J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (83 page)

I
n cold hard facts, the Reverend King was mistaken. Some 70 percent of the FBI agents working in the Deep South had been born and raised above the Mason-Dixon line. This was in accord with Bureau policy. In the interests of professionalism and ethics, new agents were never assigned to areas they knew well.

But senior agents were a different matter. If they had an influential “rabbi,” say, Assistant Director Mohr or Deke DeLoach, they could usually finagle an assignment to their office of preference. And the majority of the SACs and ASACs were natives of Dixie, who had chosen to return to their roots.

Moreover, there was something about the South. It was catching.

Outsiders in this closed society soon learned the tricks of assimilation, putting more than a hint of bourbon and magnolia in their accents. But the infection could run deeper into the bone, bringing on a feverish change in attitudes and mores, creating new sons and daughters of the South who could wolf down grits or juleps with more zest than the natives.

A litmus test might be use of the phrase “
our
way of life.” It was not a way of life that allowed much leeway for the aspirations of Dr. King and his followers.
^*

True, Hoover tried to keep his senior agents independent, even discouraging socializing between his men and local police. But such SOG decrees weren’t practical in the field. Cooperation was essential. You couldn’t trust men who wouldn’t raise a glass with you or show up at the occasional barbecue. Sure, the
special agents made a point of showing off their professional skills—and access to Washington and its awe-inspiring crime labs. But they also let the locals know that, once away from the office, and out of the dark business suits, FBI men had no trouble at all being good ole boys.

People in Birmingham had understood. When SAC Jenkins had called the policeman who was KKK, they knew he had not put the cart before the horse. He knew “our way of life.” He’d connected.

Dr. King’s mistake on the facts notwithstanding, he was whisker close on the interpretation.

“In the late fifties, early sixties,” his young aide Andrew Young would recall, “we thought of the FBI as our friends…the only hope we had.”
²

Slender reed.

J. Edgar Hoover, as early as 1957, had ordered his agents to begin monitoring the activities of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

King had flashed onto the national scene in December 1955, when he led the Montgomery bus boycott. Blacks held firm for 382 days until segregated seating was ended, and King enunciated and refined his concepts of nonviolent protest. On January 11, 1957, many boycott principals, primarily black clergymen from the South, founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

King, who had said, “We will use non-cooperation to give birth to justice,” was chosen president.
³

By May he was dramatically orating before 35,000 demonstrators at a rally in Washington, D.C., where he shouted over and over again, “Give us the ballot!”
⁴

Immediately, Hoover opened a file under “racial matters.” The SCLC had announced a campaign to register eligible black voters throughout the South, a move that the FBI director felt warranted covert surveillance. King’s file would be stuffed with “all pertinent information.”
⁵

During the 1960 presidential contest King was sentenced to serve four months at hard labor for “parading without a permit” during a protest in Atlanta. Taking a cue from campaign strategists, JFK telephoned the minister’s wife, Coretta, to sympathize with her and to affirm the goals of her husband’s movement. This famous phone call, according to some analysts, clinched the Kennedy win.

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.