At What Cost Victory?
ROBERTS, STEVEN V.
At What Cost Victory?_ Terror in the Night: The Klan's Campaign Against the Jews By Jack Nelson Simon & Schuster. 287 pp. $22.00. Reviewed by Steven V. Roberts Senior writer, "U.S. News and...
...In May 1968, the synagogue in Meridian exploded...
...They chose the money, and immediately started encouraging Bowers and Tarrants to strike again...
...On one level Terror in the Night is a crackling good story, told by a reporter who covered the grisly events 25 years ago and has been haunted by them ever since...
...Two months later, Nussbaum's residence was the target...
...What the pair did not know was that the bombing run was a setup planned by the FBI, aided by Klan informants, and financed by the Jewish community of Mississippi...
...Out of the terror would emerge a new and unlikely alliance: the FBI and the Jews...
...No matter how hard they tried, though, the Jews of Jackson could not hide from the gathering turmoil...
...Paying the Roberts brothers to entice and encourage the bombing of Davidson's house amounted to entrapment, he believed, and came perilously close to murder...
...In that book he absolves the FBI of entrapment, saying that Meyer Davidson had always been a high-priority target of the Klan...
...Convinced that the local police and political establishments were bristling with Klan sympathizers, the Jews could not seek protection or redress through normal channels...
...Governor John Bell Williams condemned the attacks against the Jews, even though he had remained silent during the widespread burnings and bombings of black churches...
...Gradually, Nelson pieced together many of the details and came to the sobering conclusion that the incident "raised serious questions about the abuse of police powers...
...One feels a bit queasy about the way the Roberts boys were induced to cooperate with the law through the payment of blood money and the threat of force...
...On the other hand, there are few pleasant or civilized methods available for infiltrating and undermining terrorist cells...
...So a deal was forged: The Jewish community would secretly raise funds that would enable the FBI to bribe Klansmen for information...
...Botnick of the Anti-Defamation League, a key confederate of the anti-Klan plotters: "We were dealing with animals and I would do it again...
...One senses that Nelson has now revised his harsh judgments of the FBI and the Jews of Mississippi...
...When Nelson published a lengthy article in the Los Angeles Times outlining these allegations, Hoover became infuriated...
...their isolation, their fear, [their] desperate resolve" to protect themselves and their families...
...Eventually, with their aid, Tarrants left prison, went to college, became a minister, and wrote a book called The Conversion of a Klans-man...
...The Jews, for their part, were convinced that local politicians and law enforcement agencies would not, or could not, stand up to the Klan...
...In the ensuing shootout, Ainsworth was killed and Tarrants gravely wounded...
...Their mission: to blow up the home of Meyer Davidson, a prominent Jewish businessman...
...Bowers had overreached, however...
...News and World Report" On the night of June 29, 1968, a dark green Buick Electra pulled up near a huge oak tree in a quiet residential neighborhood of Meridian, Mississippi...
...They agreed, and the FBI began to engineer the setup...
...The shootout effectively broke the Klan's back and ended its reign of terror...
...Once Davidson was picked as the target, the trap was set and the plan was clear...
...The shootout effectively ended the terrorist career of Sam Bowers...
...When he recovered, he was tried, convicted and sentenced to 30 years in the state penitentiary at Parchman...
...Caught in the middle was the small, deeply-rooted community of Mississippi Jews—about 140 families lived in Jackson, the state capital—who had long before chosen assimilation into "the Southern way of life...
...Five months after the shootout he got a call from a Protestant minister, Ken Dean, who tipped him off...
...Nelson, summarizing the thinking of Sam Bowers, head of the White Knights and a key figure in the Philadelphia murders, observes that, "It was not the blacks who threatened all he held dear but the Jews who were manipulating them...
...Rabbi Perry Nussbaum of Jackson, a Canadian native, defied the fears of his congregants and helped organize the rebuilding of black churches firebombed across the state...
...The FBI," he insists, "did not lure us into doing something we had no intention of doing...
...First they worked on getting two brothers, Raymond and Alton Wayne Roberts, notoriously violent but dim-witted Klansmen with close ties to Bowers, to serve as informants...
...One finishes Terror in the Night with a rush of difficult questions...
...In Washington Senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi, who shared Williams' silence when it came to Klan violence against blacks, pressured FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover to step up investigations of the Jewish cases...
...Should law enforcement agencies be allowed to bend the law in order to defend the law...
...So do embattled minority groups, like the Jews of Mississippi...
...Dozens of heavily armed agents and local police officers lay hidden at the Davidson residence...
...They saw the FBI, Al Binder told Nelson, as their "only reliable allies...
...The circumstances leading up to that shootout—and the fallout from it?form the core of this gripping narrative by Jack Nelson, now the Washington bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times and a colleague of mine on the PBS television show, Washington Week in Review...
...Some elements of the state power structure started to turn against the Klan's tactics, and for one reason: The Jews had clout in places that blacks didn't...
...In prison he underwent a religious conversion so deep and convincing that his former foes, from FBI agents to Jewish businessmen, decided to help him...
...On the contrary, says Tarrants, without the joint efforts of the Jews and the FBI, "there would have been 10 times as much violence by Right-wing radicals" in Mississippi...
...The story begins with the flowering of the civil rights movement in the early '60s and the collision of two potent social forces—the idealistic yet naive young Northerners who went south bent on rooting out racism, and the almost feudal power structure of Mississippi...
...As Tar-rants crept up the driveway, bomb in one hand and automatic pistol in the other, the trap was sprung...
...Six months after the new Temple Beth Israel was dedicated, it was shattered by a powerful bomb...
...Yet they did, in a sense, take the law into their own hands...
...The Jews were asked whether they would be willing to raise money to "purchase bodies and not testimony...
...The two people in the car, Thomas Tar-rants and Kathy Ainsworth, were members of a bitterly anti-Semitic, violence-prone wing of the Ku Klux Klan called the White Knights...
...When his congregation, Temple Beth Israel, dedicated a new building in March 1967, Nussbaum invited an ecumenical delegation to the ceremonies, including two black ministers...
...In 1967, Bowers joined forces with Tarrants, a tenacious, twisted young man possessing a talent for stealth and violence...
...Nelson did not know the full story at the time...
...Without endorsing the idea, Nelson seems to have developed a greater sympathy for the argument that if you cannot trust the legal system to act justly, at some point you have the right to act on your own...
...One of Jackson's most prominent Jewish lawyers, Al Binder, had actually helped prosecute civil rights protesters and promote the State Sovereignty Commission, established by the Governor to defend Mississippi's customs and reputation...
...A columnist in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, indignantly addressing the nightriders, wrote, "You've bombed churches before, but never one where white people worship...
...Bowers was infuriated by Nussbaum's actions and ordered a campaign of terror...
...Democratic societies, so open and vulnerable, have a right to defend themselves...
...Ultimately, the central question is one of the oldest of all moral dilemmas: Does the end justify the means...
...The bombers would not be taken alive...
...Three of the five Jewish leaders in charge of raising money for the sanctuary refused to attend the opening in protest...
...My only disappointment is that Nelson never really confronts these questions directly...
...At a dramatic meeting with law enforcement agents in a deserted house trailer deep in the Mississippi woods, the Roberts boys were given a stark choice: Take the money and help do in your comrades, or risk "having your ass shot off one night...
...Until he started researching this book 20 years later, the writer admits, he did not fully appreciate the mentality of the Jews in 1968...
...He initiated a smear campaign against the reporter and to his dying day carried a grudge against him...
...Indeed, to some racial fanatics it seemed that Jews were everywhere: raising money, representing the protesters, publicizing their cause...
...He quotes A.I...
...Can lawlessness always be combated through normal channels, or does terrorism demand special measures...
...He shared the Klan chief's hatred of Jews and compared himself to Arab terrorists "so committed to their cause that they believed their chosen ends justified any means...
...How far is too far...
...But the peaceful, prosperous life of these Jews was quickly unraveling...
...But Terror in the Night forces each of us to make our own judgments about the tangled and troubling issues it raises, and that is enough to justify this absorbing book...
...Many of the civil rights activists were Jewish, including Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner, two of the three youths brutally murdered by Klansmen in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in the summer of 1964...
...But the most compelling footnote to this story involves Thomas Tarrants, the young bomber who almost died in the Meridian shootout and was sent to jail...
...Following the Meridian bombing the pressure for decisive action increased...
...As FBI agent Frank Watts put it, "Once the Jews were attacked, it was a different ballgame...
...I think he remains ambivalent: understanding the value of what the Jews and the FBI did, yet still questioning their methods...
...Isn't that a bad precedent to set...
...On another level it is a complex morality play, raising some profound and disturbing questions about the nature of law and justice.The good guys won, but at what cost...
Vol. 76 • May 1993 • No. 7
