“The army has double-crossed me for the last time,” Cohn screamed. “The army is going to find out what it means to go over my head.”
“Is this a threat?” Adams asked.
“It’s a promise,” Cohn replied. “I always deliver on my promises. . . . We are not going to stop at this. Joe [McCarthy] will deliver, and I can make Joe do whatever I want.”
It was true. Cohn did have a strange hold on the senator and was now making it clear that McCarthy’s investigation of the army was directly related to the army’s willingness to bend to Cohn’s will. It was just one instance of many the army assembled into a dossier and made public, showing the world how McCarthy and his staff sought to hound the army to further their own ends. Ironically, McCarthy agreed to have his own subcommittee investigate the army’s charges, with him and Cohn, as implicated parties, recusing themselves. So sure was the senator of a positive outcome that he agreed to have the hearings televised. It was perhaps the greatest mistake of his life.
Millions tuned in to watch the spectacle. For many, it was the first time they were able to see Joe McCarthy in action. It was not a pretty sight. Day after day viewers watched the senator and his staff bully and harass witnesses while failing to produce any hard evidence to back up increasingly outrageous accusations. McCarthy’s credibility crumbled before the eyes of the nation. In one dramatic moment, after McCarthy attacked a young associate of Joseph N. Welch, chief attorney for the army, Welch stood up, faced the senator, and said: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you no sense of decency?”
The cloak of righteousness that had long shielded McCarthy in the eyes of the American public was now shredded. The end was near. “In this long, degrading travesty of the democratic process,” the Louisville Courier-Journal noted, “McCarthy has shown himself to be evil and unmatched in malice.” On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted 67-22 to condemn McCarthy for “conduct contrary to Senatorial traditions.” Less than three years later, he was dead of alcohol-induced cirrhosis.
8
J. Edgar Hoover: What a Drag
The sight of J. Edgar Hoover in an evening gown would be enough in itself to propel the notorious FBI director straight into the American Hall of Shame. But since that horrifying spectacle has yet to be proven, the fact that Hoover sashayed his way over the civil liberties of thousands—for nearly a quarter of the nation’s history—will have to suffice.
Red-baiter and blackmailer extraordinaire, the director-for-life made the bureau a model secret police force that infiltrated the lives of suspected enemies ranging from Eleanor Roosevelt to Albert Einstein. For J. Edgar Hoover, information meant power—the more lurid, the better—and he wielded what he knew like a spiked club. The abuses of office are legion, but the FBI’s relentless campaign against Martin Luther King Jr.—or “that burrhead,” as Hoover preferred to call the civil rights leader—show the director at his most vicious.
The FBI’s interest in King started out as routine. Red-hunting had long been the bureau’s stock in trade—even before Hoover became its director in 1924—and the civil rights movement was thought to be prime for Communist infiltration. As one of the movement’s most prominent leaders, King naturally merited watching. The attention was passive, however, until 1961, when Hoover himself became directly involved. King, heading the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), had taken a leading role in the “Freedom Rides” that year, hoping to desegregate interstate bus transportation facilities across the Deep South. Alerted to this, the director wanted more information on this uppity Negro who was making such a fuss. He was disappointed to find that there wasn’t much in the FBI files. On a memo sent to him noting that King had never been formally investigated, Hoover wrote, “Why not?” The basilisk’s glare had now been focused and would not be diverted until well after King was dead.
Increased FBI surveillance soon revealed that one of King’s closest associates, Stanley Levison, had been involved with the Communist Party in the early 1950s. And though it became apparent from further investigations—including wiretaps on Levison—that he had had nothing to do with the party since becoming associated with King, Hoover reacted as if a Soviet invasion was being plotted. King was added to the FBI’s enemies list, and government officials were put on Red alert. “This Bureau has recently received additional information showing the influence of Stanley David Levison, a secret member of the Communist Party, upon Martin Luther King Jr.,” Hoover wrote in a memo to Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
When it came to stirring J. Edgar Hoover’s eternal animosity, King’s alleged Communist connections were nothing compared to his public criticism of the FBI in late 1962. A New York Times reporter had asked King if he agreed with a report on the civil rights protests that had taken place the previous summer in Albany, Georgia, in which the FBI was criticized for ignoring patent abuses of blacks by local law enforcement. King said he did agree with the report, particularly as it concerned the FBI. “One of the great problems we face with the FBI in the South is that the agents are white Southerners who have been influenced by the mores of the community,” he told the reporter. “To maintain their status, they have to be friendly with the local police and people who are promoting segregation. Every time I saw FBI men in Albany, they were with the local police force.” The Times story, in which King went on to suggest that non-Southerners be assigned to FBI offices in the Deep South, appeared in many other newspapers across the country. Allergic to criticism of any sort, Hoover was wild.
“In a very real sense there was no greater crime in Mr. Hoover’s eyes than public criticism of the Bureau,” recalled former Attorney General Nicholas deB. Katzenbach. “All public critics of the Bureau, if they persisted,” were treated as enemies. “The only thing unique about Dr. King was the intensity of the feeling and the apparent extremes to which the Bureau went in seeking to destroy the critic.”
Hoover’s wrath was evident just before the famous 1963 March on Washington at which King delivered his stirring “I Have a Dream” speech. The FBI’s domestic intelligence division had prepared a lengthy and detailed report on the Communist Party’s efforts to infiltrate the civil rights movement, concluding that such efforts had been a failure. But with a vendetta against Martin Luther King to pursue, Hoover was not satisfied with the benign contents of the report.
“This memo reminds me vividly of those I received when Castro took over Cuba,” the director wrote on the report’s cover letter. “You contended then that Castro & his cohorts were not Communists & not influenced by Communists. Time alone has proved you wrong. I for one can’t ignore the memos re King . . . et al. as having only an infinitesimal effect on the efforts to exploit the American Negro by the Communists.”
Hoover’s underlings were smart enough to know that their jobs depended upon their interpretation of the facts meshing harmoniously with the autocratic director’s. Accordingly, two days after the March on Washington, Assistant Director William C. Sullivan—no doubt fearing Hoover’s wrath—prepared a new memo that completely reversed the position taken in the one sent a week earlier. “The Director is correct,” Sullivan wrote in humble response to Hoover’s critique. “We were completely wrong about believing the evidence was not sufficient to determine some years ago that Fidel Castro was not a communist or under communist influence. On investigating and writing about communism and the American Negro, we had better remember this and profit by the lesson it should teach us.” Sullivan went on to characterize King’s “I Have a Dream” oration as a “powerful demagogic speech,” and warned that “We must mark [King] now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security.”
With the menace of Martin Luther King now fabricated to Hoover’s specifications, Attorney Genera
l Robert Kennedy was confronted with the “evidence” of King’s continuing Communist connections. Fearing the effect a public disclosure of this might have on the pending civil rights legislation backed by his brother’s administration, Kennedy authorized wiretaps on King’s home, as well as the SCLC’s offices in Atlanta and New York. On its own initiative, the FBI planted bugs in his hotel rooms. A new phase of official harassment was beginning. It would drive King to the edge of despair.
Much of what the bugs picked up was useless noise, but the juice that did seep through was enough to send J. Edgar Hoover pirouetting across his office with glee. There was King laughing at the Kennedys. King telling raunchy stories. King cheating on his wife. It was a bonanza—dirt both to destroy the sinful minister and to satisfy the voyeuristic pleasure the director derived from hearing about the sex lives of others. Of course, Hoover’s public reaction was moral outrage, a posture dutifully emulated by the FBI rank and file. “King must, at some propitious point in the future, be revealed to the people of this country and to his Negro followers as being what he actually is—a fraud, demagogue and moral scoundrel,” Assistant Director Sullivan wrote in a memo. “When the true facts concerning his activities are presented, such should be enough, if handled properly, to take him off his pedestal and to reduce him completely in influence so that he will no longer be a security problem and no longer will be deceiving and misleading the Negro people.” Hoover put it more succinctly: “[This] will destroy the burrhead.”
The director was stunned and angered, therefore, when it became obvious that the derogatory information the FBI had so painstakingly gathered was having little effect. When King went to Europe in 1964, for example, the bureau learned that he wanted to meet Pope Paul VI. Anxious to prevent such a credibility-building encounter, an agent alerted Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York, shared the dirt on King, and encouraged him to pass it on to the Vatican. The meeting took place anyway, and Hoover was shocked. “I am amazed that the Pope gave an audience to such a degenerate,” he scrawled on a news clipping of the event.
A month later, something even worse happened. King won the Nobel Peace Prize. This was just too much for the director. “King could well qualify for the ‘top alley cat’ prize,” he wrote on a news clipping of the announcement. In light of this latest outrage, fresh accounts of King’s behavior behind closed doors were sent to the White House, the attorney general’s office, and all the government offices, including the State Department, which would play a part in King’s trip to Oslo to accept the prize. Hoover’s fury was unsated, however, and in a rare meeting with a group of female reporters, he went on a rampage. Martin Luther King was “the most notorious liar in the country,” he informed the reporters—a response to King’s criticism of the FBI two years earlier. Ignoring the frantic notes of an aide imploring him to keep his comments off the record, Hoover continued to rant, calling King “one of the lowest characters in the country.” The blistering attack became front page news.
King’s public response was restrained. “I cannot conceive of Mr. Hoover making a statement like this without being under extreme pressure,” he said in a statement. “He has apparently faltered under the awesome burden, complexities and responsibilities of his office. Therefore, I cannot engage in a public debate with him. I have nothing but sympathy for this man who has served his country so well.” Behind the scenes, though, King was preparing for battle. He instructed his aides to ask other public figures and organizations to speak out against Hoover’s outburst. In a phone conversation with one SCLC staffer—taped by the FBI, of course—King said that the director “is old and getting senile” and should be “hit from all sides” in order to force President Johnson to censure Hoover publicly.
The war was escalating, but King’s arsenal was sorely limited next to Hoover’s. This was a man who demanded results and had all the resources to get them. When Hoover complained in one memo that “we are never taking the aggressive,” he had an army below him that got the message. Assistant Director William Sullivan was no doubt inspired by the boss when he ordered the “highlights” of King’s taped misdeeds assembled into a sort of “greatest hits” recording and sent to King himself. To accompany this damning package, Sullivan, posing as a black person, wrote the following anonymous letter:
KING,
In view of your low grade . . . I will not dignify your name with either a Mr. or a Reverend or a Dr. And, your last name calls to mind only the type of King such as King Henry VIII. . . .
King, look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes. White people in this country have enough frauds of their own but I am sure they don’t have one at this time that is anywhere near your equal. You are no clergyman and you know it. I repeat you are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that. You could not believe in God. . . . Clearly you don’t believe in any personal moral principles.
King, like all frauds your end is approaching. You could have been our greatest leader. You, even at an early age, have turned out to be not a leader but a dissolute, abnormal moral imbecile. . . . Your “honorary” degrees, your Nobel Prize (what a grim farce) and other awards will not save you. King, I repeat you are done.
No person can overcome facts, not even a fraud like yourself. . . . You are finished. . . . And some of them to be ministers of the Gospel. Satan could not do more. What incredible evil-ness. . . . King, you are done.
The American public, the church organizations that have been helping—Protestant, Catholic and Jews will know you for what you are—an evil, abnormal beast. So will others who have backed you. You are done.
King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. . . . You are done. There is but one way out for you.
You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation.
“They are out to break me,” King said in despair after receiving the package—a reaction that must have delighted Hoover when it was caught on a wiretap. Though King was able to rally and continue his mission, the FBI’s harassment campaign continued until his assassination in 1968, and even beyond. Hoover approved the following proposal by his aide Cartha DeLoach after Martin Luther King’s murder: “I would like to suggest that consideration be given to advising a friendly newspaper contact on a strictly confidential basis, that Coretta King and Reverend Abernathy [King’s widow and his close associate, respectively] are deliberately plotting to keep King’s assassination in the news by pulling the ruse of maintaining that King’s murder was definitely a conspiracy and not committed by one man. This, of course, is obviously a rank trick in order to keep the money coming in to Mrs. King and Abernathy. We can do this without any attribution to the FBI and without anyone knowing that the information came from a wiretap.”
Although many of the FBI’s shameful secrets were exposed after Hoover’s death in 1972, including the ones involving Martin Luther King, the bureau’s headquarters in Washington still bears the director’s name. Until the American Hall of Shame is erected, that building remains his monument.
9
Richard Nixon: Say What!?
Ah, Tricky Dick. So much has already been said and written about the disgraced thirty-seventh president. There’s almost nothing left of Nixon to kick around anymore. Perhaps, then, it’s time to let the man speak for himself. All the president’s rants were captured on recording equipment installed at the White House, reminding us, as Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post notes, “that the leader of the free world was buggier than a flophouse blanket.”
On the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:
“Do you know what happened to the Romans? The last six Roman emperors were fags!”
On Jews (Part I):
“The Jews are [an] irreligious, atheistic, immoral bunch of bastards.”
On Civilian Casualties in Vietnam:
To National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger: “You’re so goddamned concerned about the ci
vilians, and I don’t give a damn. I don’t care.”
On Jews (Part II):
“What about the rich Jews? The IRS is full of Jews. . . . Go after them like a son of a bitch. The Jews, you know, are stealing in every direction.”
On House Majority Whip Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr.:
“An all-out dove and a vicious bastard.”
On Senator Edward M. Kennedy:
“I’d really like to get Teddy taped.”
On Panda Mating:
“The only way they learn how is to watch other pandas mate, you see.”
On Jews (Part III):
“Most Jews are disloyal, you can’t trust the bastards. They turn on you.”
On the Media:
“Newsweek is totally—it’s all run by Jews and dominated by them in their editorial pages. The New York Times, the Washington Post, totally Jewish, too.”
On Rival Democrats:
To White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman: “Keep after ’em. . . . Maybe we can get a scandal on any, any of the leading Democrats.”
A Treasury of Great American Scandals Page 20