The Secrets of the Hopewell Box: Stolen Elections, Southern Politics, and a City's Coming of Age

Part Seven: Camelot

Pa r t S e v e n Camelot Pa r t S e v e n Camelot 200 The Webster’s New World Dictionary I bought while a part-time, nineteen-year-old college freshman in 1962 defined “Camelot” as “any time or place idealized as having excitement, purpose and a high level of culture . . . as in the town of Arthurian legend where the king had his court.” Soon that definition would include the administration of President John F. Kennedy, with whom the country was having a breathless romance. To the bug-eyed, wet-behind-the-ears reporters who spent the Kennedy years at the Nashville Tennessean, nothing could have been more like Camelot than our own The Secrets of the Hopewell Box 201 newsroom—except for the part about “the high level of culture.” The newsroom itself was a pigsty of scarred old metal desks strewn with paper and clusters of half-filled coffee cups floating cigarette butts and other indistinguishable lumps, sitting around on the desks like so many putrid little ponds. Here and there a big green trash can overflowed with snarls of old typewriter ribbon and wadded copy paper. One back corner had become a junkyard of maimed and invalid chairs; in another, the huge world map on the wall was so close to the back row of desks that its equator was clearly denoted by fist-sized black smudges from the hair grease of reporters who’d leaned against it. The air in the place was so heavy it formed a low ceiling and so stale you could bleed from breathing. But the room’s spirit was pristine and our vision crystal clear. The country was reaching for the moon then, and so was the newspaper’s new editor, John Seigenthaler, home from Washington in his button-down Harvard shirts and pinstriped suits. He was our King Arthur, and we were his knights in polyester pants, five-dollar neckties, and a couple of J.C. Penney sport coats we shared. “I’m taking the coat” was an often-heard announcement indicating that one of us had an out-of-office assignment. Of the reporters, only my granddaddy’s friend and my benefactor, Wayne Whitt, who had been around since Jake Sheridan and was also a stringer for Time magazine, could afford more than one suit. A few of the reporters were pedigreed Vanderbilt University students, but as a group we were—with the James D. Squires 202 exception of the erudite Halberstam, who had just gone back east—a band of peasants, largely incapable of distinguishing a high level of culture even if one was encountered. Excitement and purpose on the other hand were ours in abundance. My job was still brand-new when the Second Ward scandal broke. My first few days of work had been spent retrieving clippings from the newspaper’s morgue, which I had ascribed to some morbid connection with having grown up around Phillips-Robinson. Then it got even more gruesome. Without warning, I was ordered to accompany a team of reporters into Little Evil’s South Nashville neighborhood in search of bogus voters. “You’re the morgue man, right? Well, I have just the job for a man of your obvious qualifications, heh, heh,” laughed Nathan Caldwell, a shaggy old tree of a man who was the newspaper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and the main writer on the story. “Unless of course you’re afraid of the dead, heh, heh.” He handed me a flashlight. My stated mission was to check the gravestones in a shabby Second Ward cemetery for the names of the two dead men believed to have voted by absentee ballot in the congressional primary. But in truth, another husky youth named Jerry Thompson, the weekend police reporter, and I had been sent along for no other reason than to swell the ranks of the Vandy students with two big local kids who’d had a street fight or two. It was a good idea. We hadn’t been in South Nashville long when a car stopped beside us and disgorged four of the toughest-looking men any of us had ever seen. The Secrets of the Hopewell Box 203 Assuming the worst, a nervous photographer among us was going for his gun when I recognized the leader of...