Patriouts And Spies, From King To Snowden
BY AMY DAVIDSON
Taylor Branch, in the last pages of “At Canaan’s Edge,” the third volume of his trilogy on Martin Luther King, Jr., and his time, describes the frantic search for King’s killer in the days after his death. Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation doggedly chased leads like laundry marks and half-seen cars, the memories of store clerks, a photograph from a bartending school. “A comprehensive review of the murder investigation showed FBI agents capable of disciplined public duty alongside a numbing array of extra-constitutional bugs, vendettas, and crimes,” Branch writes. That array included an attempt to blackmail King into committing suicide with the threat of revealing his infidelities, and did not end with his death or the capture of his assassin, James Earl Ray; in some ways, it’s not yet over.
The public-mindedness of the agents who pursued Ray alongside the abuses of the agency they worked for is not so much a contradiction or a redemption as an expression of complexity—one that comes to mind when thinking about President Obama’s speech on Friday about the National Security Agency. King had an appearance there: “I have often reminded myself I would not be where I am today were it not for the courage of dissidents like Dr. King, who were spied upon by their own government,” Obama said. “And, as President, a President who looks at intelligence every morning, I also can’t help but be reminded that America must be vigilant in the face of threats.”
Those reminders are a starting point. But it’s too easy to stop just a little beyond it. King is so revered in our time that it’s easy to put the spying on him and his colleagues in the box of mistakes so extreme that they are barely worth talking about: the N.S.A.’s practices may put one on edge, the argument goes, but it’s not like people in the agency are sitting there trying to get a great man to shoot himself. We all know that King was a patriot, and that J. Edgar Hoover was a monster. And yet, half a century ago, a lot of people regarded as respectable would have switched the labels. (We also, as Margaret Talbot noted last week, owe our insight into Hoover to people who broke the law to get that information out.)
The more challenging question is what claims about patriotism do and don’t vindicate. Obama opened his speech by talking about how “a small secret surveillance committee born out of the Sons of Liberty” spied on the British to protect “America’s early patriots”—Obama didn’t mention that their actual British government regarded them as traitors: the point was that patriots spy. And they can, and they do, within the laws that are supposed to limit them. The speech was brought about by a man Obama has said in the past he didn’t think “was a patriot”; on Friday, he said, “I’m not going to dwell on Mr. Snowden’s actions or his motivations,” though he added that the nation’s safety depends on the “fidelity” of those who know its secrets, and that the “sensational” quality of Snowden’s revelations wasn’t helpful. The motivations he wanted to talk about were those of the people working at the N.S.A. They were not, he said, “cavalier about the civil liberties of their fellow citizens.”
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