.' Well, then, does it follow that we owe a debt to Robert Kennedy and to the FBI for rescuing the Republic from an impression of Martin Luther King not only as a moralizer, but also as a moral man?

But the reviewer is not done. He concludesthat now we know "of the complex man and his struggles with the FBI--and with himself--[providing us with] a deeper appreciation of the larger crusade he waged. The book does not diminish the heroic nature of his struggle, but instead makes it more real.'

What exactly is the meaning of that?We all know that all men are sinners, we all know that all men are subject to great temptations, but do we not also know that heroism is in part defined by resistance to temptation? Last week a two-hour drama on J. Edgar Hoover was shown on cable television. In it Harry Truman and Jack and Bobby Kennedy, in sharp contrast to J. Edgar Hoover, resisted the temptation to pry into the private lives of their adversaries--a point that runs rather awkwardly into the account of the direct participation of Robert Kennedy in the bugging of the motel rooms. Still, are we or are we not saying that that which is scandalous is that which offends the public ethic, and that even though we know about the prevalence of sin, we honor especially those who struggle successfully not only to preach the Commandments of God, but to follow them?

COPYRIGHT 1987 National Review, Inc.
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