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Mr. TAYLOR BRANCH (Author, "Pillar Of Fire"): When I was a--in high
school. As a young fellow growing up in Atlanta, Georgia, not
interested in anything except football and girls, really, working in
my father's dry-cleaning plant. But I saw the--the photographs of the
dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham in the spring of '63 when I was a
junior in high school, and I asked my first political question, `How
can this be, and what is it made of?' And it kind of--my parents
didn't have an answer. They were--and it--it--it became kind of a
quest to find out about it. I just sensed the--the enormous power in
that, and it changed the direction of my life's interests when I
wasn't looking for it to happen.

LAMB: How many years of your life have you spent thinking and writing
about th--these years?

Mr. BRANCH: I started after--I got into a book career in the late
'70s, after magazine journalism. I wanted to write about this period
'cause I still hadn't answered the question, `What was it made of?'
And I started in 1981 with what was proposed to be a three-year
history of America in the King years, and it's now been 16 years. And
I've done it in two volumes, and it's now projected to be a trilogy.
I w--it will--it will be a trilogy; I'll finish it. But I'll probably
have 20 years in it. It's definitely turning into my life's work, but
I'm--major work, but I'm--I'm thankful for the privilege of writing
about this period.

LAMB: The first book, "Parting the Waters," 1,064 pages. This book,
"Pillar Of Fire," 746 pages. What's been your approach? What's
your...

Mr. BRANCH: Storytelling--to do it in storytelling. I--one of the
reasons I wanted to do it was that I knew this had an enormous impact,
somewhat like the Civil War and Reconstruction period a century
before. But most of the books I read seemed to me analytical and
argumentative, y--reinventing new labels of analysis. And I felt that
they didn't have the power to really describe what happened at the
personal level, which is where I think we really learn about race
across the divisions that we have.

And so I really resolved from some lessons out of my experience that I
wanted to try to keep it at a storytelling level and follow the
stories wherever they went. I just didn't know that there would be so
many of them or that they would be s--from--from such broad context;
that I'd be chronicling King's relationship with Rabbi Abraham Heschel
or something like--you know, these are things that I didn't--had no
way of anticipating. So I just kind of stor--I followed storytelling,
but it tumbled me off into more worlds than I'd planned on.

LAMB: I may have miscounted, but I counted 27 different FBI files
that you've gotten into in the back that you list. What value have
they been to this book, and how would they be different if you--how
would this book be different if you didn't get in those files?

Mr. BRANCH: Well, I think they're good primary material, quite apart
from the ethics of whether they should have been done or not.
Invasive wiretaps are pretty basic primary, biographical material.
And there are many more files there, actually, but these are the ones
in which there is basic primary material. And FBI material gathered
at the ground level tends to be, I think, very reliable, and the
people that have been wiretapped that I've gone to, like Bayard Rustin
or Clarence Jones the--and shown these conversations, they say they
are. It's--when it m--gets massaged up through FBI headquarters and
put to political use that--that--that the material starts getting
distorted.

But there's nothing better than a verbatim wiretap transcript of
somebody's entire telephone life, you know. That's very, very
revealing and primary, often quite the op--showing quite the opposite
character effect of what the wiretaps are premised on. The wiretaps
will be premised on the fact that--the suspicion that this person
would be talking to Boris, his Soviet agent, as a spy all the time
and, in fact, what you'll get is somebody talking about going to jail
and the freedom movement and quite--quite noble characters.

LAMB: Where do you go to get the files, and how hard is it to get
them?

Mr. BRANCH: It's not hard to get. They're in the FBI reading room
not far from here in the--at--in the J. Edgar Hoover Building.
They're in the basement of a windowless room on--and you have to read
them under supervision, and you can't leave even to go to the bathroom
without an escort. You can't leave the building without taking in a
half an hour or more going one way or another. So after a time I
build up discipline that I plan to go in at 8:30 in the morning and
take no break for lunch or bathroom, just going through the documents
enough--'cause usually there's a lot of boilerplate in 'em and a lot
of valuable stuff and you have to look at a document just long enough
to know whether you want to copy it or not.

LAMB: And you can copy it?

Mr. BRANCH: You can copy them, yes. But, of course, a lot of times
on the non-wiretap materials, believe it or not, they have fewer
deletions in them than the more political ones that are trying to make
political use of it. And I think that is material that's redacted and
blocked out. Some of them have--are heavily redacted, generally to
disguise the political use being made of them.

LAMB: Can you ever listen to them if you want to?

Mr. BRANCH: They have none. They have no tapes like that.

LAMB: They're gone?

Mr. BRANCH: They're gone. They don't exist. Now on
other--sometimes there are police recordings. Ralph Abernathy's
famous doohickey speech that he gave in Selma was recorded by the
Selma police and then fell into law enforcement's hands, which was
actually what they thought at the time--the people in the civil rights
movement thought. It was the police making all the intrusions, and
they saw the FBI as their friends, which, relatively speaking, they
were--the FBI agents on the ground. So it's a very complex period.
You have the--a hostile political part of the FBI and a--and a
relatively friendly, crime-fighting part of the FBI co-existing at a
time when the movement is under constant danger, the various scattered
movements throughout the South.

LAMB: "Parting the Waters," your first book, was published in what
year?

Mr. BRANCH: Right at the end of 1988.

LAMB: What was the period that you discussed?

Mr. BRANCH: '54 to '63. That is, '54, the year of the Brown
decision, the year that the Supreme Court unanimously said, in effect,
that racial segregation and separation is in conflict with the
American Constitution, kind of renewing the challenge of the--of
the--of the Civil War period about slavery in--being in conflict with
the premise of equal citizenship. Though that's '54, I'm going to '68
when the--when that movement, built on that premise, largely
dissolved. And it's the same year Dr. King was killed.

LAMB: I have a battered copy of "Parting the Waters." This is the
paperback version. You won a Pulitzer Prize for this. How many
hardback copies did you sell and how many of these paperbacks up to
today?

Mr. BRANCH: Golly Moses, I would have to talk to my publisher or
my--it would only be a rough estimate of roughly 100,000 hardbacks and
200,000 or maybe 300,000 paperbacks, which is--you know, it's peanuts
for Stephen King, but it's a lot for a big--a big, thick history book
based on a subject that makes some people uncomfortable. But other
people--for me, at least, it's a--it's a great leavening
transformation to read about the bravery of these people, the American
story. It's--there are a lot of black heroes and there are a lot of
white heroes, too. It's a cross-cultural drama.

LAMB: Now you credit--I think it's an outfit called Lindhurst of
Chattanooga...

Mr. BRANCH: Yes.

LAMB: ...and MacArthur of Chicago and the Ford Foundation as places
that have given you money over the years. Is that right?

Mr. BRANCH: Yes. After "Parting the Waters" came out, i--or--'cause
this book has taken nine years. The Ford Foundation gave me my first
and only research grant that I used to hire somebody for two years to
help me transcribe my interviews. Lindhurst and the MacArthur
Foundation gave me just kind of sustenance grants because usu--divided
over nine years--and I have to pay for all my travel to the LBJ
Library and all the scattered places that I have to go to do my
research, it is--it is expensive to--even doing it by myself.

LAMB: Have you made a living off of all this? I mean, is it
possible? Or did you have to do other things?

Mr. BRANCH: At the end of "Parting the Waters," I had to get two
part-time jobs on the side because I didn't have these grants then and
I had no standing or reputation. This time I didn't have to do much
work on the side partly because we've had a frustrated effort to try
to get "Parting the Waters" made into a film. And every once and
awhile Hollywood would bail me out with some money for an option that
ultimately didn't pan out--you know, to break my heart again trying to
make it a film. But I have managed to, with my wife and I working,
keep our kids in school.

LAMB: What's your wife do?

Mr. BRANCH: She's just taken a job as--for nine years she was a
speechwriter to the mayor of Baltimore, and just in January, last
month, took a job as one of Mrs. Clinton's two speechwriters. So she
moved down here right into the eye of the new storm and is writing
speeches for Mrs. Clinton.

LAMB: And you've had a special relationship with the president over
the years?

Mr. BRANCH: Well, a very special relationship in a sense that we
were roommates and partners in the 1972 presidential campaign in
Texas. We lived together. And he brought his then-new girlfriend
Hillary. And so we had a very close association then. And then I
didn't see him for 20 years, from '72 to '92, until he was elected
president and called and said, `Congratulations for your Pulitzer in
history. I'm--I'm--would love to talk to you about how to preserve
historical materials and what you've noticed from the presidential
li--libraries you've worked in.' And on that basis we have talked a
good bit while he's been president to renew our acquaintanceship after
a 20-year hiatus.

LAMB: Have you had any discussions with him about his whole race
initiative?

Mr. BRANCH: Absolutely. Yes, I have.

LAMB: What did you recommend to him?

Mr. BRANCH: I think this is a great thing. I ha--I personally think
from the--the work that I've done that our racial dialogue in America,
our discourse is far behind our objective reality and where we are;
that if you study this period and you see how parochial, how limited,
how much violence there was, how unaccustomed a lot of white people
were even to meeting somebody from a different denomination almost or
a different section of the country, there's--and the--ads in the
newspapers were divided not only by race, but by sex; `Help wanted,
female,' and jobs were--you know, secre--for women, were secretaries
and teachers.

We've lifted up a whole new reality, not to minimize the severe
problems that still are here. But what, to me, is lacking is our
dialogue, is kind of the--the--the--the scarcity of universal voices
talking about what we have in common in America, speaking across these
lines, which is what we had here.

And, to me, if these people could be confidant and hope during the
civil rights movement facing segregation, and, really, apartheid in
the South and all kinds of narrowness and violence, we need to restore
that sense of dialogue now because our problems, relatively speaking,
I believe, are--are much less. And we are--this movement has lifted
American values all around the world and--and miracles in South Africa
and singing "We Shall Overcome" when the Berlin Wall went down and
forming the model for Tiananmen Square, the demonstration. We have a
lot to be proud of as far as the way we have lifted up our objective
relations, stretched ourselves to de--to not just be a white
Protestant country. And--but our dialogue lags behind. And I think
that's what needs to be restored. We've got a lot of poison against
our--our public purpose.

LAMB: Did you ever meet Martin Luther King?

Mr. BRANCH: Never did. Grew up in the same town--that's what
I'm--talking about how unconscious I was of this. I--I grew up in
Atlanta, the same city he was in. I kind of noticed it. My father
had a lot of black employees at the time at the dry-cleaning plant.
The only time I ever heard it mentioned was we--he had a--one of his
favorite employees, he had a bet on the Atlanta Crackers baseball
games every day, and sometimes my dad would take me to those games in
the '50s. And we would have to separate at Ponce de Leon ballpark in
Atlanta, 'cause Peter had to go sit in the colored section. And
that's the only time I ever--my--my dad would say, `I don't like
this.'

But he wouldn't invite comment because it was like--it was dangerous.
There was nothing you could do about it. It was kind of like ominous
clouds, but, you know, you wou--couldn't do anything about the
weather. So I grew up in that atmosphere, which was quite common in
the South. And not until Birmingham, really, did it break through and
occur to me that there really could be something done about it on the
strength of the courage of these people, many of whom were--you know,
in Birmingham, they were girls and little kids. They were eight,
nine, 10 years old marching to jail and having the fire ho--hoses
turned on them. And that made a very powerful impression on me. But
by the time I got caught up and interested in it, Dr. King was dead.
I went to college and he was killed before I finished college.

LAMB: Where'd you go to school?

Mr. BRANCH: Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

LAMB: And is your fa--father and mother still alive?

Mr. BRANCH: Yes, they are, still in Atlanta.

LAMB: Still in the business?

Mr. BRANCH: No, he's retired now, but...

LAMB: And his business was what kind of dry cleaning?

Mr. BRANCH: Dry cleaning and laundry; had lots of them all across
Atlanta--carriage cleaners.

LAMB: How about your mom? What'd she do?

Mr. BRANCH: She helped in the--we all helped in the laundry. It was
kind of a family business, and then she later went into real estate a
little bit.

LAMB: And you live now where?

Mr. BRANCH: In Baltimore, Maryland, after living here in Washington
for--for a number of years.

LAMB: If we saw your in--you in your environment where you're putting
all this together and actually writing it, what would it look like?

Mr. BRANCH: It's a little cubbyhole in the roost of a--a turret of
a--of an old Victorian house with files that spread all the way down
through--into the basement--fireproof files that go all over the place
accumulated over these 16 years. But where I actually write is right
up in the top in a turret that's--would be claustrophobic, except I
put in two skylights that look out and let in a lot of light.

LAMB: How much time do you spend there? How long does it--you know,
do you have any idea how many hours you took to write 1,600 pages?

Mr. BRANCH: Absolutely none. But I--my discipline is that if I
don't start at 5:00 in the morning and do what I call `stew' for a
while, then days can get away from me. If I start after I break to
take the kids to school, I have to get going in the morning and sit
for a certain number of hours a day. I can't start at 5 and go into
the evening the way I did when I first started 'cause I'm getting a
little older. I don't have quite the same stamina.

But I do--I believe in routine because to assimilate this--you know,
this is a period here in '63, '65 for "Pillar Of Fire" where
everything's happening at once. You know, Freedom Summer and Vietnam
and Malcolm X and all these things are happening at once. And every
time I shift--my goal is to allow the reader to experience that
smoothly, to go from one world to another. And every time I shift, I
have to get out a new batch of research materials and that sort of
thing. And so I find that I really have to maintain a certain
discipline to mainta--to keep up the concentration level.

LAMB: What do you write on?

Mr. BRANCH: Computer. I started out 20 years ago writing on a legal
pad and moved to a typewriter. But to keep these footnotes--by the
way, 'cause several hundred of the--my books are long. I don't--but
several hundred of the pages that you're talking about in the--in the
length of these books, that includes the notes. And I do--the
computer to me is invaluable not just for editing but for keeping
track of the source notes that I think that it's vital in a subject
like this to provide to readers.

LAMB: What did you do to get the sense of what it all sounded like?
W--did you watch any film, any--listen to any audio, anything like
that?

Mr. BRANCH: I did. A lot of--a lot of sermons are--are--are--are
preserved. Unfortunately, much of the broadcast resources are not
there and--and that's sad because this is--as I said, you know,
television footage of Birmingham awakened me as a kid. It's hard to
find that. You can't go in the library and look up film research from
that period 'cause that--after all, this is before videotape. This is
back with film. And a lot of that stuff has disintegrated and is
gone.

Occasionally people would make tapes of Mass meetings, which is a
great institution when--wh--it was kind of the--the engine of the
civil rights movement when they have a meeting in a church and they
would--it would be part religious ceremony, part rally, part
information, part--because they didn't have newspapers and--of their
own. Occasionally there are tapes of Mass meetings, and as I said,
some of these surveillance tapes.

LAMB: Let me--a--and I'm going to ask you to keep it short if you can
'cause there's a lot of them. And I just want to get a flavor of who
these people are, but just define who these folks are. I'm--I wrote a
whole bunch down. Bob Moses?

Mr. BRANCH: Bob Moses was the leader of the southern voting rights
movement in Mississippi, a gentle philosophical character, essentially
the father of Freedom Summer, very moral character, ultimately had a
breakdown and then has since in the past 10 years revived to a new
career.

LAMB: Where?

Mr. BRANCH: All over the country teaching eighth-graders how to do
first-year algebra, which he says is the dividing line between whether
you have a chance in life or not, much like the right to vote was in
Mississippi in the '60s.

LAMB: Fred Shuttlesworth.

Mr. BRANCH: Firebrand Birmingham preacher who personalized the duel
with Bull Connor to--he was the--the lieutenant who invited Dr. King
into Birmingham for the climactic showdown in '63.

LAMB: Who was Bull Connor?

Mr. BRANCH: Bull Connor was the police chief and director of public
safety in Birmingham who kind of personified segregation in
Birmingham, the city that was mor--most like Cape Town in South
Africa.

LAMB: John Lewis.

Mr. BRANCH: John Lewis, young man grew up stuttering, preaching to
chickens in--in rural Alabama, went to college in Nashville,
dev--became a freedom writer on one of the shock troops and the most
devoted of King's followers among the students and is now a
congressman from--he's my mom and dad's congressman from the 5th
District in Atlanta.

LAMB: James Bevel.

Mr. BRANCH: James Bevel, the John the Baptist of the--friend
of--of--of John Lewis', out of the Nashville movement with his wife
Diane Nash who was kind of a straw boss of the freedom rides--became
kids in their early 20s who led the freedom rides, then went on to
recommend the use of children when the Birmingham movement was
suffocated. And later in testament to the children who were bombed in
Birmingham in 1963, they really devised as their response to that
bombing what became the Selma voting rights movement to win the right
to vote for minorities across the South.

LAMB: Harry Wachtel.

Mr. BRANCH: Harry Wachtel, Dr. King's lawyer, a--one of the early
corporate and merger lawyers in New York City whose conscience stirred
him because his company owned some of the lunch counter places in the
South to come and volunteer his services for Dr. King. And he became
the only--the only white fella with his wife who went on the Nobel
Peace Prize trip and a devoted career--for the rest of his career,
kind of a--a--one of the lawyers who served Dr. King in the movement.

LAMB: And you write about the Nobel Peace Prize trip and
we'll--hopefully we can talk about it before...

Mr. BRANCH: Yes.

LAMB: ...this is over. Stanley Luvison.

Mr. BRANCH: Called Harry Wachtel's twin, they were two Jewish
lawyers from New York who served Dr. King. Stanley much closer and
more--and early back into the '50s. Harry came on--along later. And
he really was--because of allegations about him in 1953, the year of
the Rosenberg trial and that sort of thing, the FBI has evidence or
claimed to have evidence that he was a Soviet agent.

The evidence is still secret almost 50 years later, long after the
sources--and Luvison died more than 20 years later. But 10 years
later in 1963, the allegations from 1953 that Luvison had been a
Soviet agent or a member of the Communist Party serving the Soviet
Union in 1953 became the premise for the wiretap first on him, and
then when they never discovered any contact with any Soviet contact,
then they wiretapped--advocated wiretaps on Dr. King, on Bayard
Rustin, on other lawyers, on Clarence Jones, on Wachtel.

All of the wiretaps that became the information base for the
persecutions of the civil rights bill were premised on contact with
this one fellow, Stanley Luvison. And he's the best case of what I'm
talking about of having his verbatim conversations refute the premise
on which the wiretaps were based. In other words, it's mostly because
of that buttressing the testimony of his friends that I'm absolutely
confident that he is an unsung patriot of the American experience in
the 20th century.

LAMB: Not a Communist ever?

Mr. BRANCH: Not a Communist.

LAMB: Where is he now?

Mr. BRANCH: He--he died in--in the mid-1970s.

LAMB: Clarence Jones.

Mr. BRANCH: Dr. King's black New York lawyer, in many respects the
model for "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner." He grew up the son of
chauffeurs to the Lippincott family and married the daughter of W.W.
Norton in the plo--in the Waldorf-res--ha--Astoria; married a white
lady in the 1950s, was kind of an entertainment lawyer, a--very, very
successful--and then was converted by an early sermon of Dr. King and
became one of his devote--another of the devoted lawyers working for
him.

He's the one who took the letter from Birmingham jail piece by piece
on toilet paper and written around the margins of newspapers out of
the Birmingham jail when Dr. King was writing it in solitary,
Clarence visiting him as a--you know, as a lawyer.

LAMB: Is that letter, by the way, stowed away somewhere in a--in an
archive?

Mr. BRANCH: Not that...

LAMB: L...

Mr. BRANCH: ...part of it.

LAMB: Uh-huh. The Birmingham letter is not?

Mr. BRANCH: No, not that part of it. It doesn't exist as far as I
know. I think it was thrown away.

LAMB: You mentioned earlier Bayard Rustin.

Mr. BRANCH: Yeah.

LAMB: Who was he?

Mr. BRANCH: Bayard Rustin was the great troubadour of the early
movement, grew up--vagabond singing with Leadbelly in the '30s. He
was a member of the Communist Party in the '30s. He was also gay at a
time when that was not even whispered about and h--and was--but a
great student of non-violence. Traveled all over the world doing
non-violence, a Gand--a--a Gandhian--he was an early zandhian, but he
was--had been a Communist, then became a pacifist and he was really
the architect of the march on Washington. He was the administrator
for it. And it made such an impression on the world when it happened
that, really, his suspect background was all but forgiven. He became
kind of a respectable figure in--in media circles toward the end of
his career. He's now dead.

LAMB: James Forman.

Mr. BRANCH: James Forman, executive director of this Student
Non-Violent coordinating committee of which Bob Moses was the primary
operator down in Mississippi. Forman was kind of the organizer who
kept it together, and he now lives here in Washington. Later on when
the students came in conflec--conflict with King, Forman to some
degree personified the student criticisms of Martin Luther King and
other leaders as being preachers preoccupied with leaders and
leadership and meeting presidents and that sort of thing.

LAMB: I could go on, but I want to ask you about some--it appeared to
me as I read through it that you had individuals vs. other
individuals. For instance, Martin Luther King vs. Ralph Abernathy.
Maybe you don't look at it quite that way, but what was their
relationship?

Mr. BRANCH: Very, very close. No secrets from one another. But
ther--but there was an undercurrent of jealousy from Abernathy because
he had been with Dr. King all along. He had a g--he had an amazing
hold over audiences. He was a very comic and gifted preacher, but he
resented Dr. King's sophistication and he was kind of starved for
status, as many black people were during that period, to the point
that he made incidents and it became a burden for Dr. King to carry.

Even at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, Abernathy refused to get in
the second limousine, according to protocol, when all of the Nobel
officials were lined up there and mortified not only Dr. King but a
lot of the people with him. so there were conflicts there. This was
a classical kind of ego conflict that Ralph Abernathy wanted to be as
sophisticated as Dr. King. So there's a--there's a Don
Quixote-Sancho Panza quality there.

LAMB: And when he sat in that chair right before he died and did this
show, they were all angry with him--the--the...

Mr. BRANCH: Yes.

LAMB: ...civil rights movement. Why?

Mr. BRANCH: They were angry because he's o--was one of the first
people close to Dr. King to acknowledge the fact that he had had
extramarital affairs, which is kind of an object of denial among many
of the people around--around him. Since then, there've been lots of
others who've acknowledged that. And, in fact, they--a woman even
wrote a book about her relationship with Dr. King. So the fact that
there were extramarital affairs is no longer as sensitive, but it was
seen--coming from Abernathy, it was seen as a betrayal.

LAMB: Elijah Muhammad vs. Malcolm X.

Mr. BRANCH: Elijah Muhammed, the founder of the Nation of Islam--or,
really, the first major head of it--coined all of the doctrines of
white devils and of a sectarian view of Islam and a very domineering
fund-raising sect of true believers of which Malcolm X was one, until
in this period he decided that there were a number of corruptions
within it, as Malcolm was always remaking himself, studying history,
changing, turning himself inside out. And he decided that it was
corrupt, not only religiously, that it was not the--a--a true version
of Islam, but financially that it was fleecing its members and violent
and using violence and that Elijah Muhammed was having affairs and
producing children by his secretary. So it's corrupt in every sense
that you find in the Bible.

And so you have a violent struggle of Malcolm knowing that he's marked
for death for trying to reform the Nation of Islam. And yet at the
same time America is awakening only to interest in him as a figure
about the races. So to me, it's a--it's an astonishing trail to
follow. Malcolm being shot at in city after city and tracked and
trying to--desperate ploys to save himself and yet come out on a stage
at a--you know, at Radcliffe or at a--at a predominantly white college
and talk about race relations with his mind spinning not talking about
that. Most of us, if people were trying to shoot us, that's all we'd
be talking about.

LAMB: Who of all the people you write about are s--still alive that
you've gotten the closest to?

Mr. BRANCH: Well, I'm--that--that--I'm--my best friends from this
period are people like Julian Bond, whom I've known since the '60s
and--and--and John Lewis. I--I met Vernon Jordan back in this period,
when he was registering voters back--back in the '60s. But the one
who made the biggest impression on me, who's not alive--actually, it's
Epta McClark. I dedicated the book to her 'cause she...

LAMB: First book.

Mr. BRANCH: The first book; she--because she was a--a--just an
utterly inspirational literacy teacher who invented methods that I
think are still being studied around the world for teaching adults
literacy. And I guess Diane Nash--I just saw la--in early February, a
fe--a few weeks ago in Chicago. And she was the leader of the Freedom
Rides, came down from the South, a beauty queen from Chicago and a--an
early leader of the going-to-jail movement that I think basically
provided a lot of the backbone to the early student movement, right on
through the Freedom Rides and being beaten up there, into jail. She
had her first baby in jail al--almost and--and then in Birmingham with
the children with her husband Bevel, who tragically left her. Bevel
was one of the rascals in the movement. He was a genius. He'd have
all these ideas, but he did abuse Diane. And right up to Selma, which
was their idea--on the night before the--the--Bevel gave the speech
proposing the Selma-to-Montgomery march into history, this
young--he--he--he struck her and their marriage fell apart. So Diane
is both a heroine and an unsung hero, and to some degree, a victim of
the great--this was like going through a war. There were a lot of
damaged people from it. And I'd--I'd say probably she's the one I
ad--admire and am closest to that--who hasn't gotten her due.

LAMB: J. Edgar Hoover vs. Robert F. Kennedy.

Mr. BRANCH: That's a Shakespearean wrestling match. There's no way
of simplifying that. Hoover was a skilled bureaucrat. He was also,
to some degree, a--a bully in that he would try to get his way, but he
was a gossip. And he--people who really stood up to him could back
him off. Bobby Kennedy never did. And I think this is a--a--a--a
younger, not mature, Bobby Kennedy who feels heavily the burden of
having to defend his brother, the president, Jack Kennedy, who's--was
vulnerable because he was having affairs with people in the Mafia and
even an East German woman and that sort of thing. Bobby Kennedy had
to have Hoover's help to protect his brother, and it compromised him
in this three- or four-way dance he's doing to try to protect the
Kennedy's political position in the South and the--and the alliance
with Martin Luther King. It's like riding razors, and ultimately, I
believe, Hoover, without ever saying, `You've got to do this for
that.' They're far too skilled bureaucrats for that. They would say,
`OK, I'll help you over here keep down the scandal against your
brother, but I'm very concerned about Martin Luther King, and we need
this wiretap.' And ultimately, Robert Kennedy signed that wiretap,
knowing that he was surrendering with it any pretense of controlling
J. Edgar Hoover. So it's a very, very complex political wrestling
match.

LAMB: What--how did they use the wiretaps and what did they learn
through them about Martin Luther King and the rest of the group?

Mr. BRANCH: They used the wiretaps primarily for advance notice of
King's travel plans. `Hello, I'm flying to Chicago. I'll be in the
such-and-such hotel. I'm flying to New York.'

LAMB: And where did they put those taps?

Mr. BRANCH: They put the taps on his home...

LAMB: Where? Atlanta?

Mr. BRANCH: In Atlanta. They put the taps on his offices, both in
Atlanta and in New York. And Hoover, being a bureaucrat, included a
very clever phrase in there, `Permission to mount technical
surveillance'--that is wiretaps--`on Dr. King's home office and any
home to which he may move.' And they interpreted that to mean a hotel
room. So anyplace he went, there was blanket authority. Now they
used that advanced knowledge to have agents go in and implant
microphones in the walls of the hotel, for which Bobby Kennedy didn't
give authority. Hoover just assumed he had that authority and one of
the embarrassments of American law. And they would use that to
intercept not just what he said on the phone, but what he would say
when he wasn't on the phone or in bed or wh--when he's arguing. And
they used the--the intercepts, essentially, to do anything they could,
either to poison people's opinion of King or to poison politicians
against one another. In other words, he would try to ingratiate
himself with President Johnson if he heard Bobby Kennedy say something
critical of President Johnson via King. In other words, this
was--Hoover's job was basically to ingratiate i--ingratiate himself
with Johnson t--t--to punish Bobby Kennedy, whom he didn't like and to
punish King whenever--whenever he could.

LAMB: By the way, did you listen to any of the Johnson tapes?

Mr. BRANCH: Oh--oh, yes, that's ano--that's a whole...

LAMB: So you could hear all those.

Mr. BRANCH: You can hear those. The Johnson tapes are wonderful.
They corroborate a lot of what's in the--in the declassified meetings
on Vietnam and in some of the files, but there's no substitute for
actually hearing the--hearing the tapes. And I quote fr--for--from a
number of them here.

LAMB: What's the trilogy?

Mr. BRANCH: What's the trilogy?

LAMB: Money, loyalty and sex.

Mr. BRANCH: Money, loyal--that became the shorthand once Bobby--once
Dr. King became aware--as I said, you know, a lot of the times, they
thought the things that were being done to them--ho--the hostile
things being done to them by police were being done by segregationist
police force, but once they became aware that it was the FBI, they had
these meetings that--and once Dr.--J. Edgar Hoover called him the
most notorious liar in the country and so forth--they had staff
meetings, `What are our vulnerabilities here?' And Dr. King said,
`It's not money.' In fact, he die--when he died, he was only worth
about $20,000 and died intestate. He--he never had much money. He
gave away what he made. He raised an enormous amount of money but
gave it away, and he said, `It's not communism. I take people for
what they are. I'm far too spirits--spiritual to be a Communist
leader. I reject communism. But I am vulnerable'--there may be a few
things on women. So of the trilogy, he admitted to his--and, of
course, some of his staff actually knew this very well--but he
admitted to Harry Wachtel, for example, it was very painful for him to
admit to some of the aides that were not privy to his private life
that he was vulnerable on this. So of the trilogy, he admitted only
that he was vulnerable to blackmail, which is what it was, on the
issue of having extramarital affairs.

LAMB: But if you add up the--the women problems of Elijah Muhammad
and John Kennedy and--I don't need to go through the whole list--it
comes that--y--I mean, there's a lot of it in your book.

Mr. BRANCH: There's an awful lot of it.

LAMB: I mean, how--what impact did--did relations with women have on
this whole movement during these periods?

Mr. BRANCH: Well, it--it never became a public issue. In fact,
Mar--Mart--Malcolm X became fr--he saw publicity about Elijah
Muhammad's illegitimate children as his hope of salvation, that it
would puncture respect among the zealots who followed Elijah Muhammad
and--to the point of willing to kill for him, but he couldn't ever get
it publicized, partly because people were afraid of the Muslims and
partly because they were afraid of la--libel suit. So it was a
private poison and l--and it was used mostly for blackmail behind the
scenes. It never became public issue. You know, Hoover
would--Hoover's agents offered the material from the King buggings all
around--all over the place, but only under the condition that the FBI
could never be identified as the source.

And in that day and age, nobody wanted to take that leap into people's
private lives without be--you know, saying, `Well, I've just learned
it,' or, `a birdie told me,' they had to have a source. Nowadays
maybe we'd figure out a way to get around that, but in those days, it
meant that the political maneuvering around the--these sex issues was
confined to propaganda--you know, J. Edgar Hoover would send his
agents to a--a university, `We hear you're thinking of giving
doctor--an honorary doctorate to Dr. King. Let us whisper in your
ear.' And they'd spike that and send them to the Vatican, to the pope,
`Don't see Martin Luther King.' So it was a--a--a private kind of
a--send them to the Hill--trying to--reputations behind the scenes.

LAMB: What was the story and at what point was it that Martin Luther
King wanted to come meet with Lyndon Johnson when he was president and
they went through this whole song and dance with Vice President
Humphrey? What was that all about?

Mr. BRANCH: That was--that was about the Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party. In the s--in the f--in the summer of 1964, there
was a challenge delegation out of Mississippi that was mostly black,
essentially saying, `They don't allow us to vote. We want to vote.'
And the Democratic Party in Mississippi is endorsing the Republican
candidate anyway. They're not loyal Democrats. `We want to be
seated.' And President Johnson--i--it--it's an amazing story, and it's
been argued it was the turning point in the movement, whether or not
you seat the b--Fanny Lou Hamer and the sharecroppers, who were black,
as the official Democrats o--of Mississippi, or whether you seat the
r--the regular Democrats headed by the governor, who were voting for
Barry Goldwater. And Johnson--it was a terrible--he's kind of like
Lincoln in a way--`Are you for slavery or are you not?' because he's
trying to keep the border states in line. He was terrified that if he
seated the black delegation that the white Democrats from Kentucky and
Tennessee and the other border states would walk out, and that's
w--that's what that--he was pretending that he didn't have anything to
do with it, but he was consumed by no other issue, and putting that
together is an amazing story--or chapter, I think, in our American
history, about the sensitivity of this issue at this time.

LAMB: But when he came up to the White House, he didn't have a
meeting scheduled with Lyndon Johnson and he was supposed to meet with
Hubert Humphrey.

Mr. BRANCH: Right.

LAMB: Wh--and what was all that--the--there was a lot of maneuvering
around.

Mr. BRANCH: Oh, well, I'm sorry, Brian. You're talking about--this
is--this is at Selma. This is--this is at Selma in February 1965.
Dr. King came out of jail in Selma and announced in depression--he
came out of jail and his aides said in S--`You can't just come out of
jail. You have to have a purpose for coming out of jail.' And he
said, `I'm tired. I'm depressed. I've been in jail.' He won the
Nobel Prize and he's still in jail in Selma on the right to vote. And
the aides simply told Dr. King, `You've gotta say you had a purpose.
Let's say that you're coming out of jail to meet with the president.'
And that infuriated Lyndon Johnson, 'cause he said, `Nobody invites
themself here in the middle of a controversy. I'm trying to run the
country.' And so they--but on the other hand, he didn't want to say,
`I won't meet with Martin Luther King, partly because he shared the
goal of getting a voting rights bill. So what they worked out was
kind of an ego salve, where they said that Dr. King was officially
coming up to meet only with the vice president, but they planned to
have the president spontaneously call over there and say, `Since
you're here, why don't you come over and talk to me?'

So it was a way of dancing around the--the egos and the political
sensitivities on the race issue in this period.

LAMB: You also told the story about Richard Russell and Lyndon
Johnson and the Warren Commission.

Mr. BRANCH: And the Warren--there were lots of those. No, I have a
phot--the first photograph there is of the--President Johnson with his
nose about this far away from Richard Russell, right after he becomes
president, telling him, `I'--you know, `I love you, Dick Russell.'
I--I don't know the exact quote. `But you're like a father to me, but
I want to give you warning, I'm going to pass this civil rights bill.
You're my dearest friend, but I will run you down if I have to do it,
and I just wanted to let you know that in advance.'

Then he also tricked him into going on the Warren Commission within
just a few days of that because Russell did not--as the premiere
Southerner, did not want to sit on a Warren--on a commission headed by
Earl Warren, who was the architect of the Brown decision outlawing
segregation in the South. And Johnson just would not take no for an
answer; kinda tricked him, maneuvered him on there, and then basically
said, you know, `You're m--you're my mama, you're my daddy, you're
everything else. I--you're darn well gonna go on that commission
'cause I'm gonna make you,' and just pleaded and cajoled and told him
that he was gonna be on there.

LAMB: The suicide package--what was it?

Mr. BRANCH: It was--it was a sample of the intercepted buggings of
Dr. King's private life, together with an extremely hostile,
anonymous note saying, `You are a fraud and we--you are evil and we
will expose you before the world if you don't take a certain act
b--within 35 days, in oth--in other words, before--essentially, before
he w--accepted the Nobel Prize. And it was meant to be that Dr. King
was to kill himself. And it became known as the suicide package
because it was warning him that he was under threat of--of exposure,
and th--th--that's when they really did figure out it was the FBI,
because they could tell that the tapes, which were garbled, but you
could hear--you could hear what was going on, were in different
cities. So they knew that no police agency would have access to a
whole bunch of different cities. They knew it was the FBI and that it
was essentially your own government telling you to commit suicide,
which is...

LAMB: Were the FBI--was the FBI racist?

Mr. BRANCH: Absolutely. Absolutely. In the--in the higher
political regions. I--see, I think there's a very sp--I have some FBI
characters in here who are heroes, but most peop...

LAMB: Like?--give me a s...

Mr. BRANCH: Like Joe Sullivan, the man who solved several of the
cases i--down in St. Augustine, Florida, which is one of the unsung
stories of this period. And then he went over to Mississippi. He was
the model for Inspector Erskine on the long-running FBI series. He
was a no-nonsense cop. And like most FBI agents, they don't go in
there with an ambition to do political work, which means listening to
earphones and planning propaganda and going around pl--prying into
people's private lives. They go in to solve cases.

So you have a--a--a delicious or a painful conflict running in this
era. You have the most spectacular political misuses of the FBI going
on at the same time the FBI is trying to solve new kinds of crime and
confronting the Klan down in the South at a time when they were
almost, a--at will, committing these crimes all through this '63-'65
period. So in the same institution, you have people who are becoming
new kinds of heroes and old kind of corruptions inside the FBI.

LAMB: Tell us more--or give us a kind of a profile on Martin Luther
King. How tall was he? How old was he during this period? Was he
married? Did he have children? Where did he go to school? All those
kind of things.

Mr. BRANCH: He's young. He was killed at 39. He never reached his
40th birthday. So in this period, '63 to '65, he's 34 to 36 years
old, a very, very young man, boyish-looking, well-educated, had
hi--his wife, Coretta, and four children, the youngest--who were quite
young--the youngest born in '63, born in Birmingham. So Dexter, the
youngest, is just an infant during this period. This is a period when
Dr. King is most political, in the sense that in the earlier period,
in parting the waters, he's getting drawn into other people's movement
because he's an orator, and he would go help out. The bus boycott
wasn't his idea. The Freedom Rides and the sit-ins certainly weren't
his idea. He would get called into these meetings, but by 1963, where
we start here, he's f--frightened that the South is hardened against
segregation and that the m--the zeitgeist, the moment in history might
fade without implanting something in history that'll resist that
r--recession, that retrograde trend. And he takes huge risks. He
says, `I'm gonna have my own movement. I'm gonna risk everything,'
first, in Birmingham, to try to crack segregation, and then later in
Selma, where we end in '65, after the long year of '64, where he's
lobbying and submitting to jail in St. Augustine to try to keep
pressure on, to pass the '64 Civil Rights Act.

Then he goes straight from there to Selma to take another huge risk
for the right to vote, which is a different--so here you see not just
the spiritual or prophetic side of King as a spokesman for--this is a
test of American values--but a very pol--consciously political King,
trying to maneuver with the--the president and maneuver between the
parties, use the media, use the press, and--and deal with a divided
movement, his rivals and a--and allies, like Roy Wilkins with the
NAACP and elsewhere. So this is--this is King at the zenith of the
movement's political impact on America, when the race issue really has
the country--you know, s--the country's full attention.

LAMB: How bad was his womanizing?

Mr. BRANCH: Y--I don't know for 100 percent sure. He had a number
of long-term affairs, people very, very loyal to him, who--o--over a
period of years, on the road. And--and I know...

LAMB: During this time period?

Mr. BRANCH: During this time period.

LAMB: Do the names come into this...

Mr. BRANCH: Not here. It b--it gets more personal later on and I'm
still--I've talked to a number of those people and, of course, my main
question is how did he reconcile this with his career? He wr--he
wrestled with it. He preached about it in general, that--that--that
evil is something very close to you and you can't overcome it by
trying to stamp it out, by trying to repress it. You overcome it by
dedicating it--yourself to something higher. He al--was constantly
using the analogy of Ulysses and--and the sirens on Cilla and
Caribdus, that it didn't work to stuff wax in your ears to try to
repress evil; you had to sing a sweeter music and then you could
go--so there was a part of him that was always reproaching himself for
being able to give up women, on--especially once he knew that--that it
could hurt the movement, that blackmail could really severely damage
people who really believed in him, that would be disillusioned. And
in many respects, hi--his s--sermons sound like he's almost punishing
himself to do penance by taking greater risks.

So I think--I have never tried to argue that there's no relationship
between one's private life and one's public life, but I think it's
really--it's very, very complicated exactly what that relationsh--ship
is, and in many respects, there are a lot of signs that he used his
private failings and regarded them as such to drive his public
mission.

LAMB: How did he get a Nobel Peace Prize?

Mr. BRANCH: He got a Nobel preace--Peace Prize in 1964, largely on
the strength of world recognition for the huge breakthrough in
Birmingham that spread the demonstrations across the country,
on--after the children, the--the--what changed me--and got the civil
rights bill introduced by President Kennedy. Then he had the `I have
a dream speech' and had the political skill working with President
Johnson to get it passed in '64, and the Nobel Prize was essentially
in recognition for that--that series of events that really changed
American politics forever, as for what the legal standard was gonna be
for equal citizenship in America.

LAMB: What happened on the trip to get it?

Mr. BRANCH: Oh, more bugs, more--lots of misbehavior, this time not
m--by Dr. King because he--Coretta was with him, if for no other
reason, but there was just a lot of ego jockeying and wild partying
and chasing women around through rooms that made for much merriment
inside the FBI.

LAMB: Wa--was--was the public aware of it then?

Mr. BRANCH: No, the public was never aware of it.

LAMB: Are you the first one to write about this?

Mr. BRANCH: No, other people have written about various parts of it.
I am the first person, I think, to write about the--I think,
the--the--the--the distressing personal con--ego conflict with Ralph
Abernathy to the d--the degree that it was. And Andy Young told me
that he--that he thought that the estrangement with Abernathy over
money aft--he wanted half the money from the Nobel Peace Prize, `if
we're partners,' and all this, and it really kind of choked
hi--hi--the--the relationship he--Andy said that he thought that this
was more painful to Dr. King than anything J. Edgar Hoover might do
to him. So there's a lot of internal cost to this thing; somebody
running a l--a lonely movement, coming up out of a time when--when
black people themselves considered themselves damaged. Their humor
was a lot of jokes at the expense of other preachers. There was a lot
of damaged psyche in here and they would recognize that, and yet
they'd still have to try to take responsibility for being leaders to
America about what America's own values were. It was a very complex
period.

LAMB: There's a picture in the book of that entire group that went
over there...

Mr. BRANCH: Yes.

LAMB: ...to Norway.

Mr. BRANCH: You'll see Harry Wachtel and his wife at the back and
the rest of the--I mean, I--I--a lot of them are there that are
familiar faces.

LAMB: And then when they came back after that event over there, there
was a dinner that they tried to get together in Atlanta. What
happened?

Mr. BRANCH: Very controversial in Atlanta, because Atlanta's got its
first Nobel Prize-winner, but it's still, if not completely
segregated, largely segregated, and the--the business communities and
the--and the political communities didn't have much to do with one
another. And--and the mayor of Atlanta and Ralph McGill, the
publisher of the Atlanta Constitution, wanted to have a dinner
honoring--and some religious figures, the r--the--the rabbi and the
archbishop wanted to have a dinner honoring Dr. King. But official
Atlanta, what I grew up in--I sa--y--once wrote that Atlanta's the
only place where the leadership figures were--called themselves openly
`the power structure'--they had a hard time embracing this, and there
was tremendous conflict 'cause a lot of people didn't want to honor
him, Nobel Prize or not, because he was black. And it finally erupted
into publicity in The New York Times and shamed Atlanta into having
this dinner, right when Dr. King is going to Selma. He comes back
from the Nobel Prize saying, `This is a great--the highest
international award for peace, but I've got to go to Selma,' and
within--`I've got to go back to the valley.'

There was a tremendous drive from Dr. King to go downward and, of
course, that's--you know, not to rest on his laurels. And I think, to
some degree, that was the guilt that he had. And lots of people
wanted him to go to honorary dinners and bask in the Nobel Prize and
never do anything else. But within three weeks, he said, `I've got to
go back to the valley.' He's in jail in Selma, and he went back down
to seek the right to vote. So this--this strong drive in him really
dominates the latter part of his life, where I'm going for here--from
here in the third volume, which ultimately ends up, of course, you
know, he was assassinated in the campaign among g--garbage workers in
Memphis.

LAMB: In the end, by the way, how did Malcolm X die? What was the
scene?

Mr. BRANCH: Malcolm X died simultaneously with the dropping out of
Bob Moses. In February '65, the beginning of the American ground
troops in Vietnam and this Selma breakthrough, Malcolm X is shot down
by members of Elijah Muhammad's temple in Newark. It's an
embarrassment to me and the American legal system that two men who had
absolutely nothing to do with it served over 20 years. They were
convicted elsewhere. Only one of the actual killers served time; four
never--they've been identified but never tried, and two people who
were pretty clearly not there and I think the legal system knew were
not there were served--were convicted and served time anyway.

LAMB: How'd all that happen?

Mr. BRANCH: It's hard to reconc--to--to call back up how marginal
the Muslims were in this period. They were, like, unspeakable,
almost, and I think basically, the legal system just wanted to get
somebody in jail and be done with it. And then, when evidence
surfaced that these people didn't have anything to do with it, nobody
wanted to reopen the whole can of worms. There was all this
surveillance evidence. There was evidence that--that the police and
the FBI knew Malcolm was being tracked and tried to be killed, and
they didn't want any of that to come out. So, basically, they didn't
want to open it up at all.

LAMB: What's new in the book that's never been written before--what
areas?

Mr. BRANCH: I think most of the stuff about Malcolm's three
years--last three years--is new. That's why there's more of that in
the book than I thought. That, plus the fact that I think Malcolm's
later--Islam in America is now very large, and it comes out of
Malcolm's reform and it's occurred i--while most of us are preoccupied
with Louis Farrakhan, who represents about 1 out of every 200
African-American Muslims in this country. Most of them are
ma--are--are legitimate Muslims, Sunni Muslims. So that--all of
Malcolm's X last three years are not really covered in the
autobiography. The ins and outs of what he's really trying to do,
trying to stay alive--what the FBI knew, what Louis Farrakhan knew,
the--the plots against him.

LAMB: How old was he when he was killed?

Mr. BRANCH: He was killed at 39, just like Dr. King. They were
both killed at 39. Neither one of 'em lived to reach their 40th
birthday.

LAMB: How many copies of his autobiography sold?

Mr. BRANCH: Oh, it's been translated into 20 languages. I think 15
million. I mean, his autobiography really created Malcolm X. W--I
put him in here because o--o--o--of--he's an extraordinary figure and
he had cultural impact, but he didn't have that much historic impact.
First of all, he's a fugitive. He's out of the country for a lot of
this period. We read a lot backwards into it that's not--he was not
that big a figure. Lyndon Johnson couldn't even pronounce his name,
called him `Muslim X'; didn't know who he was. The autobiography that
came out nine months after he was killed, toward the end of 1965,
really raised his profile dramatically. And then the next year, when
black power was pronounced and he was--as a new doctrine--and he was
kind of adoptin--adopted as the patron saint of black power, h--he
became more significant in death than he was in life as a political
influence.

LAMB: How old are you now?

Mr. BRANCH: I'm 51.

LAMB: When is the next book due out? This is 1998.

Mr. BRANCH: Well, I hesitate to make predictions, because so many of
them have been wrong, but I--I don't think this one will take nine
years. I think it'll take three or four more years to get the--the
third volume of the trilogy, which is called, "At Canaan's Edge." It
kinda completes my three titles based out of the book of Exodus,"
Parting the Waters," this one, "Pillar Of Fire" and then "At Canaan's
Edge," ba--you know, evoking Moses, trying to g--getting up to look
over into Canaan, but he's not allowed to go. The--kind of like--in
that period, American history got to look over into a--a--a new land
of freedom and was lifted up, I think, but you never quite get there.

LAMB: What--in all this time that you've been doing this, what has
been your biggest reward, besides the sale of the book?

Mr. BRANCH: The c--the--meeting the people and the continuing
exposure to people who stretch themselves and are rewarded by
what--finding that this kind of freedom movement across these lines is
really the--at the bottom of what our--all people are created equal
and a lot of our religious doctrines, and just the continuing n--the
endless mining of treasured people and ideas and new subjects, like
Rabbi Heschel, you know, in this--who's in this volume. I never would
have known that Dr. King would have such a close association with a
Hassidic Orthodox rabbi from--from--from Warsaw, and--and yet, to
track it, I then have to try to know more about Heschel, who I think
is one of the great figures of the 20th century in his own right, and
then more about Judaism, so you're hurled backwards. It's just a
continuing, to me--and the same on Malcolm X--a continuing opening of
new doors of education from the--from the freedom movement period.

LAMB: In the end, w--who's your favorite civil rights leader?

Mr. BRANCH: Dr. King.

LAMB: And w--what do you think of him?

Mr. BRANCH: I admire him more now than I did when I started, and
what I started with is--and I knew he was part of this movement that
had affected me and I kind of admired him, but I thought maybe he was
just a Baptist preacher who got carried away with turning the other
cheek.

LAMB: Who disappoints you after you get to know them more?

Mr. BRANCH: In this story? Most of us--people in Congress, Barry
Goldwater's Republican Party, which turned from the party of Lincoln
into the party of the white South on a dime in one year, in 1964. And
I hope that that doesn't stay, 'cause I know all kind of Republicans
who'd like to get the party of Lincoln back; Southern sheriffs and
politicians.

LAMB: J.B. Stoner?

Mr. BRANCH: Oh, gosh, J.B. Stoner. Yes. Well, if you're talking
about somebody--somebody who makes religion into an instrument of
hatred like J.B. Stoner, there are plenty of those.
I--I--that--they're up near the top of the list.

LAMB: Here is the book, second in a three-volume series by Taylor
Branch, this one called "Pillar Of Fire: America in the King Years
1963-1965." We thank you.

Mr. BRANCH: Thank you, Brian.

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Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65