J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  And it left a bitter aftertaste. True or not, the impression got around that King had ready access to the White House and to the Justice Department. To Jack Kennedy and Robert Kennedy.

  Hoover’s access was more formal. The man he was growing to hate was apparently in tight with both of his bosses.*

  But he could put a stop to that. The information piling up from the break-ins was bound to be useful.

  In January 1959, entirely on his own and without officially opening a security investigation, Hoover ordered FBI agents to burglarize the SCLC offices. It was the first of twenty known break-ins between that date and January 1964. According to a Justice Department study after King’s death, “Some of these entries had as one purpose, among others, the obtaining of information about Dr. King.”7

  It would be standard operating procedure—and more to the point, considering the unlikelihood that damaging materials were lying around the premises—for the Bureau to take these opportunities to install bugs. Certainly, wiretaps were installed. Former Assistant Director Sullivan later admitted that the FBI “had been tapping King’s telephone in Atlanta since the late 1950s.”8

  When the freedom rides began, in May 1961, Hoover leaped to conclusions and demanded information on King and four others.

  Apparently he considered that the in-house memorandum that resulted contained unexpected news. Referring to the “prominent integrationist,” a Bureau staffer noted, “King has not been investigated by the FBI.” The director underlined this sentence and drew an arrow to his blue-ink comment. “Why not? H.”*9

  In November the Atlanta field office notified SOG that it had found “no information on which to base a security matter inquiry.”10 Hoover was not swayed. He may even had been shocked, since the Atlanta special agent in charge had been careful always to find what the director sought. As SAC Roy Moore told an underling in 1958, “You must understand that you’re working for a crazy maniac and that our duty…is to find out what he wants and to create the world that he believes in.”11

  And so the foundation stones of that world began to be laid.

  On January 8, 1962, the SCLC took an amazingly brave step. It released a special report attacking Hoover’s FBI.

  He was ready. On January 8, he shot a detailed report of his own over to Robert Kennedy. For the first time the Bureau claimed to have proof that King and his civil rights movement were tainted with godless communism.

  What sparked the FBI director’s volley from reserve ammunition was the SCLC charge that his agents in Albany, Georgia, had not assiduously pursued the investigations of police brutality against local blacks. This was the report that was updated later in the year, provoking King’s New York Times declarations.

  The SCLC report elicited public attention, but it did not immediately benefit any innocent black person in Albany who had been beaten up by area sheriffs or their deputies. It did, however, lead to the loss of a number of Dr. King’s most trusted advisers.

  Stanley Levison, a rich socialist whose support of leftist and Communist causes was well known, was deeply involved in antisegregationist issues before he met King in 1956. Although he fit the the Bureau’s “profile” of one kind of Communist—a white man who was polite to blacks—Levison certainly diverged from the stated Moscow goal of the day: “separate national development,” or segregated republics for blacks in the United States.

  Then there was Jack O’Dell, another brilliant movement supporter who had Communist contacts in his past. Both men were complex—O’Dell was religious, Levison a very successful capitalist—and the extent of their sympathies with communism have been endlessly explored and debated.

  A third man’s political brief seems more sharply defined. Fatherless, poor, charming, Bayard Rustin had enthusiastically worked with the Young Communist League throughout the 1930s, not least because the party had provided Harlem’s only nonsegregated social clubs. He left in 1941 when U.S. Communists abandoned pro-Negro activism in order to concentrate on Hitler’s assault upon Russia. Until the Montgomery bus boycott, Rustin zestfully participated in many pacifist and intregrationist demonstrations—and just as zestfully, or self-destructively, welcomed the severe beatings and imprisonment.

  In any case, Hoover did not bother much about his ties with communism. Bayard’s open homosexuality would do just fine.

  All three men became essential to King—advising, organizing, and encouraging him to follow his best instincts. None of the three seemed likely to become a Judas. They had to be ambushed.

  The campaign against Levinson was probably set off by information from “Solo,” the FBI’s code name for two brothers who had become informants within the American Communist party. For about twenty-eight years Morris and Jack Childs successfully kept their cover—it has been rumored that Morris was photographed with Brezhnev and met with Mao—until the Bureau eased them out. They’d survived long enough to become old and demanding.*

  According to them, Levison was handling party funds as late as 1955. Even though he seemed clean during the seven years before he became King’s closest white friend, this was enough to set out the red flag to Hoover’s men.

  They wanted more. First, in the fall of 1961, the FBI pressured Robert Kennedy’s aides to advise King to drop Levison. But no explanation—and certainly no proof—was offered. The information was too “sensitive.”

  King was flabbergasted when Justice Department officials passed on the warning to him. For one thing, they confronted him minutes before a secret White House luncheon with the president. Surely, he had been feeling elated by the honor, optimistic about the consequences for his movement. The FBI maneuver sent his mood plummeting.*

  Deftly, Hoover alluded to this luncheon in his classified memo to RFK the following January 8. And to the alleged Communist pipeline from Levison through King to the attorney general. In other words, the president of the United States and his brother were in danger of being duped because of the civil rights leader’s “access.”

  Hoover wanted to protect the Kennedys from an evil they had not been astute enough to detect for themselves. One that he had already explained, in regard to Levison specifically, to several congressmen and senators as “the threat from within.”†12

  Again, a Justice Department aide tried to prize loose the Bureau’s supposed evidence, but Hoover balked, implying that the identity of Solo would be “endangered.” Besides, he scribbled on an in-house query about giving specific information to a Kennedy aide, “King is no good any way.”14

  The comment did not go unregarded on the Bureau grapevine. Nor were the director’s actions unremarked.

  On February 14, while the attorney general was out of town,‡ Hoover sent O’Donnell a file summary of King’s contacts with various left-wing activists.

  Having got his foot back in the door, he sent a copy of the Judith Campbell memo to RFK directly to O’Donnell the following week.

  A week later he made a suggestion. And the attorney general agreed. On March 20 the wiretap on Levison’s office was installed, as authorized by Robert Kennedy. It joined the MISUR that FBI agents had hidden during a break-in only five days before—unknown to Kennedy or anyone else outside Hoover’s Bureau.

  None of the surveillance provided any backing for the FBI’s charges against Levison. Perhaps even worse, to Hoover, it showed that Levison was veritably seized by the breadth of King’s vision—and often rekindled the minister’s courage, when fatigue or fear or disappointment set in.

  And, according to one agent who was initially hostile to King and believed him a Communist tool, at least one taped conversation proved “that Levison might be helping King, but that he (King) wasn’t under his control in any way…It was the other way around.”15

  Alerted by Solo, the Cold War warrior Hoover may really have thought Levison was using King, but his surveillance proved him wrong. Inevitably, he got to the heart of the problem. He would need to increase his surveillance.

  Atlanta was no help at all. Once
again, in April, the field office reported to SOG that its agents could find no indication that Communist influence was being exerted on King.

  No matter.

  Just say it.

  By April 20, in one of the memos about King’s advisers that Hoover regularly sent the attorney general, he refers to “Stanley David Levison, a secret member of the Communist Party.”16

  No explanation.

  Nor was any given when, on May 11, Hoover ordered that King be “tabbed Communist” in “Section A of the Reserve Index,” his current secret list of those slated to be arrested and held during a “national emergency.”*

  To Hoover, the patience and persistence was finally paying off. In June he heard Levison discussing with King the problem of hiring O’Dell as executive assistant, an official title that, because of his past associations, would bring “lightning flashing around him.”

  King, confirming Hoover’s suspicions by reacting in a manner that different ears in a different time might find noble, replied, “No matter what a man was, if he could stand up now and say he is not connected, then as far as I am concerned, he is eligible to work for me.”18 Hoover had never given any evidence of understanding, much less approving, this line of thinking.

  Scissoring the transcript for maximum effect, he crafted a memo designed to unnerve the attorney general. One editorial comment was the zinger: “Levison also said that if O’Dell and King should reach an agreement, it would be possible for King to see you and say ‘lay off this guy.’ ”19

  Yet again, the FBI director was trying to convince Kennedy that friendship with King laid him wide open to influence from Moscow. And Kennedy, no matter how sincere his courtship of political liberals, hated communism. The fusillade was beginning to find a breach.

  Later in the year another unsubstantiated phrase made its way into the language of the FBI memos to RFK. O’Dell was “a member of the National Committee of the Communist Party.”20

  Just say it.

  But for now, it was only established that King associated with the party’s “secret member,” sufficient reason to ask Atlanta and other field offices concerned whether or not a COMINFIL investigation should be opened on the civil rights leader.*

  Evidently, a Hoover probe back in February had failed. He had ordered SACs to cull their files for undescribed “subversive” information about King and then hie themselves to the typewriter. SOG wanted reports “suitable for dissemination.”21

  Finally, after about nine months of inexplicable delay, the train left the station. In October the COMINFIL investigation was opened. Oddly, its focus would not be the alleged Communist affiliations and intrigues of King’s advisers.

  Many noted Hoover’s growing obsession with destroying King. And they expected him to attack in the usual way, by leaking rumors that would tarnish the minister’s reputation.

  Already a world-renowned figure, King had risen from obscurity because of the power of his message and the music of his uniquely impassioned, articulate speaking style. He was rapidly on his way to becoming a kind of secular saint.

  The FBI director wanted to prove that the saint was actually made of plaster. But for a long time, he was off course, using the Communist angle because he did not yet suspect that King was very vulnerable on quite a different level.

  On October 8 DeLoach received a summary of old news articles about O’Dell for “possible use by his contacts in the news media field in such Southern states as Alabama where Dr. King has announced that the next targets for integration of universities are located.”22 At least one newspaper took the bait.

  Under pressure, King announced that O’Dell would resign temporarily while the SCLC looked into the allegations. “This is not getting any better,” RFK would write to an aide.23 He meant that King continued to meet frequently with O’Dell and Levison. Their contacts were promptly reported by J. Edgar Hoover.

  King met with Justice Department officials about the accusations, but they were never able to provide substantiation, and the months dragged on. In June of 1963 Robert Kennedy called Hoover to say that he was sending an aide to warn King once and for all about his dangerous friends. In his memo recording the call, the FBI director wrote piously that he “pointed out that if Dr. King continues this association, he is going to hurt his own cause…Bigots down South who are against integration are beginning to charge Dr. King is tied in with Communists.”24 He did not tell Kennedy where the “bigots” were getting their information.

  But there was something else now. For some months J. Edgar Hoover had been the aggrieved party.

  When King had criticized the FBI’s southern agents, the Bureau’s Alex Rosen reacted in the proper key, writing that his criticisms “would appear to dovetail with information…indicating that King’s advisors are Communist Party (CP) members and he is under the domination of the CP.”25

  In order to “set him straight”,26 in Belmont’s words, Sullivan, a northerner, and DeLoach, a southerner, were to meet with King. The FBI called him twice, and secretaries took the messages. For whatever reason, the civil rights leader never called back. And the image-conscious Bureau, hypersensitive both to published criticism and to the slightest appearance of insult, bristled.

  If Hoover was “distraught” over the initial attacks, as Sullivan later claimed, DeLoach hardly seems measured in the following memo: “It would appear obvious that Rev. King does not desire to be told the true facts. He obviously used deceit, lies, and treachery as propaganda to further his own causes.”

  This was the infamous memo of January 15, 1962, in which the assistant director not only called the minister “a vicious liar” but proved the charge by citing his dominance by Communists. But Hoover was impressed by this reasoning. “I concur,” he wrote.27

  From that day forward, the man who did not answer the FBI’s telephone calls was spared at least one kind of further contact from the Bureau. As a matter of routine, the civil rights leaders were warned when the FBI learned of potential murder plots against them.

  But not King. Not anymore.

  He was too busy to take the calls, anyway.

  King was jailed during demonstrations in Birmingham in April. Early the following month police use of dogs and high-pressure hoses to repulse protesters produced images that shocked millions of Americans. Birmingham’s leaders agreed to a negotiated settlement on May 10, reluctantly ending some official practices of segregation.

  King took the realistic view before a jubilant crowd of supporters. “Now don’t let anybody fool you…These things would not have been granted without your presenting your bodies and your very lives before the dogs and the tanks and the water hoses of this city!”28

  Indeed, the television clips of the police assaults produced a major civil rights victory. “This nation,” said President Kennedy on June 11, “for all its hopes and boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.” At last, his administration was responding to Dr. King’s frequent requests for a kind of second Emancipation Proclamation. Proposed legislation would guarantee voting rights and job opportunities for minorities as well as end segregation in all public facilities.

  And in all these months, Hoover’s steady stream of memos about Communist influence had continued without check. Once again, as King headed for an off-the-record meeting at the White House, he would be prepared to discuss major social issues—but be blindsided.

  First, it was Burke Marshall, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, whispering into his ear. Levison and O’Dell must go. Concrete evidence, which neither he nor King could be allowed to see, proved that the pair were working for the Communist party. And if word got out, John Kennedy’s political future would be threatened. John Kennedy, supporter of civil rights legislation…

  King was mystified. The charges made no sense to him. Marshall, converted at last by the sheer tonnage of the memos from Hoover, was equally mystified. Why was King not taking this matter seriously?

  If King had thoug
ht about it, he might have considered still another mystery. If only the very top national-security officials had this smoldering evidence—say, the president, the head of the FBI, the attorney general, a few others—which one was going to release it?

  Next came Robert Kennedy, primed after asking Hoover for help on specifics. In private, the attorney general built on his aide’s dark hints that dangerous international conspiracies were afoot. Moreover, the truth about Levison was so awful that it could not be shared.

  This was even less convincing to King, who felt he knew a thing or two about a couple of his most loyal supporters—and quite a bit more about typical redneck smears of the movement.

  But he and Kennedy were not hearing each other. The president’s brother was astonished that this significant revelation did not unsettle King, who was becoming increasingly skeptical as the insinuations became more extravagant.

  Within minutes he was hearing even more on this subject as he strolled beside the president of the United States in the Rose Garden outside the White House.

  “I assume you know you’re under close surveillance,” the president said first. King wondered if they had come outside because Kennedy knew, or feared, that the White House was bugged.

  “They’re Communists,” Kennedy said softly, putting a hand on King’s shoulder. O’Dell was the “Number Five Communist in the United States.” Levison was so high up in party hierarchy that Kennedy couldn’t discuss it. Both were “agents of a foreign power.”

  His immediate concern, JFK explained, was for the success of the upcoming march on Washington, a huge demonstration to be held in August. Hoover, believing the idea Communist inspired, would certainly leak his conviction to favored journalists—and conservatives would accept his opinion as fact.