Edgar’s prejudice, however, had deep-seated personal origins. Through his youth and into middle age, a rumor circulated in Washington – a rumor of which he was certainly aware – that Edgar himself had black blood in his veins.
In 1958, while researching articles on Edgar for the New York Post, reporter William Dufty enlisted the help of a black agent in the Bureau of Narcotics to obtain a clandestine interview with Edgar’s black manservant, Sam Noisette. As the three men talked, Dufty realized the two blacks were repeatedly referring to Edgar as ‘some kind of spook,’ even ‘soul brother.’ Dufty had many black friends – he had co-authored Billie Holiday’s biography Lady Sings the Blues – and remembered having heard offhand remarks along the same lines. He later realized that, in the black communities of the East, which also claimed Clark Gable and Rudolph Valentino as their own, it was generally believed that Edgar had black roots.
The writer Gore Vidal, who grew up in Washington in the thirties, had a similar memory. ‘Hoover was becoming famous, and it was always said of him – in my family and around the city – that he was mulatto. People said he came from a family that had “passed.” It was the word they used for people of black origin who, after generations of interbreeding, have enough white blood to pass themselves off as white. That’s what was always said about Hoover.’ ‘There was a sort of secret admiration among blacks for those who were able to pass,’ said Dufty. ‘Fooling white people was easy, but fooling blacks was next to impossible.’
Early photographs of Edgar do have a negroid look. His hair was noticeably wiry, and a 1939 article refers to his ‘dark skin, almost brown from sunburn. His coloring … gives a striking contrast to the crisp, white linen suit.’ Was there then some truth to the story?
As was often the case in those days, no birth certificate was registered when Edgar was born in 1895. The document that was eventually issued, in 1938, states simply that both his father and mother were ‘white.’ The ancestry of his mother is well documented, a line of solid burghers easily traceable to their ancestral home in Switzerland. His father’s family history, however, amounts to no more than a series of conflicting reports of descent from German, Swiss or British immigrants, settlers who arrived in America 200 years before Edgar’s birth. There had been plenty of time for racial intermingling.
After Edgar’s death, even Helen Gandy would speak of ‘an early story’ that Edgar had black blood. She spoke of the rumor during an interview, then dropped the subject.
‘Hoover himself had to know what people said about him,’ said Gore Vidal. ‘There were two things that were taken for granted in my youth – that he was a faggot and that he was black. Washington was and is a very racist town, and I can tell you that in those days the black blood part was very much the worst. People were known to commit suicide if it was discovered that they had passed. To be thought a black person was an unbelievable slur if you were in white society. That’s what many people flatly believed about Hoover, and he must have been so upset by it …’
Whether or not the rumor was true, it must have caused endless distress to Edgar, whose public posture was that of the white nativist, suspicious of all that seemed alien. Just as he compensated for his secret homosexuality by lashing out at fellow homosexuals, so Edgar’s worry about his racial identity may have shaped his behavior toward blacks. To those who knew their place – servants like Noisette, James Crawford and the rest – he played the decent, paternalistic boss. Those who sought to rise above their station, as perhaps he sensed he himself had done, he had at best no time for.
Born in an era when black men were regularly lynched for rape – if the victim was white – Edgar preferred to shrug off the miseries of black Americans. As with organized crime, he was content to ignore the law enforcement problems that arose, or to claim ‘lack of jurisdiction.’
The attorney Joseph Rauh never forgot the angry non sequitur of an answer Edgar gave when asked to probe the attempted murder of a white labor leader in the forties. ‘Edgar says no,’ Attorney General Tom Clark told Rauh. ‘He’s not going to send the FBI in every time some nigger woman says she’s been raped.’1
Though Edgar mounted some effective operations against the Ku Klux Klan, his priorities became obvious once blacks began to demand their rights. ‘When I was working in the South in the fifties,’ said Arthur Murtagh, ‘there was simply no comparison. The Bureau only investigated the Klan when a murder had been committed and the press forced them into it. Far more time and effort went into investigating black militants …’
During the Kennedy presidency, Edgar became involved in the struggle over race whether he liked it or not. The civil rights campaign, and the violence with which southern whites responded, was the major domestic policy issue. Edgar was forced to stop stonewalling requests for help by the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and to join the federal government in confronting the nation’s race problems.
FBI agents suddenly found themselves investigating police brutality and preventing abuse of black voters’ rights. The Bureau had been dragooned into taking on such duties, and Edgar resented it.
Martin Luther King, the pacifist preacher’s son from Atlanta, was a black man who did not know his place, who had won something Edgar had lost – the attentive ear of the President and the Attorney General of the United States.
Although King had been in the public eye for some five years, Edgar had lumped him together with advocates of violent struggle, such as Malcolm X. ‘We wouldn’t have any problem,’ he had once grunted over lunch with Johnson in his senatorial days, ‘if we could get those two guys fighting, if we could get them to kill one another off …’
Now King could not be laughed off. In May 1961 a sketchy FBI report had given Edgar the idea that the black leader might have links to the Communist Party – and revealed that the FBI had yet to investigate him properly. Edgar scrawled in the margin ‘Why not?’ – two words that marked the start of a seven-year vendetta.
Forty years earlier there had been a dress rehearsal for this. In 1919, as a young official, Edgar had played a leading role in hounding a black leader of an earlier generation, Marcus Garvey. A Jamaican by birth, Garvey offered American blacks a fantastic dream of a mass exodus to Africa, where he promised to establish a black Empire. Edgar strove to get Garvey jailed or deported, and achieved both.
He was obsessed, too, about the great singer and actor Paul Robeson, a political activist who spoke out for the poor and racially downtrodden. Over three decades FBI agents kept Robeson under surveillance, bugged his phone calls and spread false rumors that he was a member of the Communist Party. The harassment was such that Robeson’s son believed the Bureau ‘neutralized’ his father during the fifties by slipping him hallucinogenic drugs – a charge impossible to investigate because FBI records on Robeson were still censored on the grounds of ‘national security’ as this book was being written.
Edgar’s pursuit of Garvey and Robeson was a blueprint for the future. The attempts to establish they were Communists, the use of black stool pigeons as penetration agents, and electronic bugging to snoop on their private lives were all tactics that Edgar would use against King.
‘King is no good anyway,’ Edgar had written early in the Kennedy presidency. Then, his obsession was to convince Washington the civil rights movement was controlled by Communists – whether the evidence supported the accusation or not. In October 1963, after rejecting his own agents’ advice that there was no such control, he had embarked on a massive surveillance operation against King – phone taps for which he had extracted permission from Robert Kennedy under pressure2 and hidden microphone installations never formally sanctioned by anyone.
By late 1963 the recordings had yielded nothing to brand the black leader a Communist, but a good deal to raise questions about his private morality. The Reverend King enjoyed sex, and he did not let the fact that he was a minister of the Church, and married, cramp his style. ‘I’m away from home twenty-five to twenty-se
ven days a month,’ he told one friend. ‘Fucking’s a form of anxiety reduction.’ As he traveled the country, King sought relaxation in the arms of three regular mistresses, and on occasion with prostitutes. Many of his retinue, including his close friend Reverend Ralph Abernathy, did the same.
Philandering might have remained King’s secret safety valve, tolerated by those around him, had it not been for the FBI. Sleeping with women has yet to become a federal offense, but to Edgar and his aides the knowledge of it seemed to offer a powerful weapon. In December 1964, after a marathon nine-hour meeting at Bureau headquarters, the focus changed. The question of possible Communist links would henceforth be only the nominal reason for surveillance, masking an altogether different purpose.
Edgar’s aides now plotted to achieve the ‘desired result’ of ‘neutralizing King as an effective Negro leader.’ It could be done, they hoped, by exposing him as a ‘clerical fraud,’ an ‘immoral opportunist.’ There was to be a ‘counterintelligence move to discredit’ King, using ministers, ‘disgruntled acquaintances,’ ‘aggressive’ newsmen, ‘colored’ agents, even Dr King’s wife and housekeeper, and by ‘placing a good-looking female plant in King’s office.’ The Attorney General was told nothing of this plan.
A fortnight later, when it was learned King was about to arrive at Washington’s Willard Hotel, agents scrambled to install microphones and tape recorders. The resulting fifteen reels of tape, gathered during a two-day stay, included the sort of thing the FBI wanted – the sounds of a somewhat drunken party involving King and his colleagues and two women from the Philadelphia Naval Yard.
A day later, while FBI stenographers were still transcribing the tapes, Assistant Director Sullivan dictated a new memo. ‘King,’ it read:
must … 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. When the true facts concerning his activities are presented, such should be enough, if handled properly, to take him off his pedestal … When this is done … the Negroes will be left without a national leader of sufficiently compelling personality to steer them in the proper direction. This is what could happen, but need not happen if the right kind of a national Negro leader could at this time be gradually developed so as to overshadow Dr King and be in a position to assume the role of leadership of the Negro people when King has become completely discredited.
Sullivan’s suggested replacement for King was Samuel Pierce, a Republican attorney who would one day, after serving as Secretary of Housing under President Reagan, became the target of a corruption probe. Edgar scribbled ‘OK’ beneath the suggestion, adding that he was ‘glad the “light” has finally, though dismally delayed, come to the Domestic Intelligence Division.’
‘Highlights’ of the Willard tapes were brought to Edgar like hunting trophies. ‘They will destroy the burrhead,’ he responded excitedly. Edgar personally phoned President Johnson’s aide Walter Jenkins to describe the material, then sent Cartha DeLoach to the White House with a transcript.
DeLoach, who heard one of the King surveillance tapes, claimed it featured King with ‘hundred-dollar-a-night prostitutes, committing sexual acts in front of eight, nine, ten, eleven men gathered around the bed, naked, drinking Black Russians …’ It is not clear how DeLoach could count how many men there were, or know they were naked, by listening to a sound tape.
Edgar thought King ‘a tomcat with obsessive degenerate urges,’ and insisted on coverage of what one FBI report called ‘the entertainment.’ When King went to Honolulu a crack Bureau team, complete with lock-picker, was flown in from the mainland. King’s party included two female companions, but the snoopers were frustrated on that occasion – the sound of the television and air-conditioning drowned out other sounds.
Edgar’s spies had more luck in Washington. King was overheard mockingly allotting his companions bawdy titles and telling off-color stories about sex and religion. They included a crude sex joke about the late President Kennedy and his widow, Jacqueline. Earlier, apparently because of fears the Attorney General would alert King, Edgar had withheld the results of the surveillance from Robert Kennedy. Now he saw to it that the transcript of King’s ‘vilification’ of the late President was shown to his brother. Robert was appalled.
President Johnson listened to some of the original recordings and once spent an afternoon discussing them with Edgar. Nothing Edgar said or did about King, however, deterred Johnson from his growing commitment to civil rights. Whatever his failings in other areas, it was he who rammed through a mass of new race legislation, the most radical measures since the Civil War.
A tearful Martin Luther King would telephone Johnson, overwhelmed with emotion, after the President’s 1965 address to Congress on black voting rights. Edgar sat stoically in the gallery of the Capitol as Johnson invoked the words of the Baptist hymn that was the anthem of King’s movement, ‘We Shall Overcome.’ When King opposed the Vietnam War, however, the President’s exasperation would betray what he knew. ‘Goddamnit!’ he told an aide. ‘If only you could hear what that hypocritical preacher does sexually …’
Edgar used King to play on the President’s known fears. According to Richard Goodwin, the Director suggested that ‘Bobby Kennedy was hiring or paying King off to stir up trouble over the Vietnam War. It was total nonsense. If you haven’t seen those files of his, you can’t believe how flimsy the information was. Bobby did nothing to stir up King. King was against the war long before Bobby was.’
Edgar’s effort to ruin King was in high gear in the spring of 1964. The news that Marquette University in Milwaukee intended to give King an honorary degree sent an agent rushing to persuade officials to change their minds. This was especially ‘shocking’ news – the university had given Edgar the same honor in 1950. The agent received a cash award for his successful intervention.
The National Council of the Churches of Christ, briefed by William Sullivan about King’s ‘personal conduct,’ promised it would never again give King ‘one single dollar.’ On Edgar’s orders the same smear went to the Baptist World Alliance. Agents were told to thwart publication of magazine articles by King, and even a book.
Edgar’s vendetta was pursued at a time of constant racial tension and mayhem. The long-running drama of 1964 was the disappearance, presumed murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, of three young civil rights workers in Mississippi. The first FBI response was sluggish – one agent even said ‘a thrill of joy went up my spine’ when he heard the news. This was the FBI King deplored, and it was now forced to change its ways.
President Johnson bulldozed Edgar into action. ‘There’s three sovereignties involved,’ he told a colleague. ‘There’s the United States and there’s the state of Mississippi and there’s J. Edgar Hoover.’ On this occasion, the United States prevailed. Over Edgar’s protests, agents were sent to open a large new office in Jackson, Mississippi, and Johnson dispatched Edgar by presidential jet to declare it open.
Using intelligence, lavish bribes and strong-arm tactics as tough as the Klan’s, a team of the FBI’s best agents did eventually solve the Mississippi murders and enforce federal law in the state. In Washington, Edgar went on smearing King. He supplied James Eastland, the Democratic Senator from Mississippi, with surveillance film of King walking into a hotel with a white girl. One of his officials, meanwhile, informed Berl Bernhard, staff director of the Civil Rights Commission, that King was a sexual ‘switch-hitter,’ a bisexual.
In a conversation with Carl Rowan, then Director of the U.S. Information Agency, Congressman Rooney told of listening to an FBI tape in which the black leader invited his colleague Ralph Abernathy to have sex with him. Rowan, himself black, tried to explain to Rooney that the kind of sex talk he quoted was characteristic, harmless joshing between black males. Rooney, however, spread scandal about King at every opportunity.
Using a stool pigeon to obtain access and infrared cameras, the FBI also obtained pictures of King naked in a bathtub and
lying on a bed, with his associate Bayard Rustin, a known homosexual, seated beside him. When he saw two of the pictures, apparently slipped out by the FBI to bring pressure on the black leadership, Rustin was horrified. ‘In both cases,’ he said, ‘I was conferring with Martin in the only time available to me. Nothing, absolutely nothing, took place.’
This aspect of Edgar’s smear operation failed to influence anyone – except, perhaps, his closest congressional supporters. It should be stressed, moreover, that no biographer has reported a homosexual relationship between King and Abernathy, or Rustin, or anyone else.3
In September 1964, when King was due to visit the Vatican, Edgar’s friend Cardinal Spellman was asked by the FBI to persuade Pope Paul VI not to grant King an audience. To Edgar’s astonishment, the Pope ignored the advice. Then came news that the civil rights leader was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. King, in the hospital suffering from exhaustion, thought it the ‘foremost of earthly honors, not for himself, but for the movement.’ Edgar was beside himself with rage.
‘The mores of this country has [sic] certainly sunken to a new low,’ he scribbled, overlooking the fact that the Nobel was awarded by foreigners. ‘He was the last one in the world who should ever have received it,’ he said. ‘I held him in utter contempt …’ King, Edgar thought, deserved only the ‘top alley cat’ prize.
Bitterness was compounded by jealousy, for Edgar had long hankered after a Nobel himself. Herbert Jenkins, the longtime police chief of Atlanta, talked with him at this time. ‘For years and years,’ Jenkins later revealed, ‘Hoover had tried unsuccessfully to win the Prize. Many prominent Americans had been asked by Hoover to write the Nobel Committee … but every year Hoover was passed over … Then along comes a Negro southerner who is awarded the Prize. It was more than Hoover could stand. It just ate away at him.’
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