Ben Kamin, Dangerous Friendship: Stanley Levison, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Kennedy Brothers, Michigan State University Press, © 2014, ISBN 978-1-61186-131-0, 256 pages including bibliography, notes and index.
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO—Martin Luther King Jr. had as a trusted aide a millionaire friend, who was an attorney and a successful real estate investor as well as a disillusioned one-time follower of the American Communist party. Stanley Levison also was Jewish, and his contribution to the American civil rights movement would be better known today but for the facts that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover considered him a dangerous radical, President John Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, were afraid of Hoover revealing something adverse to JFK’s reelection campaign, and Martin Luther King needed the help of the Kennedys to make progress in the national struggle for racial equality.
At a meeting at the White House, King was told by the Kennedys to separate himself from Levison, that Levison’s associations were an albatross that would bring King down and cause irreparable harm to everything he wanted to accomplish. Levison, an idealist who could be amazingly pragmatic, volunteered for exile, but there was still a problem: Martin Luther King needed him, really needed him. Levison knew how to raise funds, knew how to deal with the media, and understood high-stakes politics. He was, in author Kamin’s estimate, the best white friend and advisor that King had. So walking away from Levison, completely walking away, was no simple matter. Had it not been for Levison’s devoted labor in his behalf, King might never have become the revered national icon whose name is equated today with justice and moral authority.
So, while eschewing personal meetings with Levison, King continued to communicate with him through various third parties, including the singer Harry Belafonte and attorney Clarence Jones. The problem for King and Levison was that Levison was being wire-tapped by the FBI, whose agents wrote down every conversation he had, all in a fruitless attempt to fulfill Hoover’s desire to prove once and for all that Levison was a Communist traitor.
While wiretaps never were successful in discrediting Levison, they did help to besmirch’s King’s reputation, revealing him to be a sexual philanderer. Such information could not have much bothered the Kennedy family, which never was known for marital fidelity, but the public stink this and other kinds of information Hoover had gathered from various wiretaps—perhaps even about the Kennedys themselves—could be terribly embarrassing, perhaps ruinous, to Jack Kennedy’s image as the charismatic, straightforward leader from a new generation. If Hoover ever leaked everything he knew, the sparkle could have been removed from Kennedy’s “New Frontier.”
Rabbi Kamin delved into FBI transcripts, interviewed various Civil Rights leaders, and friends and family members of Levison. Of local San Diego interest, among his sources was former Congressman and Mayor Bob Filner, who, while Kamin still was writing the book, was forced by allegations of sexual misconduct to resign the latter office. Filner’s father, Joseph, was another wealthy, former Communist sympathizer who, like Levison, saw in the paranoiac actions of Joseph Stalin, and in the crushing of the Hungarian revolt by his successor Nikita Khrushchev, that the Soviet Union was just another totalitarian regime.
Through this book and others that have preceded it, Rabbi Kamin has become a nationally known scholar of the civil rights movement, and this book adds to the canon of knowledge about this remarkable period in American history.
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Donald H. Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World, which seeks sponsorships to be placed, as this notice is, just below articles that appear on our site. To inquire, call him at (619) 265-0808 or contact him via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com