Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 30, 1993 TAG: 9301300013
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
IN INTERVIEWS, MARSHALL HAD HARSH WORDS FOR SOME
Thurgood Marshall called Robert Kennedy "a cold calculating character" and said Martin Luther King was a great leader but "wasn't worth diddly squat" as an organizer, according to taped interviews.The interviews, released after his death this week, are filled with colorful anecdotes, including encounters with Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Malcolm X.
Marshall also recalls melancholy telephone conversations with Lyndon Johnson after Johnson left the White House.
Transcripts of the four tapes, recorded in 1977 by Columbia University's Oral History Project, were released after the former Supreme Court justice died Sunday at age 84.
While he speaks fondly of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice, says King had good and bad points.
"I thought he was great as a leader," Marshall said. "As an organizer, he wasn't worth diddly squat. But very few leaders are."
Marshall displayed bitterness at King's apparent willingness to delegate his legal battles to the NAACP. Marshall served for more than 20 years as director-counsel of the NAACP legal defense and educational fund.
"With Martin Luther King's group, all he did was to dump all his legal work on us, including the bills," Marshall said. "And that was all right with him. So long as he didn't have to pay the bills."
It is unclear what Marshall thought of Malcolm X and the Black Muslims. While calling Muslims "the nicest, sweetest, most decent people you will ever run across," he later says: "I wouldn't agree with anything a Muslim ever said, any time, any place."
He also spoke about his conversations with Malcolm X: "In the end, he kept wanting to talk to me, and I kept telling him to go to hell."
Marshall called the late President Kennedy "a very sweet man," but said of Robert Kennedy: "Bobby was like his father. He was a cold calculating character. `What's in it for me?' I mean, not like his brother. He had no warm feelings. None at all."
Marshall said Robert Kennedy once offered him only a District Court job when Marshall wanted to be on the U.S. Court of Appeals.
"I told Bobby Kennedy that I was not district judge material, because my fuse was too short. I lose my temper. And that wasn't good."
" `You don't seem to understand it's this or nothing,' " Marshall says Kennedy told him. "I said, `Well I do understand. The trouble is that you are different from me. You don't know what it means, but all I've had in my life is nothing. It's not new to me, so, goodbye.' "
Marshall got a seat on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Marshall praised former President Lyndon Johnson, who once told him: "I am going to make Abraham Lincoln look like a piker."
"I think if he'd been re-elected, he'd have been still alive today," Marshall said four years after Johnson's death. "He died of a broken heart. What a lovely guy."
Marshall said that Johnson, sometimes in a funk, called him occasionally after leaving the presidency in 1969.
"He would call me for the express purpose of getting out of it. He would say, `No moaning at the bar' or something like that. And then he'd say, `OK now, go have a drink.' I'd say, `providing you do.' "
One of his angriest encounters was with Gen. Douglas MacArthur in 1950 in Korea, where Marshall was representing some black soldiers who had been arrested.
"I questioned him about the continuation of segregation in the Army, and he said he was working on it. And I asked him how many years he'd been working on it. And he said he didn't really remember how many.
"He said that he didn't find the Negroes qualified, and when he found them qualified, they would be integrated. Well, we didn't part that friendly."
Absent from the transcripts are Marshall's thoughts about the Supreme Court, where he served from 1967 to his retirement in 1991.