J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  Left out of the loop was the attorney general. Hoover’s underlings feared that Robert Kennedy might warn King about his extracurricular activities, thereby endangering the continuing operation. The FBI director agreed. “No,” Hoover wrote. “A copy need not be given A.G.”82

  Some agents were still pursuing the Bureau’s Communist strategy, but the director was no longer interested. Coverage of the SCLC office was terminated. Energies were to be concentrated on collecting more “entertainment,” as Sullivan called it. At a minimum, fourteen more hotel bugs would dog King over the next two years, and agents would also take film and still photos of the civil rights leader, his colleagues, and female friends.

  Precisely a month after the nine-hour strategy meeting at SOG, Hoover was secretly slandering King in a closed-door session of the House Appropriations Committee. The fallout suggests that he ritually brought up the Communist line. But when a sympathetic congressman offered to go public, he was brought up short. Other reactions show that the FBI director had switched gears and, at the very least, showered the panel with broad hints about Dr. King’s personal life.

  And he kept calling for more ammunition like the Willard tapes. When agents in Milwaukee suggested that coverage of King would probably be useless, since his police bodyguards would be staying in an adjacent room, Hoover disagreed.

  “I don’t share the conjecture,” he wrote to Sullivan. “King is a ‘tom cat’ with obsessive degenerate sexual urges.”*83

  Then came the forty-eight hours in Los Angeles. On February 22 the King party checked into the Hyatt House Motel and loosened up for some rambunctious socializing. The reverend tossed off religious jokes that had sexual double meanings and made up explicitly sexual nicknames for his friends. It was a high-spirited time, and King certainly shocked and outraged the sanctimonious Presbyterian listening in. But there would be more. Exuberant, King recalled TV coverage of the late president’s funeral, during which his widow leaned over and kissed the middle of his casket. “That’s what she’s going to miss the most,” he cracked.85 Now Hoover had a reason to put Attorney General Robert Kennedy back in the loop.

  Along with other materials, a report on the Los Angeles tapes was sent to Jenkins and to Kennedy. In the latter case, the Bureau aimed to “remove all doubt from the Attorney General’s mind as to the type of person King is.”86 Attention was to be directed upon, in Sullivan’s characterization, “King’s vilification of the late President and his wife.”87

  A month before, Kennedy had tried to warn the White House that the FBI had volatile information on King and was likely to use it. Now he must have been flabbergasted to discover how little he’d known. Whether for pragmatic political reasons, or because of the personal insult, Kennedy quietly backed away from Martin Luther King, Jr. His eyes had been opened to the danger—and the way to keep on top of it. Hoover let him consider all these things before asking for permission to instigate more taps.

  But there was no need to hold back with LBJ. On March 9 Hoover joined his liaison, DeLoach, for a chat with the president at the White House. The trio spent the entire afternoon discussing the King affair.

  It was the longest period of time the FBI director had held a president’s attention since his secret meeting with JFK about the Judith Campbell matter.

  Apparently the pair left a gift, since not long after their visit the president of the United States began entertaining selected White House guests by playing portions of the King tapes.

  Beset and bewildered, Hoover flailed about in the 1960s trying to prevent the bestowal of academic honors and other awards on the Reverend King.

  Horrified in March 1964 that Marquette University might give the civil rights leader an honorary degree, the FBI pressured an official of the institution. No degree was awarded.* Attempts to prevent Springfield College from awarding a degree were thwarted, however. The FBI’s contact at the college reported that its governing board had too many “liberals.”89

  Far more disturbing was the rumor picked up by August 31, 1964. King planned to visit Pope Paul VI in Rome. Cardinal Spellman, duly alerted, telephoned the Vatican and, at the Ecumenical Council a week later, personally warned the secretary of state that Saint Peter’s successor should have nothing to do with King.

  When the pope received the Baptist minister anyway, Hoover wrote “astounding” on the press release announcing the audience. FBI officials wondered “if there possibly could have been a slip-up.”90 Surely, Paul VI would have heeded Spellman, if the message actually got through.

  But he would be given no chance to ignore a direct communication from the director of the FBI, according to a joke that began passing the rounds in the Bureau. “The Pope’s been put on the no-contact list,” agents snickered.

  There was worse to come, in the eyes of J. Edgar Hoover, who had always coveted the “foremost of earthly honors.” As he spurred his Bureau on, eager to add to the compromising tapes and reported gossip about King, a committee in Sweden was poring over other kinds of material, the minister’s speeches and writings in support of the concepts of nonviolence and international peace.

  On October 14 it was officially announced that King had been given the Nobel Peace Prize.

  Hoover was enraged and the Bureau energized. A revised version of the scabrous monograph RFK had suppressed was sent to the White House. Should not copies of this important document be sent to “responsible officials in the Executive Branch”?91 Presidential Special Assistant Bill Moyers thought so. The thirteen-page printed booklet went out.*

  The Bureau also did what it could to make Dr. King’s upcoming European reception as “unwelcome” as possible. Anticipating that they “might consider entertaining King while he is in Europe to receive the Nobel Prize,” the U.S. ambassadors in London, Oslo, Stockholm, and Copenhagen were briefed on the minister’s personal life and alleged Communist connections. When it was learned that the Nobel laureate might be received by Prime Minister Harold Wilson, the legat in London was instructed to brief high British officials in the same manner, and so he did.

  Nor was the prospect of King’s return home overlooked. Numerous receptions were scheduled in New York and Washington. To discourage their participation, the UN representatives Adlai Stevenson and Ralph Bunche were given information on the civil rights leader’s private life; Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York was thoroughly briefed; and Vice-President Hubert Humphrey was given not only the updated King monograph but a separate memorandum entitled “Martin Luther King Jr.: His Personal Conduct.”

  It was during this frenzy that a very sick mind, in the highest echelons of the FBI, considered a plan that would be likely to plunge King into a very deep depression on the eve of his great acclamation, as the world watched. Far worse, far more devious, someone at SOG—or perhaps more than one person, for even the repentant Sullivan never admitted to this in his confessional years to come—decided that King should remove himself from the national scene. What would trigger the kind of despair that had caused a twelve-year-old boy to leap from an upstairs window of his father’s house?

  “King, look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a greater 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…But you are done. Your ‘honorary’ degrees, your Nobel Prize (what a grim farce) and other awards will not save you, King, I repeat you are done…

  “King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significance). 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.”

  Sometime in mid-November the long, vile letter from which these passages have been excerpted was enclosed with a tape and mailed to King at the SCLC office in Atlanta. The reel was a medley from the surveillances in Washington and Los Angeles, as well as i
n a San Francisco hotel.

  Why this peculiar initiative? The usual methods had failed Hoover in this case. He had been shopping the stuff around all over Washington for months, but no newspaper reporter would touch it. Nobody in government had leaked it. Hoover and his top men could not understand why.

  “Once it became apparent that King, who held himself up publicly and to his associates as a ‘man of God’ and as a minister, once it became clear through the coverage of his activities that he was not, at least his sexual conduct was such that he was breaking down his picture as a ‘man of God,’ the question came up whether Coretta King should be advised…It seemed proper to advise her of what was going on.” So Belmont stated to the author, shortly before he died. Sullivan put it much more simply. Asked, “What possible justification could you have had for sending a man’s wife that kind of material?” Sullivan told the author, “He was breaking his marriage vows.”92

  The plan was to mail the package to the SCLC office in King’s name, because the FBI coverage had revealed that Mrs. King opened his mail for him when he was on the road.*

  “Mail it from a southern state,” Hoover advised.93 An unwitting agent whom Sullivan trusted dropped it into a mailbox in Tampa.

  They wanted her to hear it, and they knew they were in the right—even though Sullivan and Belmont both feared that the scheme would reveal just how closely the FBI had been following the minister, and by what illegal methods.

  Let us not shy away from the obvious here. The head of the nation’s police force was protecting the national interest by using intimate tapes to wreak havoc in a man’s marriage. As the Bureau had done before, though with amateurish lies, with the marriages of left-wing activists and right-wing racists. But this was not only a highly bizarre and obscene initiative; it was plainly illegal. Under federal law, government agencies may not disclose taped or bugged conversations to a third party. Nor may government property—in this instance, the “entertainment” tapes—be converted to other than official use. And there was the matter of sending allegedly “obscene” materials through the mails.

  None of this bothered Hoover, not even the fact that the sharing of the tapes violated the Bureau’s own regulations, as approved by its director.

  Some have argued that Hoover was driven to this extremity by King’s arrogance. Consider. On November 18 the director suddenly invited eighteen women reporters over to his office for coffee. The rambling three-hour “press conference,” one of very few in his last years, was grimly fascinating. On the one hand, he condemned the violence down in Mississippi, noting that “in the southern part of the state, in the swamp country, the only inhabitants seem to be rattlesnakes, water moccasins, and redneck sheriffs.” On the other hand, he grumbled that the FBI “can’t wet nurse everybody who goes down to try to reform or re-educate the Negro population of the South.” When he recalled Dr. King’s remarks about the Albany agents, the sutures burst. “I asked [for an appointment] with Dr. King, but he would not make the appointment, so I have characterized him as the most notorious liar in the country. That is on the record…”*94

  Off the record, during this performance, he added, “He is one of the lowest characters in the country.”96

  Many in the civil rights movement trembled, others came up with a reply that was pure name-calling, but Dr. King approved a temperate, if suggestive, public statement: “I cannot conceive of Mr. Hoover making a statement like this without being under extreme pressure. He has apparently faltered under the awesome burden, complexities and responsibilities of his office.” In a telegram to the director, also made public, he said he would be happy to meet with him and “sought in vain” for any record of his request for an appointment.97

  Hoover thought the telegram was full of lies. Within a day or two, the package of tapes was mailed to Mrs. King. On November 24 the director was fulminating again, departing from a prepared speech to denounce “moral degenerates” in “pressure groups”—a slap at the civil rights movement.†98

  According to some reports, the president was becoming concerned and was actively seeking a replacement for his unpredictable FBI chief. In a White House meeting with civil rights leaders, he listened to criticism of the FBI in silence. At a press conference late in November his praise for Hoover’s efforts to protect civil rights workers was lukewarm: “He has been diligent and rather effective.”101

  Meanwhile, on November 27, the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins met with DeLoach, apparently because of rumors about the King tapes. “I told him…that if King wanted war we certainly would give it to him,” DeLoach wrote in a memo to John Mohr. Wilkins remembered a different kind of meeting, in which he warned gravely that revelations about King would split black and white America. To his colleague, however, DeLoach boasted that Wilkins had promised to “tell King that he can’t win in a battle with the FBI and that the best thing for him to do is retire from public life.”102

  There were other skirmishes. President Johnson was warned that his liaison, DeLoach, was offering the King tapes to journalists. His source was Ben Bradlee. Since LBJ had played the tapes himself, to selected White House guests, he could hardly criticize DeLoach. Instead, to show whose side he was on, he cautioned DeLoach, through Moyers, that Bradlee, who he said “lacked integrity,”103 was spreading tales.* Still, he had to be worried about what Hoover might do or say next.

  Sometime in late November, according to Sullivan, Johnson “ordered Hoover to meet with King and patch things up.”105 The FBI director had no choice but to obey, and on December 1 the pair held a “summit” meeting in the director’s office.

  Although there have been many different versions of the encounter,† most agree that the director and the reverend were polite, even complimentary, to each other. (“This was not the same man that called Martin a notorious liar,” King’s aide Andrew Young would recall.)108 Most likely, the tapes and other derogatory materials were not discussed, not even by indirection. “Quite amicable,”109 King would say, for public consumption. It was a comment made on the fly, because the director’s long-windedness had almost caused the reverend to miss a plane.

  Hoover was pleased with himself, according to Sullivan, thinking that “he had captivated King, really charmed him,” with his fifty-five-minute monologue about the accomplishments of the FBI.* All was well, perhaps, until a wiretap picked up King’s review. “The old man talks too much.” According to Sullivan, “there was no hope for [King] after that.”111

  In short order, three very significant dates occurred in the director’s life.

  On December 10 Dr. King was awarded the Nobel Prize in Stockholm. Exhausted, depressed by the rumors that the FBI still intended to publicize the information on the tapes, he said the following day, in his acceptance speech, “Those who pioneer in the struggle for peace and freedom will still be battered by the storms of persecution, leading them to nagging feelings that they can no longer bear such a heavy burden.”112

  Hoover was much more interested in an incident involving some of King’s supporters. One night, as the partying got wildly out of hand, two “stark naked” civil rights workers ran down the halls of their hotel after some prostitutes who had just rolled them. The incident was hushed up, thanks to the intervention of Bayard Rustin,† but the FBI heard about it. And quickly spread the rumor that King himself was involved. He was not. But the director of the FBI, who held the laureate “in complete contempt,” could claim that here was yet more evidence that “he was the last one in the world who should ever have received [the Nobel Prize].”113

  Then there was Christmas, thirty-four days after the tape and letter were mailed to the SCLC office, the date by which King was to have taken the “one way out.” He had not yet received the FBI’s message, however. It was early January before Mrs. King opened the thin box and called her husband, giving the Bureau a great deal of pleasure with the tone and tenor of her reactions.

  King asked some of his closest advisers to read the letter and listen to the tape. As
Hoover’s men had feared, they immediately assumed that it was all the work of the FBI. So depressed that he could not sleep, King was overhead on a tap saying, “They are out to break me.”114

  But that, in a sense, only further vindicated the events of a third red-letter day—January 1, 1965. Vacationing in Miami, dining with Tolson as his enemy fell ever deeper into despair, Hoover became three score and ten. Lesser mortals would have celebrated the day with a retirement party, but not the director. He and his cronies now served at the pleasure of Lyndon Johnson, who had learned how much he needed them earlier in the year.

  Hoover could recall how he had given his commander in chief unusual help during the summer and fall. He could smile as the wiretaps revealed King’s spiraling descent into deeper depression, exacerbated by his fear and feeling of guilt that somehow God was punishing him for not being worthy of his historic mission. He might laugh at the major news stories that had predicted the selection of a new FBI chief only weeks before. But it had been a close call.

  * * *

  *Hoover himself had lobbied through a law making the slaying of an FBI agent a federal offense, in 1934, but no one had thought to enact an applicable law for the president.

  †Eastern Standard Time is used throughout this section. Dallas was on Central Standard Time, which was an hour earlier.

  *Nixon recalled, “Months later Hoover told me that Oswald’s wife had disclosed that Oswald had been planning to kill me when I visited Dallas and that only with great difficulty had she managed to keep him in the house to prevent him from doing so.”2

  *Hosty’s recollection of the note’s contents was less explicit than Mrs. Fenner’s. He recalled, “The first part of it stated I had been interviewing his wife without his permission and I should not do this; he was upset about this. And the second part at the end he said that if I did not stop talking to his wife, he would take action against the FBI.”