On August 2, 1983, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill
creating a legal public holiday in honor of the Rev. Martin Luther King,
Jr. Although there had been little discussion of the bill in the House
itself and little awareness among the American public that Congress was
even considering such a bill, it was immediately clear that the U.S.
Senate would take up the legislation soon after the Labor Day recess.
The House had passed the King Holiday Bill by an overwhelming vote of
338-90, with significant bipartisan support (both Reps. Jack Kemp and
Newt Gingrich voted for it), and the Reagan administration was
indicating that the President would not veto it if it came before him.
In these circumstances, most political observers seemed to think that
Senate enactment and presidential signature of the bill would take place
virtually unopposed; few anticipated that the battle over the King
holiday in the next few weeks would be one of the most bitter
congressional and public controversies of the decade.
From 1981 to 1986 I worked on the staff of North Carolina Republican
Sen. John P. East, a close associate and political ally of the senior
senator from North Carolina, Jesse Helms.
While the legislation was being considered I wrote a paper entitled
“Martin Luther King, Jr.: Political Activities and Associations.” It was
simply documentation of the affiliations with various individuals and
organizations of communist background that King had maintained since the
days when he first became a nationally prominent figure. In September,
the paper was distributed to several Senate offices for the purpose of
informing them of these facts about King, facts in which the national
news media showed no interest. It was not originally my intention that
the paper be read on the floor of the Senate, but the Helms office
itself expressed an interest in using it as a speech, and it was read
into the
Congressional Record on October 3, 1983. During the
ensuing debate over the King holiday, I acted as a consultant to Sen.
Helms and his regular staff.
Sen. Helms, like Sen. East and many other conservatives in the Senate
and the country, was strongly opposed to establishing a national
holiday for King. The country already observed no fewer than nine legal
public holidays — New Years Day, “President’s Day” as it is officially
known or “Washington’s Birthday” as an unreconstructed American public
continues to insist on calling it, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor
Day, Veterans Day, Columbus Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. With the
exceptions of Washington’s Birthday and Christmas, not a one of these
holidays celebrates a single individual. As Sen. East argued, to
establish a special holiday just for King was to “elevate him to the
same level as the father of our country and above the many other
Americans whose achievements approach Washington’s.” Whatever King’s own
accomplishments, few would go so far as to claim that they equaled or
exceeded those of many other major statesmen, soldiers, and creative
minds of American history.
That argument alone should have provided a compelling reason to
reject the King holiday, but for some years a well-organized and
powerful lobby had pressured Congress for its enactment, and anyone who
questioned the need for the holiday was likely to be accused of “racism”
or “insensitivity.” Congressional Democrats, always eager to court the
black voting bloc that has become their party’s principal mainstay, were
solidly in favor of it (the major exception being Georgia Democrat
Larry McDonald, who led the opposition to the measure in the House and
who died before the month was over when a Soviet warplane shot down the
civilian airliner on which he and nearly three hundred other civilians
were traveling). Republicans, always timid about accusations of racial
insensitivity and eager to court the black vote themselves, were almost
as supportive of the proposal as the Democrats. Few lawmakers stopped to
consider the deeper cultural and political impact a King holiday would
have, and few journalists and opinion-makers encouraged them to consider
it. Instead, almost all of them — lawmakers and opinion-makers —
devoted their energies to vilifying the only public leader who displayed
the courage to question the very premise of the proposal — whether
Martin Luther King was himself worthy of the immense and unprecedented
honor being placed upon him.
It soon became clear that whatever objections might be raised against
the holiday, no one in politics or the media wanted to hear about them
and that even the Republican leadership of the Senate was sympathetic to
passage of the legislation. When the Senate Majority Leader, Howard
Baker, scheduled action to consider the bill soon after Congress
returned from the Labor Day recess, King’s widow, Coretta Scott King,
called Sen. Baker and urged him to postpone action in order to gain time
to gather more support for the bill. The senator readily agreed,
telling the press, “She felt chances for passage would be enhanced and
improved if it were postponed. The postponement of this is not for the
purpose of delay.” Nevertheless, despite the support for the bill from
the Republican leadership itself, the vote was delayed again, mainly
because of the efforts of Sen. Helms.
Sen. Helms delivered his speech on King on October 3 and later
supplemented it with a document of some 300 pages consisting mainly of
declassified FBI and other government reports about King’s connections
with communists and communist-influenced groups that the speech
recounted. That document, distributed on the desks of all senators, was
promptly characterized as “a packet of filth” by New York’s Democratic
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who threw it to the floor of the Senate
and stomped on it (he later repeated his stomping off the Senate floor
for the benefit of the evening news), while Sen. Edward Kennedy
denounced the Helms speech as “Red smear tactics” that should be
“shunned by the American people.” A few days later, columnist Edwin M.
Yoder, Jr. in the
Washington Post sneered that Jesse Helms “is a
stopped clock if ever American politics had one” who could be depended
on to “contaminate a serious argument with debating points from the
gutter,” while he described King as “a prophet, a man of good works, a
thoroughly wholesome influence in American life.” Writing in the
Washington Times, conservative
Aram Bakshian held that Sen. Helms was simply politically motivated:
“He has nothing to lose and everything to gain by heaping scorn on the
memory of Martin Luther King and thereby titillating the great white
trash.” Leftist Richard Cohen wrote of Helms in the
Post, “His sincerity is not in question. Only his decency.”
Meanwhile, Sen. Helms, with legal assistance from the Conservative
Caucus, filed suit in federal court to obtain the release of FBI
surveillance tapes on King that had been sealed by court order until the
year 2027. Their argument was that senators could not fairly evaluate
King’s character and beliefs and cast an informed vote on the holiday
measure until they had gained access to this sealed material and had an
opportunity to examine it. The Reagan Justice Department opposed this
action, and on October 18, U.S. District Judge John Lewis Smith, Jr.
refused to release the King files, which remain sealed to this day.
Efforts to send the bill to committee also failed. Although it is a
routine practice for the Senate to refer all legislation to committee,
where hearings can consider the merits of the proposed law, this was not
done in the case of the King holiday bill. Sen. Kennedy, a former
chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, argued that hearings on a
similar proposal had been held in a previous Congress and there was no
need to hold new hearings. He was correct that hearings had been held,
but there had been considerable turnover in the Senate since then and
copies of those hearings were not generally available. Nevertheless, it
soon became clear that Republicans and Democrats, liberals and many
conservatives, the White House, the courts, and the media all wanted the
King holiday bill passed as soon as possible, with as little serious
discussion of King’s character, beliefs, and associations as possible.
Why this was so was becoming increasingly clear to me as an observer
of the process. Our office soon began to receive phone calls and letters
from all over the country expressing strong popular opposition to the
bill. Aides from other Senate offices — I specifically remember one from
Washington state and one from Pennsylvania — told me their mail from
constituents was running overwhelmingly against the bill, and I recall
overhearing Sen. Robert Dole telling a colleague that he had to go back
to Kansas and prove he was still a Republican despite his support for
the King holiday bill. The political leaders of both parties were
beginning to grasp that they were sitting on top of a potential
political earthquake, which they wanted to stifle before it swallowed
them all.
On October 19, then, the vote was held, 78 in favor of the holiday
and 22 against (37 Republicans and 41 Democrats voted for the bill; 18
Republicans and 4 Democrats voted against it); several substitute
amendments intended to replace the King holiday measure were defeated
without significant debate. President Reagan signed the bill into law on
November 2nd. I distinctly remember standing with Sen. Helms in the
Republican cloakroom just off the floor of the Senate during the debate,
listening to one senator after another approaching him to apologize for
the insulting language they had just used about Sen. Helms on the
floor. Not a few of the senators assured him they knew he was right
about King but what else could they do but denounce Helms and vote for
the holiday? Most of them claimed political expediency as their excuse,
and I recall one Senate aide chortling that “what old Jesse needs to do
is get back to North Carolina and try to save his own neck” from the
coming disaster he had prepared for himself in opposing the King
holiday.
Indeed, it was conventional wisdom in Washington at that time that
Jesse Helms had committed political suicide by his opposition to the
King holiday and that he was certain to lose re-election the following
year against a challenge by Democratic Governor James B. Hunt. In fact,
Sen. Helms was trailing in the polls prior to the controversy over the
holiday. The
Washington Post carried a story shortly after the
vote on the holiday bill with the headline, “Battle to Block King
Holiday May Have Hurt Helms at Home,” and a former political reporter
from North Carolina confidently gloated in the Post on October 23 that
Helms was “Destined to Lose in “84.”
In the event, of course, Sen. Helms was re-elected by a healthy
margin, and the Post itself acknowledged the role of his opposition to
the King Holiday as a major factor in his political revival. As Post
reporter Bill Peterson wrote in news stories after Helms’ re-election on
November 6, 1984, his “standing among whites … shot up in polls after
he led a filibuster [strong opposition] against a bill establishing a
national holiday on the birthday of the late Rev. Martin Luther King,
Jr.,” and on November 18, “A poll before the filibuster showed Helms
trailing Hunt by 20 percentage points. By December, Hunt’s lead was
sliced in half. White voters who had been feeling doubts about Helms
began returning to the fold.” If Sen. Helms’ speech against the King
holiday had any enduring effect, then, it was to help re-elect him to
the Senate.
So, was Jesse Helms right about Martin Luther King? That King had
close connections with individuals and groups that were openly communist
is clear today, as it was clear during King’s own lifetime and during
the debate on the holiday bill. Indeed, only two weeks after the Senate
vote, on November 1, 1983, the
New York Times published a
letter written by Michael Parenti, an associate fellow of the far-left
Institute for Policy Studies in Washington and a frequent contributor
to
Political Affairs, an official organ of the Communist Party
that styles itself the “Theoretical Journal of the Communist Party,
U.S.A.” The letter demanded “What if communists had links to Dr. King?”
Mr. Parenti pointed out that “The three areas in which King was most
active — civil rights, peace and the labor struggle (the latter two
toward the end of his life) — are also areas in which U.S. Communists
have worked long and devotedly,” and he criticized “liberals” who “once
again accept the McCarthyite premise that U.S. Communists are purveyors
of evil and that any association with them taints one forever. Dr. King
himself would not have accepted such a premise.” Those of Mr. Parenti’s
persuasion may see nothing scandalous in associations with known
communists, but the “liberals” whom he criticized knew better than to
make that argument in public.
Of course, to say that King maintained close affiliations with
persons whom he knew to be communists is not to say that King himself
was ever a communist or that the movement he led was controlled by
communists; but his continuing associations with communists, and his
repeated dishonesty about those connections, do raise serious questions
about his own character, about the nature of his own political views and
goals, and about whether we as a nation should have awarded him (and
should continue to award him) the honor the holiday confers. Moreover,
the embarrassing political connections that were known at the time seem
today to be merely the tip of the ethical and political iceberg with
which King’s reputation continues to collide.
While researching King’s background in 1983, I deliberately chose to
dwell on his communist affiliations rather than on other issues
involving his sexual morality. I did so because at that time the facts
about King’s subversive connections were well-documented, while the
details of his sex life were not. In the course of writing the paper,
however, I spoke to several former agents of the FBI who had been
personally engaged in the FBI surveillance of King and who knew from
first-hand observation that the rumors about his undisciplined sex life
were substantially true. A few years later, with the publication in 1989
of Ralph Abernathy’s autobiography,
And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, those
rumors were substantiated by one of King’s closest friends and
political allies. It is quite true that a person’s sex life is largely
his own business, but in the case of an internationally prominent figure
such as King, they become publicly relevant, and they are especially
relevant given the high moral stature King’s admirers habitually ascribe
to him, the issue of his integrity as a Christian clergyman, and the
proposal to elevate him to the status of a national moral icon.
In the course of the Senate debate on the King holiday, the East
office received a letter from a retired FBI official, Charles D.
Brennan. Mr. Brennan, who had served as Assistant Director of the FBI,
stated that he had personally been involved in the FBI surveillance of
King and knew from first-hand observation the truth about King’s sexual
conduct — conduct that Mr. Brennan characterized as “orgiastic and
adulterous escapades, some of which indicated that King could be bestial
in his sexual abuse of women.” He also stated that “King frequently
drank to excess and at times exhibited extreme emotional instability as
when he once threatened to jump from his hotel room window.” In a study
that he prepared, Mr. Brennan described King’s “sexual activities and
his excessive drinking” that FBI surveillance discovered. It was this
kind of conduct, he wrote, that led FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to
describe King as “a tom cat with obsessive degenerate sexual urges” and
President Lyndon Johnson to call King a “hypocrite preacher.” Mr.
Brennan also acknowledged:
It was muck the FBI collected. It was not the FBI’s most
shining hour. There would be no point in wallowing in it again. The
point is that the muck is there. It is there in the form of transcripts,
recordings, photos, and logs. It is there in great quantity. There are
volumes of material labeled “obscene.’ Future historians just will not
be able to avoid it.
It is precisely this material that is sealed under court order until
the year 2027 and to which the Senate was denied access prior to the
vote on the King holiday.
One instance from King’s life that perhaps illuminates his character
was provided by historian David Garrow in his study of the FBI’s
surveillance of King. Garrow recounts what the FBI gathered during a
48-hour surveillance of King between February 22 and 24, 1964 in the
Hyatt House Motel in Los Angeles.
“In that forty-eight hours the Bureau acquired what in retrospect
would be its most prized recordings of Dr. King. The treasured highlight
was a long and extremely funny storytelling session during which King
(a) bestowed supposedly honorific titles or appointments of an
explicitly sexual nature on some of his friends, (b) engaged in an
extended dialogue of double-entendre phrases that had sexual as well as
religious connotations, and (c) told an explicit joke about the rumored
sexual practices of recently assassinated President John F. Kennedy,
with reference to both Mrs. Kennedy, and the President’s funeral.”
Garrow’s characterization of the episode as “extremely funny” is one
way of describing the incident; another is that during the session in
Los Angeles, King, a Christian minister, made obscene jokes with his own
followers (several of them also ministers), made sexual and
sacrilegious jokes, and made obscene and insulting remarks intended to
be funny about the late President Kennedy and his sex life with Mrs.
Kennedy. It should be recalled that these jokes were made by King about a
man who had supported his controversial cause, had lost political
support because of his support for King and the civil rights movement,
and had been dead for less than three months at the time King engaged in
obscene humor about him and his wife. In February 1964, the nation was
still in a state of shock over Kennedy’s death, but King apparently
found his death a suitable occasion for dirty jokes.
More recently still, in addition to disclosures about King’s bizarre
sex life and his close connections with communists, it has come to light
that King’s record of deliberate deception in his own personal
interests reaches as far back as his years in college and graduate
school, when he plagiarized significant portions of his research papers
and even his doctoral dissertation, an act that would cause the
immediate professional ruin of any academic figure. Evidence of King’s
plagiarism, which was almost certainly known to his academic sponsors at
Boston University and was indisputably known to other academics at the
King Papers Project at Stanford University, was deliberately suppressed
and denied. It finally came to light in reports published by the
Wall Street Journal in 1990 and was later exhaustively documented in articles and a monograph by Theodore Pappas of the Rockford Institute.
Yet, incredibly — even after thorough documentation of King’s
affiliations with communists, after the revelations about his personal
moral flaws, and after proof of his brazen dishonesty in plagiarizing
his dissertation and several other published writings — incredibly there
is no proposal to rescind the holiday that honors him. Indeed, states
like Arizona and New Hampshire that did not rush to adopt their own
holidays in honor of King have themselves been vilified and threatened
with systematic boycotts. The continuing indulgence of King is in part
due to simple political cowardice — fear of being denounced as a
“racist” — but also to the political utility of the King holiday for
those who seek to advance their own political agenda. Almost immediately
upon the enactment of the holiday bill, the King holiday came to serve
as a kind of charter for the radical regime of “political correctness”
and “multiculturalism” that now prevails at many of the nation’s major
universities and in many areas of public and private life.
This is so because the argument generally offered for the King
holiday by King’s own radical collaborators and disciples is
considerably different from the argument for it offered by most
Republicans and Democrats. The latter argue that they simply want to
celebrate what they take to be King’s personal courage and commitment to
racial tolerance; the holiday, in their view, is simply celebratory and
commemorative, and they do not intend that the holiday should advance
any other agenda. But this is not the argument in favor of the King
holiday that we hear from partisans like Mrs. King and those who harbor
similar views. A few days after Senate passage of the holiday measure,
Mrs. King wrote in the
Washington Post (October 23, 1983) about how the holiday should be observed.
“The holiday,” she wrote, “must be substantive as well as symbolic.
It must be more than a day of celebration… Let this holiday be a day of
reflection, a day of teaching nonviolent philosophy and strategy, a day
of getting involved in nonviolent action for social and economic
progress.” She noted that for years the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center
for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta “has conducted activities around
his birthday in many cities. The week-long observance has included a
series of educational programs, policy seminars or conferences,
action-oriented workshops, strategy sessions and planning meetings
dealing with a wide variety of current issues, from voter registration
to full employment to citizen action for nuclear disarmament.”
A few months later, Robert Weisbrot, a fellow of the DuBois Institute at Harvard, was writing in
The New Republic (January
30, 1984) that “in all, the nation’s first commemoration of King’s life
invites not only celebration, but also cerebration over his — and the
country’s — unfinished tasks.” Those “unfinished tasks,” according to
Mr. Weisbrot, included “curbing disparities of wealth and opportunity in
a society still ridden by caste distinctions,” a task toward the
accomplishment of which “the reforms of the early “60s” were “only a
first step.” Among those contemporary leaders “seeking to extend Martin
Luther King’s legacy,” Mr. Weisbrot wrote, “by far the most influential
and best known is his former aide, Jesse Jackson.”
The exploitation of the King holiday for radical political purposes
was even further enhanced by Vincent Harding, “Professor of Religion and
Social Transformation at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver,”
writing in the
New York Times (January 18, 1988). Professor
Harding rejected the notion that the King holiday commemorates merely “a
kind, gentle and easily managed religious leader of a friendly crusade
for racial integration.” Such an understanding would “demean and
trivialize Dr. King’s meaning.” Professor Harding wrote:
The Martin Luther King of 1968 was calling for and
leading civil disobedience campaigns against the unjust war in Vietnam.
Courageously describing our nation as ‘the greatest purveyor of violence
in the world today,’ he was urging us away from a dependence on
military solutions. He was encouraging young men to refuse to serve in
the military, challenging them not to support America’s anti-Communist
crusades, which were really destroying the hopes of poor nonwhite
peoples everywhere.
This Martin Luther King was calling for a radical redistribution of
wealth and political power in American society as a way to provide food,
clothing, shelter, medical care, jobs, education and hope for all of
our country’s people.
To those of King’s own political views, then, the true meaning of the
holiday is that it serves to legitimize the radical social and
political agenda that King himself favored and to delegitimize
traditional American social and cultural institutions — not simply those
that supported racial segregation but also those that support a free
market economy, an anti-communist foreign policy, and a constitutional
system that restrains the power of the state rather than one that
centralizes and expands power for the reconstruction of society and the
redistribution of wealth. In this sense, the campaign to enact the legal
public holiday in honor of Martin Luther King was a small first step on
the long march to revolution, a charter by which that revolution is
justified as the true and ultimate meaning of the American identity. In
this sense, and also in King’s own sense, as he defined it in his speech
at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, the Declaration of Independence
becomes a “promissory note” by which the state is authorized to pursue
social and economic egalitarianism as its mission, and all institutions
and values that fail to reflect the dominance of equality — racial,
cultural, national, economic, political, and social — must be overcome
and discarded.
By placing King — and therefore his own radical ideology of social
transformation and reconstruction — into the central pantheon of
American history, the King holiday provides a green light by which the
revolutionary process of transformation and reconstruction can charge
full speed ahead. Moreover, by placing King at the center of the
American national pantheon, the holiday also serves to undermine any
argument against the revolutionary political agenda that it has come to
symbolize. Having promoted or accepted the symbol of the new dogma as a
defining — perhaps the defining — icon of the American political order,
those who oppose the revolutionary agenda the symbol represents have
little ground to resist that agenda.
It is hardly an accident, then, that in the years since the enactment
of the holiday and the elevation of King as a national icon, systematic
attacks on the Confederacy and its symbolism were initiated, movements
to ban the teaching of “Western civilization” came to fruition on major
American universities, Thomas Jefferson was denounced as a “racist” and
“slaveowner,” and George Washington’s name was removed from a public
school in New Orleans on the grounds that he too owned slaves. In the
new nation and the new creed of which the King holiday serves as symbol,
all institutions, values, heroes, and symbols that violate the dogma of
equality are dethroned and must be eradicated. Those associated with
the South and the Confederacy are merely the most obvious violations of
the egalitarian dogma and therefore must be the first to go, but they
will by no means be the last.
The political affiliations of Martin Luther King that Sen. Jesse
Helms so courageously exposed are thus only pointers to the real danger
that the King holiday represents. The logical meaning of the holiday is
the ultimate destruction of the American Republic as it has been
conceived and defined throughout our history, and until the charter for
revolution that it represents is repealed, we can expect only further
installations of the destruction and dispossession it promises.
