Enemies

by Tim Weiner

  “GUTTER GOSSIP”

  The power of secret information was a gun that Hoover always kept loaded. He took it from his holster when he felt his power threatened—or when it gave him pleasure.

  On March 22, 1962, the director had one of his rare luncheons at the White House. The conversation gave the president reason to fear that Hoover knew his deepest secrets. No record of the meeting survives, but the circumstantial evidence of what took place is strong.

  The evidence suggests that Hoover let the president know what he knew about the interplay among the CIA, the attorney general, the continuing plots to kill Castro, the participation of the Mafia boss Sam Giancana, and the president’s dalliance with Giancana’s mistress, Judith Campbell.

  Immediately before dining with Hoover, the president had a crash meeting with the attorney general. Immediately thereafter, JFK had his last telephone conversation with Campbell. By one hearsay account, after the luncheon, the president told an aide that he had to fire “that bastard” J. Edgar Hoover.

  On May 9, Hoover recorded, with evident satisfaction, his face-to-face meeting on the Castro assassination plots with Robert Kennedy. They discussed “the ‘gutter gossip’ ” surrounding the CIA and Giancana. “I expressed astonishment at … the horrible judgment in using a man of Giancana’s background,” Hoover wrote. RFK scribbled a note to his FBI liaison: “Courtney I hope this will be followed up vigorously.”

  Hoover followed up. It was evident to him that the mobster’s girlfriend had been having sex with the president (as were, by the FBI’s count, five other women not his wife). Hoover also knew that Robert Kennedy was overseeing new plots to eliminate Castro.

  Hoover’s knowledge of JFK’s private conduct and RFK’s political conspiracies were potentially lethal political weapons. He brandished them now. He let the president and the attorney general know that he knew they had committed mortal sins.

  On June 11, 1962, the FBI’s bugs picked up the baritone voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. He was visiting Stanley Levison at his office on 39th Street in Manhattan. Their conversation got the attorney general’s attention. RFK knew much more about this surveillance than he ever admitted. He personally renewed his authorization for the taps on Levison’s office, and he approved Hoover’s request to tap Levison’s home telephone, where King called late at night several times a week. The FBI began gaining insights, shared freely with the White House and the Justice Department, into the hopes, fears, and dreams of Dr. King. The Bureau had identified an aide to Levison named Jack O’Dell as a suspected source of Communist influence inside the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Hoover cited the twin specters of Levison and O’Dell as the justification for an open-ended investigation of King’s headquarters and aides in Atlanta.

  Robert Kennedy now agreed with Hoover’s surmise that Levison was a Red Svengali swaying the Reverend Dr. King. “Levison influenced him. Their goals were identical, really, I suppose,” he said.

  Hoover commanded the FBI in Atlanta and New York to open a new case. It was captioned: COMMUNIST INFILTRATION OF THE SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE, shorthanded inside the FBI as COMINFIL/SCLC—a full-scale, full-field investigation of communism at the center of the civil rights movement.

  “WE MUST MARK HIM NOW”

  The confrontation over the civil rights movement grew increasingly tense. Hoover had adopted an attitude akin to civil disobedience against the attorney general.

  In September 1962, when a black man named James Meredith attempted to enroll at the segregated University of Mississippi, a white riot ensued. The Kennedy administration wound up sending thousands of troops to Mississippi and arresting a retired right-wing army general on a charge of insurrection. The duty officer at FBI headquarters on the Saturday that Mississippi boiled over was a supervisory special agent named Fred Woodcock. “The Klan got involved and they were threatening violence,” he remembered. “Some of these bonehead pro-Nazi organizations in this country were involved, and life was hell for me.”

  The phones were ringing off the hook when a Justice Department lawyer got Woodcock on the line and demanded information from the FBI’s agents in Mississippi and their informants in the Klan. “I said, ‘You know we can’t disclose that information; we have a confidential relationship with all our informants and, if we disclose their identity we could wrap up the informant program,’ ” Woodcock recounted. “A few minutes later he calls me back and he says, ‘Bobby Kennedy wants to see you in his office right away.’ ”

  “I was dumbfounded,” Woodcock said. “I gather up my files and stuff on the University of Mississippi and I go over to Kennedy’s office.… Bobby’s in his shirtsleeves and they’re actually tossing a football around. You know, this was rumored that these things happened, but I never really believed that they would sit in their office and do this.”

  “I want you to go down and arrest these Klan members,” Kennedy said.

  “Well, what would be the basis of the arrest?” Woodcock replied. “What would we arrest them for?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Kennedy said. “We’ll worry about that later. Just go down there and arrest them, get them off the street.”

  Woodcock thought to himself: “I’m in really big trouble here. This shit is getting to be pretty deep.”

  The FBI agent defied the attorney general: “I think I can speak for Director Hoover and say that we would not do that without a basis for an arrest. We would not make these arrests.” Woodcock went back to his office and wrote a long memo to Hoover, not forgetting to mention the football and the shirtsleeves. It came back from the director “without a whole lot of blue ink”—just Hoover’s “H.”—“so I figured I must have done something right.”

  That summer, badgered by the attorney general, Hoover thought it wise to hire a handful of black FBI agents. One of the first was Wayne G. Davis, posted to Detroit. Soon he got a telephone call: Hoover wanted to meet him. “I go in to see Hoover,” Davis recalled. “He talked—the whole half an hour I was with him—he talked about Martin Luther King.” Hoover railed about “how awful King was, what a hypocrite he was and how his concern was that the movement that King was leading, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was infiltrated by Communists,” Davis said. “And then he said, ‘Well, nice talking to you, Wayne, you’re doing a fine job, keep up the good work.’ ”

  “Listen, Hoover was a bastard,” Davis said. “He ruled by fear.”

  The FBI relentlessly recorded Martin Luther King planning the August 1963 March on Washington, which brought 250,000 demonstrators to the capital in the largest public protest in American history. And in the months before the march, RFK and his aides personally warned King against his associations with Communists. So did the president of the United States. King became more circumspect about his relationship with Levison, but he kept him close.

  Hoover kept bombarding the Kennedys with memoranda accusing King of a leading role in the Communist conspiracy against America. He commissioned FBI reports on the deep history of the Communist Party’s connections with the civil rights movement. What he wanted was a document so convincing that it would destroy Martin Luther King.

  “The 19 million Negroes in the United States today constitute the largest and most important racial target of the Communist Party USA,” read an August 23, 1963, report from FBI intelligence chief Bill Sullivan to the director. “Since 1919 communist leaders have devised countless tactics and programs designed to penetrate and control the Negro population.”

  But the report failed to provide direct evidence of Communist control. Hoover reached for his pen: “I for one can’t ignore the memos re King.…” Sullivan kowtowed, the day after the “I Have a Dream” oration: “In the light of King’s powerful demagogic speech.… We must mark him 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.”

  The result was “a really politically explosive
document,” said Nick Katzenbach. Signed by Hoover, it went all over Washington—“to the White House—all around the damn place—about all of King’s Communist contacts.” It was political dynamite. Robert Kennedy ordered it withdrawn, but too late. It shocked senators and generals. The memo gave Hoover the leverage he needed for an all-encompassing surveillance of King and the civil rights movement.

  “Bobby thought it was absolute blackmail,” Katzenbach said. “But he felt he could not, with all of the flood of memos about his Communist associations, then turn the Bureau down on a tap.”

  On October 10, 1963, and again on October 21, Robert F. Kennedy approved Hoover’s requests for an unlimited electronic surveillance of King and the SCLC headquarters in Atlanta. The case file was entitled MARTIN LUTHER KING JR./SECURITY MATTER—COMMUNIST. The bugs got quick results. When King traveled, as he did constantly in the ensuing weeks, to Washington, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, and Honolulu, the Bureau planted hidden microphones in his hotel rooms. The FBI placed a total of eight wiretaps and sixteen bugs on King. The transcripts are sealed under judicial order until 2027. But their essence is an open secret. The telephone taps largely recorded King thinking out loud, planning the civil rights movement, weighing tactics and strategies. The hotel bugs sometimes picked up the sounds of late-night parties that ended in the unmistakable sounds of sex. Thomas F. McGorray, an FBI agent on his first tour of duty in 1963, drew the assignment of monitoring the surveillance on King’s private apartment in Atlanta. No one questioned the wisdom of bugging King’s bedrooms.

  “It’s a moral issue,” McGorray reflected. It certainly was for Hoover.

  “Hoover was telling me, ‘It’s a terrible thing,’ ” said Jack Danahy, the FBI agent who ran investigations of Communists for decades, recalling a conversation in the director’s office. “ ‘That Martin Luther King, a minister, a religious minister … it makes me so damn mad.’ And he banged the glass-topped desk with his fist. ‘Oh, damn,’ he says. He actually shattered it.” The director displayed his pique on paper, too. “King is a ‘tom cat’ with obsessive degenerate sexual urges,” Hoover wrote in a rage on January 27, 1964.

  But in private he had reasons to be happy as the end of his fourth decade in office approached, and not only because he had the dirt on his nemesis.

  The FBI’s technical surveillances on foreign embassies and consulates constituted something close to complete coverage. The FBI’s tracking of Soviet spies and diplomats in the United States was thorough. COINTELPRO, after seven years of sabotage, had delivered results: the Bureau’s own figures showed that the Communist Party of the United States of America had now been reduced to 4,453 members—about 5 percent of its strength in the years after World War II. The Bureau had the Communist menace in check.

  And when an assassin’s bullet brought Lyndon Johnson to power in the White House, Hoover once again had a commander in chief who delighted in sharing his secrets.

  On November 22, 1963, Hoover had his last significant conversation with Robert Kennedy. It was short and brutish. Hoover had telephoned Kennedy to deliver the word that his brother had been shot. “I have some news for you,” Hoover had said—not bad news, just news. Forty-five minutes later, Hoover told RFK that his brother was dead.

  The FBI’s investigation of the Kennedy assassination was equally brusque: Lee Harvey Oswald did it. Case closed. Hoover would not countenance talk of a conspiracy.

  The Warren Commission’s official investigation was a wearisome sideshow for Hoover. He distrusted its leader, Chief Justice Earl Warren, and he kept close tabs on its work through a confidential informant who served as a member of the commission: Congressman Gerald R. Ford, the future president of the United States.

  Hoover still had to swat down swarms of rumors about the assassination. Senator James Eastland, the Judiciary Committee chairman, sent warning that CIA and State Department officers were charging that “Oswald was a confidential informant of the FBI’s” and that “Secret Service representatives were attempting to place the blame on the FBI.” That was bad enough. But Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert F. Kennedy both feared that there might have been a Communist conspiracy to kill the president. To pursue that question in public was unthinkable. It would require them to challenge the authority of J. Edgar Hoover, and neither man was prepared to do that. Both Hoover and Allen Dulles, the CIA’s director from 1953 to 1961 and a member of the Warren Commission, made sure that no one breathed a word about American plans to kill Fidel Castro. If there had been a Communist plot to assassinate the president in revenge, if the Soviets or the Cubans had ordered President Kennedy killed, and if the United States had a shred of evidence to prove the case, it would have been the opening shot of a new world war.

  Hoover knew full well that the FBI was guilty—in his own words—of “gross incompetency” for its failure to keep an eye on Oswald in the weeks before the assassination. The angry and unstable marine had defected to the Soviet Union and returned as a Marxist malefactor. He was known to the Dallas office of the FBI—known as a Communist demagogue, possibly deranged, who had passed out leaflets supporting Fidel Castro and held a job at the Texas School Book Depository building, overlooking the route of JFK’s motorcade. Hoover learned four days after the assassination that Oswald never had appeared on the FBI’s Security Index, the list of people who posed a danger due to “their training, violent tendencies, and prominence in subversive activities,” to quote the Bureau’s own standards.

  “We failed in carrying through some of the salient aspects of the Oswald investigation,” Hoover concluded. “It ought to be a lesson to us all.” He disciplined agents for dereliction of duty, overruling DeLoach’s warnings that official reprimands or letters of censure could be construed as “a direct admission that we are responsible for negligence which might have resulted in the assassination of the President.”

  But Hoover would be damned if he would let the American public think so.

  30

  “YOU GOT THIS PHONE TAPPED?”

  “EDGAR, I don’t hear you well. What’s the matter? You got this phone tapped?” asked the president of the United States.

  “No, I should say not,” said Hoover, with a chuckle. “I can hear you perfectly, sir,” he said to Lyndon B. Johnson, who himself was taping the call.

  On that evening, February 27, 1964, Johnson had been president for ninety-seven days. Every sunrise brought a fresh series of crises, landing like the morning paper on the front porch. Tonight’s hot spot was the fountain-of-youth tourist town of St. Augustine, Florida, racked by racist murders and the dynamiting of the Florida East Coast Railroad. LBJ ordered Hoover to get on the railroad case. “I’m not going to tolerate blowing up people with bombs,” he said.

  Johnson leaned on Hoover harder than any president ever had. He relied on him in matters of national security, foreign policy, and political intrigue. He praised Hoover to the skies and to his face. Some of his flattery was silver-tongued sweet talk, but some was plain truth. He wanted to believe in Hoover as a matter of faith.

  The new president pledged his allegiance to Hoover. “You’re my brother,” Johnson told Hoover a week after John Kennedy was killed. “You have been for twenty-five, thirty years.… I’ve got more confidence in you than in anybody in town.”

  Their political relationship was cultivated as carefully as the White House Rose Garden, where the two stood side by side on Friday, May 8, 1964, at a ceremony in the director’s honor. The coming Sunday would mark Hoover’s fortieth year in power. The new year would bring his seventieth birthday and his mandatory retirement under federal law. Johnson signed an executive order that day waiving the law. Hoover would be the director till he died.

  “J. Edgar Hoover is a household word,” the president said that sunny afternoon. “He is a hero to millions of decent citizens and an anathema to evil … that would subvert our way of life and men who would harm and destroy our persons. Edgar Hoover has been my close personal friend for thirty years, and he was
my close personal neighbor for nineteen years. I know he loved my dog, and I think he thought a little bit of me as a neighbor, and I am proud and happy to join the rest of the nation this afternoon in honoring this quiet and humble and magnificent public servant.”

  “THAT GODDAMNED SEWER J. EDGAR HOOVER”

  Hoover stoked the president’s fear that Robert F. Kennedy and his loyalists wanted to retake the White House. Johnson could not bear the thought. He collaborated with Hoover to excommunicate the attorney general from power, shunning him with silences and lies.

  “One of the troubles with dealing with the President was that he had that goddamned sewer J. Edgar Hoover flowing across his desk,” said the national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, a Kennedy man who served and suffered under LBJ. “Like many extremely skillful politicians, he had a weakness for under-the-rug information.”

  LBJ recorded several anguished conversations with RFK shortly before Kennedy resigned to run for the U.S. Senate in New York.

  “Mr. Hoover’s going down to Jackson, Mississippi. I understand they have a press conference scheduled there,” RFK told LBJ. “If he’s asked some of the questions about this communist situation in connection with the civil-rights movement, and answers some of them in the way that some of the memos have indicated he might, it could cause a good number of difficulties around the country.”

  LBJ answered: “All right. You want me to talk to him?”

  RFK hesitated and stumbled. His chagrin was audible: “As I’ve said before, it’s quite difficult for me.…”

  A few days later: “Martin Luther King is going down to Greenwood, Mississippi, tonight and he’s going to address a mass rally there,” RFK told the president. “If he gets killed, it creates all kinds of problems—just being dead, but a lot of other kinds of problems.”