J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (95 page)

“They will destroy the burrhead,” commented J. Edgar Hoover, reviewing the transcripts of tape recordings produced by a bug at the Willard Hotel.
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Two days after the
Time
cover story, on January 5, 1964, FBI agents in the capital had installed a microphone in the room assigned to the Reverend King. “Trespass is involved,” Sullivan had admitted in a departmental memo.
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Trespass of another kind would follow.

Fifteen reels of tape were recorded by this special MISUR, but the highlights came the first night. Two women employees of the Philadelphia Naval Yard had joined the Man of the Year and several SCLC friends for an unbuttoned fling. Even as FBI workers were painstakingly transcribing the tomfoolery,
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Sullivan was peering into the future, when King would “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.” He decided that the Bureau should somehow help raise Samuel R. Pierce, Jr.,
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a Manhattan attorney then working with the former attorney general William Rogers, to “be in the position to assume the role of the leadership of the Negro people when King has been completely discredited.”

“OK,” Hoover wrote on his subordinate’s memo describing this cockeyed scheme.
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On January 10 he heard the selected passages from the Willard tapes that inspired his “burrhead” comment, and he smelled blood. He picked up the phone to alert Johnson’s closest aide, Walter Jenkins, to the nature of the material. It was Friday afternoon, and LBJ had to wait a few days until the FBI’s written account was ready.

His impatience can be imagined, but it was abundantly satisfied when DeLoach arrived with eight pages of “Top Secret” analysis of the Willard party only four days later. The FBI agent, the president, and the presidential aide discussed the material. When Jenkins opined that a leak to the press would be a good idea, DeLoach could reply that the director had already thought of that.

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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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Attention was to be directed upon, in Sullivan’s characterization, “King’s vilification of the late President and his wife.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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”?
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Presidential Special Assistant Bill Moyers thought so. The thirteen-page
printed
booklet went out.
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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 in 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.”
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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.
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“Mail it from a southern state,” Hoover advised.
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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…”
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Off the record, during this performance, he added, “He is one of the lowest characters in the country.”
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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.
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