That Old, Rugged Cross

By Jack E. White

As the nation prepares to celebrate for the second time the federal holiday marking Martin Luther King's birthday, the civil rights leader sometimes seems in danger of being transformed from a flesh-and-blood hero to a gauzy legend. Now a provocative new biography based on interviews with his closest associates and examination of FBI files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act sheds a revealing new light on King's human side and on the vicious secret pressures he faced from the FBI. The complex and convincing portrait drawn by David Garrow, associate professor of political science at New York's City College, 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.

, According to Bearing the Cross (Morrow; $19.95), King's many liaisons included one long-term affair that, writes Garrow, "increasingly became the emotional centerpiece" of his life. The FBI stumbled upon them in the course of investigating King's links to New York Attorney Stanley Levison, a former Communist who had become one of the civil rights leader's most trusted friends. Suspecting that Levison was part of a Communist plot to infiltrate the movement, Hoover persuaded Attorney General Robert Kennedy to authorize a tap on Levison's phones. Alarmed by the discovery that Levison had recommended another former Communist to King for a job, President John Kennedy warned King as they walked in the White House Rose Garden that his association with the two men could imperil impending civil rights legislation.

When King kept indirect contacts with Levison despite this advice, Robert Kennedy "reluctantly" acceded to Hoover's plea to bug King's hotel rooms. That failed to prove that King was under the influence of Communists but 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.

Garrow writes that partly as a result of the FBI's intimidation, King often suffered from morbid depression, a contention hotly contested by some of his heirs. Says the Rev. Jesse Jackson: "The thesis that his personal life was so convoluted that he couldn't function with clarity is contrary to the facts. What I saw was courage to the point of crucifixion." Some of King's associates object to Garrow's revelations. Even if true, says Wyatt Walker, former staff chief to King, "how does that change the value of his contribution toward sensitizing the nation on the moral issue of race?" But others who value that contribution just as highly say an unvarnished understanding of the complex man and his struggles with the FBI -- and with himself -- provides 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.