When Harlem Nearly Killed King (13 page)

By now Maynard had scrubbed and entered the surgical field. Naclerio and Cordice demonstrated to him what they had before them. With his gloved hand, Maynard grabbed the protruding unsterile gauze-covered blade of the letter opener, attempting to extricate it from King’s chest. But the gauze slipped off and the blade knicked Maynard’s glove. It was torn. So Maynard had to leave the surgical field to change gloves. While he did so, Naclerio, Cordice, and Maitland looked around at the adjacent tissues to ensure that nothing more was damaged than what they could already see. Maynard returned wearing new gloves. At that point Cordice took what was called a Kocher clamp—a sturdy surgical clamp with twin jaws—and placed it on the unsterile protruding section of the blade of the letter opener, which had been covered once more with gauze. Then he handed it to Maynard, telling him, “Look, if you’re going to pull on it, pull on it with this.”

Maynard appeared a bit flustered. He took the Kocher clamp off. Calmly, Cordice took a second clamp and placed it around the blade and invited Maynard to pull the blade out of King’s chest. Either Cordice or Naclerio could have easily done it. Maynard removed the clamp again. Cordice placed a third Kocher clamp around the blade. By now he and Naclerio had grown impatient with Maynard’s lack of recognition that they were trying their best to be respectful to the chairman of their department, whom they had waited for so patiently, this man who wasn’t as skilled at thoracic surgery as they were. After placing this third clamp around the blade, both Naclerio and Cordice said, “Go on, take it out.” Maynard began tugging on the blade. Finally, with a fair amount of effort it came out.

After this, Maynard walked outside to discuss the success of the operation with the governor and reporters, leaving Cordice, Maitland, and Naclerio to close King’s chest. It was determined that about six centimeters of the blade had invaded the superior mediastinal compartment covering the innominate artery, aorta and other blood vessels, and the vital organs. This meant that the mediastinal tissue was contaminated. But experience taught Cordice, Maitland and Naclerio that all they needed to do was allow the body to take care of correcting the contamination on its own. So they closed the chest properly. This fact would be a very important one in light of the false description of the operation given by Maynard. At the press conference held in the office of the superintendent of the hospital after the entire operation was over—with Maynard, Cordice, Naclerio, and Dr. Farrow Allen present (Allen had scrubbed but did not participate in the operation)—Maynard gave the clear impression that he had been in command of the entire operation from start to finish. He told the reporters that a portion of King’s second rib and part of his breastplate (sternum) had had to be removed. He said that the blade had cut a number of blood vessels, and that its location caused “considerable difficulty.”

Of course, most of this was a fabrication. But Cordice, Naclerio, Maitland, and Allen said nothing. A few days later Maynard gave a further fabrication of what had happened to a reporter for the
Amsterdam News
. He would tell James Hicks that rather than pulling out the blade, it had been “pushed up from below.” Several years later in a book he would write about his experience as a
Harlem Hospital surgeon, Maynard would similarly fabricate details. Contrary to what Maynard stated on the day of the operation and wrote later, no removal of any portion of any of King’s ribs took place. This wasn’t necessary. And no vital blood vessels had been severed. In providing his written description of the operation, Maynard would also claim that
he
left a “cluster of Penrose drains”—which constituted rubber tubes allowing drainage to the outside—in the area of the superior mediastinum of King’s chest. He would describe this procedure as an “on-the-spot innovative technique” that he came up with. He would claim that on the third postoperative day, he called in Dr. Robert Wylie, Chief of Thoracic Surgery at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, to examine the postoperative progress of King. And that upon examining King’s right chest, Wylie “seemed particularly impressed with my innovative prophylactic drainage of the superior mediastinum” (the alleged cluster of Pemrose drains). In fact, not only had Maynard left the patient to be closed by the other surgeons but to do what he described, leaving Pemrose drains in the chest, would have been the worst possible thing that could have been done because leaving such tubes there would have left the mediastinum open to contamination.

Maynard wrote other falsehoods about the operation. For instance, he would claim that a hammer and chisel were used to remove bits of the breastbone that the blade had penetrated, in order to loosen the area around the blade. And then, rather than pushing out the blade, as he allegedly told Hicks, he later wrote that the blade was grabbed and, using a seesaw motion, loosened
and extricated. Again, as described earlier, this was not done, just as his description to Hicks of how the blade was removed was false too. Using a hammer and chisel to chip away bits of the sternum would have been too dangerous. And to use a seesaw motion to remove the blade also would have been too dangerous, given the fact that the blade was so close to the aorta and the innominate artery. To try to remove it that way would have risked tearing the aorta or innominate artery, causing the massive hemorrhaging everyone feared.

Yet Maynard successfully fabricated not only his level of involvement in the operation on King, but the details of what took place. And accounts giving him a larger role in the operation than he deserves would become part of history. For years to come, even though so many colleagues hated him, out of respect for Maynard’s position as Chairman of the Department of Surgery, no one felt compelled to correct the record.

THIRTEEN
convalescence

THE FOLLOWING DAY
King’s wife, Coretta, as well as his mother, brother, and father arrived at the hospital. While the others flew in from Montgomery and Atlanta, Martin senior arrived from the Midwest, where church work had taken him. They were all joined later by Ralph Abernathy and others. When they reached the hospital, the staff told them they could sit beside King and visit two at a time. Now he had security in the form of two New York City police officers on either side of the door to his room. King lay in his bed, his right chest bandaged from the shoulder down. An oxygen tube entered his left nostril, taped to his face, the tape forming a wishbone from his forehead to the bottom of his eyes. Photos of Emil Naclerio checking on him at bedside would be splashed across newspapers around the world. They would become part of the stock photos
of the King oeuvre through the years, paged through whenever people considered his life in photo-essay collections.

Plenty of others would stop by his bedside. Governor Harriman returned. Ever worried about the Negro vote in the race against Rockefeller (given that the voting would take place in a little more than a month), doing his best to make the most out of a show of public concern, the governor posed for a public photo opportunity with Coretta, Abernathy, and M. L. King, Sr., and his wife.

Charles Felton would return to visit King too. He brought along another resident in the hospital named Bob Wilson, who had been a medical student at Boston University and roomed with King while King studied theology there. Periodically during King’s stay they’d go up and Wilson and King would reminisce about their days in Boston. King also gave a few media interviews. In one, a reporter from the
Amsterdam News
asked him the proverbial questions leaders like him were expected to answer about what Negroes must do next. Dutifully, referring to the hot-button issue of school integration, King replied, “Our next stop is to implement what the courts have written on the books. If we Negroes do not implement the court’s decision, [that decision] will prove meaningless.”

Meanwhile after her arraignment, Izola Curry was transferred to Bellevue Hospital by magistrate Vincent P. Rao, for the purpose of undergoing a battery of mental tests. While sitting in her room at the mental hospital, she smoked cigarettes and read her mail. Curry was the recipient of hundreds of letters, some critical of what she had done, others commending her. In addition she received envelopes containing donations from racists for her
“legal defense fund.” For some reason the donations were particularly plentiful from King’s home state of Georgia. There was $12.13 from a group in the town of Crottersville, calling itself “the people of Georgia”; she received a $15 donation from a magistrate in the town of College Park who obviously disagreed with the actions of his New York counterpart in sending Curry to Bellevue; and there were two $5 donations from a White Citizens Council group in the town of Bainbridge. The coal dealer J. B. White of that town would claim to have sent her “a substantial amount.”

Speaking to a reporter about what he and six of his friends had done, White described how they were all sitting around in a drugstore when they heard the news. He would tell of how they found the stabbing particularly hilarious because it had taken place in the “cradle of integration.” White opined that there were some good Negroes who knew their place and that their ranks included Curry. Yet he would also say that the races weren’t meant to mix, that if God had meant that to be the case, he would have made everyone the same color. Clearly he had no understanding of what the deranged Curry had stated regarding her personal philosophy, which was that Negroes should appeal directly to the federal government for their civil rights, bypassing Negro preachers and organizations such as the NAACP.

King continued convalescing in Harlem Hospital, being checked on by Naclerio, Cordice, and Maynard. Coretta and the rest of his family continued to visit him. They also made public displays of concern for the rest of the patients in the hospital. On one of those days, as photographers trouped along, Coretta and her father-in-law donated some of the flowers King junior received to children on the Pediatric ward.

As they did so, the civil rights rival who treaded lightly with King, who hadn’t appeared with him at the Friday night rally, also showed his concern. Roy Wilkins was on a trip to Long Island on the Saturday afternoon King was stabbed. When he returned to the city and heard news of the crisis, Wilkins joined the other luminaries at the hospital waiting for word of the outcome of surgery. Four days later he spoke with Coretta on the phone, assuring her that of all the hospitals in the world, her husband was in the best one he could be in for the treatment of knife wounds and pneumonia. The following day he wrote King a letter offering whatever help he needed while recovering from the stabbing.

A week after surgery, King held a formal press conference while still in the hospital. He was asked what he thought of Curry; did he believe that she could have been part of a conspiracy by racists to assassinate him, specifically designing the execution to be performed by “one of his own,” since he wouldn’t expect that? “I have no knowledge of that,” King replied. “But it is a possibility. Even if she is unbalanced, an unbalanced person can be used by balanced people.”

On the fourteenth postoperative day King was released from the hospital. But he had to remain in the city for approximately two more weeks. He would stay at the home of Reverend Sandy Ray, pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Brooklyn (Ray was an old friend of Martin senior). Upon walking out of the hospital, King was greeted by a throng of about five hundred people, whom he spoke to informally. Then he was whisked off. A few days later he would appear before a grand jury along with witnesses to the stabbing, to recount what had happened. Their testimony, as well as the mental health tests performed on Curry, would result in her being declared mentally unfit to walk
the streets and confinement to a state psychiatric facility for several years.

As for the gubernatorial election that took place six weeks after the stabbing, the momentum favored Rockefeller until the final week and a half, when Democratic heavyweights finally rallied to Harriman’s support. Former President Harry Truman, a Democrat, released an indignant statement taking issue with Rockefeller’s implication that he was supporting him. Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who had been bitter about the outcome of the state convention nominating Frank Hogan for senator, put that feeling aside and denounced Rockefeller’s running mate as entirely too conservative. And Harlem’s most powerful politician, who had been conspicuously absent during the King stabbing, and whom Republicans had tried to get to endorse Rockefeller, finally weighed in in favor of Harriman.

Democrat Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., had famously crossed party lines in 1956 and endorsed Eisenhower for president. So it was not outside the realm of possibility that he would endorse the more liberal Rockefeller two years later for governor. Ever the pragmatic wheeler-dealer, Powell made peace with Tammany Hall leader Carmine De Sapio, agreeing to back Harriman in exchange for De Sapio backing his effort to become the first Afro-American chairman of a congressional committee. Once the deal was in place, Powell proceeded to lash out against Rockefeller, calling his family’s infamous support for Negro colleges nothing more than an effort to sustain “Jim Crow colleges” and buy their way into respectability. This, Powell opined, contrasted with the Rockefeller family’s lack of support for Negro civil rights. He claimed that in that regard their record was meager, as evidenced by their virtual lack of financial support to the NAACP.