Marc Aronson

by Master of Deceit: J. Edgar Hoover;America in the Age of Lies

  Since the FBI was certain Levison was a Communist, it saw King’s response in the worst possible light. King, one memo stated, “does not desire to be given the truth. The fact that he is a vicious liar is amply demonstrated in the fact he constantly associates with and takes instructions from Stanley Levison who is a hidden member of the Communist Party.” The Bureau redoubled its efforts to find evidence that Levison was still a Communist, and Robert Kennedy approved. Agents snuck into Levison’s New York office and planted a bug. It yielded nothing of interest, but the Bureau took that silence to mean that Levison was exceptionally devious. By May, both Levison and King were added to the FBI’s new and updated list of people to be swept into detention in case of a national emergency. In June, a wiretap yielded sensational news: Levison suggested that King give an important job to Jack O’Dell, a young black man who had been a public member of the Communist Party. Didn’t this show that the Party was maneuvering to position its men into key spots, building a cell just as its spies had done in the 1930s?

  In the spring of 1963, Dr. King and his colleagues began planning for a massive March on Washington later that summer. Civil rights was becoming the central national issue, and on June 22, King came to the capital. In every private conference, people friendly to the movement kept saying the same thing: Levison is a Communist, a threat to everything you are trying to achieve. President Kennedy himself took Dr. King out for a private talk in the White House garden, away from all ears. He told King he must drop Levison. “I know Stanley,” Dr. King replied, “and I can’t believe this. You will have to prove it.” The president agreed to produce the evidence.

  The FBI could not help him: it had nothing new on Levison — just the opposite, in fact. On August 23, five days before the March on Washington, William Sullivan and his Domestic Intelligence Division delivered a lengthy report to Hoover that reviewed everything the Bureau knew about King, civil rights, and Communism. Sullivan’s report was honest, clear, and devastating: the Communist Party was tiny and ineffectual, so while it had tried many times to reach and influence King, the entire effort was a complete failure. The FBI’s own files cleared King and showed no recent links between Levison and the Party. Everything the Bureau had been feeding to friendly journalists, passing on to the attorney general, and telling the president, was wrong.

  Hoover blew up.

  The director could not believe his eyes. “I for one,” he snapped, “can’t ignore the memos re King.” The excellent historian Richard Powers, who has studied Hoover deeply, thinks the director was sincerely puzzled because what Sullivan was telling him was the direct opposite of everything his agents had been saying. “I have,” Hoover wrote to Tolson, “certainly been misled by previous memos which clearly showed communist penetration of the racial movement. . . . We are wasting manpower and money investigating CP effort in racial matter if the attached is correct.” Perhaps Hoover really would have been willing to totally change the Bureau’s view of King if his men had stuck to their word. But when Hoover rejected the report, Sullivan and his entire department panicked.

  Sullivan knew what happened to agents, even the most favored ones, when, like Melvin Purvis, they crossed the director. Their careers were over, their lives ruined. “The Director is correct,” Sullivan quickly wrote back. King is “the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security.” Sullivan needed to write a new report, many new reports, as fast as possible; he needed to prove to Hoover that he knew King to be a liar, a fraud, and a Communist pawn. Indeed, he now claimed that the Bureau needed to set new rules for itself in order to deal with such a vile enemy: “It may be unrealistic to limit ourselves as we have been doing to legalistic proofs.”

  If Dr. Powers is right, Hoover was personally willing to be wrong, but he had created a Bureau that was so rigid, fearful, and habitually dishonest that his agents would much rather feed him pleasing lies than tell him upsetting truths. He himself was open to new insights, but the organization he had created was not. Hoover had turned the FBI into a lie machine.

  Would Hoover really have been willing to drop the King-Communism connection if Sullivan had stuck by his original report? That seems unlikely. Back in the 1930s, he chose to hide reports that showed the America First Committee was totally independent of the Nazis. He passed along only information that fit what he assumed FDR wanted to see. This situation was similar. He would approve only reports that agreed that King was under Communist influence. Knowing that, Sullivan and others flooded Hoover with memos stating that the Communists were controlling King. Finally, in October, the director softened. “I am glad,” he penciled on one, “you recognize at last that there exists such influence.” The more Sullivan insisted that King was “a fraud, demagogue, and moral scoundrel,” the better Hoover seemed to feel. “I am glad,” he wrote back to Sullivan, “that the ‘light’ has finally, though dismally delayed, come to the Domestic Intelligence Division. I struggled for months to get over the fact that the communists were taking over the racial movement, but our experts here couldn’t or wouldn’t see it.”

  That nod of approval suggests that Hoover’s mind had been made up for a long, long time. The Sullivan report shocked him — if only because it showed his men being willing to defy what they knew he wanted. It took him some time to calm down and forgive his own agents. But he would never have accepted anything other than confirmation of his own firm beliefs. If this view is correct, Hoover was lost in his own nightmares and no one could have shaken him awake.

  Lie machine or haunted house: either way, Hoover and his FBI could not recognize — did not even consider — the other way to look at the link between a former Communist such as Levison and King. It is not that devious Communists were using the civil rights movement. Rather, idealists who believed in racial integration at first turned to Communism, then later saw a better path through Dr. King and the civil rights movement. The connection between Party and protest was the vision of a better America King voiced at the March on Washington, not a plot for Communist revolution hatched in secret.

  Look back to the two versions of American history in the first chapter. Hoover was so devoted to the pageant of American glory — the proud story of the individual pioneer and businessman — that he could only see the alternative as coming from an alien enemy. He was wrong. You can be a severe critic of America and still be a loyal American. Hoover was blind to that idea, and no one in the FBI was willing to risk challenging him. In his mad effort to protect his country, Hoover increasingly violated the most basic American rights, starting with Dr. King.

  The FBI could not give the president the proof that King demanded. But it had plenty of evidence that King was continuing to lean on Levison for advice. If Hoover was right, if King was defying the Kennedys to protect a Communist, that meant disaster for the administration. Robert Kennedy was concerned in August, more worried in September, and in October, he decided to act. On October 10, he authorized the FBI to use electronic surveillance on Dr. Martin Luther King. He was desperate to know if any “information developed regarding King’s communist connections.” By November, agents were listening in on Dr. King twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The American government was spying on the leader of the civil rights movement. Those taps yielded secrets — but not the ones the Bureau expected.

  By December, Sullivan was back in Hoover’s good graces and seeking out ever-new ways to discredit King. He called a conference of key FBI agents to figure out the best way of “neutralizing King as an effective Negro leader.” They were out to “expose King for the clerical fraud and Marxist he is at the first opportunity.”

  In January, the FBI began planting bugs in the various hotels King visited as he traveled around the country. The tapes recorded King making raunchy jokes and having affairs with various women. King was not only a moral leader; he was also an ordained minister. Yet here was clear evidence of immorality and infidelity. According to Sullivan, H
oover felt sure that this evidence would “destroy the burrhead.” We cannot know precisely what the tapes contain, since they are sealed until 2027, but every expert is certain they are authentic.

  The tapes changed the FBI’s focus. They produced no evidence of Communist influence. But Sullivan, in particular, was outraged. The King who was heard in the hotel rooms was the opposite of the man the public admired. The FBI now tried to spread word about King’s character. They gave transcripts to Robert Kennedy and to Lyndon Johnson, who had become president when JFK was assassinated. Kennedy was disturbed, but perhaps because of his own experience with his brother, he did not judge King by his private life. Johnson, who had had affairs of his own, treated the tapes as amusing. The FBI was not able to get key people to turn against King based on the tapes. So they tried one more tack.

  In August 1964, scholars believe that Sullivan, pretending to be a black American, wrote the letter that is summarized in the prologue of this book. The FBI made a master tape with selections from its recordings of King, packaged it with Sullivan’s letter, and had it sent to King and to his wife. “King,” it read, “look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes. . . . You are no clergyman and you know it. I repeat you are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that. . . . 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.”

  Here is a second FBI redaction of the letter sent to Dr. King — compare it with the version on the second page of the prologue.

  King guessed that FBI agents had made the recordings, and he understood their aim: “they are out to break me.” Mrs. King was equally devoted to the civil rights struggle and knew that to show any public reaction would only please its enemies. But, according to King’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer, David Garrow, King was also haunted by his own moral failings. “Every now and then,” King said in one sermon, “you’ll be unfaithful to those that you should be faithful to.” Dr. King never claimed to be perfect. In fact, he always felt there were “two Martin Luther Kings” and they were at odds. “It’s a mixture in human nature,” he said. “Because we are two selves, there is a civil war going on within each of us.” The real Dr. King was not a plaster saint, not an image giving a speech about a dream. He was a flawed man who was not faithful to his wife. He was as divided, as pulled in two, as in conflict with himself, as anyone else. To King, the tapes were a record of his weakness, of the clash between his ideals and his desires.

  King did have secrets. His private life was at odds with his position of moral leadership. That could have given Hoover power, as other secrets so often had. Yet both Dr. and Mrs. King understood that inspiring leaders can have imperfect private lives. They realized that sometimes an ideal is more important than a secret. The change in America was not going to be derailed by one man’s personal weakness. In their desperate blackmail letter, which King was sure was meant to push him toward suicide, Sullivan, Hoover, and the FBI could not see that. They detested King and resisted change. They were out of step with their own time, and they went further into their own private world of calculation and plot.

  The assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 was a first indication of the increasingly violent mood of the decade. In the South, the civil rights struggle brought out both Klan members with guns and policemen with dogs, batons, and fire hoses. Overseas, the United States was increasingly involved in a brutal war in Vietnam, which inspired intense clashes on American college campuses. But the worst violence came in the poor black neighborhoods of large cities. Between 1965 and 1967, Los Angeles, Chicago, Cleveland, Newark, Brooklyn, Omaha, Baltimore, San Francisco, and Detroit erupted in flames. The FBI turned to ever-more-secret means to try to maintain control and calm the nation.

  Sullivan led the next round of COINTELPRO activities in what might seem an unexpected direction: against the Ku Klux Klan. Starting in late 1964, the FBI paid informants to join the Klan, as they had the Communist Party. Then, as Klan members grew suspicious, they used the snitch jacket, spreading rumors that Klan leaders were FBI agents. The FBI was working to track, hamper, and ultimately hobble the Klan. But by doing that from within, it took another step into dispensing its own justice.

  Hoover defined the new mission of COINTELPRO operations: to “‘neutralize’ the effectiveness of civil rights, New Left, antiwar and black liberation groups.” “New Left” was a term of the time that referred to college students who were not members of the Communist Party but were devoted to the rights and needs of workers and the poor. “Neutralize,” the same word Sullivan had used for King, was now applied to causes that were inspiring a rising generation of Americans. Hoover later added another movement to his list of evildoers: all feminists, members of the women’s movement, he said, “should be viewed as part of the enemy, a challenge to American values.” The FBI set out to undermine and fragment every voice of opposition in America so that the nation could return to the place Hoover had eyed with such contentment from the shuffleboard court of the Del Charro in 1953. He was like a mad doctor who is so determined to battle a disease that he sets about to kill his patients.

  In 1967, the FBI began seeking informants in any black organization it could reach, no matter how small. Everyone from taxi drivers to bookstore owners was asked to report on attitudes in black communities. The following year, COINTELPRO was expanded to expressly seek out black nationalist groups. Both Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated that year, and some people gave up hope of integrating America. Instead, they listened to leaders who argued that blacks needed to arm themselves, take control of their own neighborhoods, and separate from whites.

  The black nationalists rejected nonviolence. To them, King had been weak. In every word and deed, they were out to show they were tough and could handle themselves. They meant to inspire fear, and they did. COINTELPRO used this against them. Informants were paid to join groups and encourage them to battle other militants, to get more violent, to turn on one another. According to a later government report, the Bureau wanted to create “shootings, beatings, and a high degree of unrest.”

  This image of Huey Newton, one of the founders of the Black Panther Party, was a popular poster in the 1960s. “The racist dog policemen,” Newton wrote, “must withdraw immediately from our communities, cease their wanton murder, brutality and torture of Black People, or face the wrath of the armed people.” The FBI was fostering conflict in black communities, but Newton had his own violent streak and was murdered by a drug dealer.

  As rumors about FBI infiltration of black nationalist movements began to spread, paid allies once again used the snitch jacket — accusing others of working for the FBI. The FBI, the organization charged with protecting Americans, was doing its best to set off conflicts, to turn people against one another, to make sure that black organizations could not work together. And then it extended the same tactics to largely white college campuses.

  In 1968, COINTELPRO was expanded yet again, this time to go after students protesting against the Vietnam War and seeking to change American society. Agents set out to embarrass and harass student and faculty leaders and to turn administrators against them. The FBI sent letters to the parents of college students who were protesting against the war — as if the Bureau were a principal’s office sending a note about a disruptive child. In order to set the two against each other, the Bureau also tried to convince black nationalist groups that white student groups were racist. Any lie would do, so long as it served to divide students and diminish their antiwar activism.

  PHOTO DOSSIER:

  In the late 1960s and early 1970s, between images of the war in Vietnam and deadly clashes in cities and on college campuses, revolution was in the air. Burned-out cities began to look like war zones, and American soldiers fired on fellow citizens.

  Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, killed un
der suspicious circumstances

  One of the worst city conflicts in American history started in Detroit on June 23, 1967, with a mishandled police raid. In five days, forty-three people were killed and more than 1,100 were injured.

  A captured Viet Cong prisoner awaits interrogation by U.S. forces in 1967.

  This Pulitzer Prize–winning photo captures the horror on the face of Mary Ann Vecchio when the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four students and wounded nine others during a 1970 Kent State University protest against the war in Vietnam.

  Hoover now sent informants to infiltrate and report on the women’s liberation movement. Unfortunately, their reports reflected their own concerns: “One of the interesting aspects about other delegates’ dress was the extreme fuzzy appearance of their hair. Some said this . . . was gotten by braiding and leaving it that way while it was wet until it dried. Then they would take out the braid. From the looks of their hair, they apparently really didn’t bother to try and comb it out afterward.” As shocking as fuzzy hair may have been to this FBI source, it was hardly a matter of national security.

  With reports like this — on braiding, not bombing — the FBI faced the same dilemma that had arisen when it studied the America First Committee and later Dr. King. Its own best evidence showed the movement was “mainly concerned with male chauvinism and didn’t seem to require any investigation,” but Hoover would not listen. He insisted that “interwoven with its goals for equal rights for women is the advocation of violence to achieve these goals.”

  Feminism, war, and revolution all blended in the language and slogans of a violent era. The quotation in this poster comes from a delegation of Vietnamese women at a conference in Canada.